ABSTRACT
Christopher Bonovitz provides a detailed account of his work with eight-year-old Jason, who struggles with affect regulation and loss traced to his adoption. Bonovitz focuses on the “inner dialogue” of the therapist’s associations, identifications, and tentative formulations, as they emerge in relation to Jason’s play and utterances. The co-constitutive relationship between the analyst’s mind and the analytic field is focal here, as Bonovitz draws on multiple theoretical traditions (including a relational/intersubjective one) to make sense of the transference–countertransference matrix. This kind of participation, Bonovitz suggests, catalyzes the patient’s ability to recognize his therapist as a subject, thereby opening what was a “closed system” to new forms of relatedness and understanding.
