The relevance of Evelyne Kestemberg today^*

* Translated by Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz

ABSTRACT

Evelyne Kestemberg bequeathed rigorous metapsychological claims and she mapped out a way to approach the psychotic modes of being and formalise the specificities of the transference when delusion is at work, whether visibly or latently. The prime goal of the treatment is an attempt to restore the pleasure in mental functioning, a pleasure which psychotic suffering precisely obstructs.

KEYWORDS:

• Fetishistic relation to the object
• ambisexedimago
• the Self
• cold psychosis
• the pleasure of mental functioning
• the phobia of mental functioning
• the third character
• the fragmented transference

Notes

* Translated by Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz

1 Disaminated is a neologism coined by E. Kestemberg.

2 “The monster dwells in the crack between continuity and discontinuity and it orders them, nonetheless respecting the chaotic part inherent in any organisation that remains or becomes alive. In so doing, it unlocks a new dimension. It creates a fabric which constructs a strange, moving and frightening unity located somewhere between the Oedipal order and nothingness, between the masculine and the feminine, the origin and the future, between men and god, men and animals, the individual and the collective, the child and the adult as well as between the present time and another category of time, that of the tale and the myth” (Nastasi 2004, p. 148).