Commentary on Papers by Burton and Bonovitz

Abstract

The author probes bastions in Noelle Burton’s and Christopher Bonovitz’s patients’ unsymbolized experience. Bonovitz and his patient were involved in a mutually created phallic collapse, one in which they are unable to use their minds aggressively and vitally to make sense of things together. Bonovitz gained purchase on a set of conspiratorial feelings he had held toward his two analysts, feelings that were enacted with his patient. For Burton and her patient there was a different kind of bastion in which Burton’s wish to know her patient couldn’t be experienced as something other than impingement. The author argues the value of our openness to reverie not only when patients’ have poorly developed capacities for verbalization and symbolization but more generally as a clinical sensibility to cultivate with all patients.

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Steven H. Cooper

Steven H. Cooper, Ph.D., is a Clinical Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Joint Chief Editor Emeritus, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. His new book, The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis, was released in April 2016.