The Analytic Pair in Action

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Notes

Following Jacobs (1991) I will “use the term countertransference … to refer to influences on the analyst’s understanding and technique that stem both from his transferences and from his emotional responses to the patient’s transferences.” (p. 140).

This kind of response—at an angle to my question/way of thinking—constantly disoriented/jarred me. When I would tell Sallie about this asynchrony, she would spiral through an intensifying masochistic loop of feelings of badness, and “confess” that she wasn’t really listening to my words, but rather to her pre-thought thoughts. Eventually we were able to address Sallie’s humiliation and terror at my discovery that something was the matter with her mind. With this established we moved on to important discussions about not being able to have a dialogue with an actual other.

Only recently, having already written the body of this piece, I came upon a spectacular paper by Joyce McDougall (1978) in which she almost uncannily describes and then creates a cogent theoretical narrative to account for these mysteries. She references issues of primitive communication and the meaning and function of words and actions for patients who have been traumatized even before the “acquisition of language.”.

Some years later I appreciate an entirely different meaning of the dream—perhaps the meaning of the dream. My patient, who requires air for her singing, had also constructed a world—an object world—out of this air; that is, she has created a universe of people and meanings which was heroically about to be put under the scrutiny of the analysis. She must have known that this airfield would be blown to bits.

Greenacre (1957) says that the “experience of awe in childhood, the forerunner of the mystical experience” is connected to the glorification of the parents and in particular to the idealized image of the godlike father with whom there is identification. Sallie experiences me as awesome, and she wishes to benefit from my special qualities and not take them for her own. The sharing of the godlike and mystical with me, in this protected way, allows her the ecstasies of the illusion of our communion (on many libidinal levels) without the impingement of the rival and without the pain associated with differentiation.

Sharpe (1935) enriches and complicates my understanding of Sallie as artist and traumatized “doer” who uses me to “do to” and to impress on me and into my mind the unknowable story she contains: “Now the artist deals with his instinctual problems and psychical phantasies allied with them in terms of his body. He uses a knowledge that is diffused in his body, a body intelligence and bodily experience in dealing with emotional states. He knows how to do things, not by consciously thinking them out and applying his knowledge but by perfecting powers inherent in the body based upon physical rhythms. It is a method of knowing the universe, the macrocosm via the microcosm, in terms of ordering emotion” (p. 197).

I had spent some very difficult hours with myself, almost agonizing about whether to attend her show, but bewildered with myself for such concern. I considered going but remaining hidden from view—so that I could be there, accommodate her need, see her without being seen. Should I go alone? Or with whom? Finally, it dawned on me that I had never gone to nor considered going to any other performing patient’s show. This was freeing of course, and I was able to analyze what it was about for me as well as to acknowledge the power of what had been lodged in me by her.

Several months into the analysis, my patient had a dream that bank robbers were tunneling into a bank’s vault under the pretense of doing needed construction. The aboveground construction supervisor had no knowledge of the underground activity. This dream delighted and relaxed me. I blurted out, “Oh, that’s what’s going on around here! What a wonderful dream!” Sallie insisted that I was mad, despite my expressions of delight and my interpretations, which were appreciative of her clever strategies for getting the riches. Sallie did not want me to know what this dream meant, and she was furious that her secret was out.

One of Sallie’s cherished proofs of her mother’s ineptitude is a report by one of her brothers that their mother said, “you boys were easier to understand. Sallie’s harder ‘and/or’ I just don’t get Sallie.” I am in sympathy with this sentiment, and can imagine a range of affective accompaniments, on the mother’s part—including pain, sadness, bewilderment, humor, which allow me to identify with her in fantasy. Sallie regards the reported story as absolute and veridical; the brother’s motives for telling her are as unexamined as Sallie’s motives for encoding it and retaining it as concrete evidence of maternal incompetence and insensitivity. Alternative interpretations for the mother’s alleged statement had never occurred to Sallie, and she resisted reflecting on any piece of the narrative: “It is carved in stone, Doctor Herbert!”.

I am aware that there are many aspects of this case that would be productive to explore—especially, perhaps, an investigation into the dualities of Sallie’s thinking, as reflected in her divergent capacities to use language when discussing music (any aspect of which she can discuss and analyze with a sophisticated, affect-laden, and intellectually rich vocabulary) and her “ordinary” conversational speech which retains the qualities of being unreliable, chimerical, conflict-ridden, and driven.

Dupont (1984) referencing Freud’s 1922 paper on telepathic communication, describes a special kind of primitive communication which sometimes occurs between analytic partners and is reflected in uncanny clinical moments. These moments between analyst and patient are reminiscent of Winnicott’s “primary maternal preoccupation” (1958) and Bion’s “maternal reverie” (1962) and are not necessarily diagnostic, but bespeak a deep level of unconscious communication that remains to be understood.

Fenichel (1945) also describes a kind of acting out which he finds “similar to the characteristic ‘repetitions’ of the traumatic neurotic.” Often the actions which are repeated have a very impressive and dramatic character; we may speak of “traumatophilic” persons (italics mine). The repetition symptoms … serve the purpose of achieving belated mastery of experiences which brought too great an amount of excitement” (p. 300). The skilled and planful performance aspects of Sallie’s dramas, however, complicated (or obfuscated) my analysis of them as traumatic re-enactments since the exhibitionistic and artistic needs of this patient whose internal requirements included the need for an audience or fellow actor were related also to her constitution as composer and performer.

I have Graciela Abelin-Sas to thank for this immensely helpful hypothesis.

The press for re-enactment in the analytic relationship may have been in part a wordless plea for a mother to provide the proper nutriment for the resumption of ego and psychic development.

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Jill C. Herbert

Training and Supervising Analyst, New York Freudian Society; Faculty and Supervisor, Metropolitan Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Child/Adolescent Training Program) New York; Independent Practice in Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, New York.