Insight and the Analytic Dyad

Abstract

Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analytic immediacy offers the opportunity to make meanings meaningful, to convert known facts to psychic truths. The analyst's clinical task requires his private self-analysis as part of the collaborative exploration of how the patient's mind works. Higher level ego functioning, including acutely active remembering, is at times transiently loosened in order for the analyst to share in the clinical work of discovery. The words the analyst uses to communicate his understanding convey only approximate manifest meanings, though they structurally reveal deeper messages of importance to the patient. These verbal approximations help stimulate self-reflection in the analysand as a step in the process of gaining insight.

Free Associatioan and Analytic Neutraltity: Basic Structure of the Psychoanalytic Situation

“…Neutrality with regard to transference projection, displacements, and characterizations commits the analyst to a stance which acknowledges the subjective reality of the patient's experience as something to be explored and understood rather than suppressed or relinquished. It requires a remarkably high level of personal freedom (Poland, 1988) and self-confidence for the analyst to allow herself to be experienced transferentially in ways that are alien to her oivn self-experience, without protest or manipulation or withdrawal. Yet it is a fundamental premise of psychoanalytic treatment that only through a process of exploring and fully understanding the subjective reality of the patient's transference experience, including its unconscious determinants, that the most profound transformations of psychic equilibrium are made possible.…”

Response to the contributors to “Essays inspired by Theodore Jacobs'sthe use of the self”

“…Although the writings of colleagues such as Boesky (1990), Poland (1988), Natterson (1991), Renik (1993), and Levine (1992) have given me a clearer view of the way that the inner worlds of patient and analyst interweave in analysis, coming together, fusing, separating out, and coming together again as the process unfolds, I believe that during the years that I wrote The Use of the Self, I fully subscribed to this view.…”

The Quest for a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: A Retreat from Uncertainty

“…Most of the candidate participants had had seminars in ego psychology and had been exposed to papers on countertransference and enactment by Poland (1988), Chused (1991), Jacobs (1991), andMcLaughlin (1991). They had also been familiar with contemporary Kleinians such as Joseph (1989), Britton (1994), Spillius (1994), and Steiner (1994), all of whom had been visiting professors at our institute in recent years.…”