Deep Diving: Imagination, Intuition, and the Interpenetration of Minds

Abstract

How do we help patients who come to us without access to feelings and without curiosity about themselves and others? The author suggests that the analyst’s imagination and intuition provide a channel or medium through which to apprehend aspects of the patient’s internal life, make contact and communicate with younger parts of the patient, and provide containment to these parts of the person. As the analyst engages her imagination in this way, communication channels open and shared states of consciousness between analyst and patient are created, thereby facilitating the interpenetration of minds and the opening up of previously closed object worlds. In the course of this work, compassion serves as a vehicle for truth, penetrating previously closed object relational systems. This kind of work poses risks for the analyst.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank the following individuals for their careful reading and editorial contributions to this paper: Cathleen Adams, Janine de Peyer, Adrienne Harris, Alan Kintzer, Maria Lechich, and Stacy Malin.

Notes

¹ Most of what we perceive is not consciously registered (Dehaene, 2014).

² I am in complete agreement with Rosenfeld’s (1987) view that the analyst remain completely open, throughout the analysis, to what role the patient assigns him or her. These roles are not limited to parental roles.

³ Benjamin’s (2012) “differentiating third” is relevant here.

⁴ Kahneman (2011) distinguished two modes of thought. System 1, or intuition, is controlled by the right hemisphere and is based upon instantaneous evaluation of internal and external cues that are not consciously perceived or processed.

⁵ I am thinking here about how a mother seems to “read the mind” of her young child.

⁶ Importantly including shame (see Davies, 2004). Compassion is an achieved end for the therapist, that is, it is a state of mind reached through the difficult work of what Bion (1962) termed “containment.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noelle Burton

Noelle Burton, Psy.D., is Founding Member, Faculty and Supervising Analyst, The Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia; Faculty, The Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Studies; and Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is in private practice in Haverford, Pennsylvania.