Monday Reading Group: Hayuta Gurevich : ORPHA, ORPHIC FUNCTIONS, AND THE ORPHIC ANALYST: WINNICOTT’S ‘‘REGRESSION TO DEPENDENCE’’ IN THE LANGUAGE OF FERENCZI

Sacramento Psychoanalytic Society

in Affiliation with the San Francisco Center For Psychoanalysis

Presents

The Monthly Monday Reading Group

In the reading group we are trying to take a look at contemporary psychoanalytic papers (written within the last 5-10 years). The papers are read in advance and discussed at the meetings.

Monday April 1st, 7-8:30 pm

3015 O Street, Downstairs

ORPHA, ORPHIC FUNCTIONS, AND THE ORPHIC ANALYST: WINNICOTT’S ‘‘REGRESSION TO DEPENDENCE’’ IN THE LANGUAGE OF FERENCZI

Hayuta Gurevich

Gurevich, Orpha, Orphic Functions, and the Orphic Analyst.pdf

Abstract

Early developmental trauma is imprinted in the psyche by survival fragmentation and dissociation. Traumatized patients need the analyst to be actively involved and allow for regression to dependence in order to strengthen, create and construct their psychic functioning and structure so that environmental failures will be contained and not rupture continuity of being. I suggest that Ferenczi’s and Winnicott’s ideas about regression to dependence in analysis are fundamental contributions to these quests, and that Ferenczi set the foundation, which Winnicott further explored and developed. I would like to focus on their clinical theory of treating early developmental trauma of the psyche, describing it in the less known language of Ferenczi, reviving his concept of Orpha and its functions. The complementarities of the two approaches can enrich and broaden our understanding of the clinical complications that arise in the analysis of such states.