The Cracks Are Where the Light Comes in

Abstract

The sensitivity of psychotherapists in understanding others is connected to a deep capacity for both intimacy and vulnerability. The three papers by Lauren Levine, Deborah Dowd, and Sharon Ziv Beiman present clinical experiences with women patients that touch deep areas of openness for patient and analyst alike. Through their generous and evocative material, and the invitation of a male discussant, all parties are drawn into a powerful sense of mutual vulnerability. Painful mis-attunements occur and are courageously addressed by the writers. The discussion uses the poetic allusion, to the cracks in everything, as the necessary basis for the light of analytic relatedness and love to come into being.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Gerald

Mark Gerald, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and The Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis. He has taught for IARPP in Chile and has supervised for the Chinese American Psychoanalytic Alliance. His project, In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch, includes his photographic portraits of psychoanalysts in their offices in the United States, Europe, Mexico, and South America. He has taught and written about the psychoanalytic office and the importance of seeing and being seen in creating new relational images in psychoanalysis.