We are all Located Somewhere: Thoughts on History, Trauma, and the Psychoanalytic process

Abstract

This article honor’s historian/psychoanalyst Tom Kohut’s work by bringing forth the interpenetration of history, and psychoanalysis grounded in an empathic experiential method. Within the psychoanalytic process, the focus of empathic inquiry will now be informed by a radical contextual sensibility with the recognition that all dyadic experience cannot be understood outside of the contribution of the wider historical/cultural world within which that experience is embedded, a history that will inevitably include various forms of traumatizing violence. A clinical vignette is discussed in which empathic sensitivity to differences in economic privilege between therapist and patient tied to marked differences in respective historical location resulted in unusual therapist activity that evoked a special moment of meeting whereby the patient felt deeply understood. The chapter concludes with a sober reminder that the denigration of the other to inferior and subhuman status constitutes a slippery slope to genocide.

Keywords:

• empathy
• genocide
• history
• psychoanalysis
• radical contextual sensibility
• trauma

Notes

¹ A vignette concerning my work with J was discussed in an earlier publication (Sucharov, 2013b), whereby a self-disclosure of disorientation at the beginning of a session served as a stimulant for a heretofore coherent narrative of his bleak childhood.

² Given the secure and informal nature of our lengthy relationship, a bathroom break, however infrequent, would have been an ordinary event.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maxwell S. Sucharov

Maxwell S. Sucharov, M.D., is a psychoanalytic clinician in private practice in Vancouver, Canada. He is a Clinical Associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, a council member of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.