“Speak! that I may see you”; some reflections on dissociation, reality, and psychoanalytic listening

Abstract

The new emphasis on nonlinear dynamics in psychoanalytic thinking is rapidly changing our view of both psychological structure and psychological growth. The conceptualization of psychoanalytic listening and technique as therapeutically mediating the lifting of repression and the resolution of intrapsychic conflict is reexamined here in terms of new types of questions having to do with such concepts as “self‐organization,”; “states of consciousness,”; and “dissociation.”; This paper presents the view that dissociation is as basic as repression to human mental functioning and as central to the stability and growth of personality. Even in the most resilient personality, an analyst will always encounter domains of dissociated experience that have weak or nonexistent linkage to the experience of “me”; as a communicable entity. Before these “not‐me”; states of mind can be taken as objects of analytic self‐reflection, they must first become “thinkable”; while becoming linguistically communicable through enactment in the analytic relationship. This depends on the analyst's ability to acknowledge the divergent realities held by discontinuous self‐states in the patient while simultaneously maintaining an authentic dialogue with each. By “unfreezing”; the concrete, literal quality of a patient's discontinuous states of consciousness, the patient is able to embrace the full range of his perceptual reality within a single relational field, so that the process becomes a dialectic between seeing and being seen rather than simply being seen “into.”; It is through this that intrapsychic bridges are built between a patient's selfexperiences that could not formerly be contained in a relationship with the same object, and a transition begins to take place from enacted dissociative experience to interpretable intrapsychic conflict.