“Eva, Get the Goldfish Bowl”: Affect and Intuition in the Analytic Relationship

Abstract

ABSTRACT The author presents a clinical case in which aspects of the analyst’s dissociated experience – due to childhood shame or prohibitions – are evoked by her intuitive awareness of dissociated, stuck, or ossified aspects of her scientist-patient’s experience. As a consequence of this meeting of dissociated minds, the author develops a theoretical construct that she calls the outrageous interpretation. While the term outrageous refers to the analyst’s private, rebellious, and outraged response to early strictures currently emerging from dissociation, what she says becomes an outrageous interpretation when the analyst transforms her personal reaction into a contextually relevant intervention that aims to deliver affective energy into the clinical moment for the purpose of disrupting or dismantling ritualized dissociative patterns in both analytic partners. In addition, the author raises general questions of self-care by expressing her concerns for the analyst’s internal processes as she engages in helping others.