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The Work of René Roussillon: An Overview of His Major Concepts. By , , , and , pp. 108-130.
The authors provide an overview of the work of René Roussillon. They describe Roussillon as part of the second generation of French analysts who have integrated and developed the ideas of Winnicott. Roussillon is also known for his expansion of Milner's concept of the “pliable medium” and for his thinking regarding the “implications of Freud's 1920 metapsychological turning point” (p. 108).
In regard to this turning point, Roussillon, according to the authors, believes that one of the main aspects of the change involves the principle of repetition replacing the pleasure principle as the “foremost organizing principle of psychic development” (p. 110). In this model, the pleasure principle acts in a secondary phase involving linking and the “subjectivation of experience” via primary symbolization (p. 110). Thus, in the first phase, we are dealing with “non-symbolized material that is not bound by the pleasure principle” (p. 110). Therefore, the “revised unconscious, the id, contains both symbolized and non-symbolized material” (p. 110).
This is in contrast, according to Roussillon, to the earlier theory in which all that was unconscious constituted a desire related to an unconscious representation. For Roussillon, the clinical implication of this change is that the “aim of the psychoanalytic process changes since it cannot be restricted to the analysis of content that is represented” (p. 110).