IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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Another trend in French psychoanalysis , which also stems from the social dimension and socio-political interest, is represented by the work of René Kaës (2009), who developed the notion of an unconscious alliance in groups and in the analytical relationship. Kaës also developed the notion of isomorphic polarity which is a defensive organisation against archaic distress. Both notions that are close to the “bastions” described by Willy and Madeleine Baranger. According to Kaës, an unconscious alliance exists in every treatment and can have a structural, defensive but also alienating function, especially since it is unconscious and shared by both members of the analytical dyad, even if the structure is asymmetrical. In this context, Kaës’ three psychic spaces are instructive: 1) the space of the singular subject: the subject in relation to his internal space and that of others, but also putting into work unconscious processes and unconscious psychic formations which enable the subject to establish links with others and with the whole of which he is a part and constituent. This is how pacts, alliances and contracts are constituted which organize the psychic space of the subject and make him a subject of the unconscious by virtue of his status as a subject of the group. 2) the psychic space of the group and of the pluri-subjective sets of the specific whole formed by the group: the family or the couple. Here, the ‘whole’ corresponds to Freud’s (1921) model of the “Group Psychology”. This ‘whole’ of group psychology is, in contemporary Kaës’ parlance, a group psyche, the psychic space of the group . 3) the psychic space of the intersubjective link that is established between a subject in the ‘whole’ that they constitute and that contains them . A link is that which binds several subjects together in a whole, it is, like the couple, the group or the family, irreducible to the sum of its constituent subjects. II. Dc. Developments in Belgium In Belgium, Willy Baranger’s first article was published in 1985. This was his article on “The dead-alive: Object structure in mourning and depressive states” which he himself translated for the Revue Belge de Psychanalyse as “Structure des objets dans le deuil et les états dépressifs » (W. Baranger 1985), enabling readers to appreciate the richness of the psychoanalytic thoughts in Argentina, just after the French translation of José Bleger’s (1967) book Symbiosis y ambiguedad. In their joint report presented at the 2002 French Speaking Congress in Brussels, Jacqueline Godfrind, Maurice Haber, Marie-France Dispaux and Nicole Carels focused on the psychic transformations associated with the analytic process, taking into consideration transferential-countertransferential movements in the inter-psychic field. The psychic change they refer to as ‘psychic transformation’ is seen as the result of the analytical process built on the encounter between two psyches, creating inter-psychic functioning in an analytical space or analytical field. By exploring the impact of transfer-counter-transferential movements on transformations and their intrapsychic effect, they identified as indicators of psychic

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