The Unspoken in Narcissus: How to Hear and Interpret It?

Abstract

In the analysis of a survivor of the Holocaust, for years the analysand spoke
only of his inability to choose between two women and said nothing of any
memories of his early childhood, of his emotions and fantasies, or of any
transference. After having tested the analyst’s counter-transference for several
years, he was finally able to find the words to express his murderous
transference. The author emphasizes the importance of the analyst’s active
listening, of the predominance of the affects over the representations, and of
the non-transferential interpretations by anticipation charged with affect. If
psychoanalysis is a science in many regards, its practice is above all an art.