Distance And Relation: Emerging From Embeddedness In The Other

Abstract

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. The entire process—i.e., setting the other at a distance and then emerging from embeddedness in the other—must take place over and over again in any treatment, and in both directions: patients must disembed from analysts, but it is just as necessary for analysts to disembed from patients. It is the emergence from embeddedness that allows the analyst’s appreciation of the patient’s otherness. Embeddedness in the other is discussed as mutual enactment. This use of these phenomena in treatment is articulated in the theory of witnessing presented elsewhere in recent years (Stern 2009, 2012, 2022b, in press). A detailed clinical illustration is presented.

Interpretation: Voice of the Field

“…Interpretations constitute not just the analyst’s own thoughts, but the struggle of the analytic couple to know itself. Analyst and patient are always mutually embedded to one degree or another (Stern 2023), which means that what each usually takes to be their own, internally constructed experience (“endogenous,” we have often called it in psychoanalysis) really can’t be so simply claimed to be the product of a single mind.…”

“…It is instead the way the interpretations made the patient feel . Interpretation most commonly works, I will claim, not by making the unconscious conscious (although I will say nothing to question the significance of the content and accuracy of interpretations), but by widening and/or deepening the patient’s sense of being known or recognized by someone who has become emotionally significant, a process I have elsewhere called “witnessing” (Stern 2009, 2012, 2022, 2023). (For a brief review of the literature on witnessing in psychoanalysis see Stern 2022, pp.…”