“INNER DESERT”: ON THE ISSUE OF PSYCHIC TRANSFORMATION IN THE “CLINIC OF VOID”

Abstract

Abstract. Today, many patients complain of a feeling of inner emptiness, lack of interest in themselves and the world, emotional “frozenness”, and inability to think and act. These people cannot tolerate stability, predictability, and temporary inactivity, which they experience as boredom or, during these periods, severe anxiety. The lives of both give the impression of a stagnant time in which nothing happens, or everything repeats itself endlessly. As a rule, the onset of analysis is immediately marked by difficulties in associating, in speaking freely about oneself, in unbearable silence, and in the psychoanalyst’s sense of helplessness. Despite the wide range of psychic organizations, what they have in common is a sense of inner emptiness. The French psychoanalytic school, following A. Green, classifies these states as the “emptiness clinic” of borderline (non-neurotic) functioning. The suffering of patients in the “emptiness clinic” can be seen as an attempt to escape an inner emptiness and deadness that is terrifying and unendurable. It is confronting the threat of defragmentation of the self, a sense of continuity of existence, helplessness, and despair through evacuation in action. But also, the process of “emptying thinking” or phobia of mental functioning can be engaged continuously or in isolation in cases of fear of encountering negativized content that causes the subject unbearable experiences, psychic pain, and suffering. Therefore, internal representational bonds are attacked and broken, associations cease, and thinking stops. There is a narcissistic collapse into an inner anesthetized, ‘white’ universe without objects, affects, or thoughts. “Nothing must change”, and “there is no future” because change is a “nameless (unimaginable) horror”. Massive disinvestment is at the root of psychic traumatization. In the paper, the author asks about the connections between the concepts of emptiness and negativity. After a theoretical overview, an attempt is made to differentiate between the psychoanalytic concepts of “lack”, inherent in the neurotic functioning of the psyche, and “emptiness”, which describes the suffering of non-neurotic patients. This is the emptiness resulting from the economic processes of traumatization. Using a clinical example, the author demonstrates the possible dynamics of psychoanalytic work based on his findings.