ABSTRACT
I wish to try to tackle what can be loosely called the ‘human’ aspects of the psychoanalytic relationship, which make it a risky, worthwhile, spontaneous, complex and very personal endeavour. There has been in recent years increasing emphasis in the psychoanalytic world on clarifying and exploring the subjective states of analyst and patient. For example, Bollas (1987, 1989) explores the analyst's use of his subjective experience in order to clarify important aspects of the patient's early experiences. He recommends that the clinician should find a way to make his subjective states of mind available to the patient and to himself as objects of the analysis even when he does not yet know what these states mean’ (Bollas, 1987, p. 201). Aron (1991, p. 37) emphasizes the need to analyse the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity in order to ‘open the door to … explorations of the patient's childhood experiences of the parents’ inner world and character structure. The intersubjective approach to psychoanalysis, for example as explained by Stolorow et al. (1987) pays particular attention to the way that the subjectivity of patient and analyst interact. Self psychology emphasizes the need for the analyst to have a particular subjective approach — for example, the capacity to be empathic with the patient by offering ‘optimal responsiveness’ (Bacal, 1985, p. 202), in contrast to the classical technique of offering optimal frustration. Wolf also describes how ‘discrepancies in subjective experience between analyst and analysand are bound to become the foci of the working through process’ (Wolf, 1988, p. 153). Bolognini (2001, 2004) develops a complex notion of psychoanalytic empathy, which combines notions of sharing and participation with analytic understanding. Finally, many contemporary clinical presentations from a wide variety of 41analytic schools show how enactments between patient and analyst are an inevitable and necessary part of the analytic work, reflecting how subjectivities of patient and analyst are in constant interaction.
