Beyond the Clinical Moment: Searching for Realness and Reciprocity in a Long-Term Analytic Relationship

Abstract

This is the story of the early years of my therapeutic work with my patient, Adam—a young man who, as I came to see it, probed actively in order to assess my capacity for what I would call realness, reciprocity, and presence. My empathy seemed to depend in good part on how Adam saw and read my inner experience of myself and of him, as well as on how I experienced being seen and known by him. In the process of facilitating inner change for him, we both became engaged around the same basic set of universal, human, existential issues.My aim is to bring my readers, into my lived experience of beginning a treatment like this one—what it feels like and means to me. Adam, my patient, has seen this version of our story and chose to put his experience of our work in a recent letter you will find included after my narrative.