The Message of a Bottle: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual”

Abstract

Relational psychoanalysis’ promise is to connect the personal and the collective/political. Through a phenomenological approach, this comment attempts to describe the subjective effects of the “Great History” in the analytic couple dynamics. Starting from the concepts of intersubject, vinculo and the one-to-many forms of relations –proposed by Francisco González– it expatiates on “resonance” as a way to recover fragments of experience shattered by trauma and “consonance” as a means to visualize this phenomena in other collectives, as a trans-collective experience. The piece invites the possibility of creating new analytic experiential object: the Klein Bottle. By entangling the individual with the multiple and history with the present, it opens new dimensions of meaning. It can be used both to deconstruct a fixated pleat of subjectivity and to open new forms of polyphonic relationality. This approach is offered as a path through which we analysts can rejoin to the march of history.