A Psychoanalyst’s Contexts

Abstract

You only remember what you feel.¹

This is an experiential journey through some of the significant experiences that have played a part in shaping my professional identity. An analyst’s work consists of accompanying the patient in a double function of observer and participant with the aim of easing mental pain and facilitating emotional growth that has been partially blocked by past traumatic experiences. Shame is considered to be a central affect appearing in the intimate space of analysis. The subjectivity emerging in the analytic dyad is the principal focus of study for contemporary psychoanalysis. Validation and recognition of the development of subjectivity in the analytic process is the base of psychic change. The psychoanalytic experience transforms the patient’s self-experience at the same time as enhancing those mental functions deriving from good personal development, such as tolerance, mental flexibility, and the capacity of considering others.

Notes

² For me, this training included more seriously ill patients when indicating psychoanalytic therapy compared to other schools, where only typical treatment (transference neurosis) was recommended for analysis.

³ Alejandro Ávila, current president of IARPP-E, directs the Master’s program Psicoterapia Relacional (Relational Psychotherapy) in which I teach.

⁴ I include the poem Si temo, in my paper, “Dismorfofòbia o vergonya del cos” (Velasco, 2010a).

⁵ Integrity, or a normative way of being in the world, includes moral considerations. Integration, or an integrative way of being in the world, includes the development of self-experience. The ethics or morals deriving from an integrated personality are ethics that take oneself as well as others in consideration.

⁶ I am referring to the trust established between two or more analysts working in the experience of clinical review. A climate of trust allows working with the implicit that contributes to the development of all participants.

⁷ In “La vergüenza en la de-construcción y construcción del sentimiento de sí” (Shame in the de-construction and construction of self-experience; Velasco, 2008).

⁸ Julia Corominas developed this concept in “Nuclis de sensorialitat no mentalitzada: les seves manifestacions en la clínica analítica” (Nuclei of nonmentalized sensoriality: manifestations in analytic clinical work; Corominas, 1998).

⁹ An early development on self-experience is discussed in the article “El sentimiento de sí: estudio de la subjetividad” (Self-experience: A study of subjectivity; Velasco, 2002).

¹⁰ This concept is developed in chapter 8 “An implicit relational process approach to therapeutic action” in the book by the Boston Change Process Study Group, Change in Psychotherapy (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosa Velasco

Rosa Velasco, M.D., is a member of the Sociedad Española de Psicoanálisis and of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, is Director of the Seminar Relational Patterns and Subjective Experience (Institute of Psychoanalysis, Barcelona), and instructor on the Master’s program in Relational Psychotherapy (Instituto de Psicoterapia Relational), Madrid.