Mutuality – sine qua non. An attempt to continue analyzing unilaterally. Emotionality disappeared analysis insipid. Relationship – distant. Once mutuality has been attempted, one sided analysis then is no longer possible – not productive. Now the question: must every case be mutual- – and to what extent- [Dupont, 1988, p. 213].
Flat Mountain
(1996)
Mannie and Music
(1998)
Reply to Dimen
(2000)
This essay, a commentary on Sorenson's >Psychoanalytic Institutes as Religious Denominations,< explores a number of questions concerning the fate of psychoanalysis and the institutions that support it. How can psychoanalysis best survive its current travails, transcend the internecine conflicts that have always plagued it, and ride its contemporary reformation into a vital, relevant and creative second century? Approaches to training and to institutional structure at several contemporary relational psychoanalytic training programs are discussed and contrasted with more traditional models as a way of suggesting some promising directions for the future growth of psychoanalysis as a discipline.
This paper explores sources of therapeutic action located in inchoate experience, in the often-preconscious resonance that is generated in that dimension of experience which we have come to regard as enacted in the transference/countertransference field. The living and working through of a wide range of problematic and reparative elements distilled in the analytic relationship are described as a crucial source of therapeutic action. A brief historical treatment of the place of enactment in different psychoanalytic traditions is followed by the explication of two different kinds of enactments: ordinary, quotidian enactments that form the daily ebb and flow or ordinary analytic process and (capital E) Enactments. The latter are highly condensed precipitates of unconscious psychic elements in patient and in analyst that mobilize our full, heightened attention and define, and take hold of, analytic activity for periods of time. Clinical vignettes by Theodore Jacobs and Margaret Black are discussed in explicating the latter distinction and considering its implications for technique.