ABSTRACT
This response to Richard Kearney’s “A hermeneutics of wounds” focuses on the psychoanalytic therapist as wounded healer. I consider whether the analyst’s personal narrative of suffering, the story of wounds, plays a curative role in the back and forth of the therapeutic relationship. I suggest that, although the analyst’s own wounds do and must remain background for a majority of the time, there are certain circumstances when a particular patient may need to ‘touch’ the wound of the therapist. As Kearney suggests in his paper, trauma, in order to be healed, requires what he calls a double transformation, that is, through both a narrative catharsis and a carnal working-through. For some patients at some particular time, touching the wounds of the analyst provides just such an opportunity.
