Spontaneity and Improvisation in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Spontaneity—a dimension of the subjective experience of the individual and improvisation—the rules of engagement as established in the theater arts, are described as intrinsic to the analytic dialogue and as frequently facilitating the therapeutic process. After a review of the relevant contemporary psychoanalytic literature, clinical material is presented to illustrate the psychoanalytic value of improvisation in opening up new areas of exploration and new modes of participation. The various theoretical formulations of the clinical example are discussed to support the proposition that spontaneity and improvisation are essential to all psychoanalytic conversations.

Notes

¹Rosalind Chaplin Kindler, who trained as an actress before she became a psychotherapist, provided me with these examples and made me aware of the fascinating overlap between improvisational theater and the psychoanalytic process.

²Nachmanovich quoted Johnstone (1980), the inventor of “Theatresports” from the Loose Moose Improvisational Theatre in Calgary. He based his workshops on an exercise called one-on-one no-blocking. “Blocking the other player's reality stops the game and may be caused when one is unable to surrender to an unfolding situation and interaction, when one is attached to being right-one of the most common psychopathologies of everyday life” (p. 774).

³As if attempting to playfully enact this principle of integrating dialectical tension between the ritual and the spontaneous, before delivering his “You are a complete idiot” comment, Kohut (1984) set it up bywarning his analysand that hewas about to give him “the deepest interpretation he had so far received in his analysis” (p. 74).

⁴Ros Kindler (personal communication) put it nicely when she said that giving up the need for control and doing what feels weird and strange is at the heart of good improvisational work just as it at the heart of truly good acting.