Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Negotiating a deepening of the treatment

The negotiation between analyst and potential analysand, says Wilson, includes facilitating an unending process of “mutual adaptation” toward “a ‘thought community.’”  He writes, “A thought community works to bring into existence new objects, or so modifies old objects that they appear in a new way…”  I surmise that, here, there may be an interpenetration of subjectivities, a ‘hive mind’ where, as Freud noted, one’s unconscious speaks to the unconscious of another. Both patient and analyst participate in many thought communities at a given time, and the analyst facilitates the awareness of the tensions that exist between them as they approximate a closer and closer shared reality and come to terms with differences. One such difference might include the fury at the not good-enough mother clashing with the new found and mitigating recognition that mother had also been deprived as a child. It is the perturbations that make for fruitful moments of negotiation.

Tensions as well exist between differing theories held by the analyst. While theories may serve to ‘hold’ the analyst in times of inevitable uncertainty, adherence to theory may also generate tensions. To which theories we adhere is multifactorially, and unconsciously, determined. Wilson notes the pressure “to adhere and yet not to adhere...” to our theories. Both patient and analyst must adapt not only to each other but to their shared or disparate theories. Wilson expects that analysis will take on a stability “constituted by more than the individual inputs of analysis and patient” [the analytic third], and that the analyst will move “from the realm of precepts to the realm of understanding” and both participants will move toward “understanding how to understand” as they develop together an analytic space where the work of analysis can be fruitfully done.

Wilson, A. (2004). Analytic preparation: The creation of an analytic climate with patients not yet in analysis …

         J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 52:1041-1073.

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