Interaction in the psychoanalytic situation

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we are primarily interested in psychic change and how to facilitate it for the better. Change is a universal property of matter, living or inanimate: everything in nature is influenced by everything else; interaction is ubiquitous. In the early years of psychoanalysis, the prevailing view was that therapeusis was essentially informational—insight and awareness would bring about changes in the ways one would experience events and respond to them. Over time, there has been a subtle shift from the informational perspective to the transformational, where insight is often retrospective rather than the active agent. The growing awareness of the need to be deeply recognized and responded to by another human being is reflective of this shift and has loomed ever larger in the interactive arena known as psychoanalysis. This paper focuses on a single facet of the need for recognition by another—the role of enacted response in effecting psychic change. It also addresses another level of the meaning of interaction: Whereas the internal interaction between perception and response has tended to be looked upon, in psychoanalysis, as unidirectional, the present discussion draws attention to the complexity of the bidirectional interaction between perception and response.