Las tormentas afectivas constituyen una complicación frecuente en el abordaje psicoanalítico de los pacientes borderline. Se exploran las características descriptivas, psicodinámicas y estructurales de estas tormentas y se describen las manifestaciones verbales, no verbales y contratransferenciales que permiten la formulación de interpretaciones bajo dichas condiciones, como lo son las intervenciones requeridas para mantener el marco del tratamiento como condición previa para el abordaje analítico

Las tormentas afectivas constituyen una complicación frecuente en el abordaje psicoanalítico de los pacientes borderline. Se exploran las características descriptivas, psicodinámicas y estructurales de estas tormentas y se describen las manifestaciones verbales, no verbales y contratransferenciales que permiten la formulación de interpretaciones bajo dichas condiciones, como lo son las intervenciones requeridas para mantener el marco del tratamiento como condición previa para el abordaje analítico. Se revisan las principales formulaciones teóricas relativas a la patología afectiva de los pacientes borderline y se relacionan con el enfoque interpretativo propuesto. Se examina un desarrollo aparentemente opuesto, la total ausencia de desarrollos emocionales en las sesiones y se explora su función defensiva de evitar las tormentas afectivas

When we began doing research for this issue of What Is Enlightenment? eight months ago, exploring as many different spiritual and psychological approaches to understanding the ego as we could get our hands on, a contemporary psychoanalytic philosophy of ego development known as "object relations theory" captured our attention. We were fascinated to discover that many leading thinkers at the interface of psychology and spirituality, including A. H. Almaas, Ken Wilber, Jack Engler and Claudio Naranjo, rely on object relations theory in their own models of psychological and spiritual development. In particular, a number of transpersonal psychologists have found remarkable parallels between the ancient Buddhist doctrine of the illusory nature of the self and this modern Western analysis of the constructed nature of the self. In his anthology Transformations of Consciousness, coedited with Ken Wilber and Daniel Brown, Jack Engler writes, "It may come as a surprise that . . . both Buddhist psychology and psychoanalytic object relations theory define the essence of the ego in the same way." Needless to say, since exploring the essence of the ego is exactly what we were seeking to do, we wanted to speak with someone well-versed in object relations theorya subtle and complex interpretation of the architecture of the ego that is now one of the most influential schools of contemporary psychological thought.

Kernberg wrote this article when he was near to begin his term as President of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), and for this reason we can say that it has also a political meaning: it might point to the need, felt also by the psychoanalytic establishment, of speaking more clearly about the delicate issues of training. Ten years earlier, in 1986, Kernberg had written another important essay, "Institutional problems of psychoanalytic education", where courageously he spoke about the "paranoid atmosphere" (p. 803) of some institutes, of the difficult relationship between the educational and the therapeutic aspects of training, of "the still existing practice of the candidates' having a 'first analysis' for the institute, and a 'second analysis', after graduation, 'for themselves'" (p. 802), of the highly questionable custom of the training analysts' report on the candidates' progress, and so on. In 2001 he presented at the IPA Executive Council another interesting paper, titled "Some thoughts regarding innovations in psychoanalytic education" (translated into Italian in the journal Psicoterapia e scienze umane).