The Essential Being

Psychoanalytic Understanding of Totalitarianism

Rafael E Lopez-Corvo author Anamilagros Perez-Morazzani author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:19th Apr '17

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The Essential Being cover

This book explores the concept of "pre-conceptual trauma", drawing in particular on the pioneering research of Wilfred Bion. A comparison is established between two different groups of individuals: five well-known dictators and five famous creative individuals. The authors have defined "pre-conceptual traumas" as ubiquitous experiences that all human beings go through during the first years of their lives, when a temporary absence changes into a permanent presence, determining the outcome of what any individual might do or perform in the future. Pre-conceptual traumas split the mind into two dialectical and correlated states: the "traumatized" (conflictive or pathological), and the "non-traumatized (developmental or normal).

'With daring, learning, and clinical experience, Anamilagros Perez-Morazzani and Rafael E. Lopez-Corvo present the impact of childhood trauma "as it repeats compulsively and continuously" in totalitarianism and terrorism. Perez-Morazzani and Lopez-Corvo detail the unconscious motivational forces in five dictators, showing the "omnipotent and megalomaniac fantasies" of the leader. The Essential Being dramatises the internal dynamics of the tyrant's hold on power: the cockroach is "killed" but produces "a thousand small ones". The authors' immersion in psychoanalysis, with its unique access to unconscious representations and vivid metaphors of patients in analysis, provides an impressive wealth of clinical vignettes in this remarkable study of early trauma and its very different outcome in the psychodynamics of creative genius.'-- Margaret Ann Hanly, PhD, training and supervising psychoanalyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis and past president of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society

ISBN: 9781782205005

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

194 pages