Abstract

Psychological effects of the destructiveness of the pandemic, an unthinkable war, and climate disasters that are the new norm have made existing traumatic factors even more pervasive in afflicted contemporary times. This is actuality in which the culture of immediacy characterizing psychosocial change (dramatically) thrusts towards the compression of relational space and time that identity construction and psychic work need. We are witnessing phenomena of suffering– group and individual–which challenge psychoanalysis and make reflection on the heuristic potential of its fundamental concepts even more necessary. Starting from this perspective, the paper focuses on a topic which the author, today more than ever, considers central in the social as well as the clinical dimension: escape to a world of magical-illusory fantasies as a defensive replacement for authentic imaginative fantasy rooted in the relationality of illusional dynamics. It is a dimension of psychic dysfunction which, with specific regard to the different developmental stages, seems to take the form of a psychosocial syndrome: a kind of dangerous mutation towards a weakening of the thinking apparatus, thus pressing us in clinical work to query (perhaps even more so than in the past) the need for an accurate modulation of technique that can relate plastically at a level of ego development and the relation with objects on the scene. Clinical material from child and adult analyses illustrates this topic.