A Body of One's Own: From Self-Cutting to the Cuts of Separation in an Adolescent Suffering From Traumatic Early Abandonments.

The treatment of adolescents suffering from early traumatic experiences inescapably involves the encounter with patients' concrete use of their bodies and actions. The clinical history of an adolescent girl reveals the relationship between traumatic transgenerational abandonments and self-cutting in the transference-countertransference relationship. Initially the patient's body and actions were the only way to communicate experiences that could not be conveyed in words and represented: the "skin for two" of the original psychosomatic envelope needed to be wounded, cut, broken concretely. The establishment of a boundary between internal and external, self and other, is the result of a complex process with roots in the quality of the encounter with the object. Gradually, in the encounter with the analyst, the young patient may construct a tenuous possibility of differentiation and begin to access the first outline of a representation of loss.

Accident proneness and impulsiveness in an Italian group of burn patients.

There is controversy about the existence of a predisposition to burn incidents (accident proneness). Our objective was to examine, in a group of burn patients, the conditions or "unconscious" subjective predisposition, the presence of impulsiveness that may have contributed to bringing about the "burn" event, and to assess the presence of psychiatric diagnoses and specific characteristics of temperament. 25 consecutive burn patients were interviewed by using specific psychometric tests. The sample was divided into two groups: "control" group (N=10), composed of subjects who had accidentally been involved in the incident and "case" group (N=15) composed of subjects who had very likely and more or less "knowingly" put themselves at risk of injury. We observed a marked statistically significant difference with case group subjects appearing to be more impulsive than the ones in control group. Higher levels of impulsiveness may predispose case group patients to a greater risk of burn. Our survey also seems to reveal a relationship between impulsiveness and the proneness of some subjects to burns.