Re-minding the body.

The author discusses a fragment of the analysis of a patient who had experienced both neglect and sexual molestation during early childhood. The analysand had developed a defensively hypertrophied form of mindedness in an effort to gain some sense of control over bodily experience, which threatened not only his sanity, but his very sense of being. The focus of the paper is on a series of sessions from a period of regression during which the patient experienced psychotic-level anxiety and a feeling of impending psychic disintegration. The author discusses in detail two interventions that he made during this period of analytic work. The first involved the analyst's finding himself speaking with a parental voice with which he took on the responsibility of protectively "minding" the patient while the patient experienced himself on the edge of disintegration. The second spontaneous intervention involved the analyst's inviting the patient to imagine himself at his present age into a story of molestation (based on the patient's history and the history of the analysis) in which the analyst was a third presence bearing witness, bearing language and bearing compassion. These interventions seemed to have been of importance in facilitating the patient's development of a greater sense of being alive in a co-extensive minded body and bodied mind.

'The music of what happens' in poetry and psychoanalysis.

The author presents a close reading of a Frost poem and a detailed discussion of an analytic session. Using specific examples from the poem and from the analytic session, he then offers some thoughts concerning the relationship between the way he listens to the language of the poem and the way he and his patient speak with and listen to one another. The author illustrates in this reading of the poem and in the way he speaks to his patient that he is not primarily engaged in an effort to unearth what lies 'behind' the poem's words and symbols or 'beneath' the patient's report of a dream or of a life event. Instead (or perhaps more accurately, in addition), he attempts to listen to the sound and feel of 'what's going on', to the 'music of what happens'. This is achieved to a significant degree in the analytic setting by means of the analyst's attending to his own reverie experience.

A question of voice in poetry and psychoanalysis.

The author discusses the notion of voice as a contribution to the development of a set of ideas and an attendant vocabulary adequate for describing the richness and complexity of language usage in the analytic setting. In a discussion of the sounds, movement, and texture of voice in poems by Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, the author illustrates ways in which a listener attempts to experience how a speaker creates a voice and brings himself to life through his use of language. The layering of sounds and feelings in voice is discussed in terms of the creation of "oversounds" derived from the experience of analyst and analysand in the jointly constructed unconscious "analytic third."

Reverie and interpretation.

The analyst's reverie experience constitutes an indispensable avenue to the understanding and interpretation of the transference-countertransference and yet is perhaps the dimension of the analyst's experience that feels least worthy of scrutiny. Reverie takes the most mundane, personal, and private of shapes, often involving the minutiae of everyday life. Although the analyst's reveries are personal psychological events, I view them as unconscious intersubjective constructions generated by analyst and analysand. Three analytic sessions are discussed to illustrate the ways in which reveries are experienced as well as the process by which the analyst attempts to make use of this aspect of his or her experience.

Reconsidering three aspects of psychoanalytic technique.

In this paper three aspects of analytic technique are reconsidered from the perspective that analytic technique must serve the analytic process. The author views the analytic process as centrally involving the unconscious interplay of states of reverie of analyst and analysand, leading to the creation of a third subject of analysis. It is through the shared but asymmetrical experiencing of the 'analytic third' that analyst and analysand acquire a sense of, and generate symbols for, formerly unspoken and unthought aspects of the internal object world of the analysand. The state of reverie of the analytic pair requires conditions of privacy that must be safeguarded by analytic technique. From the perspective of the foregoing conception of the analytic process, the author attempts in the first part of this paper to reconsider the role of the couch in the analytic process. The second and third sections are devoted to a re-examination of aspects of analytic technique relating to the 'fundamental rule' of psychoanalysis and to the analysis of dreams.

The perverse subject of analysis.

In this paper I suggest that the analysis of perversion necessarily involves the elaboration and analysis of a perverse transference-countertransference. Both analyst and analysand contribute to and participate in the perverse transference-countertransference which intersubjective construction is powerfully shaped by the perverse structure of the patient's unconscious internal object world. In the fragment of an analysis that is presented, I illustrate the way in which the analyst makes use of his experience in (of) the transference-countertransference in gaining understanding of the perverse scenario that the patient is utilizing as a form of psychic organization, defense, communication, and object relatedness. I discuss the analyst's use of his own unobtrusive, mundane thoughts, feelings, fantasies, ruminations, sensations, and so on, in the service of understanding the perverse transference-countertransference, which understanding is utilized in the formulation of transference interpretations. The perversity of the transference-countertransference is viewed as deriving from the patient's defensive use of particular forms of sexualization as a way of protecting himself or herself against the experience of psychological deadness. Compulsive erotization is understood as representing a method of creating an illusory sense of vitality. The subversion of the recognition of the experience of psychological deadness is achieved in part through compulsively enlisting others in the enactment of exciting, erotized, and often dangerous substitutes for the experience of being alive.

Analysing forms of aliveness and deadness of the transference-countertransference.

The sense of aliveness and deadness of the transference-countertransference represents a critical dimension of the analytic experience and may be the single most important measure of the moment-to-moment status of the analytic process. In this paper the author presents four clinical discussions that illustrate the importance of analysing the experience of aliveness and deadness in (of) transference-countertransference. In each vignette particular emphasis is placed on the use of transference interpretation derived from experience in the countertransference to address the defensive and expressive role of the dynamic movement of aliveness and deadness at a given juncture in an analysis. The role played by the experience of aliveness and deadness in the structure of the patient's internal object world and quality of object relatedness is examined.

The concept of interpretive action.

Interpretive action is understood as the analyst's use of action (other than verbally symbolic speech) to convey to the analysand specific aspects of the analyst's understanding of the transference-countertransference which cannot at that juncture in the analysis be conveyed by the semantic content of words alone. An interpretation-in-action accrues its specific symbolic meaning from the experiential context of the analytic intersubjectivity in which it is generated. The understanding of the transference-counter-transference conveyed by the analyst's interpretive action must simultaneously be silently formulated in words by the analyst. Three clinical vignettes are presented which illustrate different forms of interpretation-in-action.

The analytic third: working with intersubjective clinical facts.

In this paper, two clinical sequences are presented in an effort to describe the methods by which the analyst attempts to recognise, understand and verbally symbolize for himself and the analysand the specific nature of the moment-to-moment interplay of the analyst's subjective experience, the subjective experience of the analysand and the intersubjectively-generated experience of the analytic pair (the experience of the analytic third). The first clinical discussion describes how the intersubjective experience created by the analytic pair becomes accessible to the analyst in part through the analyst's experience of 'his own' reveries, forms of mental activity that often appear to be nothing more than narcissistic self-absorption, distractedness, compulsive rumination, daydreaming and the like. A second clinical account focuses on an instance in which the analyst's somatic delusion, in conjunction with the analysand's sensory experiences and body-related fantasies, served as a principal medium through which the analyst experienced and came to understand the meaning of the leading anxieties that were being (intersubjectively) generated.

The dialectically constituted/decentred subject of psychoanalysis. II. The contributions of Klein and Winnicott.

The present paper focuses on the contributions of Klein and Winnicott to a psychoanalytic conception of the dialectically constituted and decentred subject. Klein's idea of 'positions' represents a conception of the subject constituted in the creative and negating dialectical interplay of fundamentally different modes of attributing meaning to experience. The Kleinian subject is decentred in psychological space and in psychoanalytic time. The concept of projective identification provides the elements of a theory of the creation of the subject in the context of a psychological-interpersonal dialectic. The subject for Winnicott is not coincident with the individual psyche: 'There is no such thing as an infant [apart from the mother]'. Winnicott's notion of the creation of the subject in the psychological space between mother and infant involves a conception of the on-going constitution of the subject in the simultaneity of forms of dialectical tension between at-one-ment and separateness, internality and externality, I and me, I and Thou.

The dialectically constituted/decentred subject of psychoanalysis. I. The Freudian subject.

Central among the irreducible elements that define a psychoanalytic understanding of man is Freud's conception of the subject, and yet this theme remained a largely implicit one in Freud's writing. The Freudian conception of the process by which the subject is constituted is fundamentally dialectical in nature and involves the notion that the subject is created and sustained (and at the same time decentred from itself) through the dialectical interplay of consciousness and unconsciousness. The contribution of psychoanalysis to a theory of subjectivity involves the formation of a concept of the subject in which neither consciousness nor unconsciousness holds a privileged position in relation to the other; the two coexist in a mutually creating, preserving and negating relationship to one another. The principle of presence-in-absence and absence-in-presence subtends the dialectical movement between conscious and unconscious dimensions of subjectivity.

Analysing the matrix of transference.

In this paper, the background experiential states forming the matrix of transference are discussed in terms of the interplay of three modes of generating experience: the autistic-contiguous, the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive. Portions of three analyses are discussed in an effort to illustrate clinically some of the ways in which analytic technique is shaped by an understanding of the predominant mode or modes of experience forming the context of the transference-countertransference at any given moment. There is a focus on the ways in which the analyst's interventions must often be directed to the contextual level, or matrix, of transference (for example, the significance of the way the patient is thinking, talking or behaving) before it becomes possible to address other interrelated aspects of transference (for example, the unconscious symbolic meanings of what the patient is thinking, saying or enacting).

The threshold of the male Oedipus complex.

The transition into the male Oedipus complex is complicated by the fact that there is no "change of object" as in female development. For the boy, the mother is both the object of preoedipal attachment to an omnipotent internal object and of oedipal desire for an external whole object. The psychological-interpersonal movement into triangulated oedipal object relations is mediated by the elaboration of mature forms of primal scene fantasies in conjunction with the development of a "transitional oedipal relationship" to the mother.

On the concept of an autistic-contiguous position.

The development of British object-relations theory over the past twenty years can be viewed as containing the beginnings of an exploration of a realm of experience that lies outside of the states of being addressed by Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn and Bion. In this paper, the idea of an autistic-contiguous position is proposed as a way of conceptualizing a psychological organization more primitive than either the paranoid-schizoid or the depressive position. This mode of organizing experience stands in a dialectical relationship to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive modes: each creates, preserves and negates the others. The autistic-contiguous mode is a sensory-dominated, pre-symbolic mode of generating experience which provides a good measure of the boundedness of human experience and the beginnings of a sense of the place where one's experience occurs. Anxiety in this mode consists of an unspeakable terror of the dissolution of boundedness resulting in feelings of leaking, falling or dissolving into endless, shapeless space. Principal forms of defence, ways of organizing and defining experience, types of relatedness to objects, and avenues to psychological change in the autistic-contiguous position are discussed and clinically illustrated.

Misrecognitions and the fear of not knowing.

A form of pathological internal object relationship is described that timelessly perpetuates the infant's subjective experience of the mother's difficulty in recognizing and responding to her infant's internal state. The individual identifies with both the mother and the infant in this internal object relationship and experiences intense anxiety and despair in relation to his efforts at knowing what he is feeling and therefore of knowing who he is. Substitute formations are utilized to create the illusion that the individual knows what he feels.

The transitional oedipal relationship in female development.

The concept of the oedipal transitional relationship is proposed as a way of understanding the nature of the psychological-interpersonal process mediating the little girl's entry into the Oedipus complex. This transitional relationship serves to allow the little girl to discover non-traumatically the father as external object in the context of the safety of the dyadic relationship to the mother. In this early phase of oedipal development, the little girl falls in love with the mother-as-father and the father-as-mother, i.e. the mother in her unconscious identification with her own father. In this way, paradoxically, the first triangulated object relationship is experienced in a two-person relationship; the first heterosexual relationship develops in a relationship involving two females; the father as libidinal object is discovered in the mother.

On potential space.

In this paper, I have proposed that Winnicott's concept of potential space might be understood as a state of mind based upon a series of dialectical relationships between fantasy and reality, me and not-me, symbol and symbolized, etc., each pole of the dialectic creating, informing, and negating the other. The achievement of such a dialectical process occurs by means of a developmental advance from the 'invisible oneness' of the mother-infant unit to the subjective 'three-ness' of the mother-and-infant (as symbolic objects) and the infant (as interpreting subject). Failure to create or maintain the dialectical process leads to specific forms of psychopathology that include the experience of the fantasy object as a thing in itself, the defensive use of reality that forecloses imagination, the relationship to a fetish object, and the state of 'non-experience'. The 'processing' of a projective identification is understood as the re-establishment of the recipient's capacity to maintain a dialectical process (e.g. of me and not-me) that had been limited in the course of the recipient's unconscious participation in the projector's externalized unconscious fantasy.

The concept of internal object relations.

The development of the concept of internal object relations is traced through the work of Freud, Abraham, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Bion. I have proposed that the establishment of an internal object relationship requires a dual splitting of the ego into a pair of dynamically unconscious suborganizations of personality, one identified with the self and the other with the object in the original early object relationship. These aspects of ego stand in a particular relationship to one another the nature of which is determined by the infant's subjective experience of the early relationship. Since both the self- and the object-component of the internal object relationship are aspects of the ego, each has the capacity to generate experience (e.g. to think, feel, and perceive) semi-autonomously and yet in relation to one another. Resistance is understood as the difficulty a patient has in relinquishing pathological attachments involved in unconscious internal object relationships. The view of internal objects proposed in this paper brings into focus types of resistance heretofore only partially understood. These types of resistance are based on the need of the internal object (suborganization of ego) not to be changed by the self (suborganization of ego), the dependency of the internal object on the self, and the envy and jealousy of the internal object for the self-component of the internal object relationship.