The analyst's countertransference to the psychoanalytic process1

There is countertransference, not just to individual patients, but to the process of psychoanalysis itself. The analytic process is a contentious topic. Disagreements about its nature can arise from taking it as a unitary concept that should have a single defi nition whereas, in fact, there are several strands to its meaning. The need for the analyst's free associative listening, as a counterpart to the patient's free associations, implies resistance to the analytic process in the analyst as well as the patient. The author gives examples of the self‐analysis that this necessitates. The most important happenings in both the analyst's and the patient's internal worlds lie at the boundary between conscious and unconscious, and the nature of an analyst's interventions depends on how fully what happens at that boundary is articulated in the analyst's consciousness. The therapeutic quality of an analyst's engagement with a patient depends on the freeing and enlivening quality, for the analyst, of the analyst's engagement with his or her countertransference to the analytic process.     

Dissociation,the Analyst's Vulnerability,and the Body: Review of Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys by Philip M. Bromberg

This review praises Bromberg's rich and evocative new book for its clinical and theoretical usefulness and elaborates on three broad themes: the analyst's personal role in traumatic enactments, dissociative/addictive uses of the body, and the distinction between life-threatening and developmental trauma. Extending Bromberg's formulations, the author argues that in successful work with trauma survivors, the analyst must be actually (temporarily) traumatized as actual, personal vulnerabilities of the analyst are necessarily engaged. The analyst's vulnerability serves as an internal contact point, opening up a process of unconscious empathy with the patient and providing crucial validation of the patient's experience. The review also explores how bodily processes are used to further dissociation with eating disordered patients and how they become the source of treatment difficulties. When the patient's states of desire have been “detoured” into the body (where they are ruthlessly controlled or attacked) as well as into the relationship with food (where they are temporarily gratified), they are not as available to be mobilized in the analytic relationship. The review also questions Bromberg's assumption that the underlying dissociative mechanisms are the same for life-threatening trauma (or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) and developmental (or relational) trauma.     

How to Forget the Unforgettable? On Collective Trauma,Cultural Identity,and Mnemotechnologies

Nietzsche’s notion of “active forgetting” is employed to better understand the disruptive and destructive influence of collective trauma on cultural identity. Throughout the article genocide is taken as a cause of extreme trauma and used to illustrate this impact. Active forgetting in this context should not be confused with memories fading away; it is rather a positive and active force, a capacity which an individual, a society, or a culture needs to prosper. This notion provides guidance on how to banish the trauma to the extent that it ceases to paralyze the traumatized group. Technological skills that release negative emotions and ideas generated by the trauma from the collective memory—mnemotechnologies—are required to restore the capacity of forgetting.     

Marco Conci interviews Stefano Bolognini

Abstract

This paper suggests that the understanding of intersubjectivity, which refers to “the dynamic interplay between the analyst's and the patient's subjective experiences in the clinical situation”, is crucial for psychoanalytic work. The analyst's inner experiences, from the first moment that he or she thinks about or meets the patient, belong to an intersubjective situation. Not only are these experiences a valuable channel through which the inner experiences of the patient can be understood, but—as Theodore Jacobs puts it—they are often complementary to that which comes from the patient. The author tries to illustrate the above through the study of the analytic process in the psychoanalytic therapy of a severely disturbed patient. This therapy from its very early phase led to the reawakening of some of the analyst's old conflicts. The patient's difficulties in tolerating the limits of the analytic setting and using free association are discussed, as are his enactments. The analyst's close observation of the interaction between her and the patient, the permanent engagement with her countertransference, and the use of her inner experiences with the patient helped her to contain the enactments, defined the nature of her interventions, and contributed to the analytic process.     

Implicit States of Connectivity in the Clinical Practice of Jungian Psychoanalysis and Andean Shamanism

This paper will describe the spiritual states of “oneness” experienced by Andean shamans in relation to oceanic states in early infancy and working with trauma in Jungian analysis. The author’s work exploring implicit energetic experience with Andean shamans will be referenced with comparisons made to depth psychology, in both theory and in practice. Definitions of Q’echua terms describing different psychic meditative states that Andean shamans enter into will be provided as Andean medicine people have a much more developed language for conceptualizing these experiences. A clinical vignette will be presented that demonstrates how the spaces of implicit connection that occur between an analyst and analysand in the analytic setting can be a catalyst for healing.     

Recognition of Difference in the Author–Discussant Relation: Reply to Commentary

This author describes how poetry infuses her way of thinking, feeling, and writing and her way of working analytically. She introduces the concept of a nonanalytic third—the analyst's personal, intimate, and substantially abiding relationship to some body of experience unrelated to materia psychoanalytica. She posits that this nonanalytic third, the nature of which is unique to each analyst, constitutes a source of enrichment, texture, and dimensionality as well as personally compelling metaphors that the analyst may offer to the patient as other-than-me substance and a placeholder for cultivating the potential in the discourse of analytic potential space, in addition to serving as a facilitator and comfort for transition when the analyst must recognize and promote the necessary ending of an intimate analytic relationship.

Using Stephen Mitchell's notions of intersubjectivity and also using the analyst's and patient's separate role responsibilities in the creation of a context for the absence of conscious intentions, the author develops her concept of the nonanalytic third and the particular contribution of poetry to clinical process. These ideas are illustrated with a detailed case example of an unfolding analytic process that includes an e-mail exchange at the time when a shocking form of nonanalytic third appeared—September 11, 2001.     

Race,power and intimacy in the intersubjective field: the intersection of racialised cultural complexes and personal complexes

This paper presents work with a biracial young woman, in the context of a predominantly white Jungian training organisation. The patient's relational difficulties and her struggle to integrate different aspects of her personality are understood in terms of the overlapping influences of developmental trauma, transgenerational trauma relating to the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, conflictual racial identities, internalised racism, and the British black/white racial cultural complex. The author presents her understanding of an unfolding dynamic in the analytic relationship in which the black slave/white master schema was apparently reversed between them, with the white analyst becoming subservient to the black patient. The paper tracks the process through which trust was built alongside the development of this joint defence against intimacy ‐ which eventually had to be relinquished by both partners in the dyad. A white on black ‘rescue fantasy’, identified by the patient as a self‐serving part of her father's personality, is explored in relation to the analytic relationship and the training context.     

When actions speak louder than words: Verbal and nonverbal wrangling in the therapeutic arena commentary on paper by F. Diane Barth

Patients’ use of language in the analytic setting can undergo extreme and sometimes surprising fluctuations. Seemingly articulate and engaging patients retreat to the concrete in their use of words, disconnecting verbal expression from one's internal experience. Are these fluctuations indications of limitations in the patient's capacity to put experience into language, or are they indications of the emergence of otherwise unacknowledged aspects of self into the treatment arena? Shifts in the use of language (both patient's and therapist's) can be opportunities to question the work of the analysis. Whether one uses these moments to expand the boundaries of the analytic technique or to expand the boundaries of the analytic relationship—or both—is the question posed in this commentary.     

Better Identity Politics

Suchet's paper is an inspiring demonstration of the power of openness and vulnerability. It offers a clinically daring and theoretically far-reaching account of the transformation that can sometimes occur in the psychoanalytic relationship. My commentary focuses on two of the paper's major threads: the interplay of subjective experience, intersubjective space, and collective forces, and the ethical dimension of the psychoanalytic project. From the outset, the meeting between Ara and Suchet is not only a meeting of bodies and minds, but also a meeting of collective histories and politics. Suchet finds, and in her account powerfully demonstrates, that addressing her patient's trouble requires an exploration of how collective traumas and political narratives infuse the possibilities of intersubjective exchange and subjective meaning. In my commentary I trace and elaborate on the trajectory of this analytic process, contemplating the ways in which identities and identifications involve both familial and social attachments. I attempt to highlight Suchet's contribution to our understanding of how what happens, and is made meaningful, in the register of collective identification and experience, forms the very substance of subjective and intersubjective life, and should be therefore formulated as an intrinsic aspect of the analytic endeavour. Turning to Suchet's engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I consider her drive to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of psychoanalytic discourse. Following the same drive, I add some ideas developed by Theodor Adorno, as means of illustrating the trouble and the potential for reconciliation inherent in the experience and politics of identity.     

The impact of intrusive identification in the analytic process: Some implications of real trauma and phantasy1

In this paper, the author aims to show a possible understanding of very primitive identifications, especially intrusive identifications, when associated with traumatic situations and expressed through current phantasies related to these experiences. At first glance, this understanding could be considered quite straightforward. However, the original contribution offered by the author is the participation of this special kind of combination in the formation of the primitive intrusive identifications and its association with the imprisonment inside the primitive object of identification, especially the mother. The author proposes the amplification of the clinical use of the concept of ‘life in the claustrum’, originally described by Meltzer, moving beyond persecutory claustrophobic situations. He illustrates the phenomenon with the analytic work carried out with a patient whose narcissistic and intrusive character was structured on the basis of primitive intrusive identifications and phantasies related to the claustrum inside the mother. The patient's imprisonment inside the maternal compartments has, as its background, the phantasies related to the infantile traumatic experience of the death of the patient's brother, which are reproduced in the analytic relationship.     

The analyst's narrative function: Inventing a possibility

This article describes a psychic function common to analysts that was gradually revealed through clinical work with children. It is a psychic quality derived from function α, which involves analysts’ capacity for reverie – their narrative function. The author presents two clinical situations where this function developed in the analytic field in relation to patients’ difficulty in symbolizing. In the first case there was an early traumatic experience unavailable for representation. The analyst lent the patient her ability to represent and produced a narrative that made it possible to create a world of phantasies and transform nightmares into ‘dreamable’ dreams. In other words, she removed the quality of unbearable, irrepresentable reality that characterized those raw experiences encrypted in the psyche. In the second case the analyst's narrative function sought to connect with the isolation, the shell that housed a child suffering from an autistic disorder whose ability to represent had not been established. The analyst provided meaning for the patient's repetitive, stereotyped play, thus weaving the child's subjectivity and gradually introducing a notion of alterity. The author seeks to show how this function, in the thematic construction of the session, facilitated both the working‐through of a traumatic situation (with the ability to share representations) and the constitution of the psychic fabric.     

Therapy for the Dead: Working Clinically with Jung's Black Books and The Red Book

With the 2020 publication of the facsimile edition of The Black Books, we have an opportunity to study the layers of C. G. Jung's creative writing process for the first time. In this paper, I explore Jung's practice of active imagination in relation to his fantasy dialogues with the dead during two specific episodes in 1914 and 1916. I discuss Jung's concept of the collective unconscious corresponding to the “mythic land of the dead” and I show how this idea develops in The Black Books and The Red Book, or Liber Novus, culminating in Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. I describe my work with a patient, who, in an early session, said she felt like the "living dead". I recount how the patient's experience of her own internal world began to change as we were able to wonder about the inner world of the patient's late mother and, together, to imagine her mother's lament. I consider the use of imagination when working with the concept of "therapy for the dead" (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, p. 164) in the context of intergenerational trauma.     

Displacement trauma: complex states of personal,collective and intergenerational fragmentation and their intergenerational transmission

Originally presented at the Journal’s one day conference entitled ‘Displacement: Contemporary Traumatic Experience’ held in London in November 2019, this paper expands on the author’s theory of the implicit psychological organizing gestalt, an associated pattern of psychic functions which operate in an integrated way to simultaneously structure and organize our experience of self-cohesion and self-continuity. The gestalt, which implicitly links the formation of psychic skin, body image, cultural skin and both personal and cultural identity with place, functions as an emergent non-conscious permanent presence or background ‘constant’. It develops over time and emerges out of embodied emotional experiencing with the total environment – both human and non-human. The author argues that it is the rupture of this gestalt and the disorganizing consequences of its loss which underlies the experience of displacement trauma. If disruptions in the formation of the gestalt and/or its later rupture remain unrecognized and unrepresented then the absence creates a void which can be intergenerationally transmitted. Case material is presented which describes this and which highlights the ways in which the gestalt can contribute to our understanding of collective displacement anxiety, cultural trauma and cultural complexes.     

Vicissitudes in adult life resulting from traumatic experiences in adolescence1

The author deals with the diffi culties in combining the concepts of trauma and phantasy. He evaluates Freudian observations relating to chance and trauma. He considers traumatic effects of chance in relation to the rupture of a narcissistic phantasy of invulnerability. The narrating of traumatic events may awaken in the analyst tendencies to repeat the aggression of these traumatic events towards the subject. The accusatory interpretation can be one of the means by which this repetition is established. The author explores a type of trauma which is essentially related to the disturbance of the structure which contains the ideals of the subject. This disturbance is a consequence of disillusionment resulting from the loss of an object who was the depository of these ideals. Trauma generates a state of mourning for lost ideals. The author describes traumatic events which occurred in a patient's life at puberty; paradoxical behaviours in the patient's parents caused the patient to have new traumas. The reluctance to explore the derivatives of the unconscious, and to investigate possible meaning in symbols, was a central problem in this patient's analysis. The author discusses disturbances in symbolization, and he examines the subject of projective identifi cations that were received by patients from their primary objects.     

The Case Study of Jacob: Childhood Sexual Abuse and the Limitations of the Holding Environment

Childhood sexual abuse and trauma influence relational development in significant ways. Notable among them are the development of a patient's internal object world, fantasies, and sense of self. Dynamic formulations and holding techniques are used to identify, process, and alter fractured relational dynamics. However, the use of such techniques may also influence a patient's narrative process, pulling them away from the realities of their life as lived. Using the case study method, focusing specifically on the patient's narrative development, this article examines the impact of analytic framing on a patient's experience of child sexual abuse and trauma.     

The act of interpretation1

The author understands the interpreting act as an attempt to perceive what happens in the transference/countertransference fi eld and not just what happens in the patient's mind. Interpretation transcends mere intellectual communication. It is also an experience in which analysts’ emotions work as an important instrument in understanding their patients. Interpretation is seen to possess manifest as well as latent content; the latter would contain the analysts’ feelings, emotions and personality. The unconscious content of an interpretation does not inconvenience or preclude the development of the analytic process, but, on the contrary, it allows new associative material to emerge, and it transforms the analytic session into a human relationship. Analysts’ awareness of this content derived from patients’ apperceptions is a signifi cant instrument for understanding what is happening in the analytic relationship, and what transpires in these sessions provides fundamental elements for analysts’ self‐analysis. Some clinical examples demonstrate these occurrences in analytic sessions, and how they can be apprehended and used for a better understanding of the patient. The author also mentions the occurrence of diffi culties during the analytic process. These diffi culties are often the result of lapses in an analyst's perception related to unconscious elements of the relationship.     

Impervious and intrusive: The impenetrable object in transference and countertransference

The author describes an internal object that he calls the ‘impenetrable object’ which has two characteristics: being impervious to the projections from the patient and being intrusive, i.e. projecting into the patient. It arises out of an early relationship with a mother who may be generally disturbed or traumatized so that she is unable to take in or tolerate the child's projections and may use the child as a receptacle for her own projections. He links the concept of an impenetrable object with other concepts such as Williams's ‘reversal of the container–contained relationship’ and Green's ‘dead mother’. If such an object dominates the patient's internal world, it can lead to severe difficulties in the analytic process. Interpretations may be experienced as violent projections from the analyst which the patient has to ward off and the analyst may enact an impervious or intrusive object in various ways. The author describes a case in which such dynamics played a significant role. He argues that intensive work in the countertransference is required to detect subtle enactments and allow a shift in the analyst, which in turn can enable change in the patient. He gives clinical material that demonstrates such work by the analyst and illustrates the shift from an impenetrable object to a more permeable one in the patient's internal world.     

HANSEL AND GRETEL: A TALE OF TERROR

In the analysis of a woman with multiple childhood traumas, the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” figured prominently. The author discusses the use of the fairy tale in this case at various levels. He suggests an interplay between a national myth, the fairy tale, and a personal myth—the patient's psychodynamics. The fairy tale can be used to illuminate personal meanings derived from it. In the experience of childhood trauma, the repeated reading of a fairy tale can help organize and defend against terrifying anxiety.