Privacy, Reverie, and The Analyst’s Ethical Imagination

ON BEING ABLE TO PAINT: THE REVIVAL OF AESTHETIC IMAGINATION THROUGH THE 'DYADIC PSYCHOANALYTIC ARTIST'

Vera, a middle-aged, bright and skillful mental health professional, consistently maintained throughout the first years of her analysis that she had no imagination and, indeed, exhibited during the early years of work a limited, stunted capacity for truly abstract symbolic thinking, emotional expression and playfulness. I report developments within the fourth year of Vera's psychoanalysis, currently in its eighth year, during which Vera spontaneously began to draw objects, at first copying and eventually drawing from imagination. For a time, Vera was critical of her work, which was actually quite good, and experienced great difficulty acknowledging and appreciating the many internal dimensions and interests that her work revealed. This watershed development required an equally gradual "interpretive welcoming" on the analyst's part so as to contain Vera's transition from preoccupation with concrete, technical aspects of her drawings toward a more mature thirst for the aesthetic, symbolism and play. At some point, analysand and analyst began to play with cognate associations surrounding the Hebrew word for art-o'ma'nut-combined with the image of the nursing mother (o'me'net), and fidelity, trust and faith (e'mu'nah). This creative countertransference enactment eloquently reflected the spectrum of shared transformative aesthetic-imaginative processes within both analytic partners, or the emergence of the dyadic psychoanalytic artist. Discussion elucidates what has been achieved and what remains to be achieved.

Self-criticism and unconscious grandiosity: transference-countertransference dimensions

The problems posed in understanding and working through the patient's layers of self-criticism are challenging for both patient and analyst. In particular, this paper explores some countertransference phenomena related to underlying grandiosity embedded in self-criticism. For patients who are self-critical, analyzing grandiose elements may create further grounds for self-reproach or open up new modes of self-experience and freedom. The paper tries to focus on how the analyst's experience of the patient's self-criticism often shifts over the course of analytic work. It is important for the analyst to not be crippled by a fear of considering the relevance of underlying grandiosity in relation to self-reproach. Understanding this dimension of self-reproach can help elucidate why it is so durable and refractory to interpretation. The patient has a stake in holding on to this self-punishment because it perpetuates self-regulatory fantasies. These fantasies sometimes relate to the feeling that the patient will be more successful or better loved by holding on to aspects of self-reproach. Sometimes these fantasies are based in competitive or dominant strategies related to winning out or retaliating over parents or siblings.

An elusive aspect of the analyst's relationship to transference

The author discusses the analyst's reactions to being the object of the patient's transference, noting that this topic has been somewhat neglected in the psychoanalytic literature because of the centrality of transference analysis to the psychoanalytic method. He identifies different dimensions of countertransference that relate to being a transference object and discusses these in the light of "objectionable" and "unobjectionable" transference. The analyst's relationship to theory is also discussed. To clinically illustrate his points, the author summarizes the case of a patient whose transference fantasies and attributions engendered quite contrasting reactions by two different analysts.