Relational really resonates

A candidate at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, a contemporary institute which emphasizes relational and interpersonal ideas, recently attended a conference on shame in another major city. The presenters were mostly classical/Freudian analysts. A case session was presented and discussed. The TBIPS candidate was flabbergasted to hear how others thought about the female patient, and he felt very isolated when all the attendees seemed to agree with what they were hearing from the discussants. The candidate had learned to listen in a different way from Freudian analysts. He was thinking about attachment, a second year course taught here at TBIPS in which he is currently enrolled.

This particular female patient had been separated at birth for many days due to a postpartum illness in the mother. On reunion, the mother did not believe the baby returned to her was her baby. Then, due to a death in the family and other catastrophes, the girl was separated from her parents again for three years.

In the session presented, the female patient came late and then asked for some water. The Freudian analysts all commented that she was a very aggressive patient. When the patient asked the therapist ‘what do you want me to talk about?’ the discussants reiterated what a very aggressive patient she was, ‘trying to control everything.’ The analyst remained silent and the patient began to talk about things in her life and the discussants complained that she was spewing ‘useless’ information, information of no value or importance in attempt to ‘disorient’ and confuse her therapist. They complained that she did not talk about her trauma and so did not allow them to give interpretations that would ‘create space’ inside of her.

The TBIPS candidate was bewildered by the comments, for the patient had, to him, been saying very meaningful things. She had been talking about her school days when she had always felt forgotten by others, for example, her name being left off the class rosters such that she had not even been assigned to a classroom teacher. The candidate felt the patient was talking about the trauma, about having been ‘forgotten’ by her own parents, left out of/ absent from their minds, if you will.

The candidate, feeling the patient had been unduly re-traumatized, felt he had to speak up and add a different point of view  to that of drive theory and aggression. He thought that, just as the the patient had been raised in a family where her feelings had no value for her family, so, too, had the analysts been seeing her words as valueless, and the therapist had been feeling ‘useless’ to ply the wares of the classical analytic trade, interpretation. The candidate wanted to think with the attendees about the need to establish between therapist and patient -- a patient with attachment traumas -- a secure attachment, a safe space from which to explore one’s inner life.  

The candidate had been disappointed by the conference. It had seemed unimaginative, lacking in curiosity and narrow in its scope, failing to take into account infant-caregiver research and attachment theory. I was sorry for the candidate’s suffering through that seminar but inordinately proud of his broadened perspective, as if TBIPS courses had ‘created space,’ opened up something inside of him.