IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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on presentation. Presentation does not oppose representation. It belongs to the logic of the effects of the present, of a relationship between two subjects who do not lose their alterity in the encounter.

VI. Af. Pichon Riviere’s Contribution Enrique Pichon Riviere helped found the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association and was a formative influence in the personal development and intellectual productivity of many of its leading thinkers, such as José Bleger, Willy and Madeleine Baranger, David Liberman, Heinrich Racker and Horacio Etchogoyen. A part of the vibrant bohemian, artistic, literary and journalistic culture of early 20th century Argentina, Pichon Riviere has often been referred to as the psycho-social face of Argentine psychoanalysis. Pichon Riviere (1965/1971) insisted on the intimate connection between individual and social psychology. His conceptualization of links emphasized the significance of the social group in the constitution and preservation of personal identity, as well as the important role of the intrapsychic – unconscious phantasy and personal psychology, in the shaping of culture and the social surround. He mantained that social psychology should be viewed as psychoanalytic, while psychoanalysis itself should be understood as a social psychology. For this author, the developing personality and identity, the self and sense of self, was constituted more by the world of interaction [interpersonal, intersubjective, relational experience] than [simply] by excesses of inborn drives but also that the unconscious aspects of the link inside the patient modifies the meaning of all interactions. Pichon`s ideas were a powerful forerunner of the Barangers’ formulation of the analytic field and of various movements towards and elaborations of the intersubjective dimension of the analytic process, the positive role of the analyst’s countertransference, a tentative theory of act and action in the cure and many other formulations that have given contemporary Latin American psychoanalysis its particular flavor. He also enlarged the conceptualization of the Oedipus Complex to include all triangular relations, beginning with the way a third person in the mother’s mind modifies the link between mother and child, and continuing to the general principle that the presence of a third person always modifies two-person links. In this way, the individual is, from the beginning, formed in a triadic structure so that the early relationship is bicorporal and tripersonal. Thus, while the early relationship is apparently dyadic, the third functions permanently and from the beginning in the mind of the mother. Bernardi thinks that Pichon´s, as well as Bleger’s, most important contribution, in terms of the history of ideas in Latin America, is that the object is also a subject and that there is a dialectical relationship between them, a point not readily accepted by many other contemporary Kleinian authors. In this vein, broadening the concept of object relations, Pichon Riviere described what

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