This paper is a response to a critique by C. Brooks Brenneis of the written account of a clinical enactment that featured countertransference dissociative effects in treatment and in supervision. The response focuses on the need to analyze power in overlapping clinical dyads, the effect of transpersonal transmission of affect states and disavowed experience, and the relation of power dynamics to transference and to meaning making.
This essay combine's clinical vignettes and an edited set of postings on an Internet discussion of the events of September 11 and their aftermath. I raise questions about how a psychoanalytic inquiry coordinates with other ways of understanding terrorism and trauma and about our complex relationships as clinicians, citizens, witnesses, and actors. I consider the movement from shock to reaction to analysis. I try to weave critical analysis and affective processing I was interested in the difficulty of clinical work in conditions of ongoing uncertainty and shared anxiety. These observations are interspersed with clinical material from experiences in the consulting room and in volunteer work.
In this commentary I address the functions of gender and of bodily state as a way of managing memory, affect, and interactions. I consider the status of alters as narrative or as historical truths. Graham Bass's case illuminates problems and potentials of touch and the inevitability of intersubjectively constructed enactments.