IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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To quote Guerra: “A fragile, contradictory, polychromatic, changing and malleable fabric will be formed, all along “representation” (in presence-absence); it will actually give the title to the “work”: “symbolization process” (p. 94). Most recently, Guerra, in his book (2020) and film “From the meeting of glances to the pleasure of playing together”, focuses on the early proto-symbolizations that occur during the infans stage in the parent–child relationship and culminate with a speaking subject who can speak in the singular first person. V. Bh. Emma Ponce de León (Uruguay) Ponce de León [Ponce de León, Bernardi, Gutiérrez-Sánchez – directors.] (2016) describes the subjective psychic constitution as a model of symbolization that takes place between two poles: the body; and a transforming and containing relation, of "symbolizing" quality. She views symbolization as a progressive process that occurs within the framework of intersubjective relationships, built on successive levels, ranging from the body to language. As she draws and combines multidisciplinary sources in her theorizing and proposes a multi- discplinary clinical approach, her contribution is described in greater detail in the Inter- Disciplinary section below. V. Bi. Inga Villarreal (Colombia) Villarreal’s (1991) made two principal contributions to the concept development: The first contribution centers around the clinical context (what is expected from the analyst who works with patients with failures in the symbolization process), the second one around the supervisory context. In her paper: “Constructions in Analysis” (1991), she writes that the analyst should contain the patient’s disseminated elements (or Bion’s beta elements), so the patient can live the integrating experience with another: To think about him or her, so he can think about himself; to feel him or her, so he can feel him or herself. She describes how (in a reverie-like fashion), the analyst constructs his patient in his mind and makes his own psyche available to his analysand. It is not only about his/her intellectual activity – as Freud might conceived of it – but includes the analyst's affective world, and his ability to perceive, feel and elaborate on his feelings. This she views as giving (the patient) room in his own psychic world. In later developments, Villarreal adds that the analyst offers his entire symbolic world (influenced by the zeitgeist ; his already internalized cultural world) to his patient – just as the mother does to her baby. In this vein, she agrees with Green on the need to make the analyst's symbolizing function available to his patient so that he can introject it. Thus, Villarreal considers symbolization as a process that can only occur within the framework of significant subjectivizing interactions. The construction of the patient in the analyst's mind is essential in the analysis of patients who, in part, have not been able to experience a normal process of symbolization.

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