From Thalassa to amniotic transference: Towards a matricial listening of disorganized clinical and states

This paper unfolds a conceptual and clinical trajectory that emerged over more than two decades of analytic work with disorganized patients. It traces a movement from psychic gavage – a traumatic form of maternal intrusion – toward the conceptualization of amniotic transference, through the analytic experience of what I have termed floating matricial portance. Initially, psychic gavage described a condition of psychic over-saturation that left no space for thought. Yet, despite years of working within this framework, certain treatments remained stalled. The turning point came through a dream – making visible what had been silently at work in my analytic presence: a mode of psychic holding preceding form or meaning. From this revelation emerged floating matricial portance, allowing the articulation of amniotic transference as a pre-symbolic field where the analyst functions not as an object but as a milieu – a matrix sustaining psychic life before birth. Drawing on long-term clinical experience and theoretical filiations extending from Ferenczi's Thalassa, the paper explores how this mode of listening opens psychic space for patients whose early psychic life unfolded under conditions of intrusion and saturation that prevented any nascent form from emerging. Clinical vignettes illustrate how such mode of presence becomes transformative in practice.