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’geological’ viewpoint of the evolution and fixation of the libido (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-1962/2008, pp. 811-812). While they agreed with Klein’s view that the transference relationship actualizes archaic experiences that need to be interpreted in the present relationship with the analyst, they stressed the importance of the contribution of the analyst’s countertransference, emphasizing his or her active participation. They highlight the “deep contact with a person and the profoundly different structure that is created between that person and us” (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 19; 1961-1962/2008, p. 806). This structure is radically different from each of the participants’ individual input. They draw on Susan Isaacs (1948), seeing the most primitive levels of this contact (‘primary phantasies’) as expressed by nonverbal types of communication: emotional experiences, diverse ways of reacting and acting and by the body language established between patient and analyst. Here, the ‘logic of emotion’ guides interpretive processes and inferences regarding counter-transference and transference. The analyst’s emotional and life experience as well as his or her flexibility in processes of partial and concordant identification with the patient (Racker, 1957) make it possible to select the point of ‘urgency’ that appears as the most direct expression of the patient’s unconscious aspects. At the same time, the feeling of greater or lesser urgency is regulated by the analyst’s grasp of the patient’s paranoid or depressive anxieties. Unconscious aspects are expressed in various manifestations of anxiety as well as in ‘stereotyped patterns of experiencing and behavior’. As the Barangers note: “The patient’s use of projective identification, promoted by the fundamental rule, allows re-actualization of reaction patterns stemming from past situations that have not been overcome” (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 31). Phenomena such as the ‘ bastion’ reveal crystallized and dissociated aspects of the psyche and its most primitive defense mechanisms that escape the process of verbal free association, instead operating silently. Sometimes, the narration and recovery of memories of the patient’s history, guided by the process of free association, take place in parallel with the existence of a crystallized defensive nucleus that remained split off from the apparent advance of the analysis. Its fall provokes deep catastrophic experiences in the patient. Initially, the authors considered the bastion fundamentally from the intrapsychic viewpoint. However, they soon began to mention its emergence in the analysis of a stable, complex and reciprocal structure, which tends to, “crystallize a certain configuration in the field and condition the emergence of recurrent phantasies. This configuration is quite complex, since it includes reciprocal manifestations of all the patient’s psychic agencies, the position of the Ego, the Id, the Super-ego and internal objects at different points in the field, which have certain functions” (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 36). Influences of Racker’s (1957) ‘complementary countertransference’, extended by Klein’s ‘projective identification’ and Grinberg’s (1957) ‘counteridentification’ are discernible, when Barangers wrote, “the transference-countertransference neurosis set tends to constitute a purely repetitive granite-like block that completely paralyses the analytic process“ (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 37).
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