Moments of Truth and Perverse Scenarios in Psychoanalysis: Revisiting Davies' “Love in the Afternoon”

Abstract

This paper addresses what I believe is one of the fundamental implications of Davies' groundbreaking and controversial paper, “Love in the Afternoon.” I suggest that the “perverse scenario” between parent and child that Davies describes in the developmental psychopathology of her patient may, in fact, occur in many ways in the lives and histories of many patients. Such “perverse scenarios” may sometimes be less overtly sexualized, and more subtle, but they prove to be no less insidiously destructive of patients' psychic cohesion. In this context, the possibilities for perverse scenarios and confrontations with “moments of truth” may occur frequently, albeit less in dramatic ways, in the patient–therapist engagement. The paper suggests that effective therapeutic action inevitably requires of the analyst the kind of real “moment of truth” decisions that contain within them the fate, and the hope, for the psychic integrity of both analyst and patient.

Versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American Psychological Association, San Antonio, Texas, April 2009, the South Jerusalem Mental Health Center, Jerusalem, Israel, March 2011, and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity and the Sandor Ferenczi Center at New School University, New York, NY, February, 2013. Thanks to Helit Atar-Greenfield, Ph.D., Tanya Cotler, Ph.D., Naama Gershy, M.A., Alisa Levine, Psy.D., and Mia Medina, Psy.D., for their careful reading and comments on various drafts of this paper. Irene Fast, Ph.D., Miki Rahmani, M.A., and Beth Schreiber, Ph.D., contributed substantively to my thinking in this paper.

Notes

Versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American Psychological Association, San Antonio, Texas, April 2009, the South Jerusalem Mental Health Center, Jerusalem, Israel, March 2011, and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity and the Sandor Ferenczi Center at New School University, New York, NY, February, 2013. Thanks to Helit Atar-Greenfield, Ph.D., Tanya Cotler, Ph.D., Naama Gershy, M.A., Alisa Levine, Psy.D., and Mia Medina, Psy.D., for their careful reading and comments on various drafts of this paper. Irene Fast, Ph.D., Miki Rahmani, M.A., and Beth Schreiber, Ph.D., contributed substantively to my thinking in this paper.

¹Bollas (1987) first employed the term “unthought known,” in a masterful work that raises parallel issues to the question of the way unacknowledged relational influences affect the integrity of the mind in the course of development.

²If the etymology of words might shed some light on aspects of human experience, it is worth noting the dual usage of the word moment in English, both for a point in time and as something weighty and important, as in a discovery of great moment, or momentous. Both derive from the Latin root movere, “to move.” In the context of this paper, I am suggesting that something significant, momentous, can and does happen in a fraction, or moment, of time, in the choices the analyst makes in what he says or does not say to his patients (See Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=moment).

³Cornell (2011), in a paper written independently, but in the same time frame as this one, has addressed remarkably similar concerns about the integrity of the patient's mind from within the perspective of relational transactional analysis. As it happens, he also cites the same passage from Ogden noted above.