ABSTRACT
The appearance of a paradoxical thought in an analyst would permit the resumption of a work of working through. At certain moments, during certain sessions, strange images emerge unexpectedly in the analyst's mind. Fleeting, polymorphous, generally speaking expressed in images and endowed with a strong hallucinatory character, but sometimes expressed in language, these representations develop against the background of a slight depersonalisation and in parallel with a regressive movement. Responding to psychic processes that belong to the analysand, they unfold in the analyst, anticipating the possible intellectual understanding of the clinical material presented. These images are characterised by the variety of their form and especially by their dynamism. They announce an inaccessible phantasmatic potentiality whose unconscious dynamic can be restored by interpretation. Paradoxical thought may be considered, in short, as the extreme form taken by the countertransference when the analyst's psychic apparatus puts itself entirely in the service of the patient's psychic functioning.
