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clinical practice, as they signify focus on the quality and nature of the psychoanalytic relationship. With growing volume of psychoanalytic work with children and adolescents, Erikson´s ‘ basic trust ’, ‘ industry ’, and working towards ‘autonomy’ is consistently taken into account, but very strangely considered as an exception of ego psychology theory, meaning it is more developmental and necessary, serving well as a technique with children and adolescents. Due to misunderstanding and to a cultural-historical ‘American stigma’ that confuses Ego Psychology with cognitive psychology, in a contemporary perspective, there has been a ‘weaving in’ of such ego psychological concepts as resistances, expansion of the attention to, and interpretation of, defenses , that converge in a contemporary synthetic version of Developmental Ego Psychology, that includes an updated version of Mahler’s Separation- Individuation in Daniel Stern ´s (1985) conceptualizations, like ‘ affect attunement ’, while casting Hartmann, Lowenstein and others aside. The idea that psychoanalysis belongs exclusively to the inner world may be giving way to a more integrated or contemporary psychoanalysis, taking into account also wider range of pathologies. While immigration is a big issue worldwide, in Latin America there has been much suffering, and the work with immigrants is mainly based on ego psychological and socio- cultural concepts. Such developmental concepts as Mahler ´s separation anxiety during the rapprochement subphase of her separation-individuation theory, the need for, (and reclaiming of) object constancy, and Erikson´s ‘ basic trust versus mistrust’ and (re)formation of ‘ ego- identity’ become essential, in addition to Stern´s affect attunement . Glen Gabbard ’s (2009) clarifying discussion of three major psychoanalytic paradigms: Ego Psychology, Object Relations theories and Self Psychology, and their evolution from the original classical analytic theory is gaining influence across the continent, as is Robert S . Wallerstein’s (2002) “Growth and Transformation of American Ego Psychology”, which introduced Latin American analysts to the evolution of the Ego psychology from Hartmann to the present theoretical pluralism of the complex post-Freudian thought in North America , integrating Contemporary Ego Psychology/Structural theory with Object Relations and elements of Self Psychology . Such perspective, understood as bridging the ego processes, including the reality principle on one hand, and the social life on the other, resonates with important strands of Latin American psychoanalytic thought and practice. Cecilio Paniagua’s (2014) Contemporary Ego Psychology (‘psicología del yo contemporánea’, or PYC in Spanish) has been embraced in Latin America, especially by young psychoanalysts, since it is a fresh version that emphasizes technique over theory. As a Spanish psychoanalyst, who writes in Spanish, as well as in English, Paniagua expanded on, and recognized that, the Gray’s close-process interventions may need to be “adapted to different cultural milieus” (Paniagua 2008, p. 2019). Paniagua’s systematic approach consists of the exploration of the resistances more than the associative working through, keeping in mind the importance of the therapeutic alliance, in order to privilege the self-observing ego as a road towards understanding the unconscious
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