Inevitable errors» with the «destructive» patient and mistaking the flowering shrub odor

With increasing frequency, clinical reports tell of «destructive» patients whose destruc tiveness is the cause of a paralysis in the analytic process. Some of the psychoanalytic literature, interweaving the concept of the destructive drive with that of the death drive, confers an inevitable mandate of non-transformability in such clinical situations. The author, understanding destructiveness as a drive discharge issue in the absence of symbolic thinking, and drawing on clinical material, theorizes that unprocessed life drives play a central role in the production of aggression that is acted out in the session. He maintains, therefore, that one can play with those drive elements, starting from the «inevitable errors» that are produced in a transference-countertransference dimension that is pervaded by excessive projective identifications. Analysis of the countertransference, the analyst’s mental framework, and the maintenance of the analytic method are the other crucial elements with which – starting from the calm recognition of so-called «errors» – even acted-out aggression, repetition compulsion, or destructiveness can be put into a historical context, and subjectivization and thinkability can be achieved. © 2016, Raffaello Cortina Editore. All rights reserved.