Psychoanalytic Companioning

Abstract

In this paper I offer an integration of object relations and relational conceptions of clinical interaction and suggest a register of psychoanalytic companioning. I suggest that when working with patients and states where there is no self-other definition and therefore no mutuality, the path to healing and growth is via companioning the patient into the darker, more regressed and unformed states of illusion and merger rather than via the promotion of separateness and relatedness, which, I propose, will accrue from within the companioning register. The analyst works from within an unobtrusive relational position. I offer a case example of my work in this register and suggest that this offers a different register of the use of the analyst’s subjectivity: one that is receptive, “cooperative” (Trevarthen) and responsive to the patient’s internal world and objects, rather than analytic and knowing. I consider the dimensions of intersubjectivity that cohere with the dimensions and levels of the patient’s mentalization as outlined by Leciurs and Bouchard (1997).

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Notes on contributors

Robert Grossmark

Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies, The Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, and the clinical psychology doctoral program at The City University of New York. He coedited The One & The Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory, both published by Routledge.