1st Edition
The Work of Psychic Figurability Mental States Without Representation
Biography
César Botella and Sára Botella are child and adult psychoanalysts in private practice. They are training analysts at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, and in 1983 received the International Price Maurice Bouvet for their article 'On the auto-erotic deficiency of the paranoïa'.
"...the Botellas are ... astute clinicians and their book is illustrated with clinical vignettes and case examples from adult and child analyses. While they may reason at a metapsychological level of complex theoretical and philosophical abstraction, they repeatedly return to the clinical moment to illustrate their main thesis: that a theory of psychoanalysis and mental functioning that assumes the capacity for representation and an intact, symbolizing ego is insufficient to account for the clinical phenomena and therapeutic exigencies encountered in an ordinary psychoanalytic practice! What they insist is needed instead is a theory capable of addressing and accounting for what Michael Parsons, in his very helpful introduction to the English language edition, describes as "that aspect of experience which will not 'go into words' because it will not, so to speak, 'go into thought' in the first place." (p. xvii).
"Put another way, the Botellas are attempting to create language and theory to describe the action of converting proto-elements of thought and feeling into something that is mentalizable and potentially articulatable and representable." - Howard B Levine, Psychoanalytic Quarterly
