The Fortune of a Precocious Awareness

Abstract

This article affords me an opportunity for après-coup reflection on personal experiences that contributed to shaping the motivations that determined my theoretical choices. The attempt to find explanations for clinical diversity that were not reduced to drive theory led me to draw up a model of thought in psychopathology that allows for different production mechanisms for the same type of symptom and requires differential and specific therapeutic interventions. My dissatisfaction with the Freudian views on femininity showed me the way toward the role of the adult, of the parents, in the evaluation of the self of the child, examining gender differences in the intersubjective theory of sexuality. Symptoms such as hysteria, anorexia-bulimia, and the high incidence of anxiety and depression in women require an understanding of the interpersonal and gender-related factors in its causation.Psychoanalytic Inquiry has organized this issue on psychoanalysts in Spain and has invited me to participate. This invitation is enticing because it asks me to trace and reveal my personal choices and the influences that organize my work. Jean Laplanche (1980) coined the phrase, "to set Freud to work" (p. 16). With this phrase, he was referring to the application of the psychoanalytic method to Freud's written work (not the man himself), that is, to the forces or intrinsic reasons present in his theoretical production and those that charted his course. I used this methodology in my doctoral dissertation (1996a) when examining the meaning of female sexuality in Freud's works and now I have the opportunity to do the same with my own written work. Moreover, I can reflect, après coup, about the motivational configuration that determined my own theoretical choices. There is also something of no less importance: the opportunity to take inventory of the teachers that helped forge my psychoanalytic thinking and in this way express, in life and memory, my deep gratitude to them. THE ORIGINS

Saber y autoridad: intervenciones de psicoanalistas en torno a la crisis en la Argentina

“…59 Al mismo tiempo, elaboraba una crítica a aquellos intelectuales que habían celebrado la pérdida de la ilusión utópica, comparándolos con quienes optaban por no correr el riesgo de enamorarse para no sufrir. 60 Los intelectuales tendrían por misión evitar que lo que Bleichmar llamaba, inspirándose en Herbert Marcuse, "malestar sobrante", que devorase el pensamiento al punto de impedir que se formulasen preguntas nuevas y creativas sobre la sociedad y la historia. 61 Aunque Bleichmar utilizaba un arsenal conceptual de diversa procedencia (Marcuse y Arendt, por caso), las nociones psicoanalíticas eran empleadas a veces de manera analógica; por ejemplo, Bleichmar comparaba los efectos de la "desaparición de las funciones mínimas del estado" durante la década de 1990 con el sentimiento de "desamparo" generado en la infancia, 62 o analizando los costos de los modelos económicos neoliberales de la misma década, distinguía la autoconservación del yo ("los modos mediante los cuales el yo toma a cargo los intereses de la vida") de la autopreservación del yo ("mediante la cual el sujeto preserva la representación nuclear de sí mismo"), ya que en situaciones límites puede prevalecer el primero a costa del arrasamiento del segundo (el ideal narcisístico).…”

Female Leadership: Difficulties and Gifts

“…Psychoanalytic theory building later took a turn away from the binary or male-centric point of view through the work of theorists like Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976), Adrienne Harris (2000), and Emilce Dio Bleichmar (1995, 2012, 2015). In “Freud and Female Sexuality: The Consideration of Some Blind Spots in the Exploration of the ‘Dark Continent,’” Chasseguet-Smirgel articulates a universal, preoedipal, human fear of helplessness: “The theory of sexual phallic monism (and its derivatives) seems to me to eradicate the narcissistic wound which is common to all humanity, and springs from the child’s helplessness, a helplessness which makes him completely dependent on his mother” (1976, p. 281).…”