CV
Clinical psychologist, candidate psychoanalyst. She has graduated from Boğaziçi University, Psychology department and completed her master’s degree at Bilgi University, Clinical Psychology program. She is a candidate psychoanalyst at Psike Istanbul Association, affiliated with the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). She works in private practice.
Residence: Shell-House
Psychic retreat can be described as a “place”. The psyche, that could not find the place to settle in for various reasons, builds an inside place. And this place should be highly protected. The outside world is dangerous and the way to protect this fragile home may be to withdraw under the surface of the psyche, to underground. To this end, having to abandon the pleasure of the nourishment coming from breathing the fresh air of the libidinal, the psyche seems to turn to tracheary. In this kind of “existence” where the only way to protect oneself seems to nearly cut oneself from the air or keep it very restricted, the person almost waits for the air to infiltrate through the holes of the soil, then his/her cells and feed him/her. The psychic pleasure of the relationships and building connections and the gratification of relating with the reality can be forsaken to avoid the anxieties of the pain and disappointments accompanying them and not to lose this built up “place”. Because sheltering, namely settling and rooting, can only be possible for these people by withdrawing to the underground, to inside the shell built in a place close to the roots.
These patients that cannot find a place to settle for themselves, try to live an omnipotent existence in this home of exile which they furnished with their own inventions, in the shell that they built with their own secretion, like a snail. When the infant, born with the dependency to the other’s psyche to be able to settle and root, fails to do so, could he/she be looking for a solution in the evolutionary alternatives that the nature presents? Could this situation, which can be considered as a symptom of pathological character organization in humans, be revealing itself through the regression to the earlier solutions found in the nature?
In this presentation questions, more than answers; associations made upon psychoanalysis, natural sciences, and the poetics of space, more than theoretical explanations will be mentioned. The clinical examples as the source of these associations will be presented.
Sema Sözer