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V. Da. When the Patient Cannot Associate Freely Drawing primarily on the French psychoanalytic tradition (Marty, de M’Uzan, Roussillon, Botella and Botella), Latin American analysts study patients who are experiencing difficulties or deficiencies in verbal associative processes, due to early psychic traumas. Below are specific conceptualizations that are most relevant in Latin American psychoanalysis, in this regard. According to Pierre Marty and Michel de M' Uzan (1963), ‘the operative thought’, is a conscious thought that has no links with a certain level of fantasy activity. Instead, it duplicates and exemplifies the action within a limited temporal field, lacking capacity for metaphor, fluidity of the vantage point of so called ‘identifier play’ As found in very diverse clinical pictures, such patients report their experiences as isolated events, without establishing any relationship between them. There is no affective commitment towards the analyst: the patient only tells his symptoms and expects to be cured. Replacing the terminology of ‘psychic’, ‘psychic apparatus’ and ‘word-representation’, Marty speaks in terms of ‘mental’, ‘mental apparatus’, ‘mentalization’ and ‘mental representation’. The representations of things, for this author, evoke inwardly lived realities, without any differentiation in relation to the things originally perceived, where no ‘mental mobilization’ and mental processing in light of new experiences takes place. René Roussillon’s (1999) work with the image (figure) as a first form of representation, facilitating the transition towards the word, in order to give it full meaning and open a space for further emotional development. As stated in the European section above in detail, Roussillon employs the work of figurability in the analysis of children and adults alike as a conceptual expansion/extension of free association, with the aim of expanding representational range, rendering an act and/or an image of it intelligible, accessible to further psychic elaboration. Similarly, César and Sára Botella’s (1983) work with ‘figurability’ as a basic psychic process, where an action and its image precedes though and word representation is influential in Latin American psychoanalysis of patients with deficiencies in symbolic processes. According to these authors, such a work may need to take place in the analyst. It may involve regression to the primary process visual symbolism, arriving at an image (figure), consolidating the fragments of the patient’s archaic experiences which were registered and inscribed but not represented or (consciously or unconsciously) symbolized. The work involves transformation of ‘memory without recollection’, from fragments of the psychosomatic registers towards their visual symbolization in dreams and articulation in thoughts/words, generating linking and continuity of the patient’s psychic life. As Lapacó and Laverde (2012) assert, such influences have been absorbed into the Latin American psychoanalysis, and further developed, recognizing the importance of non- interpretative technical tools that the analyst can use in order to communicate with the psychic depths of the patient, and initiate changes in psychic sectors where the register is the ‘mental non-register’. This is especially relevant while working with patients, whose failures in psychic
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