ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the resilience of both the patient and the analyst at different junctures in their life cycles – early adulthood and old age. The concept of resilience comes to us from general psychology and epidemiology, and has rarely been considered in the psychoanalytic literature. Through several case presentations, its relevance to psychoanalytic work will be explored. The traditional use of trait measures of resilience is questioned when considering the more contextual perspective of relational psychoanalysis. Moreover, a discussion of the uniqueness of the individual, and the unique paring of patient and analyst, including their intersubjective and intrapsychic dynamics, will be shown to provide a richer contribution to therapeutic work than a consideration of resilient traits by themselves. Resilience will be considered more as a process which emerges at the confluence of several factors, including individual character and dynamics, interpersonal context and time of life. Finally, the resilience of the analyst will be considered as it emerges under the pressures of the intersubjective and countertransference interaction inherent to a relational model.
