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In. Reply to Altman's and Schellekes's questions and discussion, the author explores in more depth his own theoretical-technical point of view in order to clarify – chiefly in the light of a modern application of Ferenczi's and Heimann's way of thinking – the rationale for the selection of clinical facts in his paper.
In response to Franco Borgogno's article, the author talks about the dread of falling, a theme that appears in some of the dreams presented in Borgogno's case study and that conceals very primitive anxieties, each resulting from specific object relations constellations. The discussion elaborates the understanding of this dread through various theoretical perspectives as well as through Samuel Beckett's (1946) short story, >The Expelled.<.
The thoughtful discussions of my paper by Alan Schore, Wilma Bucci, and James Fosshage raise important considerations about the relationship between theory, research, and the micromoment interactions constituting the activity of psychoanalysis. For the opportunity afforded by their contributions, and to Psychoanalytic Dialogues for publishing our exchanges, I express deep gratitude. I am initially impacted by the appreciation shown by my colleagues for the approach I am illustrating to clinical attention and its value for an expanded and, in certain ways, revised scope of psychoanalytic activity. In particular, I am appreciative of the ways that each commentator has taken up my emphasis on expanding psychoanalytic attention beyond symbolic pathways of exchange and has further contributed to understanding how this can occur. As part of a consideration of points of convergence and difference between us, I address how such convergences and differences shape both the values and pitfalls of comparisons across research, theory, and practice.
Steven H. Knoblauch has been developing a strategy and theoretical perspective for using and understanding complex nonverbal experiences and communications that occur in the analytic exchange. His delineation of nonverbal communication contributes substantially to the ongoing expansion of our views of psychoanalytic interaction and theories of therapeutic action. This expansion, contributed to by many, involves the development of an interactive systems model in which verbal and nonverbal communications are viewed as actions occurring at explicit and implicit levels. In a number of Knoblauch's clinical illustrations, subsymbolic processes rapidly invoke, or are invoked by, nonverbal or imagistic symbolic processing and meaning-making as well, often followed by verbal symbolizing processing. Subsymbolic and verbal and imagistic symbolic processing, intrinsic modes of organizing data, probably continually influence one another bidirectionally in a flowing feedback loop.
Bucci's model of emotional communication, developed in the context of her theory of multiple coding and the referential process, is applied to Knoblauch's microanalytic report of his experience of the patient and himself and their interactions during a single session of an ongoing treatment. The referential process is a bidirectional function connecting the diverse sensory, somatic, and motoric representations of the subsymbolic system with imagery and words. The process operates partially and to varying degrees within both participants in the case presented here, the dissociation among systems is severe, and emotional communication within the dyad occurs at first primarily in subsymbolic, bodily forms. Where gaps in the referential process exist for the patient, the analyst's own experience and associations operate to evoke new connections for her we see this process in moment-by-moment glimpses of the analyst's experience and his interactions with the patient. Gaps in the reader's knowledge, and possibly the analyst's knowledge, of the patient are discussed.
In October 2004 it was my pleasure to present at a cutting-edge conference entitled The Interplay of Implicit and Explicit Processes in Psychoanalysis. In addition to offering an address (>The Essential Role of the Right Brain in the Implicit Self: Development, Psychopathogenesis, and Psychotherapy<), I also provided a commentary to Steven Knoblauch's excellent paper, >Body Rhythms and the Unconscious: Toward an Expanding of Clinical Attention.< In the following, I briefly summarize these presentations, with the purpose of showing how current advances in developmental and neuropsychoanalysis are being incorporated into the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. This work is part of an ongoing effort to expand regulation theory, an overarching theoretical model of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the implicit self.
Wish, Need, Drive: Motive in the Light of Dynamic Systems Theory and Edelman's Selectionist Theory
(2005)
Limitations to the process of symbolization for communication in psychoanalytic work are considered as the basis for an expansion of clinical attention to include embodied experience as a source of unconscious meaning. The displacement effect of language and the futility that language meets, as description of lived experience, are key points recognized in the contributions of Daniel Stern and Jacques Lacan. Irwin Hoffman's critique of assumptions underlying Freud's technique for analytic work are reviewed as a point of departure for recommending a relational approach to analytic attention expanded with an emphasis on micromoment-embodied communication in addition to symbolized communication. A clinical narrative is offered, highlighting the rhythms of movement between embodied and verbally symbolized communication as a basis for constructing unconscious meaning. The implications of this approach are summarized for expanding analytic attention to include registers of communication in addition to the verbal symbolic.
This paper revisits the case of >Karen< (>Whose Bad Objects Are We Anyway? Repetition and Our Elusive Love Affair with Evil,< PD 14/6) eight years after the time period described in the earlier paper, and uses this case material as a backdrop for discussing a relational reformulation of the termination process. The paper posits that an analysis conducted around a model of mind that holds multiple self–other configurations as the fundamental organizing structures needs to take these self–other configurations into account in ending an intensive treatment. Therefore termination becomes, from this perspective, a series of endings between multiple self–other dyads that have emerged during the treatment process. Extended clinical material is provided to illustrate this point of view.