You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is a compilation of articles by Carlos Sopena, a psychoanalyst of Uruguayan origin who lived and worked in Madrid from 1975 until his death in April 2012. His dual membership of the Uruguayan and Madrid Societies provided the freshness and vitality of Uruguayan psychoanalysis and his culture and openness to different psychoanalytic currents, together with his commitment to clinical work and teaching, represented a significant contribution to the development of analytic thought at the Madrid Psychoanalytic Association. This book, published posthumously, offers a modest homage to his memory.
The choice of the chapters, by not following a chronological order, allows a gradual unfolding and harmonious interweaving of the themes studied by the author. I shall focus on ‘Freudian Heritage and Psychoanalytic Babel’, ‘On Hamlet’, ‘Amadeus: Reflections on Envy’, ‘To Love: Between the Same and the Other’, the author's work on the themes of ‘Sublimation’, ‘Mourning’, ‘Construction and Reconstruction’, ‘The Body in Hysteria’ and his last paper on the subject of ‘The Dynamic Field of Psychoanalysis’, for which he was awarded the Carolina Zamora Prize.
The work of sublimation, the work of mourning and shared mourning through the word are some of the themes the book explores at different points and in reference to different processes, such as love, passion, transference and countertransference. The always‐incomplete drive satisfaction and the void of the unrepresentable will provide the impetus for the creative and scientific act, the author maintains. These are processes present in analytic treatment, which takes part in the creative act – there is no analysis without creation, Sopena reminds us – emphasizing the importance of asymmetry in the analytic relation, which must leave a third space making possible the encounter with the hidden, with the unsymbolized, which is articulated through language – a dimension that would be present throughout his work.
One of the characte