Receptivity, or Going on (Not) Being: Commentary on Paper by Robert Grossmark

Abstract

“The treatment hinged on my being able to live with him in this ongoing non-existence and know it and tolerate it, and expect no more,” writes Dr. Robert Grossmark about himself and his patient, Kyle (pp. 637–638). This is a key sentence, outlining the core of the enlightening analytic work done. I comment on the linkage between living the ongoing nonexistence and going-on-(not)-being, then reflect about the distinction between what I call the “outward” technique, which is everything Grossmark describes about treating Kyle, and the “inward” technique, which is all that occurred within him, in an inner, hidden, powerful, unconscious dialogue with the patient, and which is only hinted at. In this context, with patients like Kyle, who bring to the analyst physical sensations and actions for dreaming, the analyst's corporeality, by which I mean his experience of his body and his capacity to connect it to emotion, thereby lending it meaning, has a critical importance. I bring, in a nutshell, references to several psychoanalytic writers about the subject of corporeality in analytic treatment and use a vignette from an analysis to demonstrate the point.

Notes

¹ Slochower (1996a, 1996b) wrote about this extensively.

²The full, beautiful sentence goes, “So in the end we succeed by failing—failing the patient's way.”

³Giving up separateness is essential in a situation like this also according to Winnicott (1963a), who wrote that in an analysis in which the patient permits the analyst to reach to the deepest layers of his personality because of his position as a subjective object, the analyst should not interpret. “It is only here, at the place when the analyst has not changed over from a subjective object to one that is objectively perceived, that psycho-analysis is dangerous, and the danger is one that can be avoided if we know how to behave ourselves. If we wait we become objectively perceived in the patient's own time, but if we fail to behave in a way that is facilitating the patient's analytic process (which is the equivalent of the infant's and the child's maturational process) we suddenly become not-me for the patient—because we are too nearly in communication with the central still and silent spot of the patient's ego-organization” (p. 189).

⁴In this word I mean the therapist's experience of his body and his capacity to connect it to emotional experience, thereby lending it meaning.