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V. Bb. Silvia Bleichmar (Argentina) Silvia Bleichmar is a post-Lacanian author in a French psychpanalytic tradition – mainly Jean Laplanche and Piera Aulagnier – in combination with Winnicott and the English ‘Middle school”, whose contribution to symbolization is developed in her book “Intelligence and Symbolization, a psychoanalytic perspective” (2010). Claiming to base herself in some of Freud’s and Klein’s ideas regarding symbol formation, symbolization and clinical technique, she also vigorously disagrees with them and all those who consider symbolization to be of endogneous (innate) and instinctual origin. For Bleichmar (2010), the formation of symbols is not innate ; it originates within the relation with another . “It is a “neo-creation”: producing something from what is given… It is necessary to produce it, it will not occur by itself without a productive intervention” (p. 87). In her view, symbolization does not occur spontaneously, deriving directly from impulses and drive; it a process that requires the other, whose function is inscribing the child in a cultural framework, of which language is one of the main pillars. She writes: “One does not learn to speak letter by letter, word by word, one learns to speak as part of the symbolic network of which the subject is part, and the subject metabolizes knowledge and so establishes orders of meaning in the world...” (p. 10). For Bleichmar, following Lacan, the human being is preceded by a symbolic order, without which he cannot be constructed as a subject. The symbolization process includes re- transcriptions (from one psychic system to another) and also re-significations (new meanings). She writes: “Symbolization is a re-transcription, but re-transcriptions are not only endogenous, but are the effect of actions coming from outside, of activations, of enrichments; they are the result of new experiences through new ways of re-symbolization, in such a manner that… something is inscribed and brings about something that existed previously.” (p. 372) The importance of the other in this process is stressed: "... the other human who offers the set of codes and the possibility of what can be codified, for example, the language system" (p. 372). The mother needs to be inscribed in a language system, because, “By means of her language, certain rhythms, certain prohibitions and certain ways of thinking of the child's psyche are structured. And when I say language, I am thinking of any language, I am thinking of categorical systems capable of organizing space and time…” (p. 117-118). Especially with child patients, the analyst provides her symbolizing function. Bleichmar states: “I want to say that there is something very important here for a child analyst, which is to save one's own identification with the child in order to make an adequate symbolizing intervention” (p. 132). She refers to Freud’s constructions in analysis with the term “symbolization of transition”: “…if it [this construction] is correct, it allows the opening to new associations” (p. 360). Offering the patient an intervention, in the way of a symbolic articulation, helps him by opening the route so he can start or resume his process of symbolic production: "The structuring
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