On the Precipice

Abstract

This discussion sees this transformative one-session treatment as a wonderful exemplar of the power of witnessing another person’s life and traumas. I imagine Freud, the patient, and the world at particular moments in historical and personal time, placing them all on a precipice. It is important to remember that although a precipice can be a point of great danger or even peril, it can also be the brink of something new and life transforming. I argue that this precipice allowed a unique witnessing moment leading to transformative growth for the patient.

Keywords:

• witnessing
• enactment
• crisis
• “birth of the self”

Notes

¹ There is not space to cover the contemporary analytic paradigm shift concerning enactment and enactive experience, but I refer the reader to some of the literature (Aron & Atlas, 2015; Bass, 2003; Black, 2003; Boston Change Process Study Group, 2013, Harris, 2011; Katz, 2013; McLaughlin, 1991; Reis, 2009; Slavin & Rahmani, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jill Salberg

Jill Salberg, PhD, ABPP, is a clinical adjunct associate professor of psychology, faculty member, and clinical consultant/supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and faculty and supervisor at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. Her papers have been published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and American Imago, and she has chapters in Relational Traditions, Vol. 5; The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud; and Answering a Question with a Question. She is a contributor to and the editor of the book Good Enough Endings: Breaks, Interruptions and Terminations from Contemporary Relational Perspectives. She has conceived of and coedits a new book series, Psyche and Soul: Psychoanalysis, Spirituality and Religion in Dialogue, at Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. She has edited two books with Sue Grand, The Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma and Transgenerational Trauma and the Other: Dialogues Across History and Difference, published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group (forthcoming December 2016). She is in private practice in Manhattan.