On not interpreting: The metaphor of the baby,enactment, and transitional experience |
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Authors: | Joseph Newirth |
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Institution: | (1) Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, 251 West 71st Street, 10023 New York, NY |
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Abstract: | Conclusion Winnicott suggests that transitional experiences after outliving their usefulness tend to fade into the background, leaving
behind the capacity to develop further transitional experiences and symbolic thought. My understanding of this transitional
experience remained uninterpreted as a form of joined action or play in the analysis. This complex set of actions and unverbalized
meanings represented for me an aspect of the use of the metaphor of the baby and the allegory of the caretaking parent both
in terms of the narrative structure and in the capacity to engage in a process of enacting the patient’s dissociated experiences
and facilitating the development of his symbolic experiences of greed and aggression through the development of a playful
transitional experience. I believe that it was the patient’s concrete experience of greed and aggression that was at the core
of the patient’s arrested development in his capacity to be a sexual and loving adult and to develop an intimate relationship
with another person. I believe that the evolving transitional experience of eating the donut and later the cookie enabled
us to enact and play out the multiple meanings of greed, envy, the destruction of the object, and finally the reparation and
recreation of the object. In the paradox created through the transitional experience I could be both greedy and trustworthy
and he could be both sadistic and generous.
In the beginning of this paper I suggested a series of dichotomies that define differences in contemporary approaches to psychoanalysis.
In the developmental arrest position that I developed in this paper the treatment parameters emphasize mutuality, symmetry,
constructivism, the political and social dimensions of experience, and most importantly the analyst’s countertransference
participation is thought of as strategic, critical, and voluntary. Psychoanalysis has traditionally been thought of as involving
multiple levels of experience, some conscious and verbal and some unconscious and experiential or acted out. The concepts
of play, enactment, and transitional experience presented in this paper bring to the fore a mode of psychoanalytic related
ness that is experiential and conscious, although not objectively or verbally interpreted, which I believe is necessary as
a means of developing the capacity for symbolic thought.
Presented to the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, October 19, 1995. |
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