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The author seeks to draw attention to the psychic structuring and subjectivization of elementary school children, which is made possible by latency work. He suggests that we cast aside our understanding of latency as a chronological period, during which all drive activity is suspended, that dull wait for the advent of puberty. He introduces us to the laborious “latency work,” which involves the subject in an intra- and intersubjective elaboration. Culture and its effects upon the structuring of the psychic apparatus are given particular attention.
Urribarri presents a psyche in perpetual movement and considers latency as one of the crucial moments where the resignification of lived experience is played out, as the production of a neogenesis.
The reader is given a meticulous tour of “the transformational metapsychological byways of the latency work” and their implications for the construction of subjectivity. The author reinforces the idea of “work,” endowed with an intense movement of psychic working through, both with regard to the object as well as to narcissism, rather than as a “period,” the latter more being more associated with the temporal rather than with psychic movements.
I highly recommend reading first the foreword by the pioneering Madeleine Baranger, who confers depth and gives pleasure to the act of reading.
I shall pause, therefore, to consider the term “work,” which in Freud finds its point of departure in “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), a text today considered foundational to psychoanalysis. It is here that he develops his concept in relation to psychic activity, the possible paths that find their beginnings in desire, and the dream work, which transforms latent thoughts into manifest content. Later on, Freud points more specifically to the “work of mourning,” with its cathexis and decathexis, in which the loss of the object gives rise to a symbolic work, that of representation. This unconscious task involves the creation of something new, as wi