ABSTRACT
The chapter describes the experience of dissociation in the analysis of a man in his 30s who uses incessant talk (the boring of the analyst) as a “technique” (Khan) for avoiding intimacy and access to feelings. A dream makes possible a turning point, allowing a momentary loss of omnipotent control and a first step towards modifying the patient's manic defense.
The analyst might be said to harbor in his own countertransference some aspects of that dissociated self which the patient is unable to reintegrate.
These are not the familiar transference/countertransference vicissitudes: i.e., not a two-way flow of projective identifications. Instead, the analyst is experienced as extraneous to the patient just as he is extraneous to himself. The paradox of psychoanalysis is that the person can only know or recognize himself by means of the other. But the other is not, in actual fact, the analyst. He is the absent third who continually turns up at the borderline of the self and the relationship with the analyst.
The analyst also uses this experience as a reminder not to be too quick to interpret, to gauge when and how the patient might be ready to receive an interpretation. Refraining from interpretation can also be a way for the analyst to preserve some private, emotional space of his own when confronted with an intrusive, compulsively narrating analysand.
