Love (and Hate) With the Proper Stranger: Affective Honesty and Enactment

Abstract

In this article I illustrate through detailed clinical examples how an impasse may serve as a function of the failure to negotiate recognition. Amid efforts to remain good objects, we often ignore signals that dictate a more forthright and meaningful communication. Subsequently, patient and analyst are often waylaid in power struggles or in dissociated and deadened moments that detour the achievement of deeper meaning between them. To maintain authenticity in the dyad, the analyst can attempt to speak in honest and forthright ways that embody the analyst's (and the patient's) subjective experience. This approach invites both participants to enter a field containing the “dialectical” tensions of grappling with and mutually recognizing the other's realities while maintaining their own.

From this frame of reference, the process of “working through” does not place by a post hoc analysis of enactment; rather the working through occurs as patient and analyst “live it together” as an affectively honest intersubjective experience. Unconscious conflict is not ignored in place of an assumed authenticity in the analyst's efforts to be “open.” Rather both patient and analyst can consider that which is unconscious from the shared experience of what the enactments call forth into awareness and language.

Analytic outcome, and sometimes the very survival of the treatment, depends on a relational process of working through in which enactment is accepted as giving voice to unconscious and dissociated content. This thinking expands on other contemporary views and emphasizes the relationship between dissociation, voice, and enactment. It is argued that if this process takes place with sufficient good faith and mutual recognition, each partner's subjective (conscious, unconscious, and dissociated) agenda can become recognizable and, ultimately, “thinkable and speakable” by the other and can provide a fuller range of subjective content for deepening the analytic work.

I offer the view that the analyst's use of self-disclosure is as negotiable as every other part of the patient-analyst relationship and that its clinical value exists only in relation to the level of “affective honesty” that provides its context at a given time.