IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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Furthermore, he stresses the healing power of the analyst’s love (Avila Espada, 2013), quoting Mitchell (1997). For Mitchell, who brought Racker’s ideas into the fuller relational context, transference and countertransference are two components of a unit; they give life to each other and create the interpersonal relationship of the analytic situation. José Bleger (1967) , an eminent disciple of Pichon-Rivière, developed a behavior theory based on structuralist and Marxist ideas. He propounds three levels of behavioral expression, namely, the mind, the body, and the external world. These three levels interact in a dynamic way. Madeleine and Willy Baranger were French-born analysts who moved to Argentina in 1946 and joined the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (de León de Bernardi, 2000). According to W. Baranger (1959, p. 81), “based on its practice, psychoanalysis must unravel its own objectivation principles and accept its role as a (in some ways exceptional) science of humankind. It must accept its nature as a science of dialogue (that is, a bi-personal psychology), its nature as an interpretive science (…) with essentially original laws and validation techniques that are different from those that govern the natural sciences. Epistemological research has the primary task of formulating the conditions that will ensure the validity of our interpretations”. The Barangers’ vision, however, differs from an extreme subjectivist or interpretive position that is primarily focused on the analyst’s point of view as creator of the interpretation. According to these authors, “the systematic study of what is taking place in the analytic bi-personal situation is the only road of access to an ideal of validation of knowledge that is truly specific to psychoanalysis. This currently conceivable ideal is realized (without being formulated) in several recent essays that provide a very thorough description of the analytic situation with interpretations and changes occurring in limited temporal sets” (W. Baranger 1959, p. 81). They also claim that, since analysts’ observation involves both the observation of the patient and a correlative self-observation, it can only be defined as observation of the field (M. and W. Baranger, 2008). Later, when they develop the notion of bastion , they suggest that analysts can establish a “second look” over the totality of the analytic field, especially over the obstacles to the process, which are posed by both patient and analyst. In their own words, “this has led us to propose the introduction of several terms: ‘field’, ‘bastion’, ‘second look’. When the process stumbles or halts, the analyst can only question himself about the obstacle, by encircling himself and his analysand, Oedipus and the Sphinx, in a second look, in a total view: this is the field” (M. Baranger, W. Baranger, and J. Mom, 1983, p. 1).

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