Rodolfo Moguillansky

• Authors:  Juan Pablo Jiménez and Rodolfo Moguillansky
• Publisher:  Routledge & CRC Press / Karnak Books
• Pages: 218
• ISBN-10: 1855758075
• ISBN-13: 978-1855758070

Description & Review:

"Perversion is a challenge for theory and psychoanalytic practice that Juan Pablo Jiménez and Rodolfo Moguillansky, American psychoanalysts known for the originality of their contributions, have managed successfully. In this book they offer us vivid and detailed clinical material of patients of analysis who presented various kinds of perversions, which they accompany by a comprehensive and accurate review of major psychoanalytic contributions on the subject, and their own contributions to it.

The reader will find not only scholarship, but also he will find himself trapped in a thriller where the analyst is continually asked to leave his role as analyst to enter a game that fascinates and rejects. In a masterful way the authors describe their own internal vicissitudes in the treatment of these patients, the counter-transferential difficulties and how perversion becomes a source of inevitable collusions in the mind of the analyst. They take us to face, from an intersubjective perspective, dilemmas of interpretation, and to become aware of the situations in which the classic transferential interpretation, when it is not attuned to the psychic reality of the patient can retraumatize him and generate adverse events.

We also count, as in thrillers, on researchers who help us review the facts and the storyline. The chapters of the book are accompanied by discussions with relevant well-known figures of psychoanalysis, as P. Fonagy, C. Featherson, and R. Krause. The end result enriches the reader with this exchange of opinions, that is in agreement with the poliphonic character of current pluralistic psychoanalysis."

Ricardo Bernardi

"This book discusses the pathological structure that we call perversion, constantly keeping in mind two main issues: the need for clear definitions, and the uniqueness of the viewpoint from which we account for the phenomenon. In this case, the viewpoint is that of considering how perversion appears in the intersubjective field, and how it, therefore, ends up by being a psychic reality in the analyst's mind. In a situation of theoretical pluralism, there is an essential need for a conceptual analysis that clearly defines the basic pathological categories, that distinguishes the experiential dimension of the analytical situation from the metapsychological description, that takes into due account the inferential processes of the analyst at work, and that underlines the importance of the psychogenesis in the comprehension of the perversion. I think that in this sense the book by Jiménez and Moguillansky is an excellent and successful example. The clinical cases and the technical reflections, as well as Hanly's preface and the discussions by Krause and Fonagy, all enrich a book that is already generous towards its readers."

Jorge Canestri

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