ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the significance of affirmation in effecting change processes in psychoanalytic therapy. The main mechanism of change in the psychoanalytic talking cure is insight into what I really feel, why I find my feelings intolerable, and what I do to protect myself against such feelings, gained through interpretation. In this chapter, I argue that to achieve emotional insight with the power of initiating change, interpretation must often be supplemented by another kind of intervention – namely affirmation, defined as a communication that removes doubt about the validity of the subject’s experience. Based on clinical material, I highlight how the therapist’s affirmative responses may convey an experience of being seen, understood, listened to, and accepted, which strengthen the inner feeling of a strategic “I” and of agency. Affirmation may be especially critical in reaching unrepresented, not mentalized “layers” of our patients’ experiences. Through the analyst’s affirmative listening events that are remembered, but not represented in their affective impact, e.g., sexual abuse, may for the first time be constituted as traumatic.
