ABSTRACT
Relational psychoanalytic literature continues to free analysts to write frankly about their lives and work—and the interplay between them—much of this writing is concerned with grim life experiences. In the necessary process of moving again and again with our patients through their pain and suffering, pain and suffering become central or privileged terms of our practice and discourse. Other patients have wondered, crankily, why they should have to pay the author to talk about feeling well, as if that were somehow less interesting or crucial than feeling unwell. More life is about possibilities for pleasure and playing, good sex and terrific songs, moments of contact and recognition within the analytic pair as well as in the larger world. Like an analyst and patient in moments when the border between them is at once a site of joining and demarcation, that border making it possible for each to recognize her and the other as separate instances of common being.
