I, Thou, and Us: Relationality and the Interpretive Process in Clinical Practice

Abstract

Relational analysis does not imply bypassing the study of unconscious mental processes. Rather, the logic of such processes seems to require a bipersonal approach. The fact that the primary process does not recognize the subject-object differentiation determines an interweaving of the patient's and the analyst's mentations, thus fostering the inception and evolution of an impersonal psychoanalytic process, which does not have a subject. The analytic setting and the analyst's interventions steer this process toward a greater and deeper awareness, by both parties, of the mutual interaction that underlies their experience of being together, doing psychoanalysis. This evolution, referred to as the interpretive process, includes both parties and is not fully controllable by either of them. Most accounts of mutual generation of clinical data correspond to the analysis of severely disturbed patients. This is so because such treatments impose the consideration of interpersonal processes, even if the analyst adheres to a one-person psychology. There is, therefore, a need for clinical illustrations showing such mutual data generation in ordinary analyses. I present an extensive vignette from two sessions of one such treatment, in which mutual data generation is apparent.