Beyond the Divan: Psychoanalysis in Review1

The Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of Rio de Janeiro (SBPRJ) offered this opportunity to encourage exchange between Brazilian and international psychoanalytical journals and to foster dialogue between psychoanalysis and other related disciplines.

Dr. Lorena Preta presented a paper entitled ‘Fertile contaminations—A model for psychoanalytical work’. She described the history of psychoanalysis as a form of knowledge that connects and interrelates various fields and experiences. She pointed out that those interactions have been used in psychoanalysis in a special way, that is, the actual objects of her research were at the same time tools of her theoretical and practical work, for example, the Oedipus myth, as both contents of the mind and a method of knowing it. Preta recalled Freud and Jung in the United States spreading the ‘pest’ of a psychism in permanent interaction: sleep, awake, conscious, unconscious, sexuality. Based on that constant exchange, she proposed the notion of ‘contaminations’ as a possibility of transformation either in therapy, or in psychoanalytical theorization, or in the relationship with the outside. But it is contamination with method: ‘We need to pay attention to our own models with a rigour not of content, which might risk becoming an oppressive orthodoxy, but of method, to achieve a dialogue of psychoanalysis with the other disciplines’. The psychoanalyst will have to face up to the repudiation of the ‘uncanny’! Preta had a conception of the review of psychoanalytical culture as a container inside which dynamics of dialogue and confrontation develop, where the ‘contaminations’ take place, and said, ‘The framework of the discourse proposed outside should be very clear, not as regards its contents or intent, but representation of the mental place that the review is going to occupy. … We cannot control or foresee the way in which these dynamics take place. Indeed we should, if necessary, presuppose a sort of