ABSTRACT
In this paper, I explore how patients’ experiences of their analysts’ physicality – conveyed in the concrete aspects of the analyst’s body, clothing, and office – can be a constructive domain of budding intersubjective engagement. This is both generally true, and of specific salience with narcissistically vulnerable patients, for whom states of psychosomatic unity are compromised, and with whom finding ways to be “usable” as objects can be elusive. At the same time, both members of the dyad can resist such inquiries and enactments despite their generative potential. I highlight how we analysts may shy away from pursuing these aspects of our patients’ transferences because of our own anxieties about how we do or do not want to be seen. Such anxieties and vulnerabilities can be heightened in this arena, given that the analyst’s physicality reflects both material constraints and fluid, unstable meanings derived from the shifting intersections between personal construction, relational context, and the broader sociocultural surround, particularly as it informs expressions of gender, race, class, and the like.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 In this sense, like a number of contemporary theorist-clinicians, I am focused on the progressive, prospective aspect of analytic treatment, and the variety of ways that therapists participate in co-creating new experiences to potentiate foreclosed experiences of self, hope, and futurity (e.g., Alvaraz, Citation1992; Aron & Atlas, Citation2015; Cooper, Citation2000; Davies, Citation2018; Director, Citation2009; Grossmark, Citation2012, Levine, Citation2016; Schwartz Cooney, Citation2018; Seligman, Citation2016; S. Stern, Citation2019, among others).
2 See for example, (Dimen, Citation1991; Harris, Citation1997; Hartman, Citation2006; Lemma, Citation2014; Orbach, Citation2003, Citation2006; Petrucelli, Citation2008; Sands, Citation2020; and Schoen, Citation2014, among others).
3 In fact, there are an array of other answers to Aron’s question, among them developmental histories that make us prone to feeling we must attend to and care for our important Others, and certainly conflicts over voyeurism and exhibitionism may find their roots in these kinds of relational matrices. But Aron’s basic point – that ambivalence about both seeing and being seen is salient among psychoanalysts, perhaps even central to psychoanalytic practice – is a valuable one and worthy of more exploration than I can give it here.
4 For some classic examples in the literature in addition to Aron (Citation1991), see Benjamin (Citation1988), Davies (Citation1994), Hoffman (Citation1983); Slavin (Citation2010), and an array of theorists on maternal subjectivity (e.g., Bassin, Chodorow, Dimen, Dinnerstein, Fast, Goldner, Harris, Layton, among others).
5 There is a history in psychoanalysis of relegating investments in objects such as clothing, particularly as they are associated with gender, to that of a fetish (e.g., Kaplan, Citation1991). That said, there are of number of contemporary gender theorists who have been challenging the distinction between surface and depth, and who argue that surface presentations of gender are both constituted culturally and experienced as core aspects of the self (e.g., Butler, Citation1990, Dimen, Citation2003, Elise, Citation2006, Hartman, Citation2006, Harris, Citation2006, Roth, Citation2006).
6 Pregnancy is particularly complicated in this regard, in so far as it often (but not always) intimates a welcome or desired event, and can, of course inspire intense feelings in patients of envy, competition, rivalry, and an array of oedipal longings and losses. Yet, it is nevertheless a change that also destabilizes the analyst across many domains (e.g., Fenster et al., Citation1986/Citation2009).
7 Greenberg valuably elaborates these points, articulating both the inhibitions patients encounter in bringing up issues with which they sense their analysts personally struggle, and the ways in which “true negative transferences presuppose a background sense of safety, a conviction that one can see what one sees, tendentiously distorted or not without endangering the analyst of the analytic relationship” (Greenberg, Citation1991, p. 63).
8 See Holmes (Citation1992), and Leary (Citation2000, Citation2012) on “racial enactments,” for nuanced elaborations of the meaning of differences in skin color in therapeutic dyads in which both patient and analyst are Black, and Suchet (Citation2004) for a moving description of the flow of racial enactments – also clearly mediated by class— between a White analyst and a Black patient.
9 Given the interplay of cultural and developmental forces, the integration of sexual subjectify and analytic identity can be particularly difficult for women analysts, not only in working with erotic transferences (e.g., Benjamin, Citation1994; Celenza, Citation2010; de Peyer, Citation2022), but also in helping women patients integrate agency and sexuality into an experience of personal subjectivity (e.g., Baker-Pitts, Citation2007; Benjamin, Citation1988, Citation1991; Elise, Citation2007; Fast, Citation1991; Schoen, Citation2014). Elise (Citation2007) has also specifically addressed the complexity of the analyst’s clothing choices in this regard. All this can make questions about patients’ experiences of their therapists’ physicality seem both more pressing, or potentially more difficult to engage for women analysts. On the other hand, as Burka notes, “every patient is in the room with a therapist’s body,” (Citation1996, p. 257) in ways that both consciously and unconsciously influence the dyadic field and every therapist can attend or in-attend to the patient’s experience of their physicality and the array of meanings with which this can be imbued.
Alvaraz, A. (1992). Live company. Routledge. Aron, L., & Atlas, G. (2015). Generative enactment: Memories from the future. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 25(3), 309–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2015.1034554 Cooper, S. (2000). Objects of hope: Exploring possibility and limit in psychoanalysis. The Analytic Press. Davies, J. M. (2018). The “once and future” focus of a relational psychoanalysis: Discussion of “vitalizing enactment”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 28(3), 355–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2018.1459401 Director, L. (2009). The enlivening object. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 45(1), 120–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2009.10745990 Grossmark, R. (2012). The unobtrusive relational analyst. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22(6), 629–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2012.737693 Levine, L. (2016). A mutual survival of destructiveness and its creative potential for agency and desire. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26(1), 36–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2016.1123511 Schwartz Cooney, A. (2018). Vitalizing enactment: A relational exploration. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 28(3), 340–354. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2018.1459398 Seligman, S. (2016). Disorders of temporality and the subjective experience of time: Unresponsive objects and the vacuity of the future. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26(2), 110–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2016.1144954 Stern, S. (2019). Airless worlds: The traumatic sequelae of identification with parental negation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 29(4), 435–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2019.1632660 Dimen, M. (1991). Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting and transitional space. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(3), 335–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889109538904 Harris, A. (1997). Aggression, envy, and ambition: The circulating tensions in women’s relation to aggression. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 2, 291–325. Hartman, S. (2006). Disclosure, dis-closure, diss/clothes/sure: Commentary on paper by Helen K. Gediman. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16, 273–292. Lemma, A. (2014). The body of the analyst and the analytic setting: Reflections on the embodied setting and the symbiotic transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 95(2), 225–244. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-8315.12147 Orbach, S. (2003). Part 1: There is no such thing as a body. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 20(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0118.2003.tb00110.x Orbach, S. (2006). How can we have a body?: Desires and corporeality. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7, 89–111. Petrucelli, J. (2008). When a body meets a body: The impact of the therapist’s body on eating-disordered patients. In F. S. Anderson (Ed.), Bodies in treatment: The unspoken dimension (pp. 237–253). The Analytic Press. Sands, S. H. (2020). Body experience in the analysis of the older woman. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 40(3), 173–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2020.1727208 Schoen, S. (2014). You’re the one that I want: Appetite, agency, and the gendered self. In J. Petrucelli (Ed.), Body-states: Interpersonal/relational perspectives on the treatment of eating disorders (pp. 59–78). Routledge. Aron, L. (1991). The patient’s experience of the analyst’s subjectivity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(1), 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889109538884 Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love. Pantheon Books. Davies, J. M. (1994). Love in the afternoon: A relational reconsideration of desire and dread in the countertransference. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 4(2), 153–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889409539011 Hoffman, I. Z. (1983). The patient’s interpretation of the analyst’s experience. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 19(3), 389–422. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.1983.10746615 Slavin, J. H. (2010). Becoming an individual: Technically subversive thoughts on the role of the analyst’s influence. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 20(3), 308–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2010.483957 Kaplan, L. (1991). Female perversions. Doubleday. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Dimen, M. (2003). Sexuality, intimacy, power. The Analytic Press. Elise, D. (2006). Beauty and the aesthetic impact of the bejeweled mother: Discussion of papers by Debra Roth and Elaine Freedgood. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7, 207–215. Hartman, S. (2006). Disclosure, dis-closure, diss/clothes/sure: Commentary on paper by Helen K. Gediman. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16, 273–292. Harris, H. (2006). Introduction to refashioning the self—Passionate possibilities and possible passions. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7, 173–177. Roth, D. (2006). Adornment as a method of interior design. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7, 179–194. Fenster, S., Phillips, S., & Rapoport, E. (1986/2009). The therapist’s pregnancy: Intrusion into analytic space. The Analytic Press. Fenster, S., Phillips, S., & Rapoport, E. (1986/2009). The therapist’s pregnancy: Intrusion into analytic space. The Analytic Press. Greenberg, J. R. (1991). Countertransference and reality. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(1), 52–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889109538885 Holmes, D. E. (1992). Race and transference in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 73, 1–11. Leary, K. (2000). Racial enactments in dynamic treatment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4), 623–653. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481881009348573 Leary, K. (2012). Race as an adaptive challenge: Working with diversity in the clinical consulting room. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2(3), 279–291. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027817 Suchet, M. (2004). A relational encounter with race. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14(4), 423–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481881409348796 Benjamin, J. (1994). What angel would hear me? The erotics of transference. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 14(4), 535–557. https://doi.org/10.1080/07351699409534005 Celenza, A. (2010). The guilty pleasure of erotic countertransference: Searching for the radical true. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 11(4), 175–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2010.513222 de Peyer, J. (2022). Unspoken rhapsody: Female erotic countertransfernce and the dissociation of desire. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 19(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1551806X.2021.2000798 Baker-Pitts, C. (2007). Two bodies in the room: An intersubjective view of female objectification. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 12(2), 124–141. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100117 Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love. Pantheon Books. Benjamin, J. (1991). Father and daughter: Identification with difference—A contribution to gender heterodoxy. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(3), 277–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889109538900 Elise, D. (2007). The black man and the mermaid: Desire and disruption in the analytic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 17(6), 791–909. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481880701703292 Fast, I. (1991). Commentary on “Father and daughter: Identification with difference—A contribution to gender heterodoxy”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(3), 301–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889109538901 Schoen, S. (2014). You’re the one that I want: Appetite, agency, and the gendered self. In J. Petrucelli (Ed.), Body-states: Interpersonal/relational perspectives on the treatment of eating disorders (pp. 59–78). Routledge. Elise, D. (2007). The black man and the mermaid: Desire and disruption in the analytic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 17(6), 791–909. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481880701703292 Burka, J. B. (1996). The therapist’s body in reality and fantasy: A perspective from an overweight therapist. In B. Gerson (Ed.), The therapist as a person: Life crises, life choices, life experiences, and their effects on treatment (pp. 255–275). The Analytic Press. Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sarah Schoen
Sarah Schoen, Ph.D. is faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute; Faculty and Supervisor at White’s Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Program; and invited faculty at the Columbia Psychoanalytic University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is on the editorial board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and is in private practice in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.