The development and its models: main reading, IPA Congress in Berlin, July 2007

Abstract

Working through is an integral part of the psychoanalytic process, one could even say its epitome. It is therefore always present in the work of an analysis, but depending on the various phases and constraints that arise in that process, changes are brought to its form, to the issues involved in it and to its economic dimension. I will explore three forms (or models) of how working through functions in relation to the dominant feature of any given analytical process. In the first of these, the issue that has to be worked over involves insight into repressed representational complex; in the second form, work has to be done on bringing into consciousness drive-related impulses or mental experiences that have not been able to be represented until then, so the analysis itself would be the first occasion on which retroactive [après-coup] processing could be initiated; and in the third form, when representation and some kind of symbolization of the subjective experience and the drive-related issues that are part of it have been accomplished, the analysand has to appropriate these issues subjectively and integrate them.