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.
The English version of this paper was translated from Portuguese by Ana de Andrade from a paper published in 1978 by Revista Brasileira de Psicanalise , Sao Paulo, 12(3): 335–346. In this paper, the author describes ideas of his that resemble those of Margaret Mahler and José Bleger and that were developed based on his own psychoanalytical experiences and clinical investigations. He attempts, following a series of earlier works, to formulate in metapsychological terms his ideas about Self disturbances and the states he calls entanglement. Specifically, he aims to demonstrate, with clinical data, the interference of destructive impulses in the emergence and maintenance of Self distortions and the resulting entanglement of the subject with its objects.
Starting from a different theoretical-clinical line than Margaret Mahler and José Bleger, this paper arrives at some conceptual points that resemble theirs. Independently of both, whom I only researched subsequently, using my clinical observations of psychotics, borderlines and neurotics whom I analyzed, and fundamentally drawing on Melanie Klein’s and Bion’s contributions to Freud’s works, I developed a theoretical conception that does not differ in essence from the aforementioned authors, but that emphasizes some aspects that are unclear in Mahler’s works and highly sophisticated
in Bleger’s. I believe my formulations aim only to contribute to detailed observations of the conduct of babies as well as to interferences and the theoretical-clinical implications that Mahler and her collaborators later developed. Mahler used data, from the direct observation of psychotic and normal children, of indisputable value for proving many of our psychoanalytical theories. However, her view seems to me – if my pretension can be forgiven – very ‘macroscopic’ in relation to what I believe I bring in a ‘microscopic’ sense; moreover, I believe my focus allows a better instrumentation of knowledge, facilitating better penetration into