ABSTRACT
The relational intersubjective and modern psychoanalytic theories of treatment, though different in their consideration of the influence of the drives and the use of transparency in treatment intervention, share the belief in the power of emotional presence, mutually attained, as a core necessity for cure. Moreover, the psychic health of the analyst as well as that of the patient is advanced when this effort is successful. Achieving emotional presence as the cases presented illustrate is often a complex, arduous, and perilous undertaking. The paranoid man about whom I wrote in Chapter 6 in which I became encapsulated in what felt like a deathly psychic chrysalis is illustrative.
