A Conversation between Melvin Bornstein and Giovanni Minonne

ABSTRACT

Mel has been my supervisor for the last ten years. It is difficult to express the depth of the feelings that Mel has awaken in me from the very first moment that we met. Maybe the best way to express these feelings is to describe them as an internal, irresistible force that moves me toward him. Mel describes this force as love, which for him is the core therapeutic force. According to Mel, this force allows us and our patients to embrace being alive, and to learn to tolerate the intensity of being alive, instead of hiding from the present and regressing in the repetition compulsion of the transference, of our learned mistrust of ourselves and others, and fear of life. What Mel taught me over these years is at the same time very simple to say and extremely difficult to fully embrace. It is his love for life and his radical openness to the other human beings, and to life.

Whenever I would ask for Mel’s help in working through difficulties with my patients, his focus would always be on my own fear, and that of my patients. This was a fear of fully embracing life, of seeing life as it is, with all its traumas and pains, and a fear of doing something good with our pain, something that brings us closer together and frees in us more power, more capacity for pleasure, more autonomy, and more growth. Mel’s teaching is Mel, there is no contradiction between his word and his being. He has always been there, ahead of me, waiting for me to keep up with him, and learn to see with my eyes what I could not see before. At the same time, he has always encouraged me to see in my own way, to find my own way of celebrating the love of life that he has sustained in me.

The simplest way to express my experience with Mel, is that I love him, and he loves me. As you can see in the transcript of a supervision with Mel that I am sharing with you, my relationship with Mel has not only been a relationship of love with no conflicts. It has also involved a constant struggle on my part to grasp what he is telling me, and to fight against his teaching because it feels too simple, too radically open. It has been difficult to allow myself to be radically open to Mel and let him work in me. This tension I still experience every time I meet with him, and it is as strong as my love for him. It is almost as if I am too afraid of completely letting go. But I do not see this only as resistance. I think that it is an essential part of the creative moment of our being with each other as two separate beings who fall in love, but are still separate and irreducibly different, and alone. The transcription of the hour of conversation that I am presenting is close to what usually happens in my supervisions with Mel. Maybe it is a little less spontaneous and free, because of the need to preserve the anonymity of the patients that we discussed. However, I have tried to be as close as possible to the actual lived experience that we have shared together. I hope that it conveys at least part of the profound love that Mel shares with every human being that has the privilege of knowing him. (Giovanni Minonne).

KEYWORDS:

• Love
• transference
• ego-psychology
• trauma
• life-force

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melvin Bornstein

Melvin Bornstein, M.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Editor-in- Chief of Psychoanalytic Inquiry.

Giovanni Minonne

Giovanni Minonne, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst. I studied Philosophy and History at the “University of Florence,” and Clinical Psychology at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” I worked in Italy for twenty years as a special aid teacher and as a psychotherapist. After I moved to the United States, I obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Michigan, and I have been working as a psychoanalyst and a psychotherapist in Ann Arbor for 18 years. I am affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan and with the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute.