Entering One’s Own Life as an Aim of Clinical Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The historical development of psychoanalysis has demonstrated that the aim of clinical work can change as the patient population changes. One of the main tasks of psychoanalytic working through today is to help difficult patients trapped in imitative dynamics and “never-to-be-born selves” enter a life of their own. Particular emphasis is given to activating a body-mind relationship, catalyzing emergence from the unrepressed unconscious, and constructing space-time parameters in relation to the most primitive and undifferentiated emotional experiences. Two clinical cases are presented, in the first of which the analyst found himself invested with an intense devitalization that tested his capacity to be present. In the second case the analyst was confronted by the necessity of stimulating the birth of basic functions of mental notation in relation to blind and dangerous acting out. The confrontation in the analytic relationship mobilized the patient’s internal resources of self-observation and self-containment, from which the capacity to exist and be present to the self could emerge.