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connected: one takes into account the person of the analyst (rudimentarily already in “Studies on Hysteria” of 1895, but mainly in “Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria” [Dora] of 1905) while the other (in chapter seven from the “Interpretation of Dreams”) describes the same phenomenon from the perspective of dream-work. As we stated above, they are two different, but somehow connected, psychological processes rooted in childhood, and in which the present and the past become confused. “Transference is a peculiar object relation with an infantile root, of an unconscious nature (primary process) and therefore irrational, which confuses the past with the present, which gives it its character of inadequate, maladjusted, inappropriate response”.( The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique . English edition.1999, page 83) Etchegoyen describes a particular phenomenon where the analytic process insidiously reaches an impasse that tends to perpetuate itself while at the same time the setting is preserved. The existence of this phenomenon is not evident, but, rather, is rooted in the psychopathology of the patient and involves the counter-transference of the analyst. Etchegoyen coins the term ‘impasse’ for this phenomenon, which consists in a group of strategies adopted by the patient in order to attack and hinder the development of the cure. The patient’s strategies may include: acting out, negative therapeutic reaction and reversible perspective. The latter consists in a particular way of thinking aimed at avoiding mental pain at any cost: the subject skilfully ‘rearranges things’, as it were, in order to accommodate them to what he thinks. This is how interaction becomes stagnant. Here Etchegoyen draws on Bion’s concept of static splitting. Although at a manifest level the patient may appear to agree with the analyst, he in fact holds fixedly to his own premises, which, however, he does not communicate, or is indeed even aware of, because they are unconscious. In this way, the patient reinterprets the analyst’s interpretations so that they can blend with his own premises. It should be stressed that the analyst usually becomes aware of this only when the process has reached a complete deadlock. According to Etchegoyen, reversible perspective, which calls the analytic contract into question, in general appears from the very beginning. As Bion points out, in the most serious cases it constitutes a phenomenon akin to hallucinosis. Perception and mnemonic phenomena such as delusional interpretations usually appear when the analytic task threatens to shake down the patient’s very structure. However, what should never be forgotten is that these patients come to analysis because they wish to be cured. VII. Ad. Mauricio Abadi In his publication “The Transference”, Abadi (1982) stated: “If before Freud psychology was a science that developed within the dimension of time, like music, with Freud psychology became a discipline that unfolds as in painting; in the dimensions of virtual space” (p.4)
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