Open Access
Subscription Access
Experience in the Third Space with a Psychotic Patient
Abstract
The author suggests that a paradigm shift in therapists’ understanding oftherapeutic efficacy from making the unconscious conscious to repeatingpast experience in the transference/counter-transference has resulted incounter-transference enactment and analysis being considered as central inthe resolution of repressed introjected pathological object relations. This shiftmarks a return to Ferenczi’s early technical innovations and ideas concerninga repetition in the transference of past traumatic object relations butwith a new and benign object, the analyst, resulting in a different outcome.The author outlines the analysis of a regressed patient in which the analyst’simmersion into the patient’s world of paranoia, magical thinking, dissociationand the uncanny, analysis of counter-transference enactment, and rolereversal contributed to a resolution of pathological introjects in the contextof a new object relationship with the analyst. Experiencing the patient’stortured inner world and the analyst’s ability to symbolize the experienceresulted in a new-found ability in the patient to reflect on and analyze hisinternal object relations.
Keywords
counter-transference analysis, role reversal, repetition of past trauma
Journal production services provided by Becker Associates
10 Morrow Avenue, Suite 202, Toronto, ON, M6R 2J1
10 Morrow Avenue, Suite 202, Toronto, ON, M6R 2J1
Telephone: 416-538-1650 | | Fax: 416-489-1713
Email: journals@beckerassociates.ca | | Web: www.beckerassociates.ca
Email: journals@beckerassociates.ca | | Web: www.beckerassociates.ca