“Where Thoughts Arrive as Actions”: Some Thoughts in Response to Commentaries by Hirsch and Newirth

Abstract

The concept of psychoanalytic companioning is reviewed. The commentaries of Hirsch and Newirth are addressed. Hirsch’s dichotomizations are queried and found to constrain the concept of psychoanalytic companioning. Psychoanalytic companioning is offered as a unique form of psychoanalytic knowing in and of itself. Resonance is found with much of Newirth’s commentary, and his question of the relation of psychoanalytic companioning to self psychology is addressed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The title’s quotation is a phrase that Bollas (2011) used to describe how character speaks through actions. I thank Bruce Reis, Ph.D., and Carina Grossmark, Ph.D., for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this response.

Notes

¹ For an insight into Hirsch’s perspective on analytic approaches where patients “are treated as fragile and as dependent” (Hirsch, 2014, p. 57), I would recommend his brave and compelling essay that addresses his personal and professional development (Hirsch, 2014). He writes that “therapeutic points of view that emphasize patients’ weakness and fragility are subject to my disdainful ire and my sometimes overt criticism” (p. 58).

Additional information

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.