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This remarkable book is a transcript of a lecture series given by Silvia Bleichmar between April and November of 2004 at the Armenian Society, and in earlier years under the auspices of the Dr. Ricardo Gutiérrez Children's Hospital, both in Buenos Aires. Apart from the reader, Bleichmar's audience are her erudite pupils, ever present in the text with their “interventions,” replete with clinical case material and cultural references past and present. The reader quickly forms an image of Bleichmar as a master teacher whose range in Freudian theory is vast and whose energy and enthusiasm for demonstrating the relevance of even the most archaic of Freudian concepts applied directly to current issues is near inexhaustible. On these pages she comes across as witty, brilliant, and persistent. And this is important, because Bleichmar's goal here is to update Freudian psychoanalysis, in particular his sexual theory, so that it continues to be a viable practice and discourse.
Bleichmar, who died in 2007, was a world-renowned child psychoanalyst, popular in Latin America and Europe, and well known in her home city of Buenos Aires as a public intellectual and frequent contributor to newspapers, magazines, and other media. The course that constitutes this book represents one of eleven years of seminars that averaged around three hundred attendees, and from which all proceeds were donated to local mental health services. She was a Freudian, influenced to some extent by Klein and Winnicott, whose studies with Laplanche during her doctorate in psychoanalysis opened her perspective to his work. Earlier, before her exile from Argentina, she was influenced by Lacan but came to be critical of his structuralist model, which she viewed as limiting authentically transformative clinical work. After reading through this particular year of her seminars, my impression is that Freudian drive and conflict theory is the backbone of her work, and that