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VI. A. SEMINAL DISCUSSION BETWEEN CRISTINA ROSAS DE SALAS AND JAIME SPILKA: REPETITION AND WORKING THROUGH Revista Latinoamericana de Psicoanálisis , (Vol. 8/2008), the official journal of the Federation of the Latin American Psychoanalytic Societies (FEPAL) brought the issue of the drive(s) into the forefront of the contemporary psychoanalytic theoretical and clinical discourse by the debate between Rosas de Salas and Jamie Spilka , published under the title “The drive and its overflows” [“ La pulsión y sus desbordes… ”]. The debate addresses deeply felt challenges and ‘risks’ associated with revisiting and revising the classical ‘immovable’ Freudian concept. Opening the discussion, Rosas de Salas notes: “As a consequence of demands that used to remain outside our consulting rooms, ideas that seemed immovable… will have to be listened to. This has been a subject for concern for some time now…” (2008, pp.143-144). She recalls that already in 1984, in the paper “Active currents in Latin American psychoanalytic thinking” [“ Corrientes actuantes en el pensamiento psicoanalítico latinoamericano ”], W. Baranger and J. Mom discussed their perspective on the expansion of the “tablets of the law”, when they wrote: “We are not fanatical. We are circumspect expansionists . We have already expressed it somewhere else, expansion without dilution and with precision.” (Baranger and Mom 1984, p-607). Guided by this position, the subject of the discussion between the two theorists is reconsideration of the challenge that the ‘drive and its overflows’ pose in the context of the Freudian ‘counterpoint’ of repetition – working through . At the risk of appearing expansionistic but non-circumspect, Rosas de Salas proposes a non-pathological conception of the repressed unconscious, thus crossing the borders between theory and practice. She chooses presentation (interweaving of significant interchanges between drive – object) as a “hinge concept”, both for metapsychological elaborations, and for discussion of the clinial practice. This intrapsychic “vicissitude” of the encounter between the drive and the object preserves both drive availability (for psychic work) and the contingency of the object (possibilities for substitution and displacement), despite the limits and the effort imposed by what overflows them. A first hypothesis is that in “difficult cases” the heart of the problem is not the non- representable but rather the “ non represented ”. It is an attempt at considering different forms of inscription and removal of repression and early traumas, which, as per Green (1993), requires the analysis of the impact of the negative, which goes beyond the sole consideration of neurosis as the negative of perversion. When the problem changes and revolves around being or having the object, in the practice, the classical device finds itself shaken, and what is known about the place and the functions of the analyst has to be revised. There are compelling metapsychological arguments to support differences between the enactment, as the possibility for the repressed unconscious processes, and the repetition in action (acting out), with the implication of different analytic approaches to working through.
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