Tag: Freudian analysis

Abstract:

In this paper I ask whether there might be any one particular psychopathology likely to be linked specifically with the physical illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), and whether CFS/ME aids and abets and “fits’ an original mental state. I think the question cannot yet be answered.

However it is my hypothesis that in some personality structures the onset of CFS/ ME following a physical illness exacerbates negativity and is an aspect of ordinary depression where there is a lowering of energy levels and a loss of zest for life, or it may reveal the pathological aspect of unresolved rage. Depending on the degree of pathological disturbance, working with and through the rage may or may not result in a resolution of the symptoms of ME.

In this paper I consider some of the problems in the transference and countertransference relationship, which make it extremely difficult to separate out reality from phantasy. There is then the further problem of the denial of the psyche by the patient as part of the violence inherent in the illness. One case is presented, an example of ME in a borderline male patient in whom resolution could not be achieved.

 

Source: Bennett A. A view of the violence contained in chronic fatigue syndrome. J Anal Psychol. 1997 Apr;42(2):237-51. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9161123

 

Abstract:

Three years of analytical psychotherapy with a professional woman in mid-life, suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), is described. Gradual recovery merged into mid-life changes; marriage, along with a new balance of maternal and paternal imagos, enabled her to trust enough to become pregnant-coniunctio in the most primal bodily and psychic modes. Her life-long, schizoid type pattern, “the pendulum of closeness and isolation’, with its extreme of psycho-physical collapse and devitalization, was replayed in therapy.

The analyst’s symbolic attitude is emphasized, containing the patient’s initial affective explosion and validating the physicality of her condition. Mirroring and steady rhythmic attunement became a new, pre-verbal, source of trust-vitalization; differentiation and separation replaced defensive splitting and dissociation. Then the overwhelmingly powerful bodily/maternal could be counterbalanced by the masculine, and a transitional space emerged for symbolic work. Both the regressive and the dynamic aspects of CFS are located in the earliest undifferentiated, archetypal, bodily/psychic modes, when the frustration of primary needs evokes the defences of the self.

It is argued that our psychodynamic understanding can contribute to the stalemate in seeing chronic fatigue syndrome as either an organic illness or depression, and that a new linking of the somatic and psychic calls for a new professional collaboration.

 

Source: Holland P. Coniunctio–in bodily and psychic modes: dissociation, devitalization and integration in a case of chronic fatigue syndrome. J Anal Psychol. 1997 Apr;42(2):217-36. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9161122

Abstract:

I describe the therapy of a 20-year-old women who believed that her difficulties in concentrating and remembering were caused by her “ME’ (Myalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS). She had been fathered by a man who never left his own wife. Work with her dreams revealed a within-body drama in which she was locked in an unspeakable fight to the death with her mother. Her symptoms improved after parallels between a dream and an accident showed her own self-destructive hand in her story.

Another dream, reflecting her first ‘incestuous’ affair, showed her search for her original father-self as someone separate from mother, and a later affair provided a between-body drama, helping her to own the arrogant and abject traits she had before seen only as her mother’s. I show how we worked in the area of Winnicott’s first ‘primitive agony’ as experienced by a somatizing patient, stuck in a too-close destructive relationship with her mother-body. I discuss how analytical work can be done with the primitive affects and conflicts against which the ME symptoms may be defending.

 

Source: Simpson M. A body with chronic fatigue syndrome as a battleground for the fight to separate from the mother. J Anal Psychol. 1997 Apr;42(2):201-16. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9161121