The Experience of Relationally Embedded Individuality and the Analytic Attitude of Affect-Respect That Fosters It

ABSTRACT

I contend that the psychoanalyst’s respect for his or her patient’s constitutively relational affectivity facilitates development in the patient of a sense of personal distinctiveness—or individuality—that reflects the patient’s unique existential and emotional embeddedness in—versus independence from—relationships with others. I call this a sense of relationally embedded individuality. More specifically, the analyst’s validating respect for the patient’s grief, angst, and intersubjective-vulnerability—affects by which one experiences one's relational embeddedness—fosters the patient’s self-experiences of ownership and relationally enriched personal distinctiveness. A clinical case of a young lady named Esther is offered that illustrates life-contexts in which she comes to feel and own varieties of intersubjective-vulnerability, and thereby develops a sense of relationally-rich individuality. The case also illustrates her psychoanalysts’ attitudes of affect-respect that fostered such development.

Notes

¹ The affectivity of intersubjective-vulnerability is a family of affect that includes all emotions of vulnerability that spring from the possibility of the person's attachment to and love of other, the possibility of the other’s attachment to and love of the person, and the possibility of all that can go right or wrong—so to speak—in that domain of relational engagement. Among many other painful forms of emotional vulnerability, this family of affect includes the senses that one’s love of other has no significance to them, that one’s love does not matter in the world, that one is not or cannot be loved, that love can change or be lost (whether one’s own or the loved-one’s), heartbreak, radical aloneness, and powerlessness to help, protect, or influence others as and when we wish.

² Analysts, like most people, are likely to be more receptive to being implicated in their patients’ expansive emotional states because such states are more likely to harmonize with such analysts’ narcissism. That said, some analysts become disorganized by the patient’s love of them because, for some highly traumatized analysts, another’s genuine love of them unsettles deeply entrenched convictions about his or her ultimate unimportance and un-lovability.

³ Such experiences of ever relationally situated individuality might include identification and even pride in those of one’s caregivers’ attunements to his/her distinctive affects that facilitated his/her sense of individuality. Alternatively, they might entail features of grief, resentment, or even horror that his/her caregivers’ emotional limitations required him to become what they needed him to be, thereby undermining—maybe even poisoning—his/her experience of his/her affectivity, his/her sense of self and world, and his/her life possibilities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter N. Maduro

Peter N. Maduro, J.D., Psy.D., Psy.D., is with the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology; International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; American Psychological Association, including its Division of Psychoanalysis; and Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis.