ABSTRACT
For most of psychoanalytic century authors have tried to tease out the many subtle processes alive in clinical work behind the manifest scene of patient associations and analyst interpretations. Reviewing the nature of the psychoanalytic process and the patient’s testimony, Felman and Laub noted that Freud created “the psychoanalytic dialogue, an unprecedented kind of dialogue in which the doctor’s testimony does not substitute itself for the patient’s testimony, but resonates with it, because, as Freud discovers, it takes two to witness the unconscious.” Psychoanalysis is a process of shared exploration, not one of the analyst’s divine revelations; for a patient’s testimony to come to life, a comprehending witness is needed. Psychoanalysis works to maximize openness to personal truths more than to comfort. The authors strive to analyze pain, not anesthetize. Witnessing as a psychoanalytic function refers to the analyst’s grasping and respecting the patient’s meanings and the meaningfulness of those meanings from a position of separated otherness.
