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\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrefaceR. Horacio Etchegoyen\nxii\n\n\nEditorial IntroductionLeopoldo Bleger & John Churcher\nxvii\n\n\n The Value of This Book for Psychoanalysts Today\nxvii\n\n\n The Context in Which the Book Was Written: Argentinian Psychoanalysis in the 1950s and 1960s\nxviii\n\n\n Structure and Composition of the Book\nxix\n\n\n Synopsis\nxx\n\n\n The Relation between This Book and the Rest of José Bleger's Work\nxxxii\n\n\n Commentary on José Bleger's Work in the Psychoanalytic Movement\nxxxix\n\n\n About the Present Translation\nxl\n\n\n Editorial Conventions\nxlv\n\n\nAcknowledgements\nxlvi\n\n\nSymbiosis and AmbiguityJosé Bleger\n\n\n\nPrologue\n3\n\n\nPart One: On Symbiosis\n\n\n\n1 Study of Dependence-Independence in Relation to the Process of Projection-Introjection\n9\n\n\n Objective\n9\n\n\n Autism and Symbiosis in the Transference\n10\n\n\n Background\n10\n\n\n Transference Narcissism\n11\n\n\n Symbiosis and Psychopathic Acting\n13\n\n\n The Patient's History\n14\n\n\n Dependence-Independence\n15\n\n\n Summary\n20\n\n\n Comments on the Initiation of the Treatment\n21\n\n\n The Course of the Treatment\n22\n\n\n Fragmentation, Dissociation and Control in Space\n24\n\n\n Re-Introjection and the Body as a ‘Buffer’\n24\n\n\n Some Characteristics of the Emergence of Insight\n27\n\n\n Summary and Conclusions\n30\n\n\n2 Symbiosis in Warrior's Rest\n32\n\n\n Symbiosis and the Nature of the Object Relation\n33\n\n\n The Material\n38\n\n\n Conditioning of the Symbiotic Link\n39\n\n\n An Encounter and the Return of the Repressed\n41\n\n\n The Process of Accepting the Depositary\n41\n\n\n Recapitulation\n43\n\n\n The Configuration or Establishment of the Symbiotic Link\n44\n\n\n Derision and Pity\n48\n\n\n Metamorphosis\n50\n\n\n Dangers of the Symbiotic Relation\n52\n\n\n Time\n53\n\n\n Sexuality\n54\n\n\n Equilibrium in the Symbiotic Link\n55\n\n\n Vicissitudes of the Symbiotic Link\n59\n\n\n Agglutination and Dispersion\n61\n\n\n Fragmentation of the Agglutinated Object Through Diversification of Object Relations\n62\n\n\n Separation\n65\n\n\n Summary of the Subsequent Course of the Symbiosis\n67\n\n\n Epilogue\n70\n\n\n Summary and Conclusions\n71\n\n\n3 Modalities of Object Relations\n72\n\n\n4 Study of the Psychotic Part of the Personality\n78\n\n\n Introduction\n78\n\n\n Technical Problems\n83\n\n\n Study of the Clinical Material\n94\n\n\n Summary and Conclusions\n155\n\n\nPart Two: On Ambiguity\n\n\n\n5 Ambiguity in Psychoanalytic Clinical Work\n161\n\n\n Introduction\n161\n\n\n Discrimination of the Concept of Ambiguity\n163\n\n\n Ambiguity and other Phenomena\n172\n\n\n The Clinical Picture and Structure of Ambiguity\n175\n\n\n The Omnipotence of the ‘Syncretic Ego’\n182\n\n\n Transitional Phenomena\n188\n\n\n Conflict and Dilemma\n192\n\n\n ‘Factic Ego’ and Psychopathic Personality\n193\n\n\n The Ambiguity of Acting Out\n204\n\n\n Thought\n205\n\n\n The Authoritarian Personality\n207\n\n\n Synthesis\n207\n\n\n Why Does Ambiguity Persist?\n208\n\n\n The ‘Blunting’ Function of Ambiguity in Regression\n215\n\n\n Comments on the Literature Related to Ambiguity\n218\n\n\n6 Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Setting1\n228\n\n\n Summary\n241\n\n\nPart Three: Appendix\n\n\n\n7 Ambivalence and Ambiguity: The Background Literature\n245\n\n\n Bleuler\n245\n\n\n Ambiguity in the Works of Freud\n248\n\n\n Divalence in the Works of Freud\n253\n\n\n Ambivalence in the Works of Freud\n259\n\n\n M. Klein and R. Fairbairn\n268\n\n\n Studies by other Authors\n276\n\n\n Other Background Literature Concerning Ambiguity\n283\n\n\n8 Commentary on ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’\n286\n\n\n9 Ambiguity and Syncretism in Freud's ‘The “Uncanny”’\n293\n\n\nReferences\n305\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n

1 An earlier translation of Chapter 6 was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis as ‘Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame’ (Bleger, 1967a)

\nix\nx\nxi\n

Symbiosis and Ambiguity

Symbiosis and Ambiguity is the first English edition of the classic study of early object relations by influential Argentinian psychoanalyst José Bleger (1922-1972). It is rooted in Kleinian thinking and rich in clinical material.

Bleger's thesis is that starting from primitive undifferentiation, prior to the paranoid-schizoid position described by Klein, autism and symbiosis co-exist as narcissistic relations in a syncretic ‘agglutinated’ nucleus. In symbiosis part of the mind is deposited in an external person or situation; in autism it is deposited in the patient's own mind or body. The nucleus is ambiguous and persists in adults as the psychotic part of the personality.

Symbiosis tends to immobilise the analytic process, so the analyst must mobilise, fragment and discriminate the agglutinated nucleus, whose ambiguity tends to ‘blunt’ persecutory situations. The psychoanalytic setting functions as a silent refuge for the psychotic part of the personality, where it creates a ‘phantom world’. At some point, therefore, the setting itself has to be analysed and the analytic relationship de-symbiotised, as Bleger observes in a celebrated chapter on the setting.

José Bleger's work demonstrates the need to analyse early narcissistic object relations as they arise clinically, especially in the setting. More widely, he regards undifferentiation and participation as operating throughout life: in groups, institutions, and society as a whole.

José Bleger was born in Argentina in 1922. An active member of the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, he was also a highly-regarded Professor of Psychology and a well known intellectual. Author of many books and papers, his reputation grew steadily after his early death in 1972. He is now considered a major figure of Argentinian psychoanalysis.

John Churcher is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Manchester, and a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Until 2002 he was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Manchester.

Leopoldo Bleger, born in Argentina, has lived in Paris since 1976. A Training Analyst of the Association Psychanalytique de France, he is currently General Secretary of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis.

\ni\n

THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

General Editor: Alessandra Lemma

The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in association with the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. It took over from the International Psychoanalytical Library which published many of the early translations of the works of Freud and the writings of most of the leading British and Continental psychoanalysts.

The purpose of the New Library of Psychoanalysis is to facilitate a greater and more widespread appreciation of psychoanalysis and to provide a forum for increasing mutual understanding between psychoanalysts and those working in other disciplines such as the social sciences, medicine, philosophy, history, linguistics, literature and the arts. It aims to represent different trends both in British psychoanalysis and in psychoanalysis generally. The New Library of Psychoanalysis is well placed to make available to the English- speaking world psychoanalytic writings from other European countries and to increase the interchange of ideas between British and American psychoanalysts. Through the Teaching Series, the New Library of Psychoanalysis now also publishes books that provide comprehensive, yet accessible, overviews of selected subject areas aimed at those studying psychoanalysis and related fields such as the social sciences, philosophy, literature and the arts.

The Institute, together with the British Psychoanalytical Society, runs a low-fee psychoanalytic clinic, organizes lectures and scientific events concerned with psychoanalysis and publishes the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. It runs a training course in psychoanalysis which leads to membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association - the body which preserves internationally agreed standards of training, of professional entry, and of professional ethics and practice for psychoanalysis as initiated and developed by Sigmund Freud. Distinguished members of the Institute have included Michael Balint, Wilfred Bion, Ronald Fairbairn, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, John Rickman and Donald Winnicott.

Previous general editors have included David Tuckett, who played a very active role in the establishment of the New Library. He was followed as general editor by Elizabeth Bott Spillius, who was in turn followed by Susan Budd and then by Dana Birksted-Breen.

Current members of the Advisory Board include Liz Allison, Giovanna di Ceglie, Rosemary Davies and Richard Rusbridger.

Previous Members of the Advisory Board include Christopher Bollas, Ronald Britton, Catalina Bronstein, Donald Campbell, Sara Flanders, Stephen Grosz, John Keene, Eglé Laufer, Alessandra Lemma, Juliet Mitchell, Michael Parsons, Rosine Jozef Perelberg, Mary Target and David Taylor.

\nii\n

ALSO IN THIS SERIES

Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld

Psychoanalysis and Discourse Patrick Mahony

The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men Marion Milner

The Riddle of Freud Estelle Roith

Thinking, Feeling, and Being Ignacio Matte Blanco

The Theatre of the Dream Salomon Resnik

Melanie Klein Today: Volume 1, Mainly Theory Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius

Melanie Klein Today: Volume 2, Mainly Practice Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius

Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph Edited by Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius

About Children and Children-No-Longer: Collected Papers 1942-80 Paula Heimann. Edited by Margret Tonnesmann

The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45 Edited by Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner

Dream, Phantasy and Art Hanna Segal

Psychic Experience and Problems of Technique Harold Stewart

Clinical Lectures on Klein & Bion Edited by Robin Anderson

From Fetus to Child Alessandra Piontelli

A Psychoanalytic Theory of Infantile Experience: Conceptual and Clinical Reflections E Gaddini. Edited by Adam Limentani

The Dream Discourse Today Edited and introduced by Sara Flanders

The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Feminitity and Masculinity Edited and introduced by Dana Breen

Psychic Retreats John Steiner

The Taming of Solitude: Separation Anxiety in Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel Quinodoz

Unconscious Logic: An Introduction to Matte-Blanco's Bi-logic and its Uses Eric Rayner

Understanding Mental Objects Meir Perlow

Life, Sex and Death: Selected Writings of William Gillespie Edited and introduced by Michael Sinason

What Do Psychoanalysts Want?: The Problem of Aims in Psychoanalytic Therapy Joseph Sandler and Anna Ursula Dreher

Michael Balint: Object Relations, Pure and Applied Harold Stewart

Hope: A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States Anna Potamianou

Psychoanalysis, Literature & War: Papers 1972—1995 Hanna Segal

Emotional Vertigo: Between Anxiety and Pleasure Danielle Quinodoz

Early Freud and Late Freud Use Grubrich-Simitis

A History of Child Psychoanalysis Claudine and Pierre Geissmann

Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis Ronald Britton

\niii\n

A Mind of One's Own: A Psychoanalytic View of Self and Object Robert A Caper

Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide Edited by Rosine Jozef Perelberg

On Bearing Unbearable States of Mind Ruth Riesenberg-Malcolm

Psychoanalysis on the Move: The Work of Joseph Sandler Edited by Peter Fonagy, Arnold M. Cooper and Robert S. Wallerstein

The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green Edited by Gregorio Kohon

The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse André Green

The Bi-Personal Field: Experiences of Child Analysis Antonino Ferro

The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes: Paradox and Creativity in Psychoanalysis Michael Parsons

Ordinary People, Extra-ordinary Protections: A Post Kleinian Approach to the Treatment of Primitive Mental States Judith Mitrani

The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement Piera Aulagnier

The Importance of Fathers: A Psychoanalytic Re-Evaluation Judith Trowell and Alicia Etchegoyen

Dreams That Turn Over a Page: Paradoxical Dreams in Psychoanalysis JeanMichel Quinodoz

The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema Andrea Sabbadini

In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop Edited by Edith Hargreaves and Arturo Varchevker

The Quiet Revolution in American Psychoanalysis: Selected Papers of Arnold M. Cooper Arnold M. Cooper. Edited and Introduced by Elizabeth L. Auchincloss

Seeds of Illness and Seeds of Recovery: The Genesis of Suffering and the Role of Psychoanalysis Antonino Ferro

The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States Without Representation César Botella and Sára Botella

Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and Recognition of the Unconscious André Green

The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links Between Generations Haydée Faimberg

Glacial Times: A Journey through the World of Madness Salomon Resnik

This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries Thomas H Ogden

Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? David M. Black

Recovery of the Lost Good Object Eric Brenman

The Many Voices of Psychoanalysis Roger Kennedy

Feeling the Words: Neuropsychoanalytic Understanding of Memory and the Unconscious Mauro Mancia

Constructions and the Analytic Field: History, Scenes and Destiny Domenico Chianese

\niv\n

Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema Edited by Andrea Sabbadini

Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius Elizabeth Spillius

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Hanna Segal

Psychoanalysis Comparable and Incomparable: The Evolution of a Method to Describe and Compare Psychoanalytic Approaches David Tuckett, Roberto Basile, Dana Birksted-Breen, Tomas Böhm, Paul Denis, Antonino Ferro, Helmut Hinz, Arne Jemstedt, Paola Mariotti and Johan Schubert

Time, Space and Phantasy Rosine Jozef Perelberg

Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting Thomas H. Ogden

Mind Works: Techniques and Creativity in Psychoanalysis Antonino Ferro

Doubt Conviction and the Analytic Process: Selected Papers of Michael Feldman Michael Feldman

Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First Psychoanalyses of Children Claudia Frank

The Psychotic Wavelength: A Psychoanalytic Perspective for Psychiatry Richard Lucas

Betweenity: A Discussion of the Concept of Borderline Judy Gammelgaard

The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field Giuseppe Civitarese

Bion Today Edited by Chris Mawson

Secret Passages: The Theory and Technique of Interpsychic Relations Stefano Bolognini

Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious: An Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian Perspectives Lawrence J. Brown

Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat John Steiner

Avoiding Emotions, Living Emotions Antonio Ferro

Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept Edited by Elizabeth Spillius and Edna O'Shaughnessy

Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works Thomas Ogden

The Maternal Lineage Edited by Paola Mariotti

Donald Winnicott Today Edited by Jan Abram

Symbiosis and Ambiguity: A Psychoanalytic Study José Bleger Edited by John Churcher, and Leopoldo Bleger

Psychotic Temptation Liliane Abensour

The Theory and Technique of Psychoanalytic Supervision: The Sao Paulo Clinical Seminars Antonino Ferro

\nv\n

TITLES IN THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS TEACHING SERIES

Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud's Writings Jean-Michel Quinodoz

Listening to Hanna Segal: Her Contribution to Psychoanalysis Jean-Michel Quinodoz

Reading French Psychoanalysis Edited by Dana Birksted-Breen, Sara Flanders and Alain Gibeault

Reading Winnicott Lesley Caldwell and Angela Joyce

Initiating Psychoanalysis: Perspectives Bernard Reith, Sven Lagerlöf, Penelope Crick, Mette Møller and Elisabeth Skale

Infant Observation Frances Salo

Reading Anna Freud Nick Midgley

TITLES IN THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS ‘BEYOND THE COUCH’ SERIES

Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification Alessandra Lemma

Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Sally Weintrobe

\nvi\nvii\n

First published in Spanish as

Simbiosis Y ambigüedad: estudio psicoanalítico

in 1967 by Paidós, Buenos Aires.

This English edition first published 2013

by Routledge

27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

John Churcher and Leopoldo Bleger, the selection and editorial matter;

John Churcher, Leopoldo Bleger and Susan Rogers, the English translation.

The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Paperback cover image of a painting by Juan Battle Planas: Radiografía paranoica, c. 1936, reproduced by permission of Giselda Batlle and Malba - Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bleger, José.

[Simbiosis y ambigüedad. English]

Symbiosis and ambiguity : a psychoanalytic study/José Bleger, John Churcher, Leopoldo Bleger.

p. cm. — (The new library of psychoanalysis)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-415-46463-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-415-46462-8 (paperback) 1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Ambiguity I. Churcher, John.

II. Bleger, Leopoldo. III. Title.

BF173.B62132013

150.19'5—dc23

2012014043

ISBN: 978-0-415-46463-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-46462-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-09398-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk UK

\nviii\n

Preface

\n\n\nR. Horacio Etchegoyen\n\n\n

With the exception of ‘Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame’ which appeared in 1967 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and a contribution titled ‘Ambiguity: a chapter of psychology and psychopathology’, published in volume II of The World Biennial of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy edited by Silvano Arieti, English-speaking readers have had few opportunities for contact with the work of José Bleger, undoubtedly one of the most lucid and original thinkers in Latin-American psychoanalysis.

José Bleger was born in Santa Fe (Argentina) in November 1922. He took his medical degree in the Faculty of Medicine of Rosario, as did his wife Lily. Later on they moved to Santiago del Estero, around 1947. They lived in La Banda, one of the poorest districts of the province, where they both practised general medicine. Her interests were more in gynaecology and his in psychiatry.

There José began to use sodium pentothal for exploration and psychotherapy of the numerous neurotic patients who came to his consulting room. From this experience emerged his first book Teoría y Práctica del Narcoanálisis (Theory and Practice of Narcoanalysis) which was published in 1952, where his clear understanding of the human mind was already apparent.

Having decided to pursue a serious psychoanalytic training the Blegers both commuted to Buenos Aires for some time, before finally settling there. They joined the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA), which had been founded in 1942. José became a member at the end of the 1950s and his personal development was steady and rapid.

Like many young practitioners of that period, myself amongst them, Bleger came under the beneficent influence of Enrique J. Pichon Rivière, and went on to become one of his most outstanding disciples. From Pichon Rivière, Bleger learned not only psychiatry and psychoanalysis but also the intimate relationship of psychoanalysis with culture and society at large, and xiithe need to review and re-elaborate Freudian hypotheses within the framework of epistemology. To do this he chose the powerful instrument of dialectical materialism, which he understood better than most.

The reading of Georges Politzer and his example as a militant in the Resistance, who was shot by the Nazis in 1942, were decisive in Bleger's intellectual development. His reflections were crystallised in his Psicoanálisis y Dialéctica Materialista (Psychoanalysis and Dialectical Materialism), a book of lasting value which was published by Paidós in 1958.

In his Critique des Fondements de la Psychologie (Critique of the Foundations of Psychology) (1928), Politzer takes ‘drama’ as the object of study of psychology, as it includes at the same time behaviour and the inner life. Convinced that what behaviourism studies is a mere physiology, and that the inner life of the psychology of introspection is only a matter of ontology or essence, a myth, Bleger takes as his starting point Politzer's dramatics. Unlike Politzer, however, he doesn't think that inner life is necessarily a myth; rather, it only becomes mythical ‘when it is extracted and isolated from the dramatic totality and is converted into a thing with its own nature and existence’ (Bleger, 1958, p. 36). If it is recognized in the dramatic unity to which in fact it belongs, inner life is the raw material of psychology and psychoanalysis; however, if it is torn out and turned into an entelechy, into ‘second nature’, then indeed does inner life give birth to myth and start to become part of the ideological arsenal of the dominant class.

Bleger understood from the beginning, and he never abandoned the thought, that one of Freud's greatest merits was to have broken away from the psychology of faculties of the soul and from fleshless behaviourism. ‘It is precisely Freud who inspired in Politzer his vision of a concrete psychology’ (Bleger, 1958, p. 32), although ‘the concrete is submerged in a theoretical structure completely rooted in philosophical idealism, if not in abstractionism’ (Bleger, 1958, p. 34).

Psychoanalysis, Bleger asserts, examines the psychological event as a function of the subject's life; but it goes astray when it abandons the dramatic for the dynamic and reduces explanation to a play of forces, extrapolated from Newtonian physics, that are called ‘instincts’. With his habitual precision, Bleger puts it thus: ‘In other words, to explain the difference between the dramatic and its dynamic transposition, it could be said that in the former the drives derive from object relations, while Freud argued in his dynamic theories that object relations derive from the interplay of the drives’ (Bleger, 1958, p. 118) There are clear Fairbairnian resonances here.

The dramatic, as a legitimate field for psychology and psychoanalysis, leads Bleger to become more and more interested in the study of interpersonal relationships by Fairbairn and by Melanie Klein. At that time, most scholars in Buenos Aires and Montevideo were feeling strongly drawn to these authors and were putting the psychoanalytic session at the centre of their interest in studying the field of the analyst-patient interaction.

\nxiii\n

The studies that culminated in the major work that the reader now has in his or her hands began to be written simultaneously with, or shortly after, Psicoanálisis y Dialéctica Materialista. In 1960 there appeared his ‘Estudio de la dependencia-independencia en su relación con el proceso de proyección-introyección’ (‘Study of dependence-independence in relation to the process of projection-introjection’) and in the following year ‘La simbiosis’ (‘Symbiosis’), which form part of the first chapters of this book.

Symbiosis and Ambiguity was published in 1967, in a beautiful edition by Paidós, at a time when Bleger's huge personality as a psychoanalyst, as a committed intellectual and university teacher, and as a true master in his field, shone in his speaking, his writing and his example.

Bleger conceived symbiosis as a state of primitive undifferentiation, which includes the subject and his/her environment, although not yet as separate entities. Homo sapiens is not born as an isolated being who acquires the status of being social by abdicating isolation and adapting to culture, as proposed paradigmatically by the Freudian theory of primary narcissism (and also the autistic stage of Margaret Mahler). For Bleger, on the contrary, the human creature is by nature a social being, who passes through a period of primitive undifferentiation that will later be transformed into other types of relationship, and which will lead into the development of identity and of the sense of reality. Bleger emphasises in the Prologue of this book, and he repeats it throughout his work, that this stage of undifferentiation is a structure, a specific organization, which always includes the subject and his/her environment in a unique relationship.

To this primitive stage, which is prior to the Kleinian positions, Bleger gives the name glischro-caric position; it is where primary identification reigns and the syncytium is formed which is the seat of ambiguity - a vertebral concept in Bleger's thinking. The paranoid-schizoid position that follows later operates with the mechanism of dissociation that Fairbairn and Melanie Klein studied. As long as objects are partial and the anxieties persecutory, Bleger uses the Pichonean concept of divalence to characterize this type of object relation. Only when the subject can integrate the good and bad parts of the object and of the self in the depressive position is ambivalence finally established. Before then, there is only ambiguity.

If it is true that every vigorous work emerges both out of and in reaction to other, similarly vigorous works, which it extends and to which it presents itself as agonistic, it could be said that when Bleger wrote he was always thinking of Freud and Marx, of Politzer, of Fairbairn and Melanie Klein, although the scope of his reading in fact had no limits.

Bleger was influenced in the first place by Pichon Rivière, who was his teacher, and teacher to the whole of Latin American psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Pichon's work found expression in those who carried it xivfurther: Liberman, Bleger, Baranger, Fiasché and Rolla, amongst others. On the other hand, Bleger is undoubtedly a Kleinian analyst, who debates with Bion and with Rosenfeld; he is also someone who takes issue with Margaret Mahler and with Searles. The title of the book sufficiently illustrates its Ferenczian roots, that Mahler was later to develop masterfully. These conceptual debts in no way diminish the originality of Blegerian thinking: they are simply the bases on which it was established and which made it possible.

Ambiguity and symbiosis are key concepts in Bleger's attempt to explore the earliest levels of the psyche, prior to the dynamics described by Melanie Klein. It is fundamental to understand that for Bleger, the primitive mental levels dominated by subject-object undifferentiation are only partially resolved during the rest of life, and they constitute the foundation for many phenomena which permeate the analytic situation, groups, institutions and society as a whole.

The brilliant application that Bleger makes of his theories in accounting for the muteness of the setting is well known. His paper ‘Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame’ (1967a) has become a classic and is part of this book.

Although Bleger's ideas open up an attractive road towards the understanding of psychosis, they also apply to neurotic patients and are at the same time the substrate of a good part of what is happening in our social and institutional life. Bleger's strongest thesis is probably that the phenomena of undifferentiation related to the early psyche operate both in clinical psychoanalysis and in processes of societal and cultural change.

Warrior's Rest, the novel by Christiane Rochefort, published in Buenos Aires in 1959, gave Bleger an opportunity to apply his ideas to understanding a work of literature. The relationship between the protagonists, Geneviève and Jean Renaud, may validly be understood from the perspective of symbiosis and the nature of the link with the agglutinated or glischroid object. The agglutinated object corresponds to a very early stage in the development of the ego, in which there is no differentiation or discrimination between ego and non-ego, and which is dominated by ambiguity and fusion (not confusion). The symbiotic link is a pact between the dead parts of the participants, which starts from a crossed identification. This hypothesis explains the relationship between Geneviève and Jean Renaud, a failed suicide, with whom Geneviève becomes involved through the dead part of her. The two parties configure an agglutinated object in which the dead parts of the man and the woman are crystallized, and crossed over in a desperate effort to rescue themselves from a symbiotic relationship and from the catastrophic anxieties that bind them together.

More than thirty years after his premature death, Bleger's research is still completely relevant today.

\nxv\n

The publication in English of Symbiosis and Ambiguity, which is added to the French version published years ago by Presses Universitaires, is proof of the enduring vitality of Bleger's thinking. The book has also been published in Portuguese and Italian. By overcoming the barriers of language, furthermore, it offers a singular opportunity through the contact with a larger audience for new conceptual bridges to emerge between analysts in the diverse areas of international psychoanalysis.

In short, a wonderful book.

Buenos Aires, 11 January 2009

\nxvi\n

Editorial Introduction

\n\n\nLeopoldo Bleger\nJohn Churcher\n\n\n

Symbiosis and Ambiguity, which is here made available in English translation for the first time, was originally published in Spanish more than forty years ago. In the English-speaking world, knowledge of José Bleger's work has until now been based largely on a single paper: ‘Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame’, which was published in 1967 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Bleger, 1967a). One of only three pieces by Bleger hitherto published in English, it had appeared earlier that year in Spanish as an integral chapter in this book. The paper has become a classic among writings on the psychoanalytic setting, but its isolation from the clinical and theoretical context of the book as a whole, as well as some deficiencies in the published translation, mean that English readers have long been denied an opportunity to make a proper assessment of José Bleger's distinctive contribution to psychoanalysis.

The Value of this Book for Psychoanalysts Today

In recent years there has been a steady growth of interest in very early object relations and their clinical manifestations. In Symbiosis and Ambiguity José Bleger made important and original contributions to this area, but the unavailability in English of most of his writings has had the consequence that when related ideas have subsequently been put forward by others they have often appeared without reference to his work.

For example, when Thomas Ogden published his work on the ‘autistic-contiguous’ position (Ogden, 1989), he cited pioneering work by Esther Bick, Frances Tustin, Donald Meltzer and others, but appeared to be unaware of José Bleger. Noting this, in a letter to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Spanish psychoanalyst Rafael Cruz Roche pointed out that thirty years earlier xviiBleger had proposed ‘concepts which were practically identical’ to Ogden's, and he made a plea for more of Bleger's work to be translated (Cruz Roche, 1992). Bleger's ideas were discussed in Horacio Etchegoyen's book The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, which first appeared in English in 1991, including briefly his views on early adhesive identification, and on symbiosis (Etchegoyen, 1991, pp. 525-534, 622, 755). No further English translations of Bleger's writings appeared, however, and a few years later Rachel Blass and Sidney Blatt could publish a wide-ranging review of the psychoanalytic literature on symbiosis without mentioning him (Blass and Blatt, 1996); the same is true of Judith Mitrani's review of the evolution of the theory of adhesive identification (Mitrani, 2001, Chapter 2).

The motive for publishing this book now is not simply to correct these historical omissions. We think that its value for psychoanalysts today lies in a distinctive view that it offers of early object relations, as these are manifested in the psychoanalytic situation in everyday clinical practice, and in its illustration of a particular way of thinking about this situation ‘in the session’. Although written almost a lifetime ago, its combination of theoretical innovation, detailed clinical illustration, and ‘clinical thinking’ (Green, 2005), makes this book as relevant today as it was when it was first published.

The Context in Which the Book was Written: Argentinian Psychoanalysis in the 1950s and 1960s

Symbiosis and Ambiguity was written at a time when major events were occurring both in Argentinian society at large and in the world of Argentinian psychoanalysis. José Bleger was personally involved in these events, and deeply affected by them, so that a proper understanding of their part in determining the directions taken by his work would involve a detailed consideration of historical and biographical material. We have avoided any attempt at this, partly for reasons of time and space, but also because our main aim in publishing this translation is to make available to the reader something in José Bleger's work that we believe is of general value to psychoanalysis today as a clinical practice, a method of enquiry and a body of theoretical ideas. Nevertheless, a very brief account of some trends in the Argentinian psychoanalytic movement in the 1950s and 1960s will help to situate the work for the English reader.2

The Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA) was founded in 1942. Almost from the beginning, this group was interested not only in ‘classical’\n\n

More detailed surveys can be found in Wender et al. (1992), Plotkin (2001), Etchegoyen and Zysman (2005a, 2005b), Arbiser (2003), Bernardi (2002), Ungar (2005), Taiana (2006). For discussion in Spanish, French and Italian see: Aberastury et al. (1967), Cesio (1981), Cucurullo et al. (1982), Mom (1982), Vezzetti (1996), Civitarese (2004). See also Moreno (1995), Tylim (1996). These lists are not exhaustive.

\nxviii psychoanalytic practice, but also in problems of psychosomatic illness, the treatment of psychoses, child analysis, problems of groups and of mental health institutions. This may be one of the reasons for the sustained interest of many Argentinian psychoanalysts in the work of Melanie Klein and her school, and their development of a strong current of Kleinian thought. Klein's investigations of early development, her stress on the importance of problems of psychoanalytic technique and the tools that she was able to construct, mainly with the concept of projective identification, were quickly taken on board by the young Argentinian movement.

Problems of countertransference became a focus of interest from early on, so that a preoccupation with countertransference is now for many readers a defining characteristic of Argentinian psychoanalysis. Heinrich Racker's first paper on this subject appeared almost simultaneously with that of Paula Heimann,3 and his book on technique, which is widely read in English translation (Racker, 1968), became quickly known in Argentina and elsewhere, and was a major point of reference at the end of the 1950s. Racker was one of José Bleger's supervisors during his training.

Interest in countertransference was accompanied by increasing emphasis on the session as the most important ‘reality’ of psychoanalytic activity, and by a gradual concentration on the here-and-now of the situation, rather than on developmental considerations. One of José Bleger's first psychoanalytic papers was on ‘The psychoanalytic session’, and we discuss this paper below.

An important influence on José Bleger was that of Enrique Pichon Rivière, a founder member of the APA. Pichon Rivière published little but his teaching became an enduring point of reference for many of the most creative psychoanalysts in Argentina, including Willy and Madeleine Baranger, David Liberman and Salomón Resnik. Some of his ideas and his way of thinking are exemplified and developed by Bleger in this book, in particular his notion of the ‘link’ (vinculo), which is not quite the same as Bion's; his distinction between ‘depositor’, ‘depositary’, and ‘deposited’ in the process of projection; and his conception of the three concentric ‘areas’ of mind, body, and external world (see below, p. xxxiii, n. 13).

Structure and Composition of the Book

Symbiosis and Ambiguity is divided into three parts. Part One, comprising Chapters 1-4, is titled ‘On Symbiosis’. Part Two, comprising Chapters 5 and 6, is titled ‘On Ambiguity’. Part Three comprises Chapters 7-9 and is titled ‘Appendix’. The paper on the psychoanalytic setting forms Chapter 6,\n\n

Racker's paper was delivered to the APA in September, 1948 (Racker, 1953); Heimann's was read at the 16th IPA Congress, Zürich, 1949 (Heimann, 1950).

\nxix which is thus the final substantive chapter of the book. It represents a culmination and synthesis of work described in the preceding five chapters, as well as its application to a particular problem in psychoanalytic technique.

From the way in which the book is structured, and from the quantity of original material included in it, it is evident that it was intended as an integrated whole and not simply as a collection of papers. The first four chapters had already appeared separately between 1960 and 1964, but the remaining five, which make up about half of the book, had not been previously published. The fifth and sixth chapters were written in parallel, probably in 1965-66.

As its title suggests, the book explores the relationship between symbiosis and ambiguity as psychological phenomena, in normal mental life and in psychopathology. An exploration is not simply an exposition, however. In the ‘Prologue’, written shortly before the book was published, José Bleger invites the reader to join him in retracing ajourney that has been undertaken over a period of some years, during which he was trying to gain a better understanding of certain problems that he had already grasped intuitively, and to find a way of formulating and conveying them. He writes:\n\n

Since the reader will be following the course of an investigation, I think it will be easily confirmed that between the first chapter and the later ones there are certain conceptual modifications to which I was led by the investigation itself…

\n(pp. 3-4)\n

One aspect of this journey is a progressive displacement of emphasis in the investigation. from symbiosis to ambiguity (which could have been an alternative title for the book), and this is reflected in the labelling of Parts 1 and 2. However, things are not quite so straightforward, for in Chapter 6 symbiosis reappears as a central concept, while ambiguity is mentioned explicitly only once, its theoretical elaboration in the preceding chapters being taken as read.

The following synopsis is intended to help orient the reader. However, those who prefer to approach the text more directly may wish to skip this section.

Synopsis

Bleger argues in the ‘Prologue’ that the beginning of human development is characterised by a primitive undifferentiation, and that the primary syncretic structures of psychological life have their roots in corporeal relationships rather than in mental ones. These two points are presented not as vague assertions but rather as hypotheses that imply a radical choice of perspective, an attempt to xxthink about development in a particular way. For Bleger, ‘undifferentiation’ is not a negative concept defined by the absence of differentiation; instead, undifferentiation has a specific structure and organisation that are evident in the analytic situation, and which can be observed in everyday analytic experience. With the concepts of symbiosis and ambiguity, ‘… it is not a matter of giving a new name to phenomena that are already familiar, but of re-situating them on the basis of a concept that comes closer to reality’ (p. 3). By ‘reality’ here he means, primarily, the reality of the psychoanalytic session.

Chapter 1

The first chapter is a clinical study of dependence and independence in relation to the process of projection-introjection in the case of a young woman, Maria Cristina, who is suffering acute difficulties in separation from her family. Bleger shows how a disturbance in the process of projection-introjection is evidence of her excessive dependence, and how ‘dependence’ and ‘independence’ can be defined in terms of stagnation or mobility of this process.

The case illustrates the co-existence of autism and symbiosis in the transference, both of which are viewed as narcissistic relations with internal objects, in which a part of the mind is ‘deposited’ by projection. In symbiosis the receiver of the projection, the ‘depositary’, belongs to the external world, whereas in autism it belongs to a zone of the patient's own mind or body. Massive projection by the patient implies a need to establish a symbiotic transference relation with the analyst, but this relation is narcissistic in character. The patient ‘needs to control the analyst (depositary) so that he does not get “inside” her, into her autistic formation, as much as she has to control him from getting into what has been deposited’ (p. 12). Reintrojection by the patient is only possible slowly and in small doses, a process in which the body functions as a ‘buffer’, limiting the disequilibrium.

Maintaining the distinction between depositary and deposited, which he borrows from Pichon Rivière,4 allows Bleger to distinguish between merely projecting a role, which may have no impact on the depositary, and promoting the acting of a role by the analyst, or delegating one which is already present in the analyst. He argues that in every analysis there is ‘a continuous assignment of roles’ which needs to be clearly understood by the analyst in order to be able to interpret. The symbiotic relationship 'is a highly\n\n

In Bleger's own words, Pichon Rivière ‘uses the term depositary for the external object into which the projection is made, depositor for the person who makes the projection, and deposited for what is projected’. He adds: ‘Discrimination between deposited and depositary makes possible the withdrawal of the projection, and thereby a better understanding of reality’ (Bleger, 1963, p. 188).

\nxxi condensed relation with very complex and contradictory aspects that need to be “broken up” in order to be introjected and worked through by degrees' (p. 24). But strictly speaking, he writes, ‘we should speak of symbiosis only when the projections are crossed, and each person acts according to the compensatory roles of the other’ (p. 14).

Chapter 2

The limitations of what can be published about symbiosis in the transference and countertransference for reasons of confidentiality, and the advantages of studying it in a situation where it is free to follow its course instead of being modified by the ‘fundamentally “antisymbiotic” task’ of psychoanalytic treatment (p. 32), lead Bleger to study the symbiotic relationship portrayed in a novel: Warrior's Rest, by the French author Christiane Rochefort (1958). It tells the story of Geneviève Le Theil, a student who takes a twenty-four hour trip from Paris to a nearby city to take possession of a legacy from an aunt. At the hotel, she mistakenly enters the room next to hers and finds the body of a man, Jean Renaud, who has evidently attempted suicide. She intervenes to save his life, and from that moment on she feels herself tied to his fate. She visits him at the hospital the following day, and as he is discharged they embark on a symbiotic relationship in which compulsive sexual activity is a way of communicating in which the roles are stabilised. Some time later she returns to Paris with him, and through a series of crises they eventually manage a kind of separation.

Bleger shows how the relationship is established as a ‘pact’ between the protagonists, each using the other as a depositary for parts of themselves by which they are threatened, and this is experienced by Geneviève as a bodily metamorphosis. Each functions as the other's sole depositary, to the exclusion of other relationships:\n\n

The symbiotic link is thus a pact with the dead, destroyed and dangerous parts of its members, who ‘pledge themselves to each other’ in order to carry a corpse they hold in common. However, it is a pact for life and for the possibility of continuing to live. The secret of symbiosis is that of a living corpse that needs to be kept, controlled and immobilized by the participants; if control is lost, destruction or at least the risk of it ensues.

\n(p. 46)\n

One day they quarrel, Renaud walks out, and from then on the symbiosis becomes progressively more disequilibrated. Eventually Renaud leaves altogether, Geneviève contracts tuberculosis, she enters a sanatorium and waits for death.

\nxxii\n

In the second part of the novel, the situation is reversed: Renaud returns to save Geneviève's life and the pact is renewed. By now other parties have become involved, and the relationship breaks down again, but this time more quickly. The novel ends with Renaud in an asylum, and Geneviève pregnant and alone.

Elaborating on the conclusions of the preceding chapter Bleger describes the symbiosis as a relationship with a unitary ‘agglutinated’ object, characterised by syncretism and lack of discrimination, and subject to immobilisation and control, including by the use of compulsive sexuality. Loss of this control results in massive, paroxistic mobilisation, with catastrophic anxiety and a risk of psychotic disintegration. Contact with other people, and a shift towards a more perverse-polymorphous sexuality, result in a partial fragmentation of the agglutinated object, and the beginning of a slow working-through, with some awareness.

The agglutinated object is also described as glischroid (from the Greek γλισχροσ, meaning ‘viscous’), and in a footnote Bleger explains that this term was introduced by F. Minkowska in her discussion of viscosity and adhesiveness as characteristic of epileptoidia (Minkowska, 1956).5 ‘Viscosity’, he writes, ‘is the phenomenon resulting from the link with an agglutinated object’ (p. 34).

Chapter 3

This brief and schematic chapter outlines a central thesis of the book: that prior to the paranoid-schizoid position as described by Melanie Klein there is a position, whose characteristic anxiety is confusional rather than persecutory, and in which the object relation is one of symbiosis with a primitive ‘agglutinated nucleus’. Bleger calls this the glischro-caric position (from γλισχροσ meaning ‘viscous’, and καρυον meaning ‘kernel’ or ‘nucleus’). In support of this thesis he refers in the first page of this chapter to passages\n\n

Minkowska wrote: ‘When in 1923, on the basis of my genealogical research, I presented to the Medico-Psychological Society [in Paris] my first paper on epileptoidia, the point that was most discussed was viscosity and adhesiveness, which were relatively new elements … To mark the importance of viscosity we have introduced, following a suggestion by Pichon, the term glischroidia. We wanted to introduce this term definitively into our nomenclature in order to avoid … any imprecision or misunderstanding attached to the term epileptoidia.’ (Minkowska, 1956, p. 110, our translation). She is referring to her first published paper (Minkowska, 1923). Her husband refers to ‘the viscous and adhesive affectivity of the epileptoid or glischroid - from γλισχροσ - described by Mrs Minkowska as the constitutional basis of the manifestations of epilepsy’ (Minkowski, 1953, pp. 67-68, our translation). (The Pichon mentioned by Minkowska here is the French psychoanalyst Edouard Pichon, and not Enrique Pichon Rivière.)

\nxxiii in Klein's work, as well as in Fairbairn's, which mention an incomplete differentiation between the good and bad objects in the first months of life (p. 72).

He also shifts in this chapter to using the term ‘agglutinated nucleus’ instead of agglutinated object, because:\n\n

there is, strictly speaking, no real object relation between the objects and the ego nuclei therein, but a true ‘primary identification’, which is the term Fairbairn used for those states in which differentiation has not occurred between the object and the part of the ego that is related to it.

\n(p. 74)\n

This nucleus persists in adults as the psychotic part of the personality, whose vicissitudes will be explored in the following chapter through clinical illustrations. It also constitutes the earliest form of the Oedipus complex, characterised by fusion and non-discrimination of the parents.

The chapter ends with a summary table indicating the characteristic anxiety, object, defences and fixation point of the glischro-caric position in comparison to those of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.

Chapter 4

At the beginning of this chapter, which is tided ‘Study of the psychotic part of the personality’, Bleger writes that an advantage of preserving the clinical autonomy of symbiosis is that it enables him to understand in a unified way a number of clinical phenomena that are dynamically related. He links this observation to psychoanalytic technique, stating that his discussion of the handling of the agglutinated nucleus is not innovative, but rather an attempt to ‘define precisely, understand and ground in a unitary manner various technical alternatives that are largely implicit in what every psychoanalyst does to some extent in the course of a treatment’ (p. 81).

The agglutinated nucleus is equated with the psychotic part of the personality, as Bion had described it some years previously in two papers (Bion 1956, 1957). In keeping with mainstream psychoanalytic practice in Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s, Bleger thinks of the psychotic part of the personality primarily in bodily terms, and he considers that its analysis requires ‘mobilisation, fragmentation and discrimination’ (p. 89). Mobilisation because the symbiotic transference implies immobilisation of important parts of the personality; fragmentation because these parts tend to function in a massive (quasi-psychotic) way; and discrimination because the elements are undifferentiated. All three steps depend on the capacity of the analyst to introduce a split between himself and what is deposited in him. The xxivagglutinated nucleus has to be ‘broken up’ before discrimination and schizoid division will be possible. This requires the alternating and complementary use of two types of interpretation:\n\n

In the first case - the split interpretation - we show patients their relation with themselves, or what they do with a part of themselves to another part of themselves, while in the latter case - interpretation without splitting - we include ourselves in the interpretation without differentiating the internal object of the depositary.6

\n(p. 91)\n

At the end of this theoretical introduction to Chapter 4 Bleger links the discrimination that is involved in naming these ‘technical alternatives’ to the discrimination that is promoted in the patient by psychoanalysing the symbiosis. Both involve ‘giving names to things that we already know’, but that this is only possible ‘when they acquire a certain identity as a result of discrimination’ (p. 93). The recommendations in this chapter are thus not simply indications for technique but part of a broader methodological approach.

This approach is illustrated by clinical material from the case of a woman patient, Ana Maria, who was in the process of separating from her husband. Her abandonment of her medical degree when she married, and her difficulty in later resuming it, were symptoms of the blockage of an agglutinated nucleus replete with oedipal conflicts whose protagonists have remained undiscriminated. Attempts to mobilise this part of her personality by interpretation are met by heavy silences and tension which for a long time tend also to immobilise the analyst. When the analysis succeeds in dispersing the agglutinated nucleus to some extent, she experiences this as being left in pieces between the sessions, like the pastry that she tries to make for a dessert but which won't hold together. In a detailed account of three consecutive sessions Bleger shows how, in a rhythmical alternation of re-projection and re-introjection, the agglutinated nucleus is analysed little by little and the various identifications of the oedipal situation become more discriminated, leading gradually to a capacity for more mature independence. Using further clinical material from the same patient, and building on observations by Klein and by Rosenfeld, he shows how the successive re-introjections are marked by various kinds of confusion that indicate regression to the glischro-caric position, and a return to the fusion of an original non-discrimination.

\n\n

He relates this distinction to Strachey's (1934) paper, and it can be seen as anticipating Steiner's (1993, 1994) distinction between patient-centred and analyst-centred interpretations.

\nxxv\n

Chapter 5

This chapter explores both the concept of ambiguity and its presentation in manifestations of the agglutinated nucleus, with numerous clinical examples. Although Bleger realized quite early that the agglutinated nucleus was ambiguous in character, it was only gradually that he fully understood the significance and the implications of this fact. An important shift of focus between Chapters 4 and 5 is from the study of the split-off psychotic part of the personality, which functions as a nucleus of symbiotic dependence and which is ambiguous due to its lack of discrimination, to the multiple personalities by virtue of which the ego itself is ambiguous; that is, to a particular kind of identity or ‘granular’ organization of the ego as a multiplicity of non-integrated nuclei (p. 165).7 Whereas in the previous chapter Bleger studies the agglutinated nucleus as split off from the more integrated part of the ego, in Chapter 5 it is the ambiguity of the symbiotic nucleus itself which is in the foreground. He writes:\n\n

Up until my most recent work on the theme of symbiosis, I studied its persistence (as dependence) in subjects who had reached a more integrated ego, in whom these nuclei of symbiotic dependence were managed by maintaining a strong splitting from the more integrated ego. In this way I studied the agglutinated nucleus and the glischro-caric position. I want to suggest that in these cases the symbiosis persists as a nucleus and to some extent also this exists in every human being, because of deficient discrimination in the split-off part of the more integrated ego. In these studies I identified the eminently ambiguous character of this agglutinated nucleus. What I want to do now is to examine the inverse situation, in which the more integrated ego is only a minimal part of the personality and the latter functions totally or predominantly with an organisation that keeps the symbiosis to the fore. This requires me to study ambiguity per se, as it presents in different personality types or traits, unlike the earlier studies in which I studied the dynamics of the agglutinated nucleus in its different manifestations (hypochondria, epilepsy, mania, melancholia, etc.). Strictly speaking, these latter manifestations depend on the defence of the more integrated ego against the possibility of invasion by the agglutinated nucleus.

\n(p. 208)\n

Ambiguity is carefully distinguished from ambivalence, contradiction, divalence, dissociation, and confusion, and equated instead with undifferentiation,\n\n

See pp. 165, 167, 172. The notion of a ‘granular’ ego is similar to Glover's (1943) concept of a primitive ‘multinuclear’ ego. Bleger cites this paper by Glover in a different context (p. 133, n. 106).

\nxxvi in which different terms co-exist without contradiction or conflict because they have never been discriminated. The agglutinated nucleus is present in everyone, and is normally split off from the more mature ego. In an ‘ambiguous personality’, where this split is absent or reduced, the personality is a direct expression of the agglutinated nucleus.

Bleger distinguishes four ways in which this typically happens. The ambiguous personality may persist as a ‘syncretic ego’, lacking firm attachments and characterised by a constantly shifting identity, shallowness and inconsistency, giving rise to an impression of ‘fictitiousness’. Or it may be partly organized as a ‘factic ego’: attached to an institution, group, or person from which it has not yet distinguished itself, the ego exists only in the action, the job, etc., without interiority.8 A similar absence of interiority is found in psychopathy, but whereas the factic ego ‘accepts’ the ambiguity and makes it central, in psychopathy the ambiguity is split off and deposited destructively in the external world through psychopathic acting. A fourth possibility is when the syncretic ego becomes extremely and rigidly polarised around just one of its nuclei of ambiguity, giving rise to the ‘authoritarian personality’ as described by Brunswick and Adorno. These main types were previously situated in a wider panorama of vicissitudes of symbiosis and ambiguity (see p. 171).

In distinguishing the various forms of ambiguous personality Bleger remarks that he is ‘describing a typology and not necessarily a pathology’ (p. 176, n. 128). He points out that although ambiguity may involve contradiction for the observer, ‘there is no contradiction for the subject, since this has not yet come into play’ (p. 175). As well as comparing each type with the mature ego, he maintains that we should ‘study each structure in itself and its own organisation’. This point is elaborated towards the end of the chapter, where he urges that instead of regarding illness as an entity, as in Kraepelin's nosology, we study the mobile and changing organisations or structures of behaviour and personality, with their dynamic interrelations (p. 224).

It is a methodological principle of Bleger's writing to avoid thinking solely in pathological terms with the normative notion of ‘deficit’, and to allow for other kinds of identity and other senses of reality. In using the expression ‘syncretic ego’, for example, he seeks to define the ambiguous personality ‘in terms not of what it is lacking but of what it is’. The syncretic ego is understood as an ensemble of personal relations, and Bleger compares this to the way the anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt understood personal identity in a Melanesian society (pp. 181-2).

The implication for Bleger's contribution to Kleinian theory becomes clear when he writes:\n\n

If we accept primary undifferentiation, the statement that the first psychological mechanism is projection (as postulated by Melanie Klein)\n\n

For Bleger, ‘factic’ (fáctico) means based on doing, on action.

\nxxvii is also placed in doubt, and the same applies to projective-introjective identification. It is a question of primary identification (Fairbairn); both projection-introjection, and massive projective-introjective identification appear as phenomena of a more integrated ego (although still in its earliest forms) which uses them to ‘manage’ ambiguity by keeping it split.

\n(pp. 185-6)\n

The syncretic ego operates in a simpler way that Bleger, borrowing a term from Levy-Bruhl, calls ‘participation’:\n\n

The phenomenon of participation does not inevitably require the hypothesis of projective-introjective identification; instead, participation consists in the mobilisation and actualisation of levels of the personality that function directly with that structure. Having to accept, as we are in the habit of doing, the existence of projective-introjective identification in all cases, requires that we consider each subject a ‘closed system’ that communicates with other human beings through diverse channels; whereas, accepting participation as an originary phenomenon implies the hypothesis that human beings begin or start out from an organisation that is an ‘open system’, gradually becoming individualised and personified.

\n(pp. 186-7)\n

By now it is clear that he has moved from the theoretical position developed in Chapters 1 and 2, in which symbiosis involves massive projection into a depositary, to one in which ambiguity results from syncretic participation in an activity or group, without the use of defences characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. This amounts to a revision and clarification of the scheme presented in Chapter 3, and is an example of the ‘conceptual modifications’ referred to in the ‘Prologue’.

The clinical material in this chapter also illustrates a defensive function of regression to the ambiguity of the glischro-caric position during psychoanalytic sessions, as a way of ‘blunting’ or ‘taking the edge off’ persecutory situations. Similarly, it can serve as a shock-absorber against the impact of insight.

Chapters 5 and 6 were written in parallel, and where the discussion in Chapter 5 touches on questions of psychoanalytic technique and treatment it anticipates the discussion of the setting in Chapter 6. The persistence of an ambiguous personality in the adult is due, Bleger suggests, to a lack of ‘trustworthy’ depositaries in early childhood, and he concludes that one of the functions of psychoanalytic treatment is to provide a symbiosis that was lacking or distorted, this function being provided by the setting. The therapeutic aim, however, is not a permanent restoration of the symbiosis, as if this were a kind of idyllic fusion. Rather, it is the temporary provision of a good-enough symbiosis as a prerequisite for a lasting escape from xxviiisymbiosis into maturity: ‘Children need a secure symbiosis that permits them to count on a depositary or ‘supplementary ego’ so that they may face their greed and destructive envy’ (p. 209).

Chapter 6

In this chapter Bleger considers the psychoanalytic setting from different conceptual viewpoints: as a ‘non-process’, as the background of a Gestalt, as a social institution, as part of the body schema, as a non-ego or meta-ego, etc. This allows him to characterise the setting more fully than hitherto but it is the preceding work on symbiosis and particularly on ambiguity which provides him with the basis for a new theoretical understanding of the nature of the setting.

The chapter begins by defining the psychoanalytic situation as comprised of an analytic process and a ‘non-process’. The ‘non-process’ is the setting, which is held constant and within which the analytic process occurs. Sometimes the setting does change, ‘from the background of a Gestalt into a figure, that is, into a process’ (p. 229), but only when something happens to make us aware of its existence. Such changes are usually temporary, because as clinicians we seek to maintain or restore the setting, to return it to the background, so that we can continue to observe and analyse the process that is occurring within it.

Bleger points out that a psychoanalytic relationship is itself a particular kind of social institution and he argues that institutions actually form parts of our personalities, so that personal identity is at least partly constituted by belonging to, and participating in, a group, an ideology or an institution. This radical position has been anticipated by clinical material in Chapters 1 and 5, and by the discussion of the ambiguous personality in Chapter 5, particularly the ‘factic ego’.

Since this participation is partly syncretic, and lacking in mind-body discrimination, social institutions also partly determine the body schema. In other words, our body schemata, the internal representations of our own bodies, partly consist of internalised versions of the institutions in which we participate.

Just as in neurology the body schema reveals itself in the phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ following an amputation, so the psychoanalytic setting makes its presence known only when it is broken. As long as the setting is not broken, it remains unnoticed. The normal, silent, continuous, background presence of the setting thus furnishes the patient with an opportunity for repeating the original symbiosis of the infant with the mother. The psychotic part of the patient's personality, the undifferentiated and unresolved part of the primitive symbiotic relationship, is deposited in the setting, where it silently persists as a ‘phantom world’, undetected but nonetheless psychically xxixreal. The primitive organisation that was studied in Chapter 5 as an aspect of the personality is now found to be inhabiting the session itself.

Because in psychoanalysis much of the symbiosis resides in the setting, and is not present in the analytic process where it might be observed ‘in action’, the setting forms a persistent, tenacious, and invisible ‘bastion’,9 a refuge for the psychotic part of the personality, which demands that nothing shall change. Precisely because the setting is so much respected and preserved in psychoanalysis, much of this area of the mind may never be analysed.

The implications for psychoanalytic technique are that at some point the setting itself has to be analysed, and the analyst-patient relationship has to be ‘de-symbiotised’, but this will meet strong resistance because the symbiosis is something which has never before been recognised by the patient.

The final part of Bleger's argument involves his recognition that the patient brings his or her own setting, which is not the same as the analyst's. Among the examples he gives is that of a patient, whose treatment he supervised, who proposed to use the familiar form of address when speaking to the analyst.10 Only by eventually interpreting this, was it possible to reveal the narcissism and omnipotence of the patient, and his use of the familiar form to suppress the person and role of the analyst. Bleger concludes:\n\n

The analyst needs to accept the setting brought by the patient… because within it will be found in summary form the primitive unresolved symbiosis. However, we need to state at the same time that accepting the patient's meta-ego (his setting) does not mean giving up the therapist's own, as a function of which it is possible to analyse the process and the setting itself when this has been transformed it into process … In sum, we may say that the patient's setting is his most primitive fusion with the mother's body and that the psychoanalyst's setting must serve to re-establish the original symbiosis, but only in order to change it. Both the disruption of the setting and its ideal or normal maintenance are technical and theoretical problems, but what fundamentally disturbs the possibility of thoroughgoing treatment is the disruption introduced or accepted by the psychoanalyst in the setting. The setting can only be analysed within the setting; in other words, the patient's dependence and most primitive psychological organisation can only be analysed within the analyst's setting, which should be neither ambiguous nor changing, nor altered.

\n(pp. 240-1)\n

\n\n

The concept of ‘bastion’ (baluarte) is borrowed from Baranger, M. and Baranger, W. (1961-62).

In Spanish, when addressing another person, use of the informal tú in place of the more formal Usted may, depending on the context, be experienced as excessively familiar or disrespectful.

\nxxx\n

Chapters 1-9

The remaining chapters form an Appendix which reviews the literature on ambivalence and ambiguity, and discusses two relevant articles by Freud.

Chapter 7 reviews the history of the psychoanalytic literature on ambivalence and ambiguity, beginning with Bleuler's introduction of the term ‘ambivalence’, and Freud's use of both concepts. Following Pichon Rivière, Bleger distinguishes ambivalence from ‘divalence’, which is developmentally prior to ambivalence and refers to antinomic elements (feelings, tendencies or attitudes) which are kept apart by schizoid division, whereas ambivalence implies the co-existence of elements in relation to the same object at the same time, and thus a degree of integration in the depressive position.11 Ambivalence always indicates conflict, whereas divalence always indicates potential or avoided conflict, and both are distinguished from reaction-formation. The implications of these distinctions and the use of related terminology are traced in some detail through Freud's work, and then in work by Klein, Fairbairn, Abraham, Glover, Sterba, Langer, Bose, Stephen, Scott, Wisdom, Kris and Kaplan, and Tarachow. The review gives Bleger an opportunity to test the utility of his classification by mapping it onto the ideas of these authors, to extend it in places, and to develop a capacity to distinguish more accurately between analytic situations that might be seen as similar.

Chapter 8 is a commentary on Freud's (1910b) paper, ‘The antithetical meaning of primal words’, and argues that the hypothesis of primitive undifferentiation offers a simpler explanation than Freud's for the appearance in dreams and in language of elements that apparently express contradictory meanings. Benveniste's (1956) critique of the etymological speculations by Abel, which Freud had used to support his argument, is included.

Chapter 9, the last of the book, is about Freud's (1919) paper ‘The “Uncanny”’. What interests Bleger here is the appearance of the uncanny when something ambiguous mobilises the ‘syncretic ego’, i.e. the non-ego, and the chapter elaborates ideas in Chapters 5 and 6 concerning the phantom world created and inhabited by the ‘factic’ personality, and its presence in the psychoanalytic setting. What for Freud is a return of the repressed, Bleger regards as a breakdown in the normal splitting between the ego and the non-ego.

In some ways the three final chapters simply extend many passages earlier in the book in which Bleger sifts through the psychoanalytic literature on undifferentiation, and in part this is done in acknowledgement of the influences on his work and in recognition of his debts to other authors. However, these chapters also demonstrate that undifferentiation and ambiguity\n\n

What Bleger calls ‘divalence’, Fairbairn (1941, p. 257) called ‘dichotomy’ (see p. 271).

\nxxxi have been present in psychoanalytic thought from the beginning. Moreover, they help to make clear a radical inversion, resulting from the gradual introduction of the idea of participation or syncretism, in Bleger's way of thinking these concepts. By the end of the book, symbiosis and ambiguity are no longer simply aspects of the transference-countertransference but ubiquitous features of mental life.

The Relation between this Book and the Rest of José Bleger's Work

José Bleger wrote on a wide range of issues. Besides his practice and teaching as a psychoanalyst in the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, he was a well-known and reputable Professor of Psychology at the University of Buenos Aires. In this context he wrote many papers and three other books: Psicología de la Conducta [The Psychology of Behaviour] (1963), Psicohigiene y Psicología Institucional [Psychohygiene and the Psychology of Institutions] (1966) and a compilation of five important papers, Temas de Psicología [Psychological Themes] (1971b). The first of these books became a classic in Argentina and other Latin American countries and is now in its nineteenth reprinting.

A thorough study of his writings would require careful consideration of the importance of his psychoanalytic views in other fields of his work, mainly in the teaching of psychology but also in the work on groups and institutions which informs some of the ideas in Chapter 6. But such a study is beyond the scope of this Introduction. We confine ourselves here primarily to papers that have some connection with Symbiosis and Ambiguity, only briefly mentioning other psychoanalytic papers and giving a brief account of those in other fields. Our intention is to give the reader only an overview of the development of Bleger's ideas. A definitive bibliography is not yet available, but the list compiled by David Maldavsky, although incomplete, gives a good idea of the range of Bleger's work (Maldavsky, 1973).

One of Bleger's first psychoanalytic papers was on ‘La sesión psicoanalítica’ [‘The psychoanalytic session’], written in 1957 and published as a chapter of his book Psicoanálisis y Dialéctica Materialista [Psychoanalysis and Dialectical Materialism] (Bleger, 1958). The title of the book is somewhat misleading as it is a critical study of the epistemological presuppositions or assumptions of psychoanalysis, starting from the work of the French Marxist philosopher Georges Politzer and arguing that these should be understood in terms of dramatics rather than dynamics.12 The paper develops Pichon Rivière's idea of the transferential interaction between patient and analyst as a ‘dialectical spiral’ in the ‘here and now’ of the session. It was written as an introduction to a clinical presentation at the APA which considered in\n\n

See the comments by Horacio Etchegoyen in the ‘Preface’, p. xiii.

\nxxxii detail all of the implications for the patient and the analyst of just one session, which could not be published in its entirety. But the paper is also a methodological reflection on the evolution of psychoanalysis and on the importance gradually acquired by the psychoanalytic session, its setting and the field that it represents, which finally became transformed into an object of investigation. The 1957 paper is clearly a precursor to the one on the setting that later appeared as Chapter 6 of the present book and in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

During the period in which the various chapters of Symbiosis and Ambiguity were written, José Bleger published two other papers directly related to symbiosis, both of them presented to the internal Congress of the APA in 1964 and published in 1966: ‘Psicopatía como deficit de la personificación’ [‘Psychopathy as a deficit of personification’] written with L. S. de Bleger, G.R. de García Reinoso and D. Garcia Reinoso (Bleger et al., 1966), and as sole author, ‘Simbiosis, Psicopatía y Mania’ [‘Symbiosis, psychopathy and mania’] (Bleger, 1966b). In the first of these psychopathy is considered as a developmental disorder and not as a defensive one, i.e. essentially as an early deficit of symbolization. Following Freud's idea of the ego as initially a bodily ego and using Pichon Rivière's concept of the three areas13 the authors consider that the process of symbolization, which pertains to the construction of the mind (i.e. of ‘area one’) in the relationship with the earliest figures, is lacking or seriously limited. This primitive relationship is syncretic; more precisely, there is a ‘syncretic organization’ rather than a ‘syncretic relationship’ (Bleger et al., 1966, p. 265). In the second paper Bleger considers psychopathy and mania as a way of controlling the agglutinated nucleus and as a primitive deficit in the installation of the symbiosis. This view of psychopathy as a vicissitude of symbiosis was overtaken by the shift between Chapters 4 and 5 of Symbiosis and Ambiguity, away from the splitting of the symbiosis or psychotic part of the personality, to the study of the ambiguous personalities built on the syncretism, including psychopathy.

In one of Bleger's three papers already available in English, ‘Schizophrenia, Autism and Symbiosis’, written in 1970 and therefore some time after the publication of Symbiosis and Ambiguity, he considers the psychoanalytic therapy of schizophrenics (Bleger, 1974). There are, he states, three\n\n

In Psicología de la Conducta Bleger writes: ‘Following Pichon Rivière, we represent the three types of behaviour by three concentric circles, numbered one, two and three, and corresponding respectively to mental phenomena, bodily phenomena, and the phenomena of action in the external world … He calls these circles “areas of behaviour’” (Bleger, 1963, p. 29, our translation). In an important footnote to the present work (p. 199, n. 152), Bleger also refers to his own ‘principle of equivalence of the areas’ and briefly outlines his view that the earliest psychological phenomena are not mental, and that the child's psychological organisation starts out as an ‘open system’ that gradually closes up, and not (as Margaret Mahler supposed) as a ‘closed system’ (autism) that gradually opens up.

\nxxxiii fundamental technical positions: one which ‘allows neither deposition14 or symbiosis’, another which supports the inclusion of the therapist in a truly psychotic symbiosis (Searles, 1965) and ‘a third (Rosenfeld, 1965; Bion, 1957; Pichon Rivière, 1961) which admits and uses deposition but does not enter into a symbiotic relationship as a technical aim’. If the aim is ‘to build a symbiosis which is different from the pathological one on which the personality was based’, then it must be a symbiosis for the patient and not for the therapist ‘who must “withdraw”, counter-transferentially, from the pathological symbiosis reproduced in the therapeutic relationship’ (Bleger, 1974, pp. 20-21). In this paper he mentions an important distinction which may have led him to take further the investigation pursued in Symbiosis and Ambiguity. He writes:\n\n

‘Syncretism’ defines a structure in which there is no discrimination (the paranoid-schizoid position has not been established). When this indiscrimination belongs to, or is a remnant of, the first stages of development, I call it syncytial structure.15 Syncretism can be found in both normal and pathological symbiosis, in the psychotic restoration, whereas the syncytial structure is normally found in the very beginnings of the development of the personality and in a certain type of symbiosis (or part of a symbiosis) which is not established by projective identification.

\n(Bleger, 1974, p. 22)\n

With this distinction and considering that in all schizophrenics there is a co-existence of autism and symbiosis, it is possible for Bleger to reconsider the different clinical presentations of schizophrenia in a unitary way. The psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis, a problem which interested many Argentinian psychoanalysts, is not examined in Symbiosis and Ambiguity where the main concern is with psychotic aspects of the transference, i.e. in clinically non-psychotic patients, and not the transference of psychotic patients. The syncytium is briefly mentioned in the book, however, when describing a patient (Ana Maria) who for a while was unable to distinguish between her own body and that of the analyst (p. 101).

In a paper on psychoses published in 1971, he takes up once more the difference between ‘the syncytial structure’ as the most primitive organization and ‘syncretism’ as that part of the personality which still functions in an undifferentiated way and which hasn't developed towards discrimination (Bleger, 1971a). This distinction allows him to consider the fundamental concepts with which psychoanalysis has tried to understand the psychotic process. He suggests that we should distinguish between psychotic\n\n

Depositación, which in the present book we translate by ‘depositation’.

In biology, a syncytium is a cell-like structure filled with cytoplasm and containing multiple nuclei.

\nxxxiv disintegration, psychotic restitution, the psychotic part of the personality and psychotic personality. This conceptual reformulation permits a more adequate approach to understanding the psychotic process and its various clinical manifestations.

In 1971, Bleger wrote a paper for the World Biennial of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, edited by Silvano Arieti, in which he manages to present in less than twenty pages, in a clearly articulated way, the hypothesis developed in Symbiosis and Ambiguity (Bleger, 1973a). It is evidently an after-effect (an après-coup) of the book and in it he reconsiders the importance of the ‘factic personality’. As in the book, he uses Leenhardt's scheme to convey the general structure of ambiguous personalities, of which the factic personality is one variety.16 He writes:\n\n

The factic personality's dependency on obsessive fixation to objects and persons shows a lack of discrimination between the ego and the object. They are the relation. No true interpersonal relation is established. His identity is formed by these relations or functions that he establishes with the objects. He does not speak about himself or his experiences; he speaks about others. But this is the only way he can refer to himself. He has a group or institutional identity; this does not mean that he depends on or belongs to a function, a group or an institution: he is the function, the group, or the institution. This is or may be all the identity he has. He defines himself or is identified by what he does or by his membership in groups. If these fail his ego is actually disorganized.

\n(Bleger, 1973a, p. 460)\n

Describing the different types of personality already considered in Chapter 5, he introduces a further consideration:\n\n

Although some of these personalities may become openly pathological, I believe they should not be entirely included in pathology, but in varieties of personification. In this sense, all ambiguous personalities are included in one chapter17 for which a term suggested by E. Pichon Bavière seems adequate: dispersonalisation. … This term ‘dispersonalisation’18 also includes ambiguity processes that appear in normal development, such as in adolescence and in period of crisis.

\n(Bleger, 1973a, pp. 464-465)\n

\n\n

Unfortunately, in the version included in Arieti's volume, the wrong diagram appears in the text at this point due to a publishing error, and the correct diagram appears in a different paper elsewhere in the same volume.

i.e. ‘under one heading’.

On ‘dispersonalisation’ see p. 167, n. 119.

\nxxxv\n

These two points, the clear description of the factic personality and regarding it as a process which also appears in normal development, allow him to write at the very end of the paper:\n\n

It is possible to assume, as a hypothesis derived from the above concepts, that the factic structure is a pattern of the most primitive psychological organization, which is followed by a gradual ‘interiorisation’ of primary identifications leading gradually, under normal conditions, to individuation and personification. All the alternatives for the agglutinate nucleus discussed in this chapter appear normally in the course of development, and it is these alternatives that enable a partial working through of the normal symbiotic situation.

\n(Bleger, 1973a, p. 468)\n

The hypothesis of the primitive organization of the personality as factic is consistent with Bleger's idea of the construction of the infant's world in the relationship with external figures, i.e. in Pichon Rivière's ‘area three’.19 This helps to explain Bleger's interest in groups and institutions and why his papers on psychoanalysis cannot easily be separated off from his papers on these subjects.

In Bleger's view, identity is not principally sustained by the most developed and consolidated aspect of the personality (which is of course a part of identity), but by the most primitive fusion and by states of nondiscrimination, the ‘syncytial structure’ referred to above. It is the persistence of this primitive structure on which identity essentially depends throughout life.

In a paper written in 1971 for a congress on adolescent identity, he suggests that the crisis of adolescence is precisely a crisis of the ‘syncytial structure’, which accounts for its importance and its radical character, a crisis of the foundations on which the whole of the personality is structured. The identity of the adolescent may then be considered as a poly-identity or ‘multiple identity’, mixing up different levels with ‘the mobilization, disorganization and superposition of all of them at the same time’ (Bleger, 1973b, p. 11, our translation). In this paper, as in the ‘Prologue’ to Symbiosis and Ambiguity, Bleger takes up once more the problem of which approach to adopt: whether to consider early mother-infant relations as an interaction between two autonomous beings, or as a symbiotic situation from which eventually two differentiated personalities may emerge. Pushing his hypothesis further, he writes at the end of the paper:\n\n

There remains the task of rethinking the relations between the individual, society and culture, since we no longer can speak of an ego-culture\n\n

See p. xxxiii, n. 13.

\nxxxvi relation as between two autonomous and independent entities that are interacting, but rather that from the psychological point of view, what is not included in the ego is the non-ego or syncretic ego and that is just as psychological as what we call the ego.

\n(Bleger, 1973b, p. 14, our translation)\n

One of Pichon Rivière's most important contributions had been his concept of the ‘single illness’, which arose from his search for a psychoanalytic theory capable of encompassing the illness itself, the processes of falling ill and of recovery, and the therapeutic process. In a paper written as a homage to Pichon Rivière, Bleger characterizes this approach in a very clear way:\n\n

The theory of the single illness allows us to understand in a unified way the dynamic relation between normal and pathological processes, as well as the transitions and relations between neurosis, psychosis, perversions, psychopathies and psychosomatic illnesses. At the same time, it allows us to follow step by step the onset and course of an illness, as well as the alternatives of a psychiatric or a psychoanalytic treatment.

\n(Bleger, 1967b, p. 348, our translation)\n

Several other papers by Bleger, most of them unpublished, are part of a project to build a psychoanalytic psychopathology by taking symbiosis and ambiguity, and particularly the agglutinated nucleus, as starting points in a search for a unified theory. What would be specific to each variety of psychological illness would be, on the one hand, the way in which the splitting is maintained to preserve the most integrated ego, and on the other hand the relationship between the agglutinated nucleus and the ego once this splitting has collapsed or disappeared. A third important element would be the loss of a depositary and the consequent danger of ego disintegration.

Thus, in ‘Perversiones’ [‘Perversions’], written in collaboration with N. Cvik and B. Grunfeld, perverse acting is characterised as an egodystonic manifestation of this splitting but with a particular handling of the situation: ‘during the perverse acting the more integrated ego is submitted to and in the service of the display of the identifications of the psychotic part’ (Bleger, Cvik and Grunfeld, 1973, p. 355, our translation). Although the more integrated ego, during the perverse acting, retains the sense of reality there exists a ‘transaction’ which makes him accept another reality, as already pointed out by Freud.

In ‘Duelo y sus vicisitudes’ [‘Mourning and its vicissitudes’], published posthumously in 1973 and probably in the same series, Bleger considers two kind of sociability, one syncretic and the other interactive, depending on the degree of discrimination between subject and object (Bleger, 1973c). If every mourning implies a certain proportion of depression and melancholia, as is usually accepted in the classical psychoanalytic theory, the proportion xxxviiwill depend on the nature of the relationship to the object before its loss: the more the relationship was one of a syncretic sociability, asserts Bleger, the more the result will be melancholia; and conversely, the more the relationship was characterised by a sociability of interaction, the more the outcome will be the possibility of normal mourning and its resolution.

During the period in which he was writing Symbiosis and Ambiguity, Bleger also prepared the three-volume edition of the Psychological Writings of Georges Politzer in Spanish, with long prefaces and appendices (Politzer, 1965-66). Horacio Etchegoyen, in his preface to the present work, clearly brings out the importance of Politzer's critique of psychoanalysis for José Bleger's ideas. Bleger used Politzer's critique as a basis for clarifying the presuppositions of psychoanalysis and the relationship between its theory and its practice.

In 1969 there was a crisis in the relationship between the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in Argentina, when two groups of psychoanalysts who were members of the APA, some of them prominent members (and including one of its founders, Marie Langer), resigned from the institution because in their view, its organisation and ways of functioning were incompatible with the political commitment required in the political and social situation that had developed in Argentina. Despite his Marxist orientation, Bleger was in complete disagreement with their position and did not resign. He partly explains his position in a paper written at this time, in which he reconsiders once more the relationship between the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, but now from the standpoint of what he called ‘psychoanalytic praxis’: he argues that the ‘institution’ (not only as an organization but taking also into account the way in which psychoanalysis is taught), must be viewed as an important part of this praxis, informed by an implicit theory, and not simply as an excrescence or something external to psychoanalysis itself.

In a trenchant assessment of the situation and development of psychoanalysis in the same paper, he wonders whether the criticism that we make of some ‘wild psychoanalysts’, is not a ‘criticism that we spare ourselves when it concerns our own theory. We are possibly carrying a legacy from a time when all psychoanalysis was “wild psychoanalysis’” (Bleger, 1969). In another paper written at the same time (Bleger, 1971c), he states that psychoanalytic institutions have on the whole tended to bring about an impoverishment of investigation: instead of using psychoanalysis clinically as a research method, they have merely ‘applied’ existing knowledge: ‘they look for what they already know, and they don't try to find out what they don't know’ (p. 122). In his view, psychoanalysis has not yet really developed its own epistemological procedures and this represents a challenge for the methodology of science.

We have omitted many other papers by José Bleger, and the various papers and books that he was working on at the time of his death. This brief xxxviiisurvey may be sufficient, however, to give the reader a view of the way in which he saw his work in the different psychoanalytic fields of clinical practice, work in institutions and with groups, theoretical work, and teaching, as all interrelated.

Commentary on José Bleger's Work in the Psychoanalytic Movement

At the time of his death in 1972 José Bleger was one of Argentina's best-known psychoanalysts and his reputation extended to other Latin-American countries such as Uruguay, Brazil and Venezuela. Many Argentinian and Latin-American analysts recognize his influence in their own work, among them Elsa Rappoport de Aisemberg, Luis Allegro, Silvia Amati Sas (in Italy), Raúl Jorge Aragonés (in Spain), Ricardo Bernardi (Uruguay), Emiliano del Campo, Allan Poe Castelnuovo, Haydée Faimberg (in France), Hector Fiorini, Yolanda Gampel (in Israel), Beatriz Grunfeld, Hernán Kesselman, Mauricio Knobel, Blanca Montevechio, Janine Puget, David Rosenfeld, Marcelo and Maren Viñar (Uruguay), Juan Carlos Volnovich, and Benzion Winograd. Symbiosis and Ambiguity was translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil in 1977. Discussion of Bleger's work by various Latin-American authors may be found in three special issues of the Revista de Psicoanálisis: ‘Homenaje a José Bleger’ (Vol. 30, No. 2, April-June 1973);‘El analista trabajando’ (Vol. 60, No. 4, October-December 2003); and ‘150 años del natalicio de Sigmund Freud’ (Vol. 63, No. 2, June 2006).

Maud Mannoni met Bleger during her first visit to Buenos Aires in 1971, and her commentary on his work was probably the first mention of his work in the French psychoanalytic world. Jean-Luc Donnet began to discuss Bleger's ideas (Donnet, 1973), and in 1975 André Green referred to the paper on the setting in a paper given at the IPA congress in London and published in the International Journal (Green, 1975). The paper on the setting was translated into French in 1979 in a book edited by René Kaës (Kaës, 1979), and a French translation of the whole of Symbiosis and Ambiguity appeared in 1981. Since then a number of French psychoanalysts have engaged with aspects of Bleger's work, including Didier Anzieu, René Roussillon, and in particular René Kaës. A new edition of the French translation of Symbiosis and Ambiguity is currently in preparation with a preface by Daniel Widlöcher.

In Belgium, Jacqueline Godfrind, André Alsteens and others have made a careful study of this book (Godfrind, 1983, 1991; Alsteens, 1984, 1987). The Revue Belge de Psychanalyse has recently published a French translation of Bleger's 1957 paper on the psychoanalytic session (Bleger, 2009).

In Italy the work of the Argentinian psychoanalyst Armando Bauleo, and other colleagues including Silvia Amati Sas, Aurelia Galletti, Claudio Neri, xxxixMaria Elena Petrilli and Mauro Rossetti, has resulted in Bleger's work becoming well known in Italy where Symbiosis and Ambiguity was first published in 1992, a second edition appearing in 2010. In 1989 an anthology of other papers by Bleger was also published in Italian and a second edition is now available (Bleger, 1989, 2011).

A survey of references to José Bleger's work in the most important psychoanalytic reviews in English suggests that although the paper on the setting was read and quoted soon after its publication in 1967 in the IJP, and despite a detailed discussion in 1992 by the Australian psychoanalyst O.H.D. Blomfield based on the French translation of Symbiosis and Ambiguity (Blomfield, 1992), it is only since the late 1990s that it has been frequently referred to. Perhaps this coincides with a certain opening of Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis recently to Latin American currents. It seems likely that Horacio Etchegoyen's book The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, published in English in 1991, and his Presidency of the IPA, the first by a Latin-American psychoanalyst, had a beneficial influence. In his book Etchegoyen integrates the work of the Argentinian and Latin-American psychoanalysts with other currents of the psychoanalytic movement and he has a thorough knowledge of José Bleger's work, which he quotes and discusses in his book. More recently, an appreciation by Rogelio Sosnik has appeared in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Sosnik, 2011).

About the Present Translation

An English edition of Symbiosis and Ambiguity was commissioned in 1987 by Robert Young of Free Association Books, and for a time this was advertised as ‘forthcoming’, under the title Symbiosis and Ambiguity: the Psychoanalysis of Very Early Experience. The translator was Christine Trollope, who became ill while working on it and who later died. The contract subsequently lapsed, and by the time we approached Roudedge in 2007 with a proposal for the present edition, twenty years had passed since the initial agreement with Free Association Books.

The present translation is the result of a collaboration between three psychoanalysts. Although we had an opportunity to read the draft translation by Christine Trollope, we decided at an early stage to start afresh. Susan Rogers made a primary draft translation of the entire book, and we as the Editors then went through her draft, revising and annotating it in detail. It soon became clear that the task was much bigger than we had realised, and that without the sustained efforts of all three of us it would not have been possible to complete it. Responsibility for the remaining errors and infelicities, however, rests with us as the Editors, who made the final decisions.

Some problems of translation were solved very simply. For example, in the previous English version of Chapter 6 (Bleger, 1967a), the phrase 'ghost xlmember' makes no sense as a translation of miembro fantasma. When correctly translated as ‘phantom limb’, however, not only does it have a clear meaning in English, but it also restores the pivotal connection that Bleger draws attention to, between the body and the setting, and the parallel consequences of injury to either.

In general, however, the difficulties we faced were of a different order. A number of terms in the Spanish are used in specifically psychoanalytic ways which do not have exact equivalents in English psychoanalytic usage. This is in part due to distinctive aspects of Latin American psychoanalysis, in particular of the rioplatense group of Argentinian and Uruguayan psychoanalysts. At the same time, the pre-eminent influence of Kleinian psychoanalysis, as developed largely in England in the 1950s and 1960s, is evident on every page of this book, as is the fact that José Bleger was immersed in and familiar with the psychoanalytic literature in English, as well as in French, German and Spanish. Further complications arise when terms used originally in German by Freud have been differently translated into English, Spanish and French, and where the Spanish or French is then retranslated into English. Similarly, some terms used by Melanie Klein were translated into Spanish in ways that cannot always be back-translated into English without some loss. Specific examples of such problems are discussed below.

In her editorial article ‘Is translation possible?’, which introduces a special issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis titled ‘Papers on Translation’, Dana Birksted-Breen characterises this situation as follows:\n\n

Translation is ‘site-specific’. The setting defines and delineates specific meanings and is an integral part of the work of translation. Outside the setting of psychoanalysis, the same ‘language’ would not take on the same meaning. Moreover it is the setting which calls forth and ‘asks’ for a translation.

\n(Birksted-Breen, 2010, p. 687)\n

She goes on to consider this problem as it arises also between different local cultures or ‘dialects’ within psychoanalysis, as do many of the papers that she is introducing.

The word ‘setting’ itself is an example of this problem. Bleger begins Chapter 6 by referring to Winnicott's use of the word, which he reproduces in English, but thereafter he uses the Spanish encuadre. The 1966 English translation renders encuadre as ‘frame’. However, as part of his definition of this concept Bleger also uses the word marco, for which the 1966 translation has ‘bounds’ (in the sense of boundaries, or limits). As Saussure (1916) pointed out, it is precisely because any language is a system of differences like that between encuadre and marco, or between ‘setting’, ‘frame’ and ‘boundary’, that perfect equivalence between expressions in different languages is impossible. Following the predominant usage in psychoanalytic discussions in English of xlirecent decades, and confining ourselves to what is merely possible, we have decided to translate encuadre consistently by ‘setting’, and marco in this context by ‘framework’.

A different kind of example is presented by the word vinculo, which we translate variously as ‘link’, ‘tie’, ‘connection’, ‘relation’ or ‘relationship’, depending on the context, and this choice is complicated by a number of considerations. Vínculo is a term used by Pichon Rivière to refer specifically to the ensemble of the object, the subject and the relation between them; Bleger sometimes uses the term in this Pichonean sense, and sometimes more loosely. Secondly, ‘link’ is a well-known concept of Bion's, and Bleger makes frequent reference to Bion's writings but he does not employ this concept directly. Thirdly, there is a degree of semantic overlap between this word and relación, which we usually translate as ‘relation’, for instance relación de objeto as ‘object relation’, but sometimes as ‘relationship’, as in la relación social: ‘social relationships’.20

A particularly complicated issue arises with a group of terms which are all in some way semantically the opposite of vínculo, since they refer to various kinds of disconnection, but which carry different theoretical connotations: these include: disociación, clivaje, escisión, división, fragmentación, disgregación, disolución. There is some inconsistency in the use of the first four of these terms in the initial chapters of the book, and we think this is at least partly due to two main difficulties: first, for the German Spaltung, which Strachey translates as ‘splitting’, the Spanish translators of Freud use escisión; secondly, the Spanish translators of Melanie Klein's principal works into Spanish use disociación for ‘splitting’,21 whereas Argentinian analysts have generally preferred clivaje. Although different Spanish words may be used for the same concept, it is clear that when discussing Freud's and Klein's work, Bleger is referring to the German concept Spaltung and the English concept ‘splitting’. This usage occurs in the context of the contrast that Bleuler made between Spaltung and Zerspaltung, which in the English edition of his book (Bleuler, 1911) were rendered as ‘splitting’ and ‘irregular fragmentation’ respectively, as Bleger discusses on p. 36 and in footnote 48 on p. 61.

In any case, for Bleger the introduction of a new position involved a distinction between the mechanisms of the glischro-caric and paranoid-schizoid positions. For the characteristic defence of the glischro-caric position, which keeps the agglutinated nucleus separated from the rest of the personality, he generally uses clivaje (‘splitting’), while for the mechanism of the paranoid-schizoid position he generally uses disociación (‘dissociation’), but also sometimes división esquizoide (‘schizoid division’) or simply división (‘division’). Following his remarks at the beginning of Chapter 2 (p. 37),\n\n

Editorial Conventions

Wherever possible bibliographic references are to original or translated works in English, quotations have been replaced by corresponding passages from these, and in most cases we have added page references. Quotations from Freud are from the Standard Edition unless otherwise indicated.

Where we have added editorial material in footnotes, or occasionally in the text, this is in square brackets. Footnotes not in square brackets are by the author.

The original text was punctuated at intervals by the Greek letter ψ appearing alone in the middle of a line. We have retained these marks which seem intended to indicate places where the reader might wish to pause for thought.

\nxlv\n

Acknowledgements

\n\n\nLeopoldo Bleger\nJohn Churcher\n\n\n

We would like to thank the following:

Susan Rogers, for laying the foundations of the translation.

Dana Birksted-Breen, Alessandra Lemma, and the Editorial Board of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, for their patience and support.

Horacio Etchegoyen for agreeing to write the Preface and for being so accessible and generous with his time and knowledge.

Arturo Varchevker, Gregorio Kohon, and Robert Young, for encouragement at various times over the years.

Nenuca Amigorena-Rosenberg and Eduardo Vera Ocampo, for their friendship and for all the work done in the Seminar on ‘Psychoanalysis in the Río de la Plata’.

Kate Hawes, Camilla Barnard and colleagues at Roudedge, for practical guidance and for allowing us the time that we needed.

Kate Fox, for a machine-readable version of the Spanish original that proved to be invaluable.

The librarians whose meticulous and professional assistance we have relied upon: Jill Duncan, Andrea Chandler, Saven Morris, Hélène Martin, and Peter Cox at the Library of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London; Diego Baracat at the ‘Biblioteca Profesor Willy Baranger’ of the Asociacón Psicoanalítica Argentina, and the staff of the ‘Bibliothèque Sigmund Freud’ of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris.

Giselda Batlle and Malba - Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires, for permission to reproduce on the cover of the paperback edition a painting by Juan Batlle Planas: Radiografía paranoica, c. 1936, from the eponymous series, tempera and pencil on paper, 26 × 19.5cm.

Taylor and Francis Books (UK) for permission to reproduce an extract from Fairbairn. W. R. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 42-43.

The Institute of Psychoanalysis and the publishers of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited xlviby James Strachey, published by Vintage Books, for permission to reproduce the excerpts from various articles in The Standard Edition that appear on pages 99, 161, 216, 233n. 179, 249ff., 286ff. and 293ff. Copyright © 1946 James Strachey. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group; by permission of The Marsh Agency Limited on behalf of Sigmund Freud Copyrights; and by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

University of Chicago Press, for permission to reproduce the diagram on page 181.

Lowell Bair, for permission to reproduce excerpts from his translation of the novel Warrior's Rest by Christiane Rochefort, and Christian Gehman for his assistance. Penguin Books do not warrant that this use does not infringe any third party rights.

Editions Paidós, for permission use the selection of material in the Table on page 77.

Two anonymous reviewers who read the final typescript and made valuable comments.

Klara and Eric King for their careful and evenly-hovering attention to the typescript and the index.

Karen Clarke and Marie-Christine Bleger, for putting up with this, and us, for so long.

\nxlvii\n\n","document":"\n\n2013\n\nSymbiosis and Ambiguity: A Psychoanalytic Study\nThe New Library of Psychoanalysis\n\n\nLondon and New York\nRoutledge Taylor & Francis Group\n\n\n\n79\ni-xlvii\nSymbiosis and Ambiguity\nA Psychoanalytic Study\n\n\n\n\n

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