Stella and the Vampire Princess

The paper gives a close description of the clinical work in a once-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a young female patient in a situation of formless impasse. This impasse was characterized by non-thinking, or psychotic functioning in the transference. The imposed once-weekly setting necessitated prolonged internal work on the part of the analyst, leading her to an understanding of the nature of the links (in Bion's sense) dominating the impasse. This led to the emergence of a transferential form – the Vampire Princess. This form was understood to contain the patient's problematic around the otherness of the analyst, and by extension the otherness of her objects. The transference was consequently understood as a re-opening of an originary situation, in accordance with the thinking of Laplanche. Thus, given form and context in the transference, the patient's problematics were made available for transformation

Alterity · Art · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Extension (predicate logic) · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Vampire · History · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research · Psychology · Psychology and Mental Health · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications