Them That’s Got1/Them That’s Not: Commentary on Paper by Julie Gerhardt

Abstract

ABSTRACT In response to Julie Gerhardt’s paper, “Clinical Anecdotes from my Home Office: Privilege and the Haunted House Next Door,” I emphasize Dr. Gerhardt’s efforts to undertake a transformation in her analytic work and its customary framework. She shares her experience of allowing herself, or even seeking out, an interruption, or even a “disruption,” of her usual methods of listening in the service of widening her analytic focus from the strictly intrapsychic, or intersubjective, to include the perspectives that social psychoanalysis allows with regard to the social and cultural patterns that shape unconscious expectations and perceptions. This brought about a transformation in her clinical work, which led to the capacity to make use of a different quality of reverie, a process that she shares with the reader as she moves to more self-consciously include the social as a significant force affecting psychic reality. In addition, I emphasize that it is important to recognize in her account the difficulties and hazards in engineering such an alteration in the analyst’s customary ways of understanding and being in relation to patients, and suggest that the process described can be rightly considered one of “self-reparation.”