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