Beginning the Treatment on a Personal Note: Creating Emotional Connection.

Psychoanalysis reflects the minds of its creators and is an ethical practice in the sense that the theories with which we psychoanalysts identify are those that reflect what is most important in life to each of us. I present autobiographical material that points to the personal sources, even earlier than my psychoanalytic training, of my conviction that the creation of emotional connection between two actual persons lies at the heart of psychoanalysis and is the key element in the beginning of psychoanalytic treatment. I argue that the beginning of an interpersonal/relational treatment has more continuity with the beginning of non-psychoanalytic relationships than does the beginning of treatment carried out by analysts from other schools.

Interpretation: Voice of the Field.

To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the contents of the analyst's interpretations, but the feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful not because of what they say but because each one is evidence that the analyst, who generally becomes someone of great significance to the patient, knows the patient more than before the interpretation was made. As a result of this process of "witnessing" patients not only know and feel-they also "know and feel that they know and feel.

Distance And Relation: Emerging From Embeddedness In The Other.

Inspired by an essay by Martin Buber (1950), and then by the work of Ernest Schachtel (1959) on the idea of "embeddedness" and emergence from it, this essay is an account of the role of "distance" or "separateness" in clinical psychoanalytic work. We tend to assume that the capacity to appreciate otherness is always already present. We often lose track of the necessity to "set the other at a distance" (Buber), the prerequisite for emergence from embeddedness in the other.

On Coming Into Possession of Oneself: Witnessing and the Formulation of Experience.

In this paper I use clinical theory and illustration to explore details of the formulation of experience, which depends upon the metamorphosis of experience from to I take the position that the movement from not-me to feels-like-me, with the accompanying possibilities for formulating new meaning that open at such moments, happens when we not only know or feel something, but also, and simultaneously, sense ourselves in the midst of this process-that is, when we know and feel that it is we who are doing the knowing and feeling. When these two events co-occur, which depends upon the process of witnessing and the breach of dissociation, we come into possession of ourselves. Witnessing of one person by another is a process of recognition, but it is also a kind of affirmation performed by "someone who is trusted and justifies the trust and meets the dependence" (Winnicott 1971, p.

Unformulated experience, dissociation, and Nachträglichkeit.

The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is an interpersonal/relational psychoanalytic account of some relationships between dissociation, time, and unformulated experience. Trauma, and the dissociation to which trauma leads, freezes time, which makes it impossible to formulate certain kinds of new experience.

Relational freedom and therapeutic action.

Therapeutic action depends on our freedom to allow ourselves novel, unbidden experience. How does this novelty arise? What is the process by which some portion of the possibilities inherent in any moment's unformulated experience are created or selected and emerge in consciousness? And what does it mean to think of freedom in this context? What does it mean for the formulation of experience to be free? In the frame of reference adopted here, the formulation of experience depends on the conscious and unconscious events of the interpersonal field. The field facilitates some formulations of experience and prevents others.

Witnessing across time: accessing the present from the past and the past from the present.

We are used to the idea that trauma in the past interrupts our capacity to grasp the present. But present or recent trauma can have a similar dissociative effect on our capacity to experience the more distant past. Contemporary trauma can rob the past of its goodness, leaving one feeling as if the past is gone, dead, separated from the present.

Partners in thought: a clinical process theory of narrative.

Even in the absence of others, we learn about ourselves by imaginatively listening to our own thoughts through the ears of the other. At the beginning of life, we need a witness to become a self. Later, patients listen to themselves as they imagine their analysts hear them, and in this way create new narrative freedom.

Words and wordlessness in the psychoanalytic situation.

The difference between words and wordlessness in the psychoanalytic situation is examined in the context of a detailed clinical example. Various pairs of terms that have been used to account for this difference are mapped onto it: word and act, thought and feeling, public and private experience. Each of these sets of differences suggests certain relations between consciousness and the unconscious, and each implies a position about the nature of language.