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In “Location of Cultural Experience”, Winnicott (1967) writes: “I have claimed that when we witness an infant's employment of a transitional object, the first not-me possession, we are witnessing both the child's first use of a symbol and the first experience of play… This symbol can be located. It is a place in space and time where and when the mother is in transition from being (in the baby's mind) merged in with the infant and alternatively being experienced as an object to be perceived rather than conceived of. The use of an object symbolizes the union of two now separate things, baby and mother, at the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separateness” (1967, p. 96-97). Transitionality, experienced from early interactions, opens up to cultural experience: “I have used the term cultural experience as an extension of the idea of transitional phenomena and play without being certain that I can define the word ‘culture’. The accent indeed is on experience” (ibid, p. 99). Winnicott’s contributions,especially in areas of transitional phenomena, e.g., transitional object, intermediate area of potential space “between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived” (1953, p. 90).and many other complex dimensions of transitionality, have influenced Latin American psychoanalysis, both directly and by providing bases for understanding the models of the psyche proposed by French authors, particularly René Roussillon and André Green, who have significantly permeated Latin American analytical work.
V. Ac. Influential French Authors V Aca. Jacques Lacan
Lacan (1998) organizes the structure of the psyche into three registers: le réel, l'imaginaire et le symbolique [the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic]. These should not be confused with stages of development. Lacan considers the symbolic order to pre-exist the human being's birth. The subject is born into a family, a system of alliances and culture, including the prohibition of incest, essential to the organization of the Oedipal structure, which retroactively organizes the pregenital structures. Accordingly, the inclusion of the father image in the human psyche is predetermined by the symbolic order into which the baby is born . The symbolic order is presented to the baby by the mother. While Freud considered that the image of the faher to be present in the psyche through primary identification (Freud 1923), for Lacan, it is the mother who transmits the father image to her baby. Lacan´s register of the real, does not correspond to the common use of the concept of reality. For him, it is a part of the psychic structure constituted by what has been foreclosed ( verworfen ), and which can resurge, perceived as coming from experiential reality. It is a basic concept for the understanding of psychotic phenomena. For example, a psychotic might fear someone reading his thoughts because he does not experience his psyche as internal.
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