ABSTRACT
The analytic attitude is based upon an attempt to stay with, accept, contain, explore, understand, and communicate exactly what the patient brings, thereby allowing these expressions and dynamics to be integrated into the patient's broader personality, just as the dynamic is integrated into the analytic relationship. Properly recognising the role of trauma, and of the reconstruction and co-construction of that trauma in the analytic relationship, makes sense of the analytic attitude by putting it in context. Whether or not putting trauma central to an understanding of the practice of analysis represents a radical alteration in perspective is an interesting and perplexing question. In trauma circles the analytic attitude is contentious, and is frequently seen as inhuman, deeply distressing, anti-relational and traumatising. As Rosenfeld and Knox suggest, the surgical, blank- screen approach can easily retraumatise the patient, particularly if the patient has a history of being met by blankness, or it can leave the patient feeling unheard, unseen, and unresponded to.
