The "insight" in the analytic situation

Abstract

The paper first tries to define the analytic situation as the dynamic field which is established between the two persons involved in the analytic contract. It describes its basic conformations (the analytic contract; the structure of the overt material; the unconscious fantasy that directs the field at every moment). The analytic situation thus appears as a bipersonal transferential-countertransferential field in which the pathologic phenomena (transference-countertransference neurosis) appear. The function of the analyst is to become partly involved in these transitory (artificial) pathologic phenomena in order to be able to interpret and elaborate them. The reciprocal projective identification which functions in the field constitutes at all moments an unconscious fantasy of pair, and its interpretation produces a restructuring of the field and gives rise to new fantasies. That is why mobility in the field is essential and its pathology is made clear when the field is paralyzed and the communication becomes stereotyped. Repeating his neurotic circles, the patient tends to establish “bastions” within the field and he succeeds in doing so every time that some countertransferential difficulty (or complicity) of his analyst enables him to. The extreme phenomenon of the pathology of the field could be called the “parasitism” of the analyst caused by the patient, when the former is invaded and “inhabited” by parts of the patient which have been projected with violence into him, as a consequence of the explosion of the analytic situation, and more specifically, by that of the bastion. These extreme cases do nothing but hypertrophy a common feature of the analytic situation: its symbiotic character which results from its functioning on projective and introjective identification. The analytic symbiosis is partial and artificial; it becomes perturbed and turns toward parasitism when it becomes massive and when it tends to lose its artificial framework. The limited symbiosis then becomes overflowing and is transformed into parasitism.
The analytic “insight”, on the other hand, can be considered as the labor of two persons and as a phenomenon shared by them. Its object is first the unconscious fantasy of the symbiotic field, whose de-symbiotization permits the modification and recuperation of the personal parts involved in the symbiosis. At those moments of “insight” the observing ego of the patient and that of the analyst collaborate and are able to concur in their respective fantasies of the illness of the field, of the analytic work which is being performed, and on the “healing” which is being seeked