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Dear Editor,
The publication of Jose Bleger's paper, Theory and practice in psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic praxis (Bleger, 2012), introduced by H. Faimberg (2012) and commented on by J. Greenberg (2012), provides Anglophone readers with a long-awaited opportunity to better acquaint themselves with the work of a generative and creative contributor to Latin American psychoanalytic thinking. While I appreciate and agree with much of Greenberg's excellent discussion, there are some points of difference that I would like to raise for your readers' consideration.
In regard to “the proper language for psychoanalysis,” the “dramatic point of view” and Bleger's discussion of the naturalistic vs. the phenomenological (pp. 1006-7), I would suggest that, while Bleger was offering a much needed corrective to the overly positivistic and one-person psychology of that period, a psychology driven towards “de-totalization” and a closed system by assumptions about psychic determinism, it would be a mistake, clinically, to completely do away with the implications of those assumptions for analytic listening and technique. The latter, which derive from Freud's topographic theory, often prove to be ‘good enough’ in the analysis of those sectors of the minds of (usually neurotic) patients whose difficulties revolve around unconscious conflict of organized, but repressed, psychic elements.
Indeed, in discussing Freud's ‘archeological’ metaphor, Bleger asserts that:
The technical orientation to which systematic work in the transference leads … obviously does not eliminate ‘archeological’ work but to some extent goes beyond it and includes it in an orientation of practice towards work on interpersonal relations in the present [i.e. analytic] situation.
He further suggests that the study and systematic incorporation of object relations, which follow by necessity from the fact and centrality of transference, require an emphasis that is “above or at least on a par with instinctive