In-Between: Shapes of Subjectivities in the Analytic Situation

Abstract

Starting from concepts that Winnicott developed and that are unexpectedly near to postmodern concepts, I attempt to map some features of the complex territory that lies between analyst and patient from the viewpoint of the relationship that exists between subjectivity and objectivity. In the first section, I give a personal reading of Winnicottian model, emphasizing the idea that the subject’s unconscious acts upon and transforms the object’s (thereby putting in motion further unconscious processes within the object). Then I highlight the presence, in the transference, of various levels of communication and of a paradoxical multidimensionality that upsets the traditional space-time categories and also upsets the analyst’s mental stance. In the third section, I present a new form of countertransference (pervasive), through which the patient’s unconscious creates a sensory environment of proto-emotions and atmospheres, of states and rhythms, that have permeated it and that, due to their intensity and nature, arrived there without symbolization. Finally, I attempt to demonstrate how the patient can undergo psychic change only if the analyst has, himself, inhabited an analogous process of transformation in response to the disturbances arising within the analytical relationship. The clinical-theoretical stance emerging from these reflections sees the relation to the other, to oneself, and to the world as made possible by subjective creation always taking place in the unconscious.

Notes

¹ “Although a conceptual distinction between transference and counter-tranference is possible, in the actual experience the two components are fused” (Heimann, 1960, p. 194).

² Modell (1990) addressed the issue of temporality in psychoanalytical treatment and the relationship between transference and levels of reality. In Poland’s words, “The present shapes the past at the very moment that the past shapes the present” (1992, p. 190). D. Birksted-Breen (2003) stressed how the concepts of depressive position and of PS–D oscillation introduce a non-linear temporality analogous to the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit. She went on to claim that the intuition of the “fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced” (Winnicott, 1974, p. 90) makes one face a temporality in which past and future are contemporaneous. On Nachträglichkeit, see also Civitarese (2005).

³ I am unable here to deal in depth with the main themes linked to interpretation (see Fabozzi, 2003, on this topic). One aspect of this complex question seems to me to relate to the building, through the interpretative function of the analyst, of dialectic between the past and the present which is able to generate (the until then absent or inadequate) psychic processes and space during the course of the analytical process. On this path, dissociation between the transference interpretation and the awareness that this specific patient is also the result of his own history and of the story of his unconscious dynamical processes would repeat the amputation of one of the temporal dimensions and perpetuate the distortions in his emotional development which often marks out the patients we treat today.

⁴ In italian, we use seen to say “in consideration of the situation…”, or “as the situation is…”.

⁵ The expression “discrete” emotions may cause some perplexity. Matte Blanco’s (1975) theorizing on symmetrization processes can give a better idea than any other description of polysemy, of the complexity and the simultaneous presence of infinite meanings belonging to unconscious thought and the processes underlying emotions. I have chosen, however, to use the term discrete, as I think that when the mind acts defensively through splitting and projective identification, it does it on the most intense and meaningful emotional segments at that specific moment in the subject’s psychic management, and in this form they may be identifiable also through countertransference.

⁶ Not only are the form and the nature of the surfeits and the overflows coming from the mother significant, therefore, but just as important is the state in which the child finds himself, which will determine the place of the registration. When the child finds himself in the quiet state in relation to the environment-mother, this form of relating, which should leave room for reception of the child’s spontaneous gesture by the mother and, therefore, give rise to the real Self, is connoted “from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing” (Winnicott, 1960, p. 148). Here, alongside the spontaneous movement, the quiet state coincides with what Winnicott defined as being, and prefigures a state of greater receptiveness that, when things go badly, is occupied by surfeits that constitute not so much single traumatic impacts as saturation of the atmosphere with which the child will nourish himself or herself. This form of recording will give rise, in the analytic situation, to pervasive countertransference, a diffusion within the sphere of the life of the Self. This issue, together with other clinical situations, is dealt with in Fabozzi (2013), in which I developed the concept of pervasive countertransference.

⁷ The work that the analyst must perform on himself or herself will differ in relation to the nature of the countertransference: In the form caused by projective identifications, he or she must redress the balance of a temporary (albeit repetitive) turbulence; in the other the analyst will have to tackle what, following the unconscious movements put in place by the patient’s form of being, has been generated inside himself or herself during analysis, creating a more lasting and widespread perturbation that pervasive countertransference induced in the analyst.

⁸ Whether one agrees or not with the concept of projective identification, just think how much our image and our experience of the person in front of us can radically change in the case in which we think he is evacuating emotions or controlling our mind and when we believe he is communicating emotions that, for him, are intolerable: two different people, two profoundly opposed worlds.

⁹ I believe, with Bonaminio (2008), that a restricted conception of the subjectivity of the analyst allows us to avoid setting up on a theoretical level what are fundamentally the analyst’s own qualities as a person, that is to say, his way of being with the patient.

¹⁰ The task to make this process reversible will then depend on our ability to transform the distance from the patient and from our countertransference emotions and fantasies (see Caper, 1997; Feldman, 1997).

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Notes on contributors

Paolo Fabozzi

Paolo Fabozzi is a Training and Supervising Analyst and member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI); Adjunct Professor at “Sapienza”, University of Rome – Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology. He teaches “Dynamic Psychology” and is in private psychoanalytic practice (adult and child) in Rome, where he lives.