ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is world filled with misrecognition; of personal history called amnesia; motor power of limbs called hysterical paralysis; and dissociation of overwhelming events called trauma or posttraumatic stress disorder. Alternatively, as Paul Ricoeur’s opus suggests, recognition is an other-dependent healing process in which the two-party therapeutic experiences offer opportunities of healing, and understanding, analytic moments of mutual recognition. This dialectic between recognition and misrecognition is one way to conceptualize the human as well as therapeutic process. We are all dependent on another to be human, to make sense of our lives. We need partners in our search for agency, affirmation, and mutual recognition in a world of dissonance and misrecognition. This chapter applies core concepts of Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology to a clinician’s experience of obliteration by the patient in the process of potential disruption to the treatment. During the reconstruction of the analyst, the patient discovers and recovers memories of physical assault and literal attempts at her obliteration. This chapter examines negation as regenerative affirmation and explores the therapeutic engine of both the obliteration and reconstruction of the self-other dyad.
