The Empty Symbol and Its Relation to the Psychoanalytic Process

ABSTRACT

Analysts need to be aware that each word used by a patient is composed of a constant conjunction of a person’s intimate emotional and historical referents, conscious and unconscious affects, memories, and conceptions and fantasies. If this conjunction does not correspond to that of the analyst, a gap develops between them. This gap in meaning is a non-understanding that emerges outside consciousness and beyond words. The author conceptualizes this relational phenomenon as the Empty Symbol.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge, Dr. Cayetano García-Castrillón for having taught me that honesty and ethics are essential to trigger the therapeutic process; Dr. Anton Obholzer, Chief Executive of the Tavistock Clinic in London, who taught me how to work below the surface; and to Pilar Armengou, for always being there.

Notes

¹ Allan Schore (2012, p. 290) stated: “The right hemisphere has been linked to implicit information processing, as opposed to the more explicit and more conscious processing tied to the left hemisphere.”

² Grinberg (1980) related this methodological approach to psychoanalytic work to Freud’s notion of suspended attention.

³ I use here the Spanish word des⁄encuentro”, which bears a wider range of meaning than mis⁄understanding; a desencuentro is also a failed or missed encounter. Each participant in the conversation is taking a different interpreting path, which gives rise to the inability to understand.

⁴ When this session took place, I was about to travel to the University of Alabama to give a talk about “The Psychology of Learning a Second Language.” I usually feel sad leaving my children for the weekend because I do not see them often during the week. The situation with the young couple also triggered my feelings of separation and loss. We shared the feeling of loss (albeit to different extents), and my ability to empathize with the mother in this way enabled her to begin to trust me.

⁵ Lemma (2014, p. 225) suggested that “the body of the analyst may be helpfully conceptualized as an embodied feature of the setting.” This approach may be especially useful to understand patients who develop a symbiotic transference and who feel any change in the analyst’s body as deeply destabilizing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frank García-Castrillón

Frank García-Castrillón, Ph.D., is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice in Seville, Spain. He is Associate Professor of the Department of Psychology at UNIR, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, and Faculty at St. John’s University (New York) Seville International Campus, Spain.