Artesanías Psicoanalíticas (Psychoanalytic Craftwork)

In reading Raul Hartke’s “The Oedipus Complex: A Confrontation at the Central Cross-Roads of Psychoanalysis” (2016), I came across a reference to a piece by Willy Baranger on the oedipus complex from the late seventies that I had never heard of and that immediately stirred my curiosity. Intrigued, and encouraged by a similarly intrigued colleague, I hunted it down and discovered that it has never been translated into English and, to my knowledge, is available only where originally published in 1976, in Revista de psicoanálisis, a publication of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association. For reasons of which I am unaware, issues of this journal disappear from the PEP database beginning in 1970, and the only other place a reader might find a copy of this brilliant treatise on Klein’s and Freud’s Oedipus is in Baranger’s Artesanías Psicoanalíticas, edited in 1995 and republished in 2014 with colleagues Raquel Zak de Goldstein and Néstor Goldstein. Here the reader will encounter a trove of invaluable writing gathered together by a small group of Latin America’s most erudite and penetrating psychoanalytic minds.

Granted, this book is mostly Willy Baranger’s ¹ ; he is the sole author of fifteen of its twenty-four chapters. The remaining nine chapters were written with the Goldsteins, Nora R. de Bisi, Hector Garbadino, Jorge Galeano Muñoz, and Gela Rosenthal. For this reason, it is possible to read this book as representative of Willy Baranger’s thinking and for his collaborators’ perspectives to fade from sight. In his prologue, Baranger insists on the common lines of inquiry that bring these analysts together, though what these are is not quite spelled out, leaving that daunting task to the reader. However, the authors’ overall aim is to showcase work representing certain points of evolution in their thinking as a group. Thus, the papers span the years 1948 through 1994, and the range of topics is wide. Since Baranger’s authorship is omnipresent, most—but not all—of my focus will be on the chapters written with others, to let readers sample the thinking of his collaborators, less well-known to North American analysts.

Among the surprising themes included in this collection is an exploration of dissociative dynamics within psychoanalytic societies and the larger group made up of psychoanalysis itself, in a chapter written with Héctor Garbarino and titled “The Childhood Illness of Psychoanalysis.” ² The authors begin by stating outright that splitting is the rule in analytic societies; it was as much an issue in 1961, when the paper was written, as it can be today. They wonder why this should be so, and observe that analysts quite frequently accept this as a fact of analytic institutional life to be analyzed with a sense of resigned fatalism. The usual suspects, the authors note, tend to be the unresolved neuroses of analysts whose faulty or insufficient training analyses have left them twisting in the winds of a profession known for its long hours and little social contact except with anguished analysts like themselves. Begging to differ, the authors view the problem as a specific group issue that should be faced as such, noting that the dissociative signature of the psychoanalytic group does not manifest in the same way as with other work groups. Analytic groups tend to function more like therapy groups, in which paranoid-schizoid mechanisms can carry the day, than like ideologically blended work groups, where the shared ideology of group members mutes these mechanisms and preserves a sense of unity over time. So why are psychoanalytic groups especially susceptible to paranoid-schizoid mechanisms? For the authors, the leaders of the various schools of thought play a role, with these leaders experiencing themselves as successor to the great man, Freud, always in the background. To modern ears this might seem a dated and oversimplified solution to a problem among societies that in 1961 had yet to outgrow the need for direct links to the founder. Today’s theorists and schools, with the possible exception of those within the Lacanian or ego psychological traditions, do not perseverate as much about their Freudian lineage as did the second or third generation, and yet division flourishes among us perhaps more than ever. The second reason given by the authors, which is their main focus, is the analyst’s relationship to ideology, as much an issue now as it was in the 1960s.

According to Baranger and Garbarino, it is the act of participating in a shared ideology that forges the link contributing most to a sense of unity among analysts. Theoretically, the freer this link is from ambivalence, the greater the identification and sense of solidarity among group members, which should push the splitting processes stemming from oedipal rivalry to the background. However, wherever there is ideology there is idealization, necessary to bear the emotional and financial sacrifices of analytic training, but vulnerable to deidealization, disillusionment, and devaluation. These in turn are warded off through various mechanisms: devaluation of opposing ideologies and identification between the reidealized object and one’s own opinions; a new, idealized dependent relation with a partial theory, alternative to the deidealized original one; or, most drastic, abandonment of the link with the ideology and profession of psychoanalysis altogether. In any case, deidealization is a natural and inevitable part of the educational process and a crucial moment in the training of candidates; how it is managed will have a determinate impact on the analyst’s professional future. Quite often, psychoanalysis is identified with its representative in the person of the training analyst; and neither the training analysis nor the training analyst’s ideology tends to survive when rapid deidealization sets in. However, this confusion between leaders (training analysts) and ideology tends to be a consequence of group life, rather than being based solely on individual dynamics, and the necessary though at times precarious deidealization of the candidate’s individual analysis informs whether or not psychoanalysis is pathologically devalued, leading to the activation of compensatory, dissociative mechanisms in an analytic group.

Dissociative mechanisms lead to the formation of subgroups, the reidealization of new leaders, and so on, as if the effort to deidealize a father or parent were destined for the same failure encountered in doing away with the family schema on which the new group is now based. Naturally, the return of always precarious idealizations leads to the tendency to devalue other subgroups, with a resultant increase in identification of one’s own subgroup with ultimate truth. When this chorus chimes in, it is to the tune of “that’s not analysis.” Significantly—and this is of interest in regard to some of the core identity problems institutional psychoanalysis faces today—a tendency of the original parent group in response to the dissociated splintering-off into subgroups is to rigidify, to excessively formalize its norms and functional/technical aspects of treatment, leading to a diminution of the enthusiasm its members once held toward more essential aspects of the group life of psychoanalysis.

The chapter written with Jorge Galeano Muñoz, like Baranger from Montevideo, “The Appearance of a Hypochondriacal Cyst in the Course of an Analysis,” is fascinating. It is a short report on the case of Margarita, perhaps the most detailed of the handful of cases presented in this volume. The unconscious hypochondriacal fantasy mentioned in the title bears directly on the psychosomatic situation of the patient. The authors present the case of a “cyst fantasy” in a woman, Margarita, whose reason for seeking analysis was inhibition around becoming pregnant. The cyst fantasy appeared as an evolution of an original castration fantasy, having to do with feeling that she had suffered a severe genital injury. As the work evolved through different phases, the affected parts moved further and further into her interior, encompassing the inside of her belly, and culminating in the now conscious fantasy of containing a sac or cyst filled with needed but persecutory fragments of organs, body parts, and body fluids. The authors write that the patient began analysis with an idealized expectation of a quick and successful treatment that would end in mutual contentment for both her and the analyst (an easy intercourse, conception, and birth). However, after several failed attempts at becoming pregnant, disillusionment set in and she imagined the analyst as denying her the wished-for child, assigning him the role of a depriving father or vengeful mother. Envy at her mother’s pregnancy with her brother and resentment toward that brother were revived in the analysis, leading to the unconscious fantasy of stealing the mother’s babies. Due to the aggressive character of the introjective processes, Margarita developed a sense that these babies were now bits and pieces inside her—destroyed fragments, as, according to the authors, in this case “to introject is to steal through destruction.” The more Margarita had difficulty conceiving for no apparent medical reason, the more she imagined that it was her analyst who was denying her, and the more she fantasized about stealing the analyst’s children, or about murdering her own depriving parents in order to have children. By the time the authors reach the end of their narrative, Margarita’s insides can barely contain all the body parts in them; unfortunately, the authors offer no conclusion other than to claim that this fantasy is probably typical in cases such as Margarita’s, and they do not reveal whether her symptoms ever resolved. But the interplay between Margarita’s envious attack on the analyst/parent’s capacity to bear children, and her own introjected belief of being enviously deprived of this ability—itself an interplay between real frustrations in the analytic work and in life, and imagined injustices—is what the authors manage to convey in this fascinating chapter.

Also of particular interest in this book are the historical perspective and unique, creative slant of the authors’ writing on perversion. Baranger, de Bisi, de Goldstein, Goldstein, and Rosenthal’s chapter on the perverse structure gathers their reflections after attending the 20th Symposium of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association in April 1980. Writing in that year, the authors were already sensitive to the use of the term perversion in psychoanalytic as opposed to sociopolitical space. Perversion is related to transgression of a cultural norm in the same way that the oedipus complex is related to the structure of myth and civilization. Weary of the overuse of the term—case in point, Kraft-Ebing’s, Havelock Ellis’s, and Kinsey’s use of it to describe behavior that may or may not refer back to a common structure—and seeking a distinctive psychoanalytic formulation, the authors distinguish between the Great Perversions and other, more banal forms, drawing on the distinction made in nineteenth-century French psychiatry between sadists great and small. The Great Perversions are the true ones, corresponding to a structure “that determines what is essential in the manifest sexual life of the subject, that covers his fantasies and dominating anxieties, his solution to the oedipus and castration complexes, defense mechanisms, and particular resultant superego and ego formations” (p. 373). Perversion must refer to the specific modality of the individual’s sexual life, which in itself reflects and reverberates through the individual’s engagement in the world. It is unclear in this chapter whether the authors consider Melanie Klein’s theories of perversion as referring to mere perversity rather than perverse structure as Klein would have it, though they consider Meltzer’s formulations on perverse states of mind an “extreme abuse” (p. 374) of Klein’s ideas on the relationship between perversion, psychosis, and the death drive. Nevertheless, they find Klein useful when theorizing perversion and are able to distill her contributions in a way that clearly distinguishes them from Freud’s. For Freud, fetishism was the paradigm from which the essential mechanism of perversion would be wrought. The defense of disavowal, the yes-but-no regarding the existence of castration that staves off ontological anxiety released from the discovery of sexual difference, is memorialized in the fetish. But Freud does not integrate these findings with his new theory of the death drive, which is where Klein steps in. Perversion appears as a response to psychotic anxieties (paranoid or depressive) saturated in unconscious sadistic fantasies. The excessive activation of projective identification in an effort to curb these produces a blurring of self and object and confusion about the object’s nature and one’s own sexual identity. Because of the similarity with delusion’s restitutive function, Klein places perversion as an intermediate structure between neurosis and psychosis, and not, as Freud famously formulated, as merely the negative of neurosis. So, while Freud privileges fetishism, Klein privileges sadism as the maximum expression of the death drive in its relation to the object.

In the short chapter that follows, these same authors go into depth on the character of Dolmancé the Corruptor, from Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. I won’t go further here on this very rich piece than to point out the authors’ interesting—and, for our political times, relevant—insight on the perverse discourse. Reflecting on Lacan’s work on Kant, the fanatic of the Law, and Sade, the fanatic of transgression, they note that the pervert does not try to substitute the Law with a form of anti-Law. The point is not lawlessness. The point is to hold the law up so that everyone can see and violate it in plain sight. The Law must remain in existence for the lugubrious flower of its transgression to bloom.

Also included in the book are a brief assessment of the work of Pichón-Riviere, and specifically his “spiral-process,” along with Willy and Madeleine Baranger’s dynamic bipersonal field. Though only a small part of the book, it is an interesting chapter that highlights to modern ears how in Pichón there was already the basis for what decades later we would conceive as a bidirectional/intersubjective understanding of projective identification, and the oscillation between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as dialectical loops of regressive and progressive movement. Pichón’s encounter with the work of Heinrich Racker and Paula Heimann heavily influenced his thinking on the spiral process, and formed the basis for his idea of the analytic situation as the central unit of study. Here as in other places throughout the book, Baranger quarrels with Meltzer, whom he accuses not only of misreading Klein but also of a certain rigidity in thinking. This is contrasted with Pichón’s versatility in taking in ideas that excited him and his disinterest in orthodoxy. Adept at noticing ambiguities, Baranger points out that it is precisely when Heimann distances herself from Klein regarding countertransference that Pichón becomes interested in both women’s thinking, epitomizing what Baranger calls Pichón’s “most Kleinian period” (p. 351).

The remaining chapters in Artesanías Psicoanalíticas take up matters far-flung in terms of interrelatedness, yet linked through their underlying Freudian-Kleinian framework. There does not seem to be any logic to their order of appearance, and they cannot be separated into sections by themes. But there is a certain freedom that comes with that, a sense that these gems have been left out on the rack for want of suitable placement and gathered here as a group of precious misfits. The reader who is used to identifying Baranger with the analytic field gets a sense of what else preoccupies him. He is especially astute in his assessments of ambiguity in Klein’s (and her followers’) concepts of object, unconscious phantasy, and ego, and demands a similar clarity with concepts like identification, disidentification, introjection, and the superego. In all of this Baranger distills Klein’s work in the fashion of someone who is a clear admirer and adherent, with the talent of a master teacher for communicating her thinking. The oedipus complex and the role of the father in the functioning of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and as an institution are also recurring foci; these complement the chapters on ideology, psychoanalytic institutionality, and lay analysis scattered elsewhere in the book.

To return to the paper referenced by Hartke and mentioned at the start of this review, Baranger’s “The Early Oedipus and the Oedipus Complex” is the pick of the bunch. In it, Baranger masterfully lays out the nuances that link Freud’s and Klein’s oedipus complex, and argues for a relocation of emphasis on the father function central to Freud’s model (relegated to being merely a “late oedipus” by Klein, a status preceded by the primarily structuring dyadic earlier oedipus). For Freud, it is the identifications that supplant the oedipal ones through the resolution of conflicts that inaugurate a new stage of development—indeed, a new structure within which the mind develops. These new identifications come on the heels of the internalization of castration—for both sexes—as the incorporation of the knowledge of differences in the sexes and the assumption of one gender, with the corresponding structuring and lasting acceptance of loss, yearning, and incompleteness that comes from having to make that unconscious choice. For Klein, these occurrences are in a way epiphenomena of the early oedipus, where the structuring moments really lie. The father’s penis (or the father) as castrating persecutor is determined by the displacement of the phantasy of the persecutory breast, resulting from early experience with the mother. The early and late oedipus are thus joined by a constellation of phantasies that make the boundaries between both organizations fluid, leading ultimately to the loss of any substantial sense of structure in the so-called late phase. Baranger notes the blurriness of the figure of the father as traced out by Klein and even Freud. Both establish that in the child’s development the father surpasses his initial status of appendix to the mother, formed out of a “negative constitution” and arising from her lack as revealed to the child in his experience of separation. But Klein’s father always remains a diluted shadow of the mother, discriminated only secondarily from the experience of the breast. “The penis has to be conquered over the breast through a series of processes that give it a flimsy existence” (p. 297), writes Baranger, these processes being the cycles of intense libidinal and sadistic strivings at the breast, followed by the not-too-excessive activation of projective identification and splitting that would lead to a later projection of the breast into the penis.

The result is the loss of the oedipus complex as a new and separate structure ushering in a new phase of development and a new form for the mind, which would distinguish the subject’s experience in the world from the previous phases of persecutory, dyadic relatedness in a way not fully captured in the notion of the depressive position. Again, it is at these nuances in thinking between Freud and Klein, and their consequences for our work as analysts, that the contributors to this volume excel. This book is highly recommended to colleagues with a deep interest in the work of Argentine and Uruguayan thinkers—work that is unique in style and perspective, not to mention rigor, and accessible to analysts with varying degrees of sophistication in their understanding of Freud and Klein.