Abstract

PEREZ ZAMBON, Silvina. Study of wishes and defenses in two cancer patients. Subj. procesos cogn. [online]. 2010, vol.14, n.2, pp.167-174. ISSN 1852-7310.

Objectives: To analyze the discourse of two cancer patients by detecting wishes and dominant defenses. Sample: fragments of clinical interviews of two patients at least two years after completion of their cancer treatment. Method: the David Liberman algorithm (ADL), which allows detection of drives and defenses, as well as their state, in narrated episodes, speech acts and word networks. Procedures: (1) selection and analysis of narrations corresponding to the period in which the illness is presumed to have begun, (2) analysis of speech acts associated with these narrations, (3) application of the computerized dictionary to the analysis of the narrations, (4) comparison of the results at the different levels. Regarding issue (3), the manual approach was privileged -which, among other aspects, enables discourse analysis with the addition of words considered pertinent and that were not detected by the dictionary- in place of the automatic one, since the extension of the sample was short. Results: the analysis of the sample with the DLA instruments allows the detection of a combination of several drives and defenses, which have different relevance in the most important fragments of the interviews. While on the narration level both patients coincided in the dominance of pathogenic regressive psychic processes, on the level of words this wasn´t the case since on that level the results of both individuals were divergent. These divergences consisted in that for one of them - on the level of the words- languages inherent to more developed psychic processes were detected, and for the other individual those evolved psychic processes were combined with quite more regressive ego functions. It´s possible to assume that, if for the first individual these pathogenic psychic processes were mitigated more neurotic ego functions would appear while in the second patient, on the other hand, new pathological psychic processes that currently have a secondary character would surface.

Keywords : Cancer; Wishes; Defenses; Discourse.

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