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Ahumada can be considered a scholar in view of his vast knowledge of psychoanalysis as well as of other disciplines, his critical ability, thorough method of study, vast clinical experience and his original oeuvre as a whole.
The Logics of the Mind was written over a span of sixteen years, from 1979 to 1996, and has been published in various languages. It is a collection of eight papers, plus a foreword by Horacio Etchegoyen, an introduction and an epilogue. The style of writing taxes the reader's understanding and demands great concentration, even if one is well acquainted with the psychoanalytic theories of the many eminent authors who have inspired Ahumada in one way or another. He gives credit to these authors, citing all his sources in the long list of references at the end of the book.
All the papers presented are illustrated with clinical vignettes from different patients. I shall focus my attention here specifically on one patient, Mrs A, who is referred to in different chapters of the book, at different moments of her analysis, showing her slow and difficult evolution. This testifies to what a fine analyst Ahumada is, and how his reflection on the dream and other clinical material made him build up his specific theoretical ideas inductively.
The author's peculiar approach to the topography of the mind is based on a notion that permeates his understanding of the patient's psychic dynamics. He posits a transposition of self and object as a two-person psychological structure, in which a central false self usurps the place of the object, and splits off the self's unconscious needy emotional aspects, projected into an external object.
To be ‘successful’, this psychic operation requires a double cleavage: the projection of an envious aspect of the self delusionally identifies with—and usurps—the kindness of a primal internal object, giving place to a delusion of one's omnipotent goodness, and the cleavage and projective identification of one's needy infantile self in