Perhaps in some measure due to Freud's fascination with archeology, clinical psychoanalysis has tended to embrace an image of two people on a “quest”—a journey to reach an unknown destination to recover a buried past. Despite the fact that I rather like the image, in my day-to-day work as a practicing therapist, I seem to find my reality shaped more by Gertrude Stein than by Indiana Jones. Stein (1937, p. 298), commenting about the nature of life and the pursuit of goals, wrote that when you finally get there, “there is no there there.” My patients frequently make the same comment. The direct experience of “self-change” seems to be gobbled up by the reality of “who you are” at a given moment, and evades the linear experience of beginning, middle, and end. But linear time does indeed have a presence of its own—like the background ticking of a clock that cannot be ignored for too long without great cost—and it is this paradox that seems to make psychoanalysis feel like a relationship between two people, each trying to keep one foot in the here and now and the other in the linear reality of past, present, and future. Described this way, it sounds like a totally impossible process. If, indeed, “everyone knows that every day has no future to it” (Stein, 1937, p. 271), then what sustains a person's motivation for analytic treatment? How do we account for the fact that a patient remains in a relationship with another person for the express purpose of dismantling his own self-image for a presumedly “better” version that he cannot even imagine until after it has arrived? The answer, as I see it, touches what may be the essence of human nature—the fact that the human personality possesses the extraordinary capacity to negotiate continuity and change simultaneously, and will do so under the right relational conditions (Bromberg, 1993, 1994). I believe that this attribute is what we rely on to make clinical psychoanalysis, or any form of psychodynamic psychotherapy, possible. How we understand this remarkable capability of the mind, and what we see as the optimal therapeutic environment for it to flourish, are, I suggest, the fundamental questions that shape psychoanalytic theory and practice. What I talk about here is an outcome of this way of experiencing and thinking about the human relationship we call “psychoanalysis.”

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Surprise and the psycho-analyst

Standing in the Spaces: The Multiplicity Of Self And The Psychoanalytic Relationship

The new emphasis on nonlinear dynamics in psychoanalytic thinking is rapidly changing our view of both psychological structure and psychological growth. The conceptualization of psychoanalytic listening and technique as therapeutically mediating the lifting of repression and the resolution of intrapsychic conflict is reexamined here in terms of new types of questions having to do with such concepts as “self‐organization,”; “states of consciousness,”; and “dissociation.”; This paper presents the view that dissociation is as basic as repression to human mental functioning and as central to the stability and growth of personality. Even in the most resilient personality, an analyst will always encounter domains of dissociated experience that have weak or nonexistent linkage to the experience of “me”; as a communicable entity. Before these “not‐me”; states of mind can be taken as objects of analytic self‐reflection, they must first become “thinkable”; while becoming linguistically communicable through enactmen...

“Speak! that I may see you”; some reflections on dissociation, reality, and psychoanalytic listening

Shadow and substance: a relational perspective on clinical process

Creativity in social work

One might venture the guess that to the future historian of science one of the most intriguing features of the present era of psychoanalysis might lie in the following paradox: that while psychoanalysis, both as theory and practice, represents the most advanced form of current thought regarding psychological growth and human relationships, there is, a t the same time, considerable vagueness and disagreement among workers as to what constitute the characteristic operations of this science. If we view this state of affairs in the light of the history of other sciences, particularly mathematics and physics, we find that the problem in psychoanalysis-as sketched ahove-has no parallel in the evolution of those sciences. Indeed, i t is well known that in the natural sciences, a precise definition (description) of the scope and mode of opera-

Surprise and the psycho-analyst

Citations

Standing in the Spaces: The Multiplicity Of Self And The Psychoanalytic Relationship

“Speak! that I may see you”; some reflections on dissociation, reality, and psychoanalytic listening

Shadow and substance: a relational perspective on clinical process

Creativity in social work

On the experiences of the analyst in the psychoanalytic situation; a contribution to the theory of psychoanalytic treatment.

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