My Colleague, That Other

Abstract

The author uses Janine Puget's ideas about the social dimension of the building of subjectivity to reflect about relationships among analysts and among psychoanalytic institutions. Extending Puget's notions of difference, and of representation versus presentation, the author highlights the anxiety and disturbance generated in tolerating the otherness of the other and the impact of the new. Tracing the development of our awareness of the effects of our subjectivity beyond narcissism, the author points out the distress caused by otherness, often resulting in a need to pathologize that which cannot be made coherent. Following this line, the paper attempts to clarify the difficulties analyst face in accepting ideas different from those in which they were trained. The emergence of really new ideas and of analytic creativity can only occur in the tolerance of the space of the Two.