Description
Book SynopsisSymbiosis and Ambiguity is the first English edition of the classic study of early object relations by influential Argentinian psychoanalyst José Bleger (1922-1972). It is rooted in Kleinian thinking and rich in clinical material.
Bleger''s thesis is that starting from primitive undifferentiation, prior to the paranoid-schizoid position described by Klein, autism and symbiosis co-exist as narcissistic relations in a syncretic agglutinated' nucleus. In symbiosis part of the mind is deposited in an external person or situation; in autism it is deposited in the patient''s own mind or body. The nucleus is ambiguous and persists in adults as the psychotic part of the personality.
Symbiosis tends to immobilise the analytic process, so the analyst must mobilise, fragment and discriminate the agglutinated nucleus, whose ambiguity tends to blunt' persecutory situations. The psychoanalytic setting functions as a silent refuge for the psychotic part of the personality, whe
Table of Contents
Etchegoyen , Preface. Bleger, Churcher, Editorial Introduction. Prologue. Part I: On Symbiosis . Study of Dependence-Independence in Relation to the Process of Projection-Introjection. Symbiosis in Warrior’s Rest. Modalities of Object Relations. Study of the Psychotic Part of the Personality. Part II: On Ambiguity . Ambiguity in Psychoanalytic Clinical Work. Psychoanalysis of The Psychoanalytic Setting. Part III: Appendix . Ambivalence and Ambiguity: The Background Literature. Commentary on ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words'. Ambiguity and Syncretism in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’.
