Esta obra está dividida en tres apartados: Un apartado conceptual, otro clínico y un tercero sobre la creatividad y el vivir. El lector podrá encontrar aquí una selección de textos creativos, presididos por una basta pluralidad de pensamientos, multiplicidad de ideas y experiencias, organizados en forma de capítulos escritos con un estilo personal y libre. Cada uno de los capítulos contiene la aportación propia de cada autor en la que Winnicott actúa como inspirador y sembrador de ideas, y es a la vez una excelente apertura a lo que Winnicott aporta a los clínicos actuales.

From the Foreword By Spyros D. Orfanos

A funny thing happened to me when I was preparing the scientific program for the 2007 Athens conference for the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP). A computer malfunction caused the loss of information about the panel submissions of the Spaniards who were planning to travel to Greece and participate in the event. I was upset because I had no way to communicate with them. Not knowing even their names, I felt devastation and walked around for days murmuring, “What happened to the Spaniards?” Finally, the Spaniards sent an email message and we resolved matters. They came to the conference armed with dazzling theoretical and clinical presentations for an eager international audience. The Andalusian-Athens connection was saved. Years later in 2011, Alejandro Avila of Madrid and Ramon Riera of Barcelona co-chaired the Madrid conference of IARPP, the very year I was president of IARPP. Thus, continued the scholarly contributions of today’s Spaniards to the expansion and dissemination of relational ideas and practice. If it can be said that relational thinking has been part of the global age of psychoanalysis, and I believe there is clear evidence for this, then the Spaniards have played a crucial role.
Relationality as a concept has evolved over time to become an entity of its own, on which theoretical, social, and educational enterprises have been built. In the development of relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, a book emerging from a specific country or geographical region is a natural addition. The creation of this edited volume by Avila is a major achievement. By composing it, Avila and his colleagues allow us to consider the vast archipelago of relational thinking with Spanish eyes.
It is of historical interest that the first translation of Freud’s collected works was in Spanish by the philosopher Ortega y Gasset. But as Avila explains while relational thinking took formal hold in Spain in the early part of the 21st century, it has its roots in the 1960s when the intrapsychic began to lose its grip on the clinical psychological world of Spain. The contributors to this volume have been influenced by the early developments of the relational school in the United States and even before that by the pioneering interpersonal and cultural schools of psychoanalysis as exemplified by H. S. Sullivan and Erich Fromm. Yet, the contributors in this book travel with their own Mediterranean sensibilities about theory construction, and ways of uniting the humanities and sciences.
Culture and context have always been said to be important in modern psychology but those who practice relational psychoanalysis actually mean it. Moreover, one of the major clinical principles of relational perspective is that every psychoanalytic dyad has its unique features and from this we know that the participants have to invent their own therapeutic process of change. This process has bidirectional elements. It is rooted in each participant’s psychological core and the manner in which he or she is influenced by the other. But because they were not directly educated in psychoanalysis by Anglo-American traditions, what we find in these pages is a particular passion for relational thinking that incorporates a Mediterranean sensibility with a particular Spanish coloring.
This does not mean that they use the post-Romantic European imaginary that is treated critically by many contemporary thinkers within Spain and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The reader of this book will not find the most frequent romanticizing tendency that the Spanish culture is the expression of a tragic, primitive, and folkloric Spain. There are no references to Don Quixote, the poet Federico García Lorca, the painter Salvador Dalí, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, the composer Manuel de Falla, medieval Iberia, the Franco dictatorship, Guernica, economic austerity, the political leftist party Podemos, or soccer.
The thinking and values that are at the root of these assembled essays go beyond stereotypes. They bring us to a wide breadth of coverage of contemporary relational thinking and what strategies and methods are viable and effective in best serving others. The Spanish sensibility in these pages is a modern one.
Like other nations of the Mediterranean (i.e., Greece, Italy, and Israel), Spain’s cultural heritage has often been turned into a commodity for craving tourists seeking exoticism. In the volume, you the reader hold in your hands, this is highly resisted. These studies have an insightful sensitivity to globalization and its means of communication across nations and generations. In fact, it may be an underlying premise of all the chapters in this book that understanding our relationality in a global age and its pathologies allows us to brave our vulnerable, common humanity-that of our patients and our own. The pathologies, according to Florentine philosopher Elena Pulcini, can be our sense of unlimited individualism and fearful, closed communities.
Deep down what the writers know in their blood and bones is that the relational approach is neither comforting for the patient nor the therapist, but it can be healing. What is clear is that the Spaniards are not relationalists because they lack discipline. They are relationalists because they think deeply and feel deeply and therefore honor their humanity, their social consciousness and that of their patients. Lastly, they help us understand, to paraphrase the American artist Robert Rauschenberg, that relational ideas are not real estate.
We have reasons to be grateful to Alejandro Avila and the contributors to this anthology and the English language version of their essays. They remind us that some recent and sparkling thinking about relational horizons can be accomplished from across the Atlantic. We should not be surprised. We might even be influenced if we have the good fortune.
I have always been fond of a delicious story told by the playful Chilean Pablo Neruda. It was about being with the enchanting enchanter – Federico García Lorca. Neruda was reading one of the poems he was working on to his friend. Neruda says that halfway through his Andalusian friend would stop, raise his arms, shake his head, cover his ears, and cry, “Stop! Stop! That’s enough, don’t read any more, you’ll influence me!” I believe the reader of this book may be delighted with such an influence.

–Spyros D Orfanos, Ph.D., ABPP

New York City, USA

El dolor de los duelos propone un viaje por el camino de la vida, un paseo por el amor y la muerte, los vínculos, las pérdidas y las incertidumbres. Es preciso adentrarse en el ser y el hacer humano, explorar la fragilidad, las dependencias inevitables y las fortalezas que necesitamos para hacer frente a los caminos que nos vamos encontrando y al mismo tiempo trazando. La vida nos es dada sin buscarla y al final del trayecto nos será arrebatada inevitablemente.
En este libro se exploran los duelos que son inherentes al proceso del vivir y aquellos otros que producen un alto nivel de dolor y sufrimiento, pérdidas de seres queridos, el suicidio, el duelo perinatal, la enfermedad, la pérdida de la propia vida, entre otros. Es también una propuesta desde la perspectiva de la psicoterapia relacional para ayudar y acompañar a las personas que los padecen.ÍNDICE Agradecimientos Prólogo por Roger Armengol 1. El devenir y la fragilidad 2. La hipermodernidad y la sociedad de perfil emocional bajo 3. Excelencias y necesidades 4. La insoportable incertidumbre 5. Cuestionando algunos dogmas y creencias propias de las sociedades «avanzadas» 6. Narcisismos y autoestimas 7. Las necesidades psicoemocionales del niño y de sus cuidadores 8. La importancia de la vinculación afectiva. La calidez de los vínculos 9. Duelo, separación, pérdida, carencia y trauma 10. Duelos evolutivos y duelos disruptivos 11. La elaboración de los duelos 12. Otras emociones y sentimientos implicados en los duelos 13. La muerte paradigma en el que se asientan los duelos 14. Budismo y duelo 15. Creatividad, experiencias transicionales y duelo 16. Duelos complicados y no elaborados 17. El duelo y la muerte en los niños 18. Acompañar y asistir a las personas en duelo. Una propuesta relacional. Colaboración de Ingrid Ximénez de Embun Ferrer, Gabriel López Campos y Roser Hurtado Fernández 19. Algunos comentarios a frases hechas que deberíamos evitar en los procesos de duelo Epílogo por Saïd El Kadaoui Referencias bibliográficas .

Winnicott fue un célebre pediatra, psiquiatra y psicoanalista inglés, que contribuyó de forma decisiva, junto a Ferenczi y otros, al progreso del psicoanálisis después de Freud. Dotado de una inmensa capacidad creativa, y siempre a partir de su experiencia clínica, Winnicott conceptualizó sobre la creatividad y las experiencias transicionales, el falso self en relación al verdadero, la unidad psicosomática y, especialmente, la interacción del niño con sus cuidadores adultos.
Según Sáinz, fue uno de los pioneros del hoy llamado psicoanálisis relacional, al que prefiere referirse como «la perspectiva relacional en el psicoanálisis».
El autor nos ofrece en este libro una elaboración propia de las aportaciones teóricas de Winnicott y sus aplicaciones en la psicoterapia. Nos habla del papel que tiene el psicoanálisis (en su acepción relacional) para devolver la vida a la persona que ya no se habita a sí misma, de cómo se puede reparar el narcisismo primario dañado, para vivir las emociones y crecer con ellas, recuperando así la estima de la propia genuinidad subjetiva.
Este libro intenta acercar al lector a Winnicott como psicoanalista intersubjetivo, cuyas aportaciones pueden ser de máxima actualidad en diversas esferas del saber, por lo que será de gran utilidad para psicólogos, psiquiatras, trabajadores sociales y todas aquellas personas interesadas en los procesos mentales, relacionales y artísticos