Spontaneity and Improvisation in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Spontaneity—a dimension of the subjective experience of the individual and improvisation—the rules of engagement as established in the theater arts, are described as intrinsic to the analytic dialogue and as frequently facilitating the therapeutic process. After a review of the relevant contemporary psychoanalytic literature, clinical material is presented to illustrate the psychoanalytic value of improvisation in opening up new areas of exploration and new modes of participation. The various theoretical formulations of the clinical example are discussed to support the proposition that spontaneity and improvisation are essential to all psychoanalytic conversations.

Introduction

Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with a reality and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression. (Spolin, 1963, p. 4)

SPONTANEITY

Although they are often used interchangeably, spontaneity, and improvisation are not the same (see also Ringstrom, 2007, this issue). An activity is spontaneous when it has the quality of being voluntary and unconstrained, without deep thought or premeditation. Spontaneity refers to the subjective sense of freedom and lack of constraint associated with any action or response. This subjective quality of spontaneity defines and distinguishes it from improvisation, which embodies the idea of a cooperative effort at keeping the play, or creative conversation, going forward.

Improvisation is based on the rules of engagement of the relationship and spontaneity refers to the subjective experience of the individual. In any interaction, improvisational or scripted, spontaneous actions may occur, the spontaneity referring to the experience of the responder, actor, or thinker. In the analytic situation, when the improvisational dimension is going well, both participants might become more spontaneous. On the other hand, they may proceed quite cautiously while improvising, always aware of the other person's agenda, sensitivities, needs, and always weighing up their options as to how to move the analytic exchange forward.

IMPROVISATION

In Moliere's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain states: “Good heavens! For more then forty years I have been speaking prose without even knowing it” (Act 2 Sc 4). As others, including, Ringstrom (2001a, 2001b, 2007), Meares, (2001), Knoblauch (2001), Chaplin Kindler (1996, 2005) have proposed, the same thing might be said of psychoanalysts and improvisation, that they do it all the time without even knowing it. Nachmanovitch (2001) stated it more boldly:

Improvisation is the normal mode of human communication. Whether the context is therapy, art, lovemaking, parenting or any number of other arenas in which we interact, we do not write down what we are about to say before we say it. We simply say and do, prompted by the incalculable mixture of conscious and unconscious influences that shape the self at that time and place in our development. (pp. 771–772).

He asserted further that we value the unexpected and the unpredictable in our interchanges with others. We are less interested and less trusting of prepared scripts and formal responses because they always seem less authentic.

All human interaction, I suggest, has an improvisational dimension existing side-by-side (or perhaps foreground and background) with the formal dimension. Our improvisational facility and freedom in a particular relational context permits us to respond without preparation, and with a creative orientation towards form, procedure, or role. Everyday relaxed conversations have these qualities of free interchange, informality, unpredictability, and randomness. By contrast, formal communication organized by prescribed rules, scripts, roles, and rituals requires us to respond according to certain patterns and stay within certain limits. Reading a lecture, arranging appointments, participating in rituals, whether religious, domestic, or simply greeting another, are organized by specific words and orderly sequences of behavior. Both dimensions, the formal and the improvisational, are present in every interaction to varying degrees.

Even the scripted play, complete with sets, stage directions, and choreographed movements, has an improvisational dimension in that each performance will be subtly different as the actors recreate their roles each night before a different audience. A classical musician, although always playing the same notes, may change the phrasing in a performance according to taste and mood. Without this freedom, performances would become mechanical and dull. At the other end of the improvisational scale, a modern jazz performer may improvise to an extent that never even comes close to the written melody (the musical script). But the performer is still constrained by the sequence of chords and time structure for that piece of music. Without this structure, the musical relationship with both fellow performers and audience would be lost. Within this frame, however, the improvising jazz soloist and accompanist interact in a complex mutually enriching dialogue. Knoblauch (2000) likened this musical dialogue to the interchanges between therapist and patient that “sustain and continue the process of unfolding and expanding feelings and meanings emerging within the treatment” (p. 37).

In the spirit of Moliere, our recognition that “we, as analysts, have been improvising all this time” and that these contributions are intrinsic to the therapeutic process might encourage us to attend to our improvisational skills with some of the same energy we devote to developing our theoretical knowledge and scripted technique.

THEATRICAL IMPROVISATION

Consider these two contrasting beginnings to a piece of theatrical improvisation between actor A and actor B:

A: Why are you wearing that chicken on your head?

B: There is no chicken on my head.

A: Oh!

The scene stops.

A: Why are you wearing that chicken on your head?

B: So it's still there? How does it look?

A: It has a very strange expression on its face.

And the scene has taken off.

These are examples that demonstrate one of the cardinal rules of improvisational theater. These may be called the Yes—but and the Yes—and responses. ¹ The rule for actors or improvisational players might be stated as: “Never block the scene by negating the reality of your partner.” In the first example, “There is no chicken on my head,” the player B breaks this rule by challenging the reality introduced by A. This halts the interchange and blocks the creative coconstruction of a narrative. The play is halted in its tracks. In the second example, B accepts A's initial gambit that states the problem and implicitly seeks B's help. The “yes—and” rule allows the play to go on and on indefinitely. B elaborates the experience of the chicken, thereby giving A the chance to develop the story further and to extend B's reality in a new direction. The strange expression on its face opens up a whole world of possible meanings about the chicken's subjectivity and its meaning to B. Needless to say, both players need to feel safe with each other to continue to play freely in this way.

PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACHES TO IMPROVISATION

Ringstrom (2001a), in his groundbreaking paper, “Cultivating the Improvisational in Psychoanalytic Treatment,” invoked both classical and improvisational theater as excellent “metaphors of psychoanalytic practice” (p. 731). The formal structure and skills of classical theater are analogous to the rituals (Hoffman, 1998) of traditional psychoanalytic theory and technique, and the absence of sets, scripts, rolesm and props in improvisational theater captures the unique qualities of “the moment to moment unfolding of the psychoanalytic process. By prescribing very little, Ringstrom suggested, improv permits the bursting forth from the unknown in the moment. Nachmanovich (2001) in his discussion of Ringstrom, suggested that we go even further and consider that “the ability to improvise (is the) desired goal of analysis or therapy” (p. 771). Both authors emphasized the improvisational rule of keeping the play going, the yes—and” approach illustrated above. ²

Chaplin Kindler (2005), commenting on play therapy with a child, put it thus: “There is a close relationship between the creative spontaneity required in the psychotherapy or analytic session and that which occurs in a two-person dramatic improvisation. Both are endeavors involving the imaginative collaboration of the two participants” (p. 89).

Elsewhere, she elaborated:

All the rules of dramatic improvisation apply:

1. The play space is sacred

2. Follow the lead of the other participant

3. Do not challenge or deny

4. There should be unconditional acceptance of the other's reality

5. Listen and watch carefully

6. The actor must clarify, enhance and facilitate the action so that the scene can move forward. (Chaplin Kindler, personal communication)

With these rules in mind, consider the following beginning to a therapy session.

On his way to a psychoanalytic session, the patient, a middle-aged man, had met his female therapist on the icy street outside her office as she was walking to her car to retrieve something. He offered to escort her because of the slippery sidewalk, but she declined his offer, so he went on in to her office to wait for her. The session begins:

Patient (Lightly): Here I was trying to be a gallant Southern gentleman and you turned me down.

Therapist (Seriously): I wonder what your thoughts are about that?

Patient (Angrily): I have been avoiding therapy all these years so I wouldn't have to be humiliated by responses like that.

The patient cannot develop the narrative further because the therapist blocks his humorous self mocking/self aggrandizing opening gambit with a serious and technically correct inquiry. As the therapist reflected on the interaction in supervision, she became aware that she had been too anxious to play with him around this because of his previous seductive behavior with another woman and her concern about overstimulating him. She sought safety in the ritual question well known to all therapists: “What are your thoughts about that?” Analogous to the first improv example above, her yes—but response blocks the playful initiative of her patient. “Yes, you may want to play at being a Southern gentleman, but you are not a Southern gentleman so let's be serious and look at what this really means.” At that particular moment, in that therapeutic relationship, no other response was open to her, and the events unfolded as described. She felt compelled to get to work, to follow a script rather than to play the game initiated by her patient. A more playful response (Ringstrom, this issue) might have allowed him to feel that his humor was appreciated and accepted while permitting a playful inquiry into the disruption. Such creative play might contribute to the development of an increasingly safe relationship that facilitates exploration by diminishing shame through the use of shame-sharing humor.

Bromberg (2001) quoted Lewis, an authority on shame, as stating: “Laughter, especially laughter around one's transgression as it occurs in a social context, provides the opportunity for the transgressing person to join others in viewing the self” (pp. 899–900). He suggested that such moments may provide access to dissociated self-states in both patient and analyst. The mutual experience of shame dispelling playful humor might permit them both to deal more openly with such unacceptable parts of themselves.

Such freedom carries risks. Gabbard referred to the “high risk, high gain” aspect of spontaneity (personal communication to Ringstrom). I have found, at times, that spontaneous humor may feel quite brilliant and playful from my point of view, but hurtful or humiliating from the patient's point of view. Patients might experience their analyst as self-involved, as trivializing their pain, or even as contemptuous. But, as Knoblauch (2001) pointed out, all interventions are risky in that we can only know their impact after the fact, whatever our intention and however spontaneous or technically proper we may believe ourselves to be.

Lachmann (2002), in his article “Humor and Spontaneity in the Therapeutic Process,” proposed that humor and spontaneity contribute significantly to transforming the psychological structures that underlie pathological aggression. Lachmann suggested that the playfulness, spontaneity, and humor of psychoanalysts may have been discouraged by Freud's (1927) paper on “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious”: “After Freud located jokes in the psychopathology of everyday life, no therapist could feel safe when veering off the prescribed analytic path.”

A fundamental component of the paradigm shift of modern psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has been the inclusion of the therapist's authenticity (Renick, 1999; Teicholz, 2003), including unscripted, that is improvisational, spontaneity as a legitimate component of the psychoanalytic process. Surveying the expanding psychoanalytic literature on this shift, one is left with the impression that the precise nature of the new integration is still emerging. Hoffman (1998) has provided a conceptual framework for this evolution with his description of the dialectic tension and fluidity of movement between the safety of the frame of the psychoanalytic setting with its ritualized procedures on the one hand, and the unpredictable creative contributions of analyst and patient on the other. He reminds us that the frame, comprised of the rituals of psychoanalytic technique, office, couch or chair, regular appointments, fees, the rule of free association, the asymmetrical relationship and so on, may actually serve to provide a sanctuary supporting playful authenticity. But we should be aware that the psychoanalytic frame can also be an oppressive danger. Its rigid application may coerce a vulnerable patient into inauthentic accommodations which replicate pathogenic relationships (Wolfe 1985).

Hoffman (1998) made a plea for flexibility:

There is no way for the analyst to know, with certainty, what course to pursue with respect to the balance between spontaneous, personal responsiveness and adherence to psychoanalytic rituals at any given moment, nor can the balance that is struck be one that the analyst can completely control. (p. 225)

At times, Hoffman suggested, we have to throw away the book of rules and restrictions, as when Kohut (1984), with mock seriousness, told his reckless analysand, “You are a complete idiot” (p. 74). But, Hoffman warned, even when we do so, we should strive to maintain the dialectical tension between the spontaneous and the ritual. For Hoffman, spontaneous participation and psychoanalytic discipline remain inexorably intertwined. “If there is a right thing or best thing for the analyst to do, it might be something that is integrative of as many considerations of the relationship as possible” (Hoffman, 1998, pp. 228). ³

Bacal (1985) has also addressed these issues in his proposal that optimal responsiveness replace Kohut's (1984) optimal frustration as the essential component of analytic cure. Bacal established a more flexible model of treatment by suggesting that whatever is specifically needed by the patient at any particular time is an appropriate, indeed necessary, therapeutic response from the therapist. In a recent paper (Bacal and Herzog, 2003) the issue of spontaneity in Specificity Theory has been addressed and included in the range of therapeutic responsiveness: “because we have broadened the spectrum of possible therapeutic responsivity, we regard any spontaneous engagement as one of the many ways that optimal therapeutic interaction can occur” (p. 645).

The Boston Group (Stern et al., 1998) has written extensively on the something more than interpretation that contributes to change in the therapeutic relationship. The Group views the therapeutic process as moving along in an improvisational way from moment to moment. Basing their formulation of psychoanalytic process on the newly established understanding of implicit knowledge as organizing relationships nonconsciously, it suggests that unpredictable emergent events in the relationship alter the subjective context of each partner. These now moments demand that the participants be more in the moment and that the therapist is required to respond more personally to the patient and not be limited by the explicit requirements, the rituals, of the formal relationship. Such moments are “pregnant with an unknown future which can feel like an impasse or an opportunity” (Stern et al., 1998, p. 912), and in which the therapist cannot resort to technique or theory-based responses to create the opportunity for change through a new relational experience. They must be willing to try something new or “weird,” ⁴ and be present through a response that is “fashioned to meet the singularity of the moment” (p. xx). When such a nodal moment is successfully created, the intersubjective field is altered and, with it, the implicit relational knowing, the unconscious and procedurally encoded rules that govern the way the patient and therapist know one another.

For Lichtenberg (1999), disciplined spontaneous engagements represent unexpected, verbal and nonverbal responses that are often unconscious enactments of a role. The disciplined quality refers to analysts' unflagging commitment to the rituals of psychoanalysis, their maintenance of the frame, their ethical values, and their professional identity in their ongoing relationship with the patient. Spontaneous refers to the “analyst's often unexpected comments, gestures, facial expressions and actions that occur as a result of an unsuppressed emotional upsurge” (Lichtenberg, 1999, p. 732). They pop out rather than occur as premeditated responses and, for Lichtenberg, go against the analyst's grain and familiar technique. Lichtenberg's disciplined spontaneous engagements resemble Meares's (2001) categories of self-contained spontaneity, the therapist's breaking free from the restraints imposed by the relationship and pseudo-spontaneity where the therapist is pulled into a role of reenacting the patient's past traumatic experiences through his spontaneous interventions. Each of these manifestations has very different experiential qualities for both participants.

For Gabbard (see above) spontaneous responsivity is a “high risk, high gain” option; for Stern (1998) it involves tolerating the weird, for Hoffman (1998) opposing the prescribed, and for Lichtenberg (1999) expressing the emergence of unconsciously communicated role responsiveness. For both Meares (2001) and Nachmanovich (2001), it is the therapeutic ideal that occurs when all is going well in the psychoanalytic process. For Meares (2001), the therapeutic process is at its best, a playful process for both participants, a space where both associate freely and augment each other's reflective capacity. Play and play-like activities are essential to the emergence of “personal being” or, for Kohut (1984), the sense of self.

As Meares (2001), Lichtenberg (1999), Knoblauch (2001), Ringstrom (2001b), and others have suggested, we assess the impact of all of our psychoanalytic interventions by observing what happens next. When the analyst's intervention fails, he or she sees a loss of vitality, negative affects, and a profound shift in cognition, including a loss of associational thinking and the capacity for reflection. Meares' descriptions of the results of unsuccessful interventions seem quite consistent with Kohut's (1984) conceptualization of “fragmentation of the self” (pp. 9–10), often signaling disruptions in the therapeutic process consequent to the absence of needed selfobject experience. Meares suggested that the analyst's spontaneous input is effective when it is followed by an increase in the patient's vitality and self-reflective capacity along with the recovery of autobiographical memory.

A clinical vignette serves to illustrate many of these ideas.

CASE OF SHEILA GOLD

Sheila Gold had come to see me because she was becoming increasingly depressed, her work was suffering, and she was concerned that she would lose her high profile, high status position in the public service. She was a bright, petite woman of 50, married, with three grown-up children, all of whom were doing well. Her marriage, however, was clearly doomed, and she was having difficulty facing it. Two years after she began analysis, her husband, Tom, announced that he was leaving her in a way that left her feeling deeply betrayed and humiliated. For most of the 4 years leading up the sessions to be described, we had met 5 times per week. She rarely missed a session or came late, except for sessions immediately before or after a break. Regardless of which of us was leaving, she could not bear attending before separations and would often call to cancel the last session or two. She couldn't bear the intensity of separations and reunions, and regulated her discomfort by staying away.

After several years of relative incoherence, even muteness, interspersed with moments of great clarity and eloquence, she had very gradually developed a sufficient sense of safety to intermittently speak about herself in complete sentences. In the months prior to the sessions described in the following paragraphs, she had been able to sustain this for several sessions in sequence, rather than retreating into silence after a session of exploration and self-revelation. She was still subject to crippling shame whenever she contemplated her husband's betrayal and abandonment of her. She had begun to allow herself at times, with great trepidation, to acknowledge her need for our relationship, often coyly alluded to as the “r” word. Even this often exceeded her comfort level, forcing her to retreat into silence or find another topic. Sometimes, I had to content myself with watching her animated inner dialogue as it played itself out upon her face and in her body. On occasion, I would venture a speculation about what she was going through and suggest a version of her inner dialogue.

Despite my frustration over her need to retreat from our world into her inner world, I liked her and enjoyed our work together. Occasionally, something momentous would happen between us and her true spirited creativity would come shining through. Then we both would feel precariously restored. These moments helped sustain my respect and admiration for her courage as she struggled to participate in a dialogue that was completely unfamiliar and dangerous for her, speaking about her subjective world to another person who had become meaningful to her. She often longed for the safety of our first session, when anonymity prevailed between us.

Clinical Process

Several weeks before an unusually long break, Sheila was having a difficult time in the sessions and in her life in general. She was fighting with her children about their father, her now estranged husband, dealing with her changed domestic circumstances, and finding her needs for me more humiliating and threatening than ever. Her feelings of closeness were always immediately shrouded in fears of a sudden ending, of being terminated, rebuffed, or found to be burdensome.

Session 1

Sheila had been in a fog yesterday, which lifted slightly after she left her session, allowing her to get some work done. She began to tell me about a call from her mother, but stopped herself. She simply stated tersely, “She [her mother] was in that flat state which always devastates me.” She instantly negated her complaint by assuring me that she forgave her mother completely before lapsing into incomplete vague sentences. I said very little about this sequence because we had been over such affective shifts many times and I sensed it would not be easy for her to reflect upon it. She then recalled that, on her way home from work yesterday, she absent-mindedly drove to her old address, the house in which she had lived for many years with Tom and the children. She discovered her error when she was almost there and turned around to go to her new apartment. That night, she went to sleep with the fantasy that Tom was back with her. He was in bed with her and everything was as it used to be. I commented on her achievement of getting herself off to sleep by dreaming about being with Tom. Sheila quickly dismissed me and fell silent. I waited with her in the silence, feeling a mixture of tenderness and frustration, and sensing that any efforts I might make to encourage her to talk would make it worse for her.

At this point, my eyes fell upon the arrangement of animals on my table, next to her chair. A 4-year-old boy had been in my office the previous day while I met with his parents. He had amused himself as we spoke by playing with the decorative animals on my table, and, unnoticed by the adults, had arranged them in a line. The warthog was following the swan, which followed the pelican. Bringing up the rear were the Koala bear and the New Zealand tree frog. The whimsy and freedom of this procession struck me and, without much thought, I found myself drawing Sheila's attention to it.

Gesturing towards the table, I said that the child who had been here yesterday didn't seem to have as much difficulty playing as she seemed to have playing with her dreams as a way of calming herself. At first she was perplexed and shocked at my mention of the child, but when she followed my line of sight to the table and the parade of animals, her face lit up with the most animated smile I had ever seen from her. Then, just as quickly, it disappeared as she slumped again. Recovering slightly, she asked me what I had meant and I told her of the 4-year-old boy who had done this quite spontaneously, without any of the adults noticing, while he was in the office. I hadn't been able to bring myself to rearrange the animals again once I'd discovered them last night. She was quite captivated by the audacious procession of animals and became reflective. “I don't think I could have done that, even at 4,” she reflected. We explored her difficulty being present in the moment with me and her need to protect herself from the inevitable losses associated with any sense of spontaneity or joy. We then parted for the weekend.

Session 2

On Monday morning, she slumped into the chair with a rueful smile. “It's Monday again.” I asked her about her “Monday feeling” but she was unable to say anything. As she sat in silence, she caught sight of the animals, still on parade, and again a smile brightened her face briefly before she slumped back into despair. It had been a very difficult weekend but she was completely unable to talk about it. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I found myself expressing, out loud, my musings during the silence. I told her about the fantasy I had in response to the child's game, that we would have a game in which, for a few minutes, she would say whatever comes into her mind without any responsibility for what she was doing. She warmed to the idea quickly and began to tell me about events leading up to her arrival, interrupting herself often to exclaim playfully, “I can't believe I'm saying this!”

As she walked along the corridor to my office, Sheila had noticed that the morning newspapers in front of all the other doctor's offices were still out on the floor, but mine was gone, which meant that it had been taken in and placed in the waiting room. The other doctors were obviously not in yet, but I was already at work. This meant that they were anxious and not doing as well as me, that I was more successful, and this felt good to her. She immediately became alarmed that this might be a burden for me to hear and that I really didn't want her to be here. Her excited anticipation of our mutually pleasurable reunion had immediately turned to dread of the opposite, one in which her idealizing excitement was rejected as burdensome. We played around for a while with her sense of the contrast between me and the corridor of losers (my word, but one she allowed me to use as a playful co-conspirator joining her to put down my neighbors).

She then turned to her weekend, her daughter's departure for California for the summer, her involvement with friends and her incredulity at their apparent ease and even enthusiasm in speaking about their own personal issues and their own agenda. What a contrast, she noted, to her own “absence” in such conversations. She was worried as we finished the session, because she doubted her ability to repeat it tomorrow. She hoped we could play again because of the spontaneity it permitted her. As she finished, she commented on how totally unfamiliar this was for her and began to cry. Her tears, she explained, were in response to the fact that I had suggested the game to her, that it had allowed her to do something she had never done before, and (this was most difficult to say) that it seemed important to me.

Session 3

In the next session, she was quite active and I found myself drawing her attention to repetitive sequences of excitement, optimism, hope, or competence followed inexorably by despair and/or hopelessness. Sheila spoke about her work where she noticed that, just as she found herself achieving a sense of accomplishment, she found herself suddenly losing energy, slowing down and dragging herself away. She noticed that, as she approached my office, she dragged her feet more and more slowly, with less and less energy, and this seemed connected to her anticipation of how I would be feeling. Then she suggested that we resume our game, following which she told me about her encounter with a very elderly woman in the street outside my office. The woman told her that she had something amiss with the back of her dress. It was, in fact, the style of the dress, but she was delighted to receive the woman's attention. Rather than just let it go, Sheila took the time to explain to the elderly woman that it was not really a problem with the dress but a fashion statement. She found herself thinking about the animals still lined up on my table, and wished she had told me not to feel that I had to leave them there on her account. She was pleased to see that, in fact, they had now been returned to their more sedate and familiar decorative arrangement.

She was, once again, amazed at her ability to have such a thought, let alone tell me about it, when it revealed such shameful fantasies about me thinking about her and attending to her needs I would be very critical of her for harboring such a shameful sense of entitlement. She did relish the sense of the game and the feeling that, in the game, we erected a barrier around us to allow a kind of safety and a way of being together which she found totally unfamiliar. She smiled as she spoke about the pleasure of being able to play and we talked about the feeling of play. She was aware that certain words such, as us, our, or play, although she understood them intellectually, could be almost meaningless to her emotionally. “They just don't seem to apply to me.”

As the end of this active session approached, she had to stop the game in midthought. Once again, her own excitement about herself triggered a sense of dread about the well-being of someone close to her. She now became occupied with the protection of her daughter, who was traveling the next day, by placing severe restrictions upon herself and obliterating the expansiveness and excitement associated with her own experience of playful intimacy.

DISCUSSION

The emergence of our game seemed to evoke an intimate vitality and engagement as Sheila and I began to play together. Sheila's initial response to my drawing her attention to the animals on parade, “I don't think I could have done that, even at 4” was, for her, quite spontaneous. She had rarely spoken of herself as a child and never in such a direct and reflective manner. It was as if my improvisational expression released something in her and that continued in our interchange. In our subsequent play, we were surrounded by imaginary barriers that fended off the judgmental outer world while enclosing us in a safe zone of intimacy that permitted the opening up of Sheila's inner world. This jointly constructed imaginary zone of safety gave her permission to do, for a limited time, what she could never do before. She was now able to articulate and thereby familiarize herself with the inexorable emergence of her burdensome sense of self just as she found herself enlivened, expressive, excited, and connected to someone she admired. Immediately, she had to contend with her certainty that the admired other to whom she had felt safely connected now viewed her with contempt and longed to be elsewhere.

Although this playful sequence did not herald the end of Sheila's inhibitions and fragmented self-states, it did seem to be a transition point to which we could return many times when in need of release and a sense of freedom to explore her subjective world. It became a play space that could be summoned by either one of us simply by referring to the animals on parade or to the safety barriers we could erect around us to keep out the judgmental outer world while we spoke of the unspeakable, the “us” of our relationship.

My intervention might be judged as successful because of “what happened next” (Meares, 2001). We witnessed the tenuous emergence of vitality along with personal reflectiveness and associational thought as Sheila tentatively responded to my playful gambits around the animals on parade and my story of the playful child who made them. She was able to reflect on the absence of such playfulness in herself. We could return to a more intimate connection in the next session, and in many subsequent sessions, as a way of breaking free of the waves of crushing shame that eradicated, for Sheila, any authentic self-expression. In the process, she became more familiar with the inhibitions pervading her life and constantly eradicating her access to lively and intimate relationships.

Meares (2001) might consider this interaction an example of a “self-contained spontaneous intervention” (p. 762) because it included my experience of needing to break free of Sheila's dismissal of my understanding of her dream of her ex-husband's return. At that moment, I was not responding to a playful initiative of hers in a spontaneous associational manner, analogous to the yes—and improvisational play. I contrasted the playful child to her own blocked and inhibited state, and this seemed to arouse her. Implicit in my comparison was the verbal message: “[Yes, but]—if only you could be more like that child?” There was a risk, partially realized, that she would feel diminished, even ridiculed by the comparison. My intervention could have blocked her rather than freed her up. But the sight of the animals on parade, the products of a child's imaginative play, along with the reassurance, implied perhaps in my tone of voice, that I welcome children and their play in my space, prompted her to come out to play, just for an instant.

My further contribution, the fantasy barrier that we could erect to protect our play space from the judgmental outside world, seemed to be particularly welcome and continued to be part of our play for many months into the future. This seemed to be a more mutually constructed playfulness through which Sheila seemed to develop a clearer sense of herself as an experiencing person. Both were emergent and spontaneous from my point of view, and this analysis took place well after the fact and in the context of writing this paper.

For Lichtenberg (1999), my participation could be understood as my role responsiveness to Sheila's unconscious communication of her need for someone not to take her too seriously and to take the initiative to start playing with her, even teasing her. I certainly felt the sense of something bursting forth from me that was quite unfamiliar. I suspect that it might well fit the criteria of the Boston Group for the personal signature and moment specificity required from the therapist to establish a moment of meeting. I was very moved by the child's play and couldn't bring myself to rearrange it for several days and I am sure this came through to Sheila in my demeanor as I referred to it. It certainly doesn't fit in with any response based on psychoanalytic technique or theory. I do think something unspoken about our relationship was irrevocably changed by these events.

I have purposefully stayed away from the multitude of other approaches to the clinical process provided, many of which would enrich and deepen the understanding of the material. A different analyst, or myself on a different day, may have chosen to go in these directions and proceeded to explore different issues. My purpose in choosing this material was to illustrate the emergence of an improvisational sequence that did seem to open up some new themes and offer a safe entry into previously unsafe areas. This case shows Sheila now able to speak about her fantasies as she approached my office, her delight that she was coming to see someone who was a success unlike those around him. She could tell me about her response to the older woman and the care she took to explain to her that her dress was designed that way and not faulty, as the woman had thought. Such detailed intimate interchanges either within herself, her inner dialogue, or between herself and another, were hitherto inconceivable.

Although I have focused on specific moments of interchange influencing the process between Sheila and me, I don't want to leave the impression that the rest of the exchange was strictly scripted and formal. As I have suggested, all psychoanalytic dialogue has an improvisational dimension, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background. My silence as Sheila withdrew following my suggestion that her dream of Tom helped her sleep was also part of an improvisational exchange between us. This one was based on our familiarity with the negative impact of my efforts to focus on her silence and its meanings. Without thinking it through as a strategy at the time, I might well have been expressing, nonverbally, something like: “Yes, you have to hide in shame after hearing what I thought about your dream about your ex-husband, and I will respect that need and wait for you to recover from the shame I have caused you.”

CONCLUSION

Analysts may be restrained in ways other than the specific influences of the analytic relationship. Theoretical, aesthetic, or ethical convictions may dictate that spontaneous participation is ill-advised or unacceptable, even nonanalytic. Such constraints are unlikely to be affected by the ideas contained above. Alternatively, analysts may find the improvisational mode of relating personally difficult and awkward. Workshops have been presented at conferences (The Annual Self Psychology Conference) and in extension programs (Toronto Psychoanalytic Society) directed at the facilitation of improvisational skills using theatrical improvisational exercises and applying them to clinical situations (Chaplin Kindler and Gray, 1997–2000). More needs to be done in this area to ascertain the value of these approaches to psychoanalytic education.

Although it has been well known to theater teachers (Spolin, 1942) and drama therapists (Chaplin Kindler, 2005; Chaplin Kindler and Gray, this issue) for some time, analysts are only recently becoming aware of the significance of the analyst's freedom to be spontaneous and to improvise in the facilitation of personal growth and learning. We have tended to privilege technically sound interventions or cognitively sound interpretations, justified by their consistency with a valued theoretical model. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory, as reviewed, suggests that spontaneity and improvisation are intrinsic to the analytic dialogue and frequently contribute significantly to the therapeutic process. These developments point to a model of psychoanalytic participation that includes an acceptance of, and a more careful consideration of, spontaneity and improvisational responsiveness. Such a model expands our skills in the art of psychoanalysis while maintaining our allegiance to the science.

Notes

¹Rosalind Chaplin Kindler, who trained as an actress before she became a psychotherapist, provided me with these examples and made me aware of the fascinating overlap between improvisational theater and the psychoanalytic process.

²Nachmanovich quoted Johnstone (1980), the inventor of “Theatresports” from the Loose Moose Improvisational Theatre in Calgary. He based his workshops on an exercise called one-on-one no-blocking. “Blocking the other player's reality stops the game and may be caused when one is unable to surrender to an unfolding situation and interaction, when one is attached to being right-one of the most common psychopathologies of everyday life” (p. 774).

³As if attempting to playfully enact this principle of integrating dialectical tension between the ritual and the spontaneous, before delivering his “You are a complete idiot” comment, Kohut (1984) set it up bywarning his analysand that hewas about to give him “the deepest interpretation he had so far received in his analysis” (p. 74).

⁴Ros Kindler (personal communication) put it nicely when she said that giving up the need for control and doing what feels weird and strange is at the heart of good improvisational work just as it at the heart of truly good acting.