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Douglas H. Ingram's thoughtful essay on the value and modes of reassurance in psychoanalytic therapy succeeds in large measure because the author carefully distinguishes between false and superficial (defense) reassurance, on the one hand, and basic reassurance, on the other hand (cf. Strachey, 1934, p. 372). Only the latter, existential form could possibly aspire to elligibility as a component of the psychoanalytic process—and then, only as analytically parsed and negotiated. And since Ingram is a postmodernist, he does not believe that reassurance necessarily leads toward “wholeness” or “integration” in any simple-minded sense, since it is not self-evident that these states represent what ultimately ought to be considered a healthy adaptation to reality. Deconstruction, one might say, can be as reassuring as reconstruction.
The larger issues here merit continued discussion, but I would like to reconsider what Ingram calls the reassurance process. He delineates four elements of this process: (1) languaging of distress by the patient, (2) encoding of distress by the analyst, (3) interiorization of the analytic dialogue, and (4) narration of the patient's life stories. I shall focus on the third, interiorization, since it particularly interests me and because I believe it is vulnerable to superficial interpretation.
Ingram defines interiorization as the patient's capacity to “continue their dialogue with the analyst outside of the consulting room,” resulting from “the special vocabulary that the therapist and patient gradually evolve, an idiolect, or private microdialect” (p. 235). This strikes me as an excellent definition, but the mechanism itself, and the road to its achievement, are much more complex and complicated than the two paragraphs alotted to the subject (or the subsequent discussion by Glucksman [1997]) suggest. In what follows I may be saying things that Ingram appreciates no less than I do, but I think they deserve independent emphasis.
1. Ingram states c