Getting Cold Feet, Defining “Safe-Enough” Borders: Dissociation, Multiplicity, and Integration in the Analyst’s Experience

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the fate of the analyst’s multiple self/other organizations during times of heightened countertransferential enactment. It is suggested that such countertransference activity involves the “de-homogenization” of otherwise indecipherably integrated self/other constellations, evoked independently or in response to, but always in interaction with, the patient’s own unique organization of multiple centers of psychic awareness and unconscious receptivity. An extended clinical example is used to illustrate the theoretical conceptualization.