Abstract
In this response to Danielle Novack’s intellectually astute and clinically rich paper on the “analyst’s trust,” I reflect on the valuable ways in which Novack elucidates this undertheorized aspect of the analyst’s experience and reconfigures trust/mistrust as a meaningful intersubjective dimension of the therapeutic relationship. Novack shows how attending to shifts in trust/mistrust can provide valuable clues for deciphering the transference/countertransference. While I strongly agree with her construction of trust as a psychoanalytic achievement, I question the notion that the analyst’s trust is a necessary condition for her participation. Novack’s work on the analyst’s trust joins a broader contemporary conversation about potential overreaches in the relational paradigm, which I discuss. Finally, I consider the implications of Novack’s work for specifying the factors that underly resilience and engaging a conversation about surviving destruction in contemporary relational psychoanalysis.
Published Version
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