IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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These authors also point out that sometimes certain positive signs presented by the patient are in fact only covering up a non-process, with which it is intended to ‘make the analyst happy’, as it were, but avoiding greater dangers. Stereotyping is an intrinsic danger in every treatment. The Barangers number among the resistances that pose great difficulty to the analyst the negative therapeutic reaction, the incoercible resistance, and impasse; all of them put treatment at risk. In contrast to other kinds of resistances, these are obstacles characterized by being stable and long lasting. The analyst has become even more involved and proves unable to put a stop to them. In fact, these obstacles can only be understood in terms of the field underlying the bastion. The dynamics of the process become crystallized as a result of the resistances of both the analysand and the analyst and the Barangers suggest that the bastion should be approached and analysed thoroughly. With regard to the impasse, an end could be put to it without further ado; unfortunately, however, this is not the case with the negative therapeutic reaction which, in general, leads to tragic endings. The bastion usually reappears in some form or other and constitutes the expression of the compulsion to repeat (the death drive). Changes in the discourse of the patient and in the dynamics of affects are an indication of the existence of an analytic process. The Barangers consider that the Kleinian perspective on the different forms of anxiety (persecutory, depressive and confusional anxiety) can prove useful to check the direction the process is taking. On the other hand, they remain opposed to a definition of transference- countertransference only focused on what is being experienced hic et hunc . Rather, they take into account the nuances of transference and, in consequence, establish a distinction between those kinds of transference that are not the result of the mechanism of projective identification – and which are characterized by the simultaneous appearance of highly specific counter- transference expressions which give the analytic field important pathological traits – and the structured, repetitive transference that Freud called ‘artificial neurosis’ (the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex). These transferences need to be interpreted, while other kinds of transferences, momentary and changing, emerge from the successive ways in which the field is being structured and do not demand urgent interpretation. With regard to counter-transference, the authors also distinguish between the non- stereotyped transferences of the analyst on to the patient, which are part of the process, and those provoked by the analyst’s projective identification and which can even cause ‘counter- transference micro-delusions’. W. and M. Baranger consider the analysis as a privileged moment when a subject’s history is re-written and its meaning changed. It is when insight happens that this can be appreciated; that instant when an aspect of the individual’s life history is reworked and new prospects are considered. The whole process develops with no sense of time, within a present

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