Silent dialogues in the analytic relationship

Abstract

In borderline or even narcissistic patients, the relation to the objects is built on the basis of omnipotent control, so that those patients present difficulties related to mourning for the loss, as well as for the independence, of the objects. Their basic trait is a huge inability to recognize the separateness of others, together with an excessive use of primitive defense mechanisms, such as projective identification. Each experience that contains the danger of re-experiencing the primal separation poses an attack on the analytic setting, in order to avoid such a re-experiencing. Those attacks sometimes take the known form of acting out, whereas other times they are limited to a special use of speech, which lacks any communicational faculty and is used rather as a weapon. This special climate affects the analyst, causing specific countertransferential reactions. Nowadays, we tend to consider such a communication not mostly as an obstacle, but rather as an opportunity, allowing the analyst to comprehend the patient, through his countertransference, and create a meaning to replace the void those patients usually experience. The transference and countertransference enactments, their silent dialogues taking place in the analytic setting, are those which progressively give meaning in this primitive non verbal communication.

Keywords:

• Primal communication
• projective identification
• mourning
• separateness
• countertransference
• emptiness