Contingency, a sense of surprise, and trauma

ABSTRACT

All human experience is organized in the dynamic space between necessity and contingency, and these values play a significant role in therapeutic issues such as human encounters, trauma, racism, physical disease, accidents and minority experience. How and in what form do contingency and necessity emerge in our therapeutic works? How can we help our patients to live with human tragedy and the inevitable contingencies and necessities of the human world? Through a case vignette of a traumatized female patient, I attempt to explore how the therapist’s recognition of being a player-witness—the recognition that “I could have been my patient”—can help both the therapist and patient to share the transience of the world and hope for the future. I conclude that the sense of surprise—that comes with the therapist’s realization that there is no reason why the trauma experienced by the patient could not have happened to them—allows the therapist, and patient, to be open to many other possibilities in their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Alter-ego
• contingency
• humanization
• player-witness
• psychoanalytic zero
• traumatization
• twinship

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Plenary IV: Living and Practicing When the World Feels Uncertain, the 43rd Annual IAPSP International Conference, Sunday, October 23, 2022, Washington, D.C.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Koichi Togashi

Koichi Togashi, Ph.D., L.P., is a Council Member of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, an Associate Editor of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, and an Editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is an author of “Kohut’s Twinship across Cultures: The Psychology of Being Human” (co-authored with Amanda Kottler, Routledge, 2015), and “Psychoanalytic Zero: A Decolonizing Study of Therapeutic Dialogues” (Routledge, 2020)