Publicación oficial de la Asociación Psicoanalítica del Uruguay (APU), integrante de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Internacional (API) y de la Federación Psicoanalítica de América Latina (FEPAL) ISSN 1688-7247 (en línea). Editada desde 1956 La RUP se publica a razón de dos números por año.
Este libro contiene una serie de trabajos con reflexiones interesantes al momento de introducirnos en la temática de la clínica con parejas y familias.
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Es tiempo ahora de voces entre voces apoyadas
Trabajo ganador del Premio Psicoanálisis y Libertad 2018, Fepal; publicado originalmente en: Veríssimo de Posadas, L. (2018). Es tiempo ahora de voces entre voces apoyadas. Calibán, 16(2), 14-31.
Encuentro en Montevideo con David Tuckett
Presentamos una entrevista con el Dr. David Tuckett, eminente psicoanalista y exeditor del International Journal of Psychoanalysis, realizada durante su visita a la Asociación Psicoanalítica del Uruguay (APU) para presentar su último libro, el cual condensa los hallazgos y resultados de más de trescientos talleres de discusión en el marco del proyecto CCM (Comparative Clinical Methods; Métodos Clínicos Comparativos).
Reflexiones sobre la complejidad del mal y sus repercusiones en el quehacer psicoanalítico
Comentario al trabajo de R. Hercilia Rojas «Un mundo convulso: La influencia de la intolerancia y el fanatismo en el desarrollo de las teorías psicoanalíticas y su incidencia en las modificaciones del método».
Tiempos de urgencias y mutaciones socioculturales que interpelan la clínica y la formación psicoanalíticas
La historia de la humanidad parece estar llena de ejemplos de expresiones de fanatismo e intolerancia que han tenido un impacto profundo a nivel social e individual. Desde la invención del psicoanálisis hasta nuestros días, contamos dos guerras mundiales y numerosos conflictos armados posteriores que aún en la actualidad parecieran insistir sintomáticamente; junto con esto, las expresiones de discriminación, xenofobia, fanatismo político y religioso siguen estando presentes.
Adolescencia(s), entorno familiar y epocal
The authors address the construction of subjectivity today, initially taking the Netflix series Adolescence as their starting point. In the face of cultural, political, and social changes in recent decades, parental figures and their symbolic functions deserve a space for developing new hypotheses in psychoanalysis. They argue that today we are witnessing a mutation in the ideals that organize desire and question the unconscious transgenerational effects and ways of expressing the violation of otherness. These movements confront us with the difficult task of finding the psychic and factual limit in the parent-child bond. It is inevitable to maintain the condition of enigma surrounding the vicissitudes of the human soul, its conflicts and paths, since it is not possible to find more than threads that sometimes intersect and sometimes do not, when trying to make sense of an act that questions us about the possible passage to the act, brutal and incomprehensible. The legitimacy or illegitimacy of symbolic places also affects those who occupy them in their «profession.» At the same time, their setting of limits to «everything is possible» is discredited, which attempts to convey the need for the loss of omnipotence as an irreducible condition of being human.
In this article, I will present a reading of the case of Iris Cabezudo, as featured in Extraviada, by psychoanalysts Raquel Capurro and Diego Nin. This is a case of passage to the act (passage à l´acte), in which both the gaze and the scene have played a significant and determining role. I will read the case in dialogue with the novel The ravishing of Lol V. Stein, by Marguerite Duras. I take literature as both illuminating and questioning of supposedly stabilized theoretical-clinical notions. Duras’ novel will provide elements to reread Extraviada, challenging the supposed primacy of the Symbolic over the other registers of the Borromean knot: the Imaginary and the Real. The focus is placed on the Imaginary register, recovering the power of the image in the constitution of the Self and its relationship with the world and the Other; and on the Real, particularly in its relation to the act, especially the mad act, as that which overflows language. While the dimensions of speech and the Symbolic are not neglected, the article proposes a reading of the case that articulates all three registers.
Acompañamiento, contrapunto y variaciones en el arte de pensar
This paper aims to comment, that is to say, both gather and evaluate the ideas, as well as consider the procedures that Silvana Hernández employs in her text «La belleza de pensar». To this end, some of the many ideas contained in her work are pointed out and highlighted, seeking to identify the purpose that motivates the author, her aim, what she seeks and the method she uses to achieve it. This commentary mentions some ways of saying and listening, and advances some peculiarities and characteristics of the activity of thinking, its modalities and its obstacles. It thus seeks to join Hernandez´s call to expand our capacity, both individual and collectively, to cultivate thought. Some rhetorical and ethical requirements for promoting communicative exchange are also mentioned. And it concludes with a brief consideration of beauty as an epiphany.
This work poses and develops the following question: What is to think for a psychoanalyst? It refers to thinking between sessions, among colleagues and in the context of our institutions. The essays in response to these inquiries go down the path opened by some literary works.
This paper examines the body as a psychic surface of inscription in adolescents affected by early trauma, through the clinical case of Mary, an eighteen-years-old patient. Her history of childhood sexual abuse, family violence, and repeated disavowals left a fragmented psychic organization, where self-injury and tattoos emerged as bodily ways of processing the unthinkable. Drawing on Ferenczi, Laplanche, Smadja, Doctors, Catz, and Bleichmar, the study suggests that recourse to the body can operate as a self-soothing procedure when psychic symbolization fails. Within this trajectory, tattoos may acquire a symbolizing function, attempting to create ego boundaries and continuity, in contrast to self-injury as an impulsive discharge of suffering. The case highlights the transition from cutting to tattooing as a subjectivating shift: from discharge to inscription, from acting out to memory. The clinical importance of reading the body as an affective geography is emphasized, supporting the patient in constructing narratives that restore meaning where fragmentation and silence predominate.
El predominio visual y la sexualidad hiperreal
This essay offers a psychoanalytic reading of the body and sexuality in today’s visual culture. Starting from the notion of the written body, it explores the dynamics of pulsional inscription, desire, and the clinical effects of visual excess. Drawing from both theory and clinical practice, it addresses how some bodies remain outside symbolic ties, and how psychoanalysis can host what fails to be inscribed. Transference is understood not as repetition but as a space for unconscious production. Against a culture that desexualizes through the imperative of enjoyment, the text advocates for a practice that sustains lack as the condition for desire.
Psychoanalysis and severe disorders in young children
This book deals with the beginnings, the foundations on which the human psyche is founded.
As I wrote these lines, I was thinking about life's paradoxes: on the one hand, a previously scheduled scientific conference at the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association (APU): "40 Years of Democracy: Memory, Freedom, and Psychoanalysis," on this significant date of June 27th, and on the other, my own story.
This interview took place after Bernard Golse's return to Paris from Montevideo, as part of his participation in the 2nd Conference of the International Coordination of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists and Associate Members Working with People with Autism, Latin America (CIPPA LA), "Body and Autism." During this visit, he also received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Republic (UdelaR), a recognition sponsored by the Faculties of Psychology, Medicine, and Nursing. In an après-coup to this brief yet intense visit, Golse recalled his ties to Uruguay and compared the situation of psychoanalysis on both sides of the Atlantic. The second half of the conversation focused on the role of the infant as an opportunity for psychoanalysis to delve deeper into the origins of the psyche. Without abandoning his theoretical foundations, he concluded by defending what he calls a third, very early intrapsychic topic, beyond the subject-object pair.
The Lacanian demodernization of Freud, or psychoanalysis in a disuniverse
Lacan's subversion of the Cartesian cogito produces a demodernization of Freud's work. This is the thesis that this article will develop.
Toward a psychoanalysis in the times to come
For several years now, we have witnessed a marked concern among psychoanalysts about the challenges facing psychoanalysis and how to address them. While the future of psychoanalysis does not depend entirely on itself, since it is closely linked to the sociocultural conditions that determine it, the times to come will still be largely determined by how we confront the problems it poses.
The celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association (APU) calls us to write. This event will undoubtedly include, along with its festive atmosphere, moments of reflection and pause, an opportunity to examine the reality of the institution and its prospects, based on historical memory. As Korovsky (1985) says, psychoanalysts are, by vocation, historical revisionists. For this task, its own members will be better able to assess the vitality of the enterprise today than the author, as a friend of APU. Nevertheless, in the following lines, I will attempt to offer a perspective that hopefully complements that of the event's main protagonists.
Henri Ey (1900-1977) and his scheme of unconscious/conscious relations
Henri Ey was a French psychiatrist (1900-1977) whose thinking and work, beginning in 1946 (after World War II), were of great importance in Europe and the Americas. He was born in Banyuls-des-Aspres, a small town in Catalonia, France, in the Pyrénées-Orientales. He was educated in the south and completed his medical training in Paris, where he settled at the age of twenty. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne; he was an intern at the Seine Psychiatric Hospitals (Palem, 1997) and worked in the clinical services of his principal mentors: P. Guiraud and H. Claude. In 1932, he moved with his partner to the former Bonneval asylum (Chartres), which he transformed into a psychiatric hospital and where he lived until his retirement in 1970.
This article describes the migratory process in its intrapsychic, intersubjective and sociocultural aspects. The place of the stranger is par excellence that which every migrant has to accept to occupy, configuring a place of difference, otherness and radical negativity. We quote the Freudian Unheimlich to think of this place of stran- ger, being threatening and familiar at the same time. All migration requires migrants to develop a great psychic plasticity because they will have to undergo constant changes and thus build their own interculturality. The migrant family develops certain characteristics of its own, as it goes through the process of adaptation to the host country. We define the concept of parentship and filiation, in a broad reciprocal relationship. We note in the migrating family, a reversal of places between generations caused by the changes that all migration im- poses on the people who go through this process. The children of migrant families, having mastered the new language before their parents, guide them in their habits and customs and this creates great changes in the family.
The Historias Desobedientes movement—its history and that of its members—has moved me since its inception due to its disruptive impact. It is a collective linked to human rights in Argentina, made up of the sons, daughters, and family members of military personnel tried for crimes against humanity committed during Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship. I believe it represents an opportunity to revisit various challenging and compelling themes. From a psychoanalytic perspective, it allows us to reflect on transgenerational trauma in the second and third generations, as well as on the legacy of the perpetrator of crimes against humanity and the role of their families in the construction of memory.
Lights and Shadows of "Freud's Lacanian Demodernization"
Fifty years ago, the publication of Introduction to the Study of Perversions: The Theory of Oedipus in Freud and Lacan, by Hugo B. Bleichmar (1976), was for many the first legible access to Lacan's teaching.
Historicizing the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association (APU) is not equivalent to historicizing psychoanalysis in Uruguay. This first distinction is not self-evident, as the vast majority of publications on the history of psychoanalysis in Uruguay have been oriented in this direction.
Some notes on the subjective experience of migration and identity in the person of the analyst
Unpublished and adjusted version of the paper presented at the 35th Fepal Congress, Rio de Janeiro, October 2024. Based on psychoanalytic conceptualizations of migration and mourning, we take into account what this type of life experience may also imply for the analyst as a person who at a certain point in his life has had to emigrate; what he loses, what he can keep and what he must build in a new territory enter a common space full of uncertainties, which can only be progressively traversed by the paths of integration and the establishment of psychic bridges between here and there, between the before and the now, between what has been left behind and what can be gained. In this sense, the clinical practice of each analyst will be challenged, perhaps subjected to some necessary modifications in order to continue to take place, but above all it may be full of diverse encounters that will raise effects in the transferential-countertransferential field. The importance of institutional memberships as an identity factor of great relevance for the analyst is also considered, while ques- tioning why these insertions are not always possible even within other psychoanalytic organizations affiliated to IPA, giving rise to experiences of exclusion in many cases.
This paper addresses the experience of estrangement in migrant subjects exploring in particular the way the body is used as a meta- phorical resource to speak about the experience of change that comes with the displacement of language, country, and culture. We begin by exposing the use of metaphors of bodily transformation in some passages of Homer’s Odyssey and its relationship to memory and the loss of one’s origins. We then explore the metaphors of the body present in the story of a young contemporary migrant. This paper takes up some thematic lines developed in the author’s doc- toral thesis, on the construction of otherness in migrant subjects residing in Uruguay, and uses excerpts from interviews conducted within the framework of that research.
Children, adolescents, and their families
This work aims to account for the suffering of children, adoles- cents, and their families in the face of migrations to which they are coerced, whether due to urgent political, economic, or social causes. Through clinical material, it seeks to demonstrate the pos- sibilities that psychoanalytic intervention offers for supporting and treating the psychic pain caused by these vital circumstances. In an attempt to theorize the suffering of migrant children and adolescents, the interdisciplinary experience of working with this specific population is narrated. Psychoanalytic intervention, along- side social work, is thus a possible model of practice for psycho- analytic theory and practice to move beyond private consulting rooms and engage with the community. In this way, psychoanalysis is promoted as a complex and plural set of theories and practices, in full development, marking an evolution in the possibilities for the integration of an increasingly broad population in Uruguay.
Starting with a children’s story based on the condensation of nar- ratives from different patients, who frequently speak about their relationship with food during their migration process, I pose the question: During migration processes, do individuals use certain foods not only as an identity resource but also as a transitional object? To do so, I will introduce this text with Winnicott’s defini- tion of the transitional object and briefly review how the relation- ship between individuals and eating has been interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective. Finally, I briefly address the relation- ship between the transitional phenomenon and Proust’s madeleine moment. I bring these ideas up with the intention of considering them together, as they are still developing.
In the context of a project working with migrant children and adolescents in vulnerable situations, which is starting to operate after the signing of an agreement between the Asociación Psicoanalítica del Uruguay (APU), the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an attempt is being made to explore the impact of migration in general, and especially on adolescence. Moments of turbulence, transformations, changes and grief. For this purpose, and in a socioclinical approach, we share the material of a Venezuelan adolescent, where the wound of migration is present. We question ourselves about psychoanalysis as a valid tool working in community in a singularized listening and in conjunction with the social area, as a team, to make room for the migratory suffering and to transit through possible meanings that allow these people to inhabit their lives in a better way.
The text questions the role of psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, regarding the perspective and support of parenting in the context of human mobility. It proposes a close examination of the construction in our western culture of certain naturalized categories that generate discomfort. These categories are understood to be in tension with the process that involves the arrival of new life, whose essence relates to sensitivity, time, and movement. It suggests a break from perspectives that establish the different as foreign and subject to modification based on a single way of being and existing in the world. These categories, understood as mechanisms of control, generate discomfort and violence in parents who are just beginning to assume this role in an unfamiliar territory. In this context, the work proposes a reflection on the perspective and support of psychoanalysis and its tools, emphasizing the necessary attention to both the representations of the analyst and the parental references, understanding them in full relation to their histories, contexts, and circumstances. It suggests repositioning the moment of birth within the social fabric of which psychology and psychoanalysis are a part, and the necessary responses from ethical and committed care.
culture / care / parentality / upbringing / newborn / birth / migration / crisis