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does not always amount to “being a Person”, and vice versa : one condition doesn’t exclude the other, but it doesn’t grant for it either. In Bolognini’s view, the Interpsychic is an occasional, natural way of co-experiencing and co-working that connects two individuals, and not a structural and stable condition. It doesn’t necessarily imply that a Person or a Subject is there. As a prototype of it, when a mother breastfeeds a baby, there is at the beginning no declared personal “status”: a natural cooperation between mouth and nipple that allows both mother and baby to “work together” (Segal, 1994), in a régime of good fusional cooperation. The two are able to exchange interior contents (both bodily and emotional) through their specific organs going into and out of the internal world (Bolognini, 2008): these bodily relations, initially experienced with a low level of mentalization but with a high degree of imprinting, will work as further intrapsychic equivalents mainly at a preconscious level (as happens, i.e., in the majority of cases in the creative processes); they will perhaps also become conscious and will find a full mental representation, but this could also not happen. In the interpsychic exchange there is no confusion: a pre-subjective and co-subjective area of sensations, feelings and thoughts can be shared, while maintaining at the same time and at other levels, with undissociated continuity, individual ways of psychic functioning, characterized by a condition of good-enough separateness that doesn’t need to be constantly assessed (Guss Teicholz, 1999).
III. C. Intersubjectivity in French Psychoanalysis: Europe and North America
III. Ca . Introduction French psychoanalytic tradition is not a monolithic tradition. But even though French psychoanalysts have several different psychoanalytic affiliations, it is nonetheless possible to identify some factors that shaped the specificity of post-Freudian French psychoanalysis. Among them, the relation to Freud’s writings, the French translation of Freud, Lacan’s influence, the relation between psychoanalysis and psychology and the emphasis on language appear especially important for understanding the reactions to the US intersubjective orientation in French psychoanalysis. These factors are inter-related and mutually reinforce each other. Furthermore, like in any other country, such factors are themselves determined by other sociological and cultural conditions. Political traditions, law, – including family law –, modes of parenting, gender roles and gender relations, economic and social status of psychoanalytic patients and practitioners, as well as the education and fields of training of psychoanalysts, are also instrumental in bringing to the fore some concepts or elements that become central in a given psychoanalytic culture. These factors may well have played a significant role in the reception of the American intersubjective orientation in French psychoanalysis.
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