Carlo Bonomi M.D

Bio: Carlo Bonomi M.D is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: The Symbolic. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 15 citations.

Trauma and the symbolic function of the mind

Abstract: The relationship between trauma and the symbolic function of the mind is discussed in three parts. First, a short outline is given of the long‐lasting split within the field of trauma: it consists in a dichotomy between the symbolic and anti‐symbolic reading of the traumatic experience – as I have called it in a previous paper. In the second part, it is maintained that the work of Ferenczi represents an attempt at overcoming this split. In the third and last part, the notion of symbolic adaptation is introduced. The process of adaptation has to ensure the survival of the individual along lines capable to foster the hope that the lost equilibrium between the individual and his environment will one day be restored. This function is performed by symbols: by linking together the lost satisfaction and the hoped‐for wish‐fulfillment, by creating bridges between past and future, symbols enable us to adjust to the new environment without renouncing hope. Symbols are mediators between the pleasure principle and th...

Pathological Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Recent Research and Clinical Implications

Abstract: This review is focused on integrating recent research on emotion regulation and empathic functioning with specific relevance for agency, control, and decision-making in narcissistic personality disorder (NPD, conceptualized as self direction in DSM 5 Section III). The neuroscientific studies of emotion regulation and empathic capability can provide some significant information regarding the neurological/neuropsychological underpinnings to narcissistic personality functioning. Deficiencies in emotion processing, compromised empathic functioning, and motivation can influence narcissistic self-regulation and agential direction and competence in social interactions and interpersonal intimate relationships. The aim is to expand our understanding of pathological narcissism and NPD and suggest relevant implications for building a collaborative treatment alliance.

Sándor Ferenczi and the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: WO YEARS AGO WAS THE 1oo'Jl-I ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST FATEFUL meeting between Sigmund Freud and Sindor Ferenczi. T Ferenni's visit to Freud's home at No. 19 Berggasse on the 2nd of February, 1908, not only marked the beginning of a deep friendship and lifelong professional relationship, but also .opened the door to a new perspective in the psychoanalytic movement just then emerging. Ferenczi developed innovative concepts in scholarly thinking and on the meeting points of culture and psychoanalysis. He and the members of the Budapest School represented not only Hungarian roots but also the values, the scholarly approach, and the creativity characteristic of Central Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century. They were fundamental in supplying the world with a great many scholars and artists-among them nuclear physicists Edward Teller and Leo Szilard, mathematician John von Neumann, father of the modern computer, and writer Sajldor MArai; the latter two were close to Ferenczi. Ferenczi energized the psychoanalytic movement. He launched the paradigm shift that still affects psychotherapeutic theory and practice today. At the same time, he proposed the setting up of key institutions.

Ferenczi's “wise baby” phenomenon and resilience

Abstract: How did psychoanalysis find its way from “traumatic progression” or “precocious maturity,” as described by Ferenczi at the beginning of the 1930s with its background in the “wise baby” phenomenon, to research on resilience? The paper focuses on psychoanalytic approaches to resilience. What was the contribution of ego psychology, object relations and attachment theories, self-psychology, and group experiences to understanding resilience? Results concerning resilience are based on longitudinal studies of early hospitalized or traumatized but “resilient children,” child survivors of genocides, wars, and communal violence, populations of children and adult refugees. The paper shows the different approaches to resilience, from factoral components to views of structures and processes, including the new ideas that place resilience and depletion as phenomena at the two ends of the same continuity of structural dimensions: psychobiological and object relational.

The Contemporary Relevance of Sándor Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with the Aggressor to the Diagnosis and Analytic Treatment of Chronic PTSD

Abstract: The underreporting of childhood traumatic etiology of the later onset chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of our present day Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV: APA 1994) has complex societal-cultural, as well as unconscious, reasons, complexities of which are written already into the original Ferenczi’s concept of Identification with the Aggressor, as corroborated by the contemporary dynamic developmental neuroscience. Ferenczi’s is the pathogenic sequence (unlike Anna Freud’s later concept of the same name) resulting in the Identification with the Aggressor including the Confusion of Tongues between the adult abuser and the abused child, which results in a layered configuration of posttraumatic identifications of the Wise Child and the Identification with the Aggressor. The clinical vignette illustrates the dynamic complexity of the overall Identification with the Aggressor, with the Confusion of Tongues acquiring additional internalized form through perceptual–affect...

Ferenczi and Ego Psychology

Abstract: HE OXFORD CONGRESS, IN 1929, WAS ENTITLED ‘‘PROGRESSES in Psycho-Analytic Technique.” Sandor Ferenczi presented the T groundbreaking paper “The Principle of Relaxation and Neocatharsis,” in which he expressed a rather strong criticism of psychoanalytic therapy based on the new structural model. Although the latter permitted a more sophisticated approach based on metapsychology, Ferenczi was not enthusiastic about scientific advances. He complained that “too little attention was paid to the libido” (Ferenczi, 1929, p. 112) and confessed that when he began to work from this perspective, he could not escape “the impression that the relation between physician and patient was becoming far too much like that between teacher and pupil” (p. 113). In Ferenczi’s view, the new ego-metapsychological standpoint represented the culmination of a tendency to substitute teaching for analysis, which was ultimately rooted in Freud’s own vacillation about the therapeutic implications of his own discovery. The structural model of the mind was introduced by Freud (1921, 1923, 1926) after World War I, marking a transition in psychoanalysis from its focus on the unconscious to a period in which emphasis shifted to the ego as the primary source for shaping behavior. In 1929 the struc-