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“There is me and there is something inside me, not something, but someone, but since that someone is inside me, I can have an idea who it is and not just be it. Sometimes this is connected with a feeling that it's a physical space inside my body, but it's sometimes in my head or isn't located any specific place in my body. It's a feeling, not a place, but it feels like a place.”
When a patient shifts, while engaged in free association, from one item to another, a process of spatialization occurs. The twists and turns of the clinical narrative depict the contours of psychic space as it evolves. The patient is talking about her boyfriend. Suddenly she finds herself thinking of an incident she witnessed in her parents' relationship. What links these two thoughts is a space whose interior can then be fleshed out and filled with associative understanding through reflection. New perspectives can be opened up and new positions in relation to what was previously thought of as unquestionable reality can be assumed. The owning and integration of these new angles from which inner experience can be reflected upon are the goals of an insight-oriented approach to treatment. In order to accomplish this, psychodynamic therapy offers the patient the opportunity to refine the capacity for symbolizing his or her experience, so that the boundaries of agency are expanded—so that “I” (as a symbolizing ego) might become in the place where “it” (unsymbolized experience, to which one feels passively subjected) resides.
Yet the therapeutic process must also be understood as a process of temporalization. Telling stories takes time. Narration and transference open up and unfold over the course of the treatment. Symbolization occurs when the patient's stories begin to reveal to him the interaction of past and present. The