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VI. DEVELOPMENTS AND HISTORICAL REVISIONS OF THE CONCEPT IN LATIN AMERICA
Inspired by Freud’s ‘work in progress’ character of his drive conceptualizations and definitions, reflected in his statements “The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions.” (1915a, p. 117); “the total absence of any theory of the instincts which would help us to find our bearings” (1914, p. 78); referring to drive as “the most obscure element of psychological research” (1920, p. 34), and as “an obscure subject.” (1923/26, p. 265), Latin American analysts continue searching for clarity of the continuously redefined ‘obscure elements’ and ‘obscure areas’, including life and death drives and their clinical manifestations. 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 Cristina 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
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