Mutual Vulnerability: Intimacy, Psychic Collisions, and the Shards of Trauma

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the profound potential, and the challenges, of mutual vulnerability in psychoanalysis. I describe ways in which analysts are penetrated by shards of our patients’ trauma, and how this interpenetrates with our own vulnerabilities and ungrieved losses (Harris, 2009; Levine, 2016). In my patient Lisa’s fierce determination to come into being, and in our mutual efforts to survive each other’s ruthlessness (Winnicott, 1969) we each struggle to recognize and own malignant “not-me” versions of ourselves (Bromberg, 1998), as we reach toward reparation, mutual recognition, and healing.

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Notes on contributors

Lauren Levine

Lauren Levine, Ph.D., is Faculty, The Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Studies; Supervisor in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at City University of New York; and Visiting Faculty at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. She is on the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and has written about transformative aspects of the analyst’s own analysis and their resonance in work with patients, ways in which shame, recognition, and creativity are co-constructed in analytic realms, trauma and mutual vulnerability. Dr. Levine is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.