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.

Notes

¹ In 2007 articles about this topic were published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association (55) and in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Child (62).

² For example, Laplanche (2007, p. 213) asserts, “Careful! We say “gender is social,” “sex is biological.” Be careful about this term “social,” since it covers at least two realities that intersect each another. On the one hand there is the general social or sociocultural. Of course it is in “the social” that assignment is inscribed, if only in the famous declaration from the outset, made on the level of the institutional structures of a given society. But what does the inscribing is not society in general but the small group of those close to a peson, the socii. That is to say, it is really the father, the mother, a friend, a brother, a cousin, etc.”

³ For an explanation of the Modular-Transformational model of psychoanalysis, the reader can go to the article by Hugo Bleichmar pubished in this same issue.

⁴ The work of Hugo Bleichmar on depression and its multiplicity of motivations does include them.

⁵ Laplanche (2007, p. 214) writes: “The idea of assignment or ‘identification as’ completely changes the vector of identification. Here I think there is a way to get out of the aporia of that ‘beautiful’ formulation of Freud’s that has led to so much cogitation and commentary: ‘primitive identification with the father of personal prehistory’ … . I would simply ask the question, or rather I propose this: Wouldn´t this be, instead of an ‘identification with’, an ‘identification by’? In others words, I would say: ‘primitive identification by the socius of personal prehistory.”

⁶ For a more extensive treatment of this topic, see Dio Bleichmar (1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emilce Dio Bleichmar

Emilce Dio Bleichmar, M.D., is a member of the Argentinean Psychoanalytic Association and Director of the Postgraduate Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid, Spain.