Introduction
The Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association (APdeBA) has reached thirty five years in 2012.
In all these years APdeBA has been included in the psychoanalytic and cultural milleu in our community and has an important place in the national and international organizations to which it belongs.
One of the more important intelectual assets of APdeBA is its atmosphere of pluralism, openness and freedom of thought in which the members develop their interests in different orientations, which allows for rich and fruitfull exchanges.
The openness and pluralism that characterizes APdeBA at present are in fact the product of a tendency that has been sustained in the course of the years and is at present a valuable feature of the institution in every occasion.
APdeBA has reached a very important and valuable position at national and international levels as a member of FEPAL (Federation of Latin American psychanalytic Associations) and IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association). Members of APdeBA have distinguished themselves in local, Latinamerican and international congresses.
One of the more essential objectives of APdeBA is based on its stimulus to projection towards the world and it values the presence of the institution in other societies and publications.
For this reason, together with the established links, the association directs its efforts to develop new and fruitful exchanges with other psychoanalytic institutions and related disciplines.
For al these reasons APdeBA thanks the invitation received from the “Sapienza” University of Rome to participate in the Journal Funzionegamma, which shows the interest to know the Latinamerican psychoanalytic perspective.
This publication expresses the work of APdeBA´s psychoanalysts and is the product of the development and deepening of the ideas that were born in Viena and were enriched, broadened and became more complex due to the contributions of numerous thinkers.
Among these works stand out the subjects of object relations, the group aspects of the mind and the emotional experiences, experiences which require the constitution of the psychoanalytic field as a fundamental basis for the work of patient and analyst.
One of the authors, Dr Samuel Arbiser, points out the contributions of a local pioneer, Dr Enrique Pichon Riviere, regarding the relational perspective of psychoanalysis and the notion of “internal group”. He considers the psyche as the result of the encounter between what is biological disposition and the socio-cultural impression trough the immediate human groups. “The infinite variety of personal histories determine the singularity with which each individual decodes and processes the social universals and the cultural inheritance”.
In reference to this last statement, the work of Dr Delia Torres and Lic Marcello Cossu shows the formation of the subjectivity in a 12 years old boy during the Second World War when he lived with his family in Rome. Fifty years later he comments on the drawings he had done at the time. The authors contribute a psychoanalytic stance on this material. In this paper we are able to see how “the group makes possible and facilitates the birth of subjectivity in this patient through the interplay of reciprocal identifications which give a feeling of belonging to the group”.
Drs Clelia Manfredi and Leonardo Linetzky show, in their valuable paper, how through the account of traumatic situations, the presence of the other with reverie capacity enables the working through of the experience. What is incorporated in the psyche are relational structures and not merely instances, in a group conception of the mind that explains the subject included in the social, in an interplay of mutual determinations between the individual and the collective.
Isabel Mansione, Diana Zac and Marta Viola present an interdisciplinary research work on violence at secondary level schools. The authors say that the title of their paper “relates to some unconscious beliefs shared by the social groups that shape the community. The authors point out that in the education community Bion’s basic assumption groups are clearly present.
“Premature birth is a traumatic event. Technical progress may generate unprecedented situations that have an impact on the mother-child relationship”.
Dr. Osvaldo Menéndez describes a session with a group of mothers in which their fantasies around the experience are shown. Such a place is thought as “a compensating structure that would work as a continent which reverie would process the sensorial impressions of Beta elements, transforming them in Alfa elements that can be used for thinking and symbolize, allowing to re-establish the link”.
Dr. Victoria Zolotnicki thinks that the analytic situation is the temporal space in which the process develops. The process originates in the mental models with which we operate. The author contends that the ways in which the emotional experiences express themselves in the session and the difficulties in learning from them allow for the process of working through. The Epistemological perspective of mental phenomena recognizes in emotionality the meaning of the links and the seed of the thoughts that shall develop thinking.
Dr. Carlos Barredo tells us that psychoanalysis is a method, an asymmetrical device in which the experience of the unconscious takes place. In this paper the author discusses countertransference, the question of the presence and the person of the analyst. Dr. Barredo says that free association makes possible the emergence of an unknown knowledge, of the forms in which Freud referred to the unconscious. He emphasizes the importance of making free association feasible; it´s effectiveness implies the evacuation of the “meta” representations that would orientate towards a termination of the associative process. It is not the case of not expecting anything, but of not knowing what is expected, which presents itself as a surprise that the analyst sanctions with an interpretation. For that to be possible, the analyst has to be located in the place in which the dispositive attaches as the place of the Other. The author describes his model of work through what he thinks about interpretations, about the person of the analyst, about countertransference and about the different elements that constitute the psychoanalytic field in which he develops his work.
Oscar Elviras´s paper has as its axis the psychoanalytic the ideas developed by Bion and Meltzer after Freud, Ferenczi and Melanie Klein.
The author says that Bion is frequently recognized as an author who, with his immense creativity, measured group and institutional phenomena. He denominates this phenomenon the “bionian dimension of human development”. The author points out that Bion gives an important space to leadership in group situations, which establish a group mentality. Oscar Elvira refers to Meltzer saying that this author gives importance to mental spaces inside the mind and inside the objects – internal and external-. These spaces will become dramatized in the psychoanalytic process through the transference, made possible because of the existence of the psychoanalytic field. He illustrates his ideas with clinical material.
In reply to the invitation made to the members of our Association on “The psychoanalytic field. Group aspects of the mind, It´s influence in the couple, the family and institutions”, we have received the works that today we offer to the psychoanalytic community of Funzione Gamma, in a very satisfying exchange of ideas and experiences.
Liliana Ferrero
Anamaría Cravenna de Melazzini