The Analyst’s Way of Being: Recognizing Separable Subjectivities and The Pendulum’s Swing

Abstract

Whether the analyst finds the patient’s emerging transference affectively tolerable or intolerable plays an important role in the analytic couple’s negotiation of the configuration that the transference-countertransference relationship ultimately assumes. If the analyst is deeply repelled by transference-related roles to which he is assigned, patient-ascribed attributions, or projection-drenched interactions, he may react in violent protest, engaging in enactments that say more about his separable subjectivity than about the intersubjective situation. While there has been a recent trend to view enactments as a crucial aspect of psychoanalytic technique, this trend risks overlooking the way in which the analyst’s way of being comes into play in the treatment.

• Analyst’s way of being
• separable subjectivities
• analytic process
• countertransference
• enactment
• manifest and core transference
• one- and two-person psychologies
• role responsiveness
• analytic stance
• doer/done to
• conjunctive and disjunctive reactions
• projective identification
• analyst’s psychology