ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the challenge to relational psychoanalysis of working with patients and states that are unable to engage and utilize dialogic interaction and who barely recognize subjectivity in themselves or others. It is argued that a relational treatment that seeks to engage with the verbal and symbolizing capacities of the patient and foregrounds the analyst’s subjectivity can ask too much of these patients and further bury and shame their unrelated selves. Building on Winnicott and Balint the author reconfigures the concept of regression and proposes that an unobtrusive relational analyst can be both present as his or her own subject and be unobtrusive to the flow of enactive engagement wherein the analyst companions the patient into states of mutual regression, waking dreaming, non-symbolized and non-represented areas of trauma, pain and confusion. Psychological growth and new meaning emerge via companioning the patient within these inchoate areas rather than seeking to bring the patient out of these states and into areas of greater relatedness and insight.
