Abstract
Gianni Nebbiosi’s paper speaks to therapeutic action in a new key in the challenges of finding communion with a hard-to-reach patient. He achieves this through the creative interweaving of the nonsymbolic, his mime and music, and the symbolic, which attains greater purchase through painful personal reckoning in concert with his increasing awareness of previously unformulated states within and between each member of this particular analytic dyad. Central to this paper is the move from an empathic stance to greater complexity for each of the dyad. Distinguishing between empathy and recognition is germane. Particularly as we witness the transformation through therapeutic action of empathic presence to recognizing presence that permits the emergence of a more complex empathy—an achieved empathy that incorporates feeling and knowing the multiple, more deeply held, and often paradoxical aspects of our patients and indeed of ourselves as these play out in intersubjective space.
Notes
1 These are views articulated and elaborated on by many relational analysts such as Aron, Citation1996; Bass, Citation2003; Benjamin, Citation1999, Citation2012; Black, Citation2003; Bromberg, Citation1998, Citation2006; Ehrenberg, 1972; Davies, Citation2004, Citation2015; Hoffman, Citation1998; M. Slavin, Citation2012; Stern, Citation2003, Citation2009.
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Notes on contributors
Hazel Ipp
Hazel Ipp, Ph.D., is Joint Editor-in-Chief for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the International Journal of Self Psychology. She is a Founding and current Board Director and Past-President of IARPP. She is a Founding Board Director and Vice President of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She is a senior psychoanalyst in private practice and is a supervisor and faculty of several national and international psychoanalytic institutes.
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