ABSTRACT
I argue for a return in analysis to the immense unconscious value of clinical history and of free association. For Freud, the supreme value resided in the giving of interpretation, to which Ferenczi added the key parameter of ‘being in the experience’, a difference that I see at the centre of contemporary debate in psychoanalysis, and which I examine through a focus on trauma and its history in psychoanalysis. In particular, the evocation of the real that is early trauma and its subsequent mental development are explored in the analysis with a man with a severe tic (spasmodic torticollis). It is central to my argument that much analytical exploration of early trauma does not occur within the intellectual component of interpretation. Rather, it comes about by being discovered in sometimes intangible fragments which can appear as enactments, enabling the unconscious affect of the child to emerge and to be felt by the analytic pair. It can thus begin to be noticed as an experience within oneself and then understood. Such moments in analysis are far different from being told that this or that happened in the then and the now. I also suggest that the position of the analyst must be seen as the expression of their own (analysed) character, and that the desire to belong can drive the analyst to take particular theoretical positions. Finding the analyst’s creative direction is often, if not invariably, a long time coming. It is a paradox of, or at least a tension inherent in, analysis that the analyst must survive both alone and also in the presence of the other.
