Intrafamily violence and psychic transmission in the context in which dreams and playful activity are expressions of the family body: case study

Abstract

This paper, using psychoanalytic framework, discusses the process of updating psychic transgenerational conflicts in the body of member(s) of a family group as a symbolic expression of collective representational psychic world. It initiates from the view that the individual body, in their somatic manifestations, expresses shared content by all family unit, leading the phenomenon of an intrapsychic sphere to another inter-relational and transpsychic. As a strategy of the theme development a clinical case will be presented in which a mother reports dreams in which successively wakes alarmed and startled, with body manifestations including tachycardia and physical discomfort. Thus, in this case study, psychosomatic symptoms can be understood as an intra, inter and trans subjective event expressed in the context of the family. This clinical attendance has been developed with the mother individually and together with her children, and the mother gave a Consent Form for this study, that focuses on the children’s drawing and their playful activity expression, which in line with the dreams from the mother, express the psychic dynamics lived in the family with the involvement of all in the context of domestic violence. It is concluded that intrafamily violence needs to be understood in the interrelational context and inserted in its intergenerational chain.