ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a contribution to the exploration of those patients who seem to function in analysis through a particular form of repetition: “role-reversal”. It suggests that the analyst’s “mutative” interpretation is the whole action of literally interpreting and living “in the patients’ place” a part of psychic life that is either simply unknown to them. The chapter emphasizes that, in analytic treatment, these patients need first of all to encounter an analyst who witnesses in his body the feelings and anxieties the patients lived when they were children, without denying their mental suffering and their catastrophic experiences. The understanding and “interpretation” of the role-reversal that was taking place in the sessions required a careful and progressive working through by the analyst of his own counter-transference. The chapter focuses on the fact that the more archaic forms of the transference–countertransference issue take shape in the analytical setting or in its framework through actual mutual enactments.
