IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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Such ideas of bastion may come close to Joseph Sandler’s (1976) more recent idea of ‘role responsiveness’ and contemporary developments of the notion of enactment (de Leon de Bernardi and Bernardi, 2005; Cassorla, 2005). By 1979 and 1982 (Baranger M, Baranger W and Mom, 1982), bastion was considered a defensive formation of the field involving both patient and analyst. With this advance, one of the most important factors for the advance of an analysis is the analyst’s understanding of his or her complementary responses to the patient’s unconscious ways of relating, which are acted out in silence through analytic interaction. Faced with the regressive experiences of establishing and analyzing the countertransference micro-neurosis , interpretation offers the possibility of a double recovery in relation to the patient as well as the analyst. The authors return to the theme of observation of the field, in its two aspects: self-observation and hetero-observation of the patient and the types of interaction established. By regulating affective tensions, the analyst strives to have sufficient ‘porosity’ to be able to support the patient’s disposition to self- observation and observation of the unity of the field. Following the session, the analyst needs to be able to take a ‘second look’ at the session and the evolution of the process. In the 1961- 62 paper, interpretation is conceived as part of a dialectic process, based on the Freudian idea of an unconscious communication between the psychic systems. This is akin to the Pichon Rivière’s idea of the ‘spiral process’ of a dialectical spiral between the ‘here, now, with me’ and the ‘there and then’. The interpretative process is conceived as a sequential, progressive spiral that broadens out from the point of urgency, indicator of an unconscious aspect of the patient, into interpretation and insight, leading to re-structuring of the field. This illustrates the retrospective and prospective character of interpretation, the analyst is a “transactional” object between the real and the phantasied world, i.e., a “double projection screen” (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 44). Additionally, the interpretation seeks to dialectically integrate different dimensions, especially sensorial and bodily emotions, of the partially dissociated primitive experience, thereby avoiding “the dangers of intellectualization” (ibid, p. 46). Interpretation is framed here as a psychoanalytic communication, following Luisa Álvarez de Toledo ’s (1954) reflection on the language of interpretation and the characteristics of analytic communication. This view of interpretation continues throughout the subsequent decades in the psychoanalysis of the River Plate region. A comprehensive approach to the subject is found in the work by David Liberman (1970) that integrated developments in linguistics with understanding of the complementary styles of patient and analyst. For Álvarez de Toledo, interpretation is ‘a doing with the patient’. For the Barangers, too, the words of interpretation may be “bearers of gratification and aggression and in general of innumerable phantasies” (Baranger M and Baranger W, 1961-62, p. 43). In this perspective, regressive processes allow words to recover “their original power to reach internal life” (ibid., p. 46), to reintegrate splitting and transform primitive, pathological object relations. The analyst’s language may recover certain characteristics similar to those of the child’s communication with the mother, allowing the patient to acquire new levels of symbolization of

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