On Saturday, October 5, 2019, The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society hosted Janine de Peyer. She elaborated three heretofore very neglected ‘countertransference’ positions. They were: when the analyst has a seemingly telepathic connection with a patient; when the analyst fears the patient; and when the analyst is erotically attracted to her patient.
Regarding ‘telepathy’: Evoking ideas from quantum physics, to quote from her 2016 paper, de Peyer says,
If particles in the quantum world communicate instantaneously with one another, jumping from one place to another without seeming to need to travel in between, would it not follow that patients’ and therapists’ minds would be capable of doing the same thing?
Is a mind a closed entity just as the brain encased in a skull? Or is the mind like particles in the universe with a connection and interconnection across time and space? When a person knows what another person is thinking, the exact word(s) -- even if the words were previously unknown -- how does one know? Is there a collective unconscious? a hive mind? Or can uncanny parallel thoughts, dreams, and actions between patient and analyst be explained by implicit relational knowing? [Implicit relational knowing not only relies on experience with the physical presence of another, perceiving microexpressions, changes in breath or smell, but these experiences are encoded in the brain to provide expectations on how to behave, even in novel situations (a ‘transference’)] And don’t mirror neurons also rely on physical presence and proximity? What about influence beyond sensory perception? How does one know of the death of a loved one thousands of miles away at the exact moment it occurs? And if humans are capable of knowing the thoughts of others across space and time, could our minds be bombarded with excess stimuli were we not to ignore this capability? Would all privacy of thought then be lost?
There was also a very interesting discussion about fearing from patients for our physical safety. Some thought the patient was trying to instill fear in the analyst. I, without attributing any malintent, prefer to think that a patient must show their own fear to the analyst, presenting it on a silver platter, when s/he evokes it in the therapist. Called an enactment, the analyst and patient together must play out the dissociated parts of the patient if the patient’s experience is to be known. The analyst, too, dissociates, of course, often out of shame (de Peyer noted that with a sexually aggressive male patient she had joined him in repudiation of the feminine by having equated ‘feminine’ with ‘victim’). She had also dissociated her own aggression, leaving the patient to carry it, and carry it alone. Correspondingly, the patient had dissociated his own vulnerability; its recognition and ownership required by him in order to heal.
Perhaps the most provocative (taboo) discussion came when talking about the sexual arousal of the analyst by the patient. [But I will leave that to the next post.]
de Peyer, J. (2002). Private Terrors: Sexualized Aggression and a Psychoanalyst's Fear of Her Patient. Psychoanal. Dial., 12(4):509-530.
de Peyer, J. (2016). Uncanny Communication and the Porous Mind. Psychoanal. Dial., 26(2):156-174.
No comments:
Post a Comment