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Following the recent series of papers published under the rubric of Visions of the Self, the editors are now inviting contributions for a new series, The Voice of the Analyst. Beyond our character structure and our psychodynamics, what is there about each of us that is as personal and idiosyncratic as our DNA and that, training and theory aside, comes out in our way of being with our patients? I will offer a contribution to launch the series.
AJH
The other day a patient presented a dream saying, “I was lost and couldn't find my way.” I suggested that a change in inflection would be to the point of the dream as a whole. “I was lost and couldn't find my way.” He had started the hour with a comment about civil engineers who design freeways with ramps that turn you completely around so that you can lose your sense of direction.
Helping the patient find his way, his voice, seems to me to be the goal of therapy. If the therapist does not have access to her voice, to her own way, if she has internal constraints, conscious or unconscious, against that freedom, how can she help her patient? One such constraint might be a doctrinaire loyalty to a given theoretical school or position. Finding one's own analytic voice is part and parcel of having access to one's own voice in a more generic sense. The term voice, as a signifier, contains so much more than the words we speak. To me it contains the essence of who I am, of what is innate, learned, and acquired and the freedom to make use of it all in my own way.
Discussing a poststructuralist interpretation of the psychoanalytic relationship, Ingram (1994) writes: