José Bleger’s dialectical thinking

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Acknowledgements

I thank my husband, Antoine Corel, for his contributions during the different stages in the composition of this article.

Notes

1. The New Library of Psychoanalysis (Routledge).

2. In different parts of the world we have seen the huge gap left by the sudden and premature death of certain thinkers: Otto Fenichel and David Rapaport (who died at the same age as Bleger); Heinrich Racker (who died in 1961, at the age of 50); George Klein and Steven Mitchell.

3. This and other highly relevant proposals made by Bernardi are beyond the scope of this article.

4. As just one example of this interest we may mention the discussion groups concerned with this very problem, starting from concrete clinical experience (in line with José Bleger’s approach): Franco‐British groups (started up for a few years in the 1970s and reactivated in 1993 up to the present); since 2001 in the European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF), where I had the honour of organizing the first clinical discussion groups; in various psychoanalytical institutions such as the IPA’s international congresses, NAPsaC in the USA and FEPAL in Latin America, where previously organized groups developed further; among societies with different traditions; among candidates in different institutes (IPSO and OCAL) and recently in some psychoanalytic training institutes. I personally am indebted to José Bleger (with whom I had the good fortune to maintain an initial dialogue in supervisions, seminars and theoretical classes) for the inspiration to explore the fundamental role of dialogue in thinking about what we didn’t know we were thinking. I continue this dialogue by asking myself how José Bleger would have tackled the problem in question. I thus developed a method for group discussion of clinical material in 2002 known as ‘listening to listening’.

5. We should note that the relation between explicit and implicit theories in psychoanalysis was first discussed in the Anglo‐Saxon world by Joseph Sandler (1983) and by Joseph Sandler and Ursula Dreher (1996). It was subsequently the subject of discussion groups in the European Federation (EPF) and of publications.

6. In March 1972 he planned to hold a seminar to reread Freud from other perspectives (personal communication, March 1972). For this reason I omit what Bleger writes in this and in other papers regarding some of Freud’s concepts.

7. The historical‐genetic point of view needs to be reviewed in the light of the concepts of construction/reconstruction and temporality in psychoanalysis. I have discussed these issues in other texts.

8. It is to be noted that in his teachings, Bleger – like Enrique Pichon‐Rivière – said that although a session has two official protagonists, each brings his own psychic make‐up, making for additional complexity. This formulation also refers to the divergence between what is usually called a ‘one‐person’ theory and an implicit clinical theory that is necessarily a ‘two‐person’ theory. It is not within our present aims to discriminate between this conception and relational, interpersonal, intersubjective, etc. theories. However, what is essential is the theory of the link (‘teoría del vínculo’) proposed by Enrique Pichon‐Rivière (implicit throughout José Bleger’s theory), which offers a radical decentring of object‐relations theory. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to develop this point but I will simply note that in Latin America, Pichon‐Rivière’s theory of the link was developed through the work of Isidoro Berenstein and of Berenstein with Janine Puget.

9. ‘Situational’ refers to texts by Daniel Lagache and Kurt Lewin. Might it also refer, on another level, to Sartre?

10. Bleger (1958).

11. The connection between Bleger’s thinking and Politzer’s works merits a separate article. Bleger studied Politzer in depth and promoted the Spanish publication of his complete works, adding abundant footnotes and an important preface. Georges Politzer was shot by firing squad in 1942 as a Resistance fighter against the Nazis in France (at Mont‐Valérien). Over and above the value that Bleger gave to Politzer’s thinking, he clearly wished to pay tribute to him by giving new life to his ideas.

12. Thomas Ogden later worked on a similar idea, probably without knowing that José Bleger had already put forward this concept and had been developing it extensively since the 1960s.

13. For my part, I have referred in other articles to the components of the countertransference position of listening and interpreting, which include, in particular, the analyst’s theory, how psychoanalysis was transmitted by his own analyst and supervisors and the relationship he forms with his own psychoanalytic institution.

14. ‘Overcome’ is the best translation I can think of for the concept of Aufhebung, which we shall discuss in subsequent paragraphs. There is no good translation of the term in English, French or Spanish. What needs to be stressed is that Aufhebung should not be translated by ‘synthesis’ (in any of the three languages) if we wish to be faithful to the meaning that Kojève gave to that Hegelian concept.

15. It is impossible to discuss this vast subject here.

16. The Aufhebung is inseparable from the dialectical process.

17. Bleger speaks of ‘fantasy’ as the patient’s condition of existence.