The Psychic Life of Fragments

In this chapter, Raluca Soreanu builds on Sándor Ferenczi's understanding of trauma, psychic scenes and psychic fragments to introduce a novel approach to fragmentation. She explores psychic processes that have to do with living among fragments, scraps, detritus, but also new growths, protective membranes and contagions. Firstly, the chapter proposes a psychoanalysis of scars, held together by a vocabulary of wounds and scar-tissues. Here, the attention goes to a scar-tissue resulting from the encounter with the Other, out of which both memory and the ego are made. Secondly, it proposes a psychoanalysis of organs, interested in radical plasticity and in surprising modes of psychic splitting that result from the scene of trauma. Here, the guiding question is ‘what can a fragment do ?’. Thirdly, it explores an eventful psychoanalysis, centred on catastrophe and trauma. Raluca Soreanu approaches the scene of trauma from new angles, paying attention to oblique lines, un-common transversal trajectories, orientations that are from below or from above, and asymmetric encounters.