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In this paper selected clinical issues and practical applications of feedback that occur in the everyday warp and woof of dynamic psychotherapy will be covered including metaphors, the silences of the analyst, attempts to undermine alienation from self, empathy, what is remembered by the therapist, sharing by the therapist of psychophysiologic reactions during sessions, introduction of the topics of mortality, death and abandonment, video as an adjunctive tool for self-confrontation, the necessary disillusionment in characterological personality reconstruction, and the transformation of knowledge into wisdom, which positively enhances life for the patient and therapist.
The metaphor used above, “warp and woof,” conjures the picture of energy expressed by experienced hands esthetically, creatively, and with bold intent weaving a fabric for constructive use. The metaphors used in dynamic psychotherapy also aim with bold intent to cut through an excess or lack of appropriate words or silences in order to define expeditiously and with pictorial clarity an experience, a process, or a pattern! The metaphor that serves as a condensed interpretation to a patient of one of his “previously unacknowledged patterns of psychic functioning” (Ingram, 1992) is a powerful multisensory and multilevel message. Ingram sees the context of the intimacy of the therapeutic relationship as the frame for the use of metaphor. He sees the intimacy as being experienced simultaneously by both patient and therapist. My clinical experiences confirm his observation of the shared intimacy as an aspect of the matrix