Introduction

Abstract

This introduction outlines a paper by Rina Lazar and discussions by Anthony Bass, Sam Gerson, and Stephen Seligman. The target paper, an extensive clinical case, is described: a case where regression, countertransference dilemmas and opportunities, and intergenerational trauma are all in play. I consider the contribution of the discussants: their unique interpretations of relational work, the distinct focus on intersubjectivity, shifting self states (Bass), intergenerational trauma (Gerson), and regression and the role and status of development (Seligman).

This panel, with a target paper by Rina Lazar and discussions by Anthony Bass, Sam Gerson, and Stephen Seligman, takes up several important but singularly daunting problems in contemporary relational psychoanalytic work. How does any particular relational analyst take up the intermingling of transference and countertransference phenomena? In imagining always, in some way, a co-constructed analytic field, what are the challenges in working in a two-person system of understanding? Second, how does each analyst, the main paper’s author and her discussants, maintain the tension between internal worlds and interpersonal worlds? Third, how does each analyst in this panel work out the interrelation and relative potency and importance of what we might call “small h” history and “big H” History? How does one contain and consider the larger social field and its intergenerational leaks and scars alongside the immediate densely textured outcomes of attachment, interrelationships, and familial circumstances?

But there is another feature of Lazar’s paper and clinical account that issues another kind of challenge, deeply difficult for any analyst of any persuasion. What do you do when a relatively well-functioning patient with quite extensive capacities and responsibilities falls so deeply and almost violently into a deep and impacted regression? Regression scarcely encompasses what Lazar’s patient goes into, a state not really anticipated by either patient or analyst. In the depths of these states, time is disrupted, and self states swirl and explode. Lazar thinks of this as swimming alongside and inside. How do relational analysts handle regression? How does anyone?

This situation is perhaps particular to this historic period in which hospital stays are difficult to arrange, to afford, and to find secure harbor in. Changing economics and the presence of many medications make collapses and regressions likely to fall into the purview of the individual practitioner. This is perhaps truer now than in earlier eras and differentially true in different cultures. The analytic pair here is Israeli and the commentators all American. All four analysts are deeply immersed in and concerned with the traumatized and collapsed state of the patient.

Lazar’s characterizes her work as a new way of paying attention. In the sessions she provides, we see this in vivo. She practices a double stance in working with deep trauma, both being with and accompanying, always witnessing. This way of working is simultaneously careful, mindful, deeply open to the patient and to the analyst’s own inner process, and self-protective.

In looking at the commentaries, I was struck by two quite opposite thoughts. First, I recognize each of these discussants as inhabitants of the relational tent. But their way of working and their conceptualization of the case and the treatment are at the same time very different. Perhaps this would be true of any group of analysts within any tradition, but it seems to me that it is a particular hallmark of a relational approach that there is a wide range of ideas about psychic life, about interactions, about the potency of the social field, and about treatment.

Bass’s commentary, of all the discussions, seems most clearly in Lazar’s idiom. Everyone in this panel speaks the same language, but there are dialect differences, accents perhaps, and personal idioms. Bass’s immersion in and commitment to a process of transference and countertransference work keeps both participants involved in what is happening in the here and now. For Bass, much of the work is tracking shifting self states—in patient and analysand. He describes a way of working: listening, light on one’s feet, attuned, perhaps wary, certainly ready for surprise and contact.

Gerson takes up yet another strand of the relational weave. He tells that reading Lazar he reached for Winnicott and drawing inspiration of Winnicott’s (1969) “The Use of the Object.” He tracks the demands to work through destructiveness with all its attendant terrors such that something precious and useful survives: part of the self, the other, the damaging parent, the traumatizing agent. Gerson is the discussant who reaches for big History, for thinking about the effects of intergenerational transmission of trauma via the mother, in Lazar terms “a Shoah child.” For Gerson, the dream material is evocative of many traumas, local to Sheli’s life and to her mother’s and to the wider culture’s. I would add to Gerson’s question, Is the culture so accustomed to the wounds of history? I would wonder about silences and secrets.

Seligman finds himself bridging Freudian and relational thought in his long immersion in parent–infant interaction. In a case like this, attention to the slips and collapses, the unwiring of temporality and shifting characters, Seligman thinks of regression and in that way is developmentally inclined but in a particular process that is primarily nonlinear. All four authors—Lazar and her discussants—move through time and space and characterization and object relation in unpredictable way. We are not in the usual world of developmental lines and linear progression.

In sum, these papers take us to deep waters, to the drowned and the saved, to the most challenged part of the analyst’s instrument and character. In ways that are altogether relational through with unique inflections, each writer shows us how she or he is up to these challenges.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty and is a supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. In 2009, She, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safron established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University.