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Jaime Lutenberg's, creative, intriguing, and rigorous work is clearly evident in his new book, El vacío mental (The Mental Void), which opens up new avenues of inquiry into what are referred to these days as the “new pathologies.” His conceptualizations carry with them new theoretical understanding and new clinical approaches to psychoanalytic work with these patients.
The creativity of Lutenberg's thinking is reflected in his ability to combine familiar psychoanalytic concepts in a novel fashion and his ability to introduce fresh ideas. Based solidly in Freudian metapsychology, Lutenberg, a training analyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, has also been influenced by an eclectic mix of authors from around the world, including Wilfred Bion, José Bleger, André Green, Melanie Klein, David Liberman, Margaret Mahler, E. Pichon-Rivière, Harold Searles, Frances Tustin, and D. W. Winnicott.
Inspired by the work of David Liberman (1976) on psychoanalysis and communication, and by his passion for music, Lutenberg's inquiry begins by identifying different types of silences. Lutenberg brings to the associative sequences of patients a distinct way of listening. Registering not just the alternations between silences and the discourse proper, he makes a distinction regarding the quality of silences. Some point to the presence of repressed material; others indicate a void. This distinction is the starting point for his inquiry.
The “empty silence,” characterized by its hollow quality, is the signpost of the mental void. It is a silence emerging from a split-off segment of the psyche. It is, so to speak, a silent silence. This empty silence can be registered only through the analyst's countertransference. The analyst can always recognize the silence that signals a mental void through his or her own experience.
Lutenberg allows us to witness the clinical experiences with these challenging patients that led him to develop the concept of the mental void. Throughout, one can ap