Abstract
This paper discusses the development of the Freudian clinic and the impasses in Freud’s course that led to different formulations of what would apparently be a single concept of psychic elaboration. It seeks to situate the historical, theoretical, and technical conditions that enabled the emergence of different formulations of psychic elaboration during the development of the Freudian clinic, investigating its developments and variations. The first formulation of psychic elaboration, associative elaboration, is related to an intrapsychic process, defined as the psyche’s ability to link affections and representations. The second, working-through, is related to overcoming resistance, in a transferential and interpsychic process, since it is through the analyst’s interventions that working-through finds chances to occur as potentiality. Finally, the paper points out that the second formulation entails the first, since it is by overcoming resistances that the association of a representation occurs.
Keywords:
psychic elaboration; Freud; Roussillon; resistance; working-through