Making Music Together: Discussion of Gianni Nebbiosi’s “The Smell of Paper”

Abstract

Finding life in our patients is a common goal for analysts. Historically this project had been defined as one of freeing unacceptable impulses from their imprisoning defenses with the analyst, via interpretation, then contrasting the patient’s internal fantasied reality with “actual” reality. Untangling fantasy from reality could free the impulses to provide energy for more realistic projects. This imagery stands in stark contrast to the fluidity of a contemporary relational conceptualization of human experience where our inner experience is now understood to be the lens through which we construct our vision of external reality, always a subjective perception. Clinical change—finding life—now depends more on the activation of a generative intersubjective process between patient and analyst, which contributes to the expansion of the patient’s subjective experience. Gianni Nebbiosi’s use of music and of mime to help him feel his way into his patient’s and ultimately into his own similarly defended experience demonstrates the creativity and idiosyncratic clinical approaches that emerge from a contemporary relational orientation. This orientation recognizes the analyst’s subjectivity as a fundamental tool of clinical change—a vehicle through which any theoretical approach will necessarily be shaped. Differing approaches to a clinical situation do not always simply reflect theoretical disagreements; they may also reflect the expression of the particular subjectivity of the analyst.

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Notes on contributors

Margaret J. Black

Margaret J. Black, LCSW, is Founding Board Member and Faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, a Board Director, Director of Continuing Education and Supervisor at NIP. She is also a Founding Board Member and Vice President of IARPP, an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and a member of the Editorial Board for Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is coauthor, with Stephen Mitchell, of Freud and Beyond, A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought (Basic Books, 1995). Her publications concern the relationship between theory and clinical practice.