“Open Close Open”: Discussion of Raanan Kulka's “Between Emergence and Dissolving: Contemporary Reflections on Greatness and Ideals in Kohut's Legacy”

Abstract

Kulka's work, taking Kohut's bipolar model to its next developmental stage, introduces the idea of an existential vibration of consciousness: between openness, prior to existence, and the ‘closedness’ of coming into being. I discuss in my response to Kulka's two clinical examples of patients who have lost their ability for this existential vibration, focusing on the quality of the therapeutic presence that is required for enhancing its return. The analyst's position of emptiness, his meditative state, his position of dissolving, is essential for the restoration of the patients' primary open nature and thereby for the possibility of moving between their infinite existential potentials and into unbroken emergences of being.