Improvisation and Mutual Inductive Identification in Couples Therapy: Commentary on Paper by Susan M. Shimmerlik

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Notes

¹Shimmerlik investigation of “explicit and implicit memory systems” and their corresponding forms of communication stems from cognitive neuroscience and infant development research.

²I have gratefully borrowed the distinction between little “i” and big “I” improvisation from Lynne Preston (2007), which arose in her discussion of my work on improvisation with Eugene Gendlin.For me, important signals of the “mutual dissociation” in analytic process involve the disappearance of play. By this, I mean the inhibition within myself and my patients to play with our ideas and feelings, as well as our inhibition to play with one another. My efforts in forwarding ideas about improvisation are an attempt to follow Winnicott's (1971) admonition that if the patient can't play, he must be taught to, and if the analyst can't play, no therapy can happen. I think this was among his greatest insights, though never fully pursued in adult treatment.

³Although, Hoffman (1998) used the term “spontaneity” in its dialectical position vis-à-vis ritual, his work is very similar to what I am trying to illuminate in the dramaturgical metaphors of the improvisational versus the “scripted.”

⁴ Bromberg (2006) differentiated normal dissociation from traumatic dissociation, noting that in the latter, the traumatically dissociated self-state often trumps the others. I would add that the requirement of the traumatized, often rigidified self-state frequently exert extra pressure on the requirement of attuned recognition, a requirement that risks tilting the relational field into one-up and one-down complementarity (Benjamin, 1992, 2004).

⁵This seemingly sobering fact actually makes a great deal of common sense. When children are developing, they are changing all the time. The child, to whom the parent seemed so exquisitely attuned a month ago, may well be a “different” child this month and different in yet another. It can be very difficult to “score” very highly with “moving targets”! In fact, parents who try too hard can be experienced as overly attentive, robbing a child of her necessary privacy to sometimes come to things on her own terms before they are explicitly translated for her.

⁶Obviously, the capacity to play at all may be sorely missing in the individual patient or the couple, so then the effort at teaching them how to play, much as Winnicott averred, must take place.

⁷See discussion of untangling “relational knots” (B. Pizer, 2003; Ringstrom, 2003). Mostly, however, I think it requires some faith in play in psychotherapy. This then entails, beginning to experiment with ways in which the constricted “scripted-ness” between (and within) each can be “rewritten.” In effect, in Shimmerlik's work with Bob and Debbie, all three were mutually inducing each other into familiar roles vis-à-vis one another that corresponded with a kind of reaction to a group mutual dissociative process that had to be enacted to be investigated.

⁸See examples of this in the collection articles of articles on improvisation that I mentioned previously.