Making Our Hairs Stand on End—A Call to Psychoanalysis to Look Outside Itself: Response to Commentaries

Abstract

I am grateful for the rich commentaries of Ogden and Ferro and Civitarese, and wish we could continue this discussion, as it speaks to the importance of psychoanalysis looking outside itself to the arts and other disciplines to enrich and expand our ways of hearing. In my response I take up Ogden's discussion of the resistance of the medium of psychoanalysis and the necessity of “changing the terms.” I present a short sequel to the clinical material presented in my paper to illustrate what Ogden is discussing. I also agree with the importance of Ferro and Civitarese's focus on the primacy of incarnate emotional experience and the necessity of moving in and out of integration and nonintegration as we struggle to register what is going on in the analytic encounter and how we may all generate meaning out of these experiences.

Notes

¹Paradoxically, the psychoanalytic term “resistance” referring to the patient's “resistance” was not present in this chain of reverberations for me or Ogden, though it would be worth pursuing.