In preparation for the 52nd IPA Congress, we will present a number of episodes dedicated to the activities that will take place and its theme: THE INFANTILE: ITS MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS.

Please visit ipa.world/theinfantileonline to explore the extensive program and to register. The 52nd IPA Congress will be held online from July 21st to August 1st, and by visiting our program you can set your schedule to suit your personal time zone.

In this episode we’ll listen to Laura Colombi talking about the paper titled: “The dangerous call of the wild. Clinical considerations about dissociation into fantasy”.

Here she discusses how fantasizing, understood as a flight into fantasy, belongs to a type of mental functioning as opposed to that of imaginative fantasy. The Author follows Winnicott’s idea that withdrawal into fantasy can take on a dissociative quality, which is structured early on as a defensive solution following the loss of hope in object relations.

Such defence becomes the foundation for a dangerous enclave in which the subject ends up enclosing himself, experiencing an illusory self-sufficiency which is nourished with omnipotence and sensory pleasure.

From this perspective, the Author suggests that the withdrawal into fantasy must be understood as a risky factor of emptying the Self or of a crystallization into psychopathological structures. This way, it could become an automatic activity of ‘non-thought’ that replaces the working-through processes necessary for the development of the mind.

Clinical material, omitted in the podcast, of both children and adults will illustrate how the flight into fantasy, over time, may take the form of an anti-relational realm of the mind, compromising the operations necessary for the integration of psychic life.

Laura Colombi is Training Analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society and Analyst for Children and Adolescents. She has been working on the educational and theoretical levels on disorders related to the pathology of primitive psychological organization and weaves together interests from the clinic of children and adult patients with severe psychopathology and identity disorders. On the topic of 'dissociation into fantasy' she has published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and in the Italian Psychoanalytic Journal.

This episode is available also in Italian

Clearing in the Forest (1880), Rodolphe Bresdin. Etching on cream laid paper. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Debussy Rêverie, Constantin Stephan.

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