Both parts of the therapeutic dyad are searching for ways of relating between them that are more flexible and that open up new possibilities for thought and feeling. When therapy succeeds, patients transcend old transference expectations and fears in a meeting with another subject, a meeting with qualities of something essentially new. Here, it is hypothesized that the patient in the transference unconsciously searches for a transformational meeting with another person. Through the interaction that is a result of this search, the patient moves between twoness and thirdness, and thereby enhances his or her mentalizing capacity. A transcript (of recorded material) from an intensive psychoanalytic therapy with a female patient in her early twenties is presented, analyzed, and discussed, focusing on how she made progress in her relational search during a session.
This paper explores the role of existential vulnerability in the experience of personal identity and how identity is found and created. Existential vulnerabilities mark a boundary between what humans can bring about willfully or manipulate to their advantage and what is resistant to such actions. These vulnerabilities have their origin, on an ontological level, in fundamental conditions of human existence. At the same time, they have implications on a psychological level when it comes to self-experience and identity formation. Narrative and value-based identity depend on how a person relates to finitude and the ambiguous side of lived experience. Relational identity depends on how a person relates to existential aloneness and the fact that the meaning and value of our actions are partly out of our control; they are always also dependent on other people’s responses to us. Bodily identity makes us feel continuous and real, but at the same time vulnerable to death and the gaze and actions of others. Being >thrown< into an arbitrary life context is also a form of existential vulnerability. Authentic psychological identities can develop by giving meaning to these circumstances and balancing acceptance of existential vulnerability with the courage to make choices and act.