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1. Translated by John Churcher.
Acknowledgements
For their questions, comments and criticism, I wish to thank especially Nenuka Amigorena‐Rosenberg, Eduardo Vera Ocampo and John Churcher, with whom I have for a long time been working and exchanging ideas concerning José Bleger and psychoanalysis in Argentina. I also wish to thank Jan Abram, Howard Levine, Marie‐Claire Caloz‐Tschopp and Christine Frisch‐Desmarez for their invitations to speak about the work of José Bleger in London, with John Churcher, and in Boston, Geneva and Brussels. This paper owes much to the Editorial Introduction, written jointly with John Churcher, to the English translation of Symbiosis and Ambiguity (Bleger and Churcher, Citation2013) and to our joint paper read to the British Psychoanalytical Society (Bleger and Churcher, Citation2014).
Notes
1. Translated by John Churcher.
2. There are a number of books and articles on the history of psychoanalysis in Argentina. These include: Arbiser (Citation2003), Etchegoyen and Zysman (Citation2005), Bernardi (Citation2002), Plotkin (Citation2001), and Dagfal (Citation2011).
3. In France something similar happened with a number of the analysts who were contemporaries of Jean Laplanche and Daniel Widlöcher. See for example the discussion in the Association Psychanalytique de France as recently as 1984 (Anzieu et al., Citation1984).
4. See Bleger (Citation1957, p. 136, n.6); he uses the term ‘genetic’ in the same sense as Hartmann and Kris (Citation1945). See also Bleger (Citation2012).
5. The phrase is taken from de Spinoza (Citation1901).
6. Spanish: mente.
7. Spanish: conducta.
8. In photography, this is literally a matter of adjustment. But in its extended sense, the Spanish word enfoque has no exact equivalent in English or French. It would be somewhere between ‘approach’, ‘angle’ and ‘point of view’.
9. See the chapter on the psychoanalytic situation in the book by Ferenczi and Rank (Citation1925).
10. One could, however, cite Marie Langer as early as 1951, ‘A psychoanalytic session’. In 1966 Rodrigué and Rodrigué wrote: “For us, the unity of the analytical process is the session. The analytic hour is an event of great complexity […] each session is a grand synthesis of the psychical process [acontecer]: the interaction between that which is repeated and something that renews itself” (p. 11). And further on: the Argentinian group “has introduced a style and an approach [enfoque] that is specific to us […] a series of basic assumptions that are embedded in our way of working and of understanding analysis” (ibid., p. 19).
11. Bleger (Citation1957); published in 1958 as chapter 6 of Psychoanalysis and Dialectical Materialism.
12. The French ‘la vie concrète’ refers to life as a material fact or process.
13. Spanish: ‘conducta’.
14. French: ‘devenir humain’.
15. The Spanish term ‘acontecer’ has no exact equivalent in English or French: it refers to what takes place, what happens, events, what comes to pass. It corresponds to the German term that Freud uses in Formulations of the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (Freud, Citation1911), where the German word translated by Strachey as ‘functioning’ is Geschehen.
16. French: ‘devenir’.
17. This is also an important point in the paper by M. and W. Baranger in 1961–1962 on the psychoanalytic field (2008): to consider the analytic situation in terms of the unconscious phantasy of the analyst‐patient couple.
18. Chapter 10 of the same book is devoted to ‘Settings for the study of behaviour’ [Encuadres para el estudio de la conducta].
19. His account of the clinical material shows an extreme condensation that recalls the contrast indicated by Freud between the brevity of a dream text and the opening up of all the associative pathways involved in the dream thoughts.
20. See also an interesting paper by David Liberman, where he brings together and compares his own views with those of other Argentinian colleagues (1971, pp. 385–456).
21. Analogously, the Barangers in their paper on the field move away from discussing its potentialities in order to tackle the main obstacle, which they call the ‘bastion’ (baluarte in Spanish).
22. A complete list of Bleger's citations of Mahler's work can be found in the bibliography of the English edition of Symbiosis and Ambiguity.
23. This study was first published in 1961, and later as Chapter 2 of Symbiosis and Ambiguity.
24. See the section on ‘Symbiosis and the nature of the object relation’, pp. 33ff.
25. Shortly before his death, Bleger wrote a very clear and concise text on ambiguity (1973a).
26. Bleger borrowed the term from the work of Françoise Minkowska on epilepsy (1923, 1956). It was also perhaps linked with what Freud (Citation1917, p. 348) refers to as ‘adhesiveness’ of the libido.
27. In the English translation of the paper on the setting for the IJP in 1967, encuadre was translated as ‘frame’. In the new translation of Symbiosis and Ambiguity, where the paper appears as Chapter 6, John Churcher and I decided to translate it as ‘setting’. In support of the latter choice, we may notice that Bleger's text begins by using this word in English in quoting Winnicott. Moreover, to use a different term would be to assume that Bleger was trying to create a different concept and that he wanted to move away from the discussion on the question of ‘the setting’ in the psychoanalytic literature.