Back to Table of Contents
disguised signals of anxiety that conform the analytic material are indeed the tip of the iceberg of the id elements that have created the need for a certain type of ego defense. There is an increased understanding of a need for a development of a strong working alliance within the clinical psychoanalytic setting, fostering the ego’s self-observing function in the here and now, which, in turn, increases the patient’s readiness to use the analyst’s interpretation of the underlying fantasies and drives. While Latin American analysts may use different methods, informed by various theories, to explore the unconscious (internal and external) motivation, the basic methods of free associations, setting, resistances, defense interpretation, transference and counter transference remains. Ego Psychology theory is always in multitude of ways present in everyday clinical practice. As psychoanalysts work with patients, they explore the most primitive body ego pathologies, lack of symbolization, and acting-out as part of basic contemporary psychoanalytic methodology that guides towards effective working through resistances and defenses truncating ego functions of symbolic processes and language. There is a continuous need for viable core elements of psychoanalytic clinical theory, and theoretical paradigms (and their changes) have repercussion in the clinical practice (Tuckett, 2011). Various integrational efforts between Ego Psychology and Object Relational thought in Latin America underlie the recognition that all analytic orientations subscribe to the common denominator that our life is guided by unconscious motivations even if they differ in the method of exploring those motivations. It follows that Contemporary Ego Psychology in its many facets is very much alive in Latin America, but it has been neglected as being recognized as such: Paradoxically, theory is frown upon, yet, technique is an essential part of everyday clinical psychoanalytic practice, as it is understood that, in practice, working with defenses and resistances opens the way to underlying conflicts, drive derivatives, unconscious fantasies and drives. --- Most authors across North America, Europe and Latin America, who include Ego Psychological concepts as part of their theoretical and clinical armamentarium understand that ego development proceeds in the context of object relations and in the context of ego’s mutually influential interactions with the id. In this regard, the theoretical division between the drives and their derivatives on one hand versus unconscious ego at work on the other hand, translated clinically into ‘id analysis versus ego analysis’ presents false dichotomies. In depth exploration of the intricacies of the web of ego’s adaptive, maladaptive, defensive as well as creative functioning allows for drive material to emerge more spontaneously at the clinical surface, and this in turn permits a more thorough analysis of the id. Additionally, creative flourish of contemporary integrations and conceptual overlaps, involving variations and elements of Ego Psychology, shed light on the dynamic realm of ego functioning , including multidirectional interplay of the conscious and unconscious contents and processes, the inner representational world linked with affects and drives in relation to multiple dimensions of psychic structure formation, as well as multiply conceptualized ‘transformative
306
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online