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.