The Challenge to and of the “Outsider”: The Reception of Kohut's Ideas by an Analyst Trained in a Different Tradition

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Notes

Ricardo Bernardi is Doctor in Psychology (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Member of the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association, and professor in medicine and psychology schools at the Universidad de la Republica Oriental del Uruguay.

¹I am referring to notions such as the importance of the interpersonal bond, developed by E. Pichon-Rivière and many others, the analytic situation as a “bipersonal dynamic field” of W. and M. Baranger, the importance of the complementary and concordant countertransference (H. Racker), the styles of communication in the therapeutic interaction, (D. Liberman), the value of words as acts between analyst and patient (L. Álvarez de Toledo), among others.

²I have examined elsewhere (Bernardi, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008) the positive and negative aspects of this kind of pluralism.

³The use of a different theory is more than a cognitive change in the analyst. To be fruitful, new theories have to change the analyst's attitude toward the patient, and that is possible only if these theories have inner resonance in the analyst. I discuss this issue toward the end of this article.

⁴Probably, the acme of the fantasies of merging was accompanied by the initiation of depressive anxieties announced by the departure of the space visitors and by the allusion to the silence that I found then very difficult to understand and that I tried to explore with my interventions.

⁵I prefer writer (or producer) instead of author because both—writer and reader—can be considered authors, in the sense specified in the text.

⁶I wrote then: “Probably the core of the problem of aggressiveness in Pablo is that loving the other as a part of himself encloses one paradox (the paradox of narcissism): though it was felt as love, it is a love that does not know the other as someone different to himself.”

⁷More than the effect of specific interpretations, these changes were probably due to the general transformation produced by the analysis.

⁸It would be interesting to compare in Pablo the changes evaluated through the analysis with the study using appropriate tools of changes in the attachment style or, even more specifically, in his reflective function (Fonagy et al., 2002) that means his capacity to understand what is happening in his own mind and in the mind of the other. This function is presumably impaired when selfobject relationships are dominant. But that needs to be investigated. Controversial problems should be tackled comparing their study, using different methods, hypothesis and conceptual frames.