The analytic pair in action--finding the missing mental life: an intersubjective approach.
The case of a musician/performer whose disposition and identity involved action as a privileged modality and whose initial presentation included the absence of a palpable mental life is used to show how the analyst's urge to disclose/to fill in what was unknown was midwife to the development of a symbolizing capacity and an articulated mental life. The patient at first could only tell her story by showing and doing and so the analyst's participation in the actualization of the narrative was vital to its discovery. Relationships between the patient's unusual mental structure, including her proclivity for action, the use of projective mechanisms, and an ease with the concretization of fantasy are discussed with reference to her endowment as a gifted musical composer; and her identity as an "artist. " Technical strategies and difficulties in arriving at a 'best' technique are discussed as the analyst struggled to locate the patient developmentally, and to contain and permit difficult transference/countertransference enactments to unfold. Reflections on parallels to child/adolescent developmental necessities enabled the evolution of a viable technique.
Herbert
Jill C
JC
New York Frudian Society, USA.
D000184:Acting Out; D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D003379:Countertransference; D004213:Dissociative Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D004325:Dreams; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008393:Marriage / Q000523:psychology; D008606:Mental Processes; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009146:Music; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D012650:Self Disclosure; D014167:Transference, Psychology