The Analyst's Embeddedness and the Emergence of Unconscious Experience

Abstract

Using a case of Owen Renik's, the issue of self-disclosure, and, most importantly, a discussion of the effects of the analyst's concrete psychic and behavioral actions on the immediate analytic context, I outline an experiential-contextual perspective of psychoanalysis. I distinguish this perspective from traditional analytic perspectives that emphasize interpretation, the understanding of meaning, and clinical interventions based on a consensually validatable reality.

The perspective I present is clinically grounded in the analyst's utilization of emergent and unbidden experience that I see as arising from her or his unconscious embeddedness in the immediate clinical context. This experience appears to move on its own as a function of clinical contexts that continually change as a result of the analyst's ongoing psychic and behavioral actions. Working strongly from such experience can lead both to surprising speculations about what is going on in the treatment and to innovative ways in which the analyst might act.

In contrast, the traditional ways of working draw largely from the analyst's conscious and directed thoughts and feelings, which, in turn, are based on a more prescriptive and reality-based understanding of what is taking place with the patient and in the treatment in general. From an experiential-contextual perspective, the analyst's sense of knowing appears emergently and unbidden—almost as a free association—rather than as something the analyst actually “knows.”