From the “Green Woman” to “Scheherazade”

Abstract

This paper focuses on the becoming of a fundamentally new experience and development in psychoanalytic treatment. It is based on psychoanalytic approaches whose visions of psychoanalytic change theoretically and clinically incorporate the striving for a “new beginning,” “new opportunity for development,” “lifegiver,” and rebirth. The author argues that in creating a profound living transformation during treatment, it is not enough to confront the gap between the patient's unbearable past experiences and the new, more benign relationship with the analyst; nor is the patient's internalizing of this new relationship sufficient. To undergo profound change, the patient's destructive or traumatic split-off core experiences and the ensuing defense organization must be processed and modified within a new, actualized, and more able psychic space that is created by the patient-analyst's deep interconnectedness. This interconnected psychic space becomes the arena in which these unbearable past experiences invade the present and are forcefully relived, and the intense struggle for a qualitatively new experience takes place; it is the venture zone of the change process, experienced in the past-present convergence. The analyst's willingness and capacity to risk, bear, and survive the vulnerability, anxiety, madness, not-knowing, and knowing caused by yielding to the impact of the patient's world, become crucial to the process. The above is illustrated by several clinical examples.