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Several of the authors here grouped retrospectively together as “third model” developers seem to have reached similar conclusions about the relative inefficacy of classical interpretative work with persons operating below the ‘neurotic’ spectrum. Therapeutic value is displaced to the analyst’s function as a container and as a facilitator of the patient’s capacity to feel, to verbalize, and to represent. Winnicott wrote of “holding and handling” and the “capacity to play”, Bion (1962a, 1962b) referred to “reverie”, Green (2003/2005) proposed the “putting to work of representation”, Aulagnier (1977) stressed the right to secret thoughts of one’s own, Reid (2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2015) referred to the access to transitionality and “tertiary” psychic processes, Roussillon (1991; Casoni et al, 2009; Daoust, 2003) to the “malleable medium”, and Loewald (1960, 1970, 1971, 1972) to the “mediating” and “integrating interactions” of the parent and analyst. Apparent in these works is another correlative which appears to converge with the direction of many other psychoanalytic orientations, and with which Freud himself would have been in agreement, that is, the conclusion that mental health and resilience are associated with an optimal fluidity among the intrapsychic structures as well as a relative identificatory freedom in relationships. (See also entries THE UNCONSCIOUS, INTERSUBJECTIVITY)
VI. LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION
The conceptulizations pertaining to object relations theories in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, have been related to the Kleinian theory and its developments mainly in Bion, Meltzer and Winnicott. The early genealogy of Klein’s theory emerged from her psychoanalysis of children’s play. Klein observed that the child’s play personified his or her feelings and thoughts. The toys stood in for people, situations, hated feelings, persecutory enemies, loved wishes, wild theories of sexuality, bodily implosions, and so on. Play was not only a way for the child to control what must at first feel unknowable and dangerous. The toys themselves were treated as if they had feelings: they lived, worried, died, and tried to destroy. In this sense objects can be defined as phantasy apprehensions of the external world. Internal objects are not ‘representations’, as they might be in memories or in conscious phantasies (daydreams). Objects are felt to make up the substance of the body and of the mind” (Hinshelwood 1991, pp. 71–72). The concept of “internal objects” is understood in the context of the whole of the Kleinian metapsychology, in interaction with other main hypothesis such as: the existence of life and death drives, a theory of early mental functioning which formulates the existence of an ego capable of perceiving anxiety, the development of the ego of primitive defence mechanisms, the hypothesis of unconscious fantasies and the theory of paranoid-schizoid and depressive position. (Bianchedi,1984).
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