Psychic Withdrawal: Consequences in Children Children and Adults

Psychoanalysis and psychopathology

Abstract

In this paper I will try to define the concept of psychic retreat giving particular space to the infantile one. My hypothesis is that the infantile psychic withdrawal, which splits the child from the relational world, induces a mental state of a sensory imaginative type that can lead to psychotic alienation in adulthood. Childhood withdrawal should be differentiated from the autistic spectrum disorder which develops differently and takes different paths. In the second part of the paper I briefly describe the long analysis of a psychotic patient who had lived for a long time in a childhood retreat. The ongoing work on his particular way of creating a dissociated reality (sensory in childhood and then delusional) gradually led to the resolution of his psychotic state and to the development of emotional and relational skills.