ABSTRACT
In the course of the past several decades, psychoanalysts have increasingly turned to their fantasies, reveries, and dreams in an effort to gain a sense of what is happening in the transference–countertransference experience. If the analytic space between analyst and analysand is severely compromised or collapsed, an analyst may consult a colleague to make use of the colleague's unique perspective and his or her capacity to imagine what is going on in an analytic experience. The analyst's role is not merely that of facilitating the birth of past experience that has been reanimated through the transference and delivered to the analysand; through a close reading of his or her own subjective response to what the patient communicates, the analyst may grasp something of the patient's emotional states as they are being procreated within the depths of the analytic experience. The analyst and patient produce forces that must be reckoned with through the active containing presence of the analyst.
