Villa, François <br/><br/>
The Psychoanalyst’s Persona 

 -  2003.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 94 
<br/><br/> In turning away from reality, the “neurotic” patient avoids the need to act on the world, to change it according to their childhood wishes. At the risk of narrowing down the fields of perception and action, they hide away in the autoerotic satisfactions allowed by autoplastic changes. This autocratic tendency of psychic life is a barrier to treatment. Alongside its actualization in transference, the analyst’s persona also represents an obstacle. While the “indeterminate persona” of the analyst constitutes for the patient a “force of attraction” that attenuates the influence of autocratism, if it becomes too “embodied” in transference it may threaten therapy. By attempting to avoid de-anthropomorphization, these two resistances together constitute a barrier to going beyond the pleasure principle, and hinder the recall process. By resorting to the model of the endosymbiotic chimera, the author reconsiders the issues and limits of the therapy, and calls into question the “evidence of reality” we have available to us so that the therapy does not get endlessly bogged down in the reconstruction of an ersatz “infant + mothering” system. Having questioned the elements that provide us with the means to distinguish the (person-related) limits to be overcome from the specific ones we cannot escape, the author suggests a way to consider the difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.