On November 22, Raluca Soreanu will attend the International Conference ‘De Sándor Ferenczi à l’École de Budapest: Témoins contemporains’ and present the paper ‘La vie psychique des fragments : Sur la traversée d’une mosaïque’
In this talk, Raluca will discuss the topic of radical plasticity of the psyche in relation to trauma. She argues that psychic fragmentation is a ubiquitous operation of the psyche. The psychoanalytic clinic of our times is traversed by references to a range of ‘dissociative’ processes, and forms of splitting and fragmentation, but these processes often remain enigmatic and underspecified. In dialogue with Sándor Ferenczi, she argues that we can talk about the psychic ‘life’ of the fragments that result from the trauma and produce further and important differentiations in this ‘culture of fragments’. She will unpack some of Ferenczi’s unique vocabulary on fragmentation, which includes references to fractures, splits, atomisations, pulverisations, leakages, detritus, but also new formations, protective membranes, vesicles, expansions, contagions, and inner growths. She will also discuss some of the implications of focusing on radical plasticity and on forms of psychic reconstruction for the contemporary debates in trauma theory. She argues that the capacity for rearranging the fragments and making new compositions out of the split psychic fragments is one of the most important anchors for working clinically with trauma.
