ABSTRACT
HOLLY LEVENKRON HAS OFFERED US AN ARTICLE COURAGEOUS IN ITS candor and valuable in its sharing of the intimate intrasubjective and intersubjective process she experienced with Ali. In doing so, she has provided vivid illustration of the essential clinical phenomenon of ongo ing breakdown and restoration of recognition between analyst and patient and the potential for an ultimately larger trajectory toward increasingly intimate and differentiated mutual recognition and growth. Levenkron1 seeks to illustrate "the relationship among confrontation, enactment, and dissociation." She introduces her concept of "affective honesty" and em phasizes the intrinsic therapeutic action of intensely engaged, affectively charged enactments in the analytic dyad. "Specifically," she writes, "I am focusing on the process wherein negotiating enactments becomes intersubjective relating." In this discussion we will emphasize that enact ments become intersubjective relating through a process of negotiation that is intrapsychic as well as relational and entailing the analyst's inter nal negotiation between her transferences and her recognitions . Loss of the paradoxical tension between transference and recognition is the breakdown of intersubjectivity. We persist in negation of the other when we are marooned in our own transference position. Holly's sessions with Ali beautifully illustrate the complementarity of their transferences based on maternal identifications and the clinical process whereby Holly and her patient recreate intersubjectivity between them.
