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VII. Ac. R. Horacio Etchegoyen Based on Freud, Etchegoyen (2005) defines transference as opposed to experience. The prototypes are formed by two kinds of impulses: those conscious, which allow the Ego to understand present-time circumstances with the models of the past and within the Reality principle (experience), and the unconscious impulses which, subjected to the pleasure principle, take the present for the past in search of satisfaction, of discharge (transference). He emphasises the repetitive aspect of transference led by the death drives, and the resistance to transference mobilised by the pleasure principle, by libido. With regard to counter-transference, Etchegoyen points out that it was H Racker in Argentina (and also, at the same time, P. Heimann in London) the one who drew attention to the role played by counter-transference as a sensitive instrument. Etchegoyen suggests that countertransference feelings and drives appear in the analyst’s Unconscious as a result of the patient’s transference (p. 297) The starting point is the patient’s transference, while countertransference is its counterpoint, and both are generated within a setting. The setting operates as a contextual reference that creates a non-conventional, asymmetric relationship. “The analyst could respond to the patient´s transference in an absolutely rational way, maintaining himself always at the level of the working alliance. But the clinical facts prove that the analyst responds at first with irrational phenomena in which infantile conflicts are mobilized. In this sense, this is clearly a transference phenomenon on the part of the analyst. But if we are to preserve the analytic situation, it has to be a response to the patient. If it is not, then we would have to say that we are not within the analytic process but are, instead, reproducing what happens in everyday life between two persons in conflict”. (“The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique”. Revised. English edition, 1999, pp. 268-269) Transference is, at the same time, past and present. The Unconscious is timeless, claims Etchegoyen, and the cure consists in giving temporality to it. For this reason memory, transference, and history are inseparable. The analyst must help past and present blend in the mind of the patient, leaving behind the mechanisms of repression and splitting that try to separate them. Etchegoyen considers that referring transference to the past is not enough; rather, the situation can only be solved if we acknowledge the hic et nunc of transference; that is, what is happening in the present should also be taken into account. With regard to the interpretation of counter-transference, it should be carried out in such a way so as to prevent it from becoming a mere act of ‘levelling with’ the other. Therefore, in order for transference to become a technical instrument, it is with interpretation that it should be blended. In this way, the analyst’s confidence in his own thinking is recovered. Based on the concept of transference put forward in two Freudian texts: “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) and the postscript of the case of Dora (1905), Etchegoyen says that Freud discusses two different ideas about transference that are, nevertheless,
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