ABSTRACT
This chapter inquires, by combining a descriptive approach with a normative one, into the rational and emotional processes that guide the analysts' choices and changes in their theoretical and technical ideas. It examines the phenomena of real change in psychoanalytic ideas and also inquires into ways that could bring greater conceptual depth and empirical validity to the new ideas. The chapter presents the preliminary results of an ongoing qualitative investigation based on the analysis of published texts and on interviews with senior analysts who played an important role in a period of significant change in the history of psychoanalytic ideas in the Río de la Plata region (Buenos Aires and Montevideo). In its early days, the leading idea was of cumulative change in psychoanalysis, in which theoretical and technical advances supported each other. Since the 1970s, a period of increasing theoretical and technical pluralism has begun.
