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During more than 40 years of following contemporary art, I have been drawn to artists whose enigmatic early works turn out to secretly contain all the elements of a basic question at the core of their being. Their further work then reads as a kind of unconsciously generated search either to elaborate or to make sense of what was unknowably there at the very beginning.
Over a comparable time-sojourn in the realm of psychoanalytic thinking and practice, my interest has been similarly drawn to a small number of those in the field for whom the same premise may hold true. Neville Symington has been one of them, and this new book confirms it.
Neville Symington first came to my attention with his 1983 paper “The analyst's act of freedom as an agent of therapeutic change” in the International Review of Psycho-Analysis (a green-clad short-lived sibling of the International Journal that carried a whiff of the outre; I loved it.) Thankfully, the paper was republished in 1986 (Kohon, 1986). Years later, in 1998, I reviewed Symington's The Making of a Psychotherapist for Psychoanalytic Books (another equally lamented departure). Between the lines of both works was the liminal presence of a personal energy driving Symington's acute powers of original observation.
By 1983 Symington had identified a kind of communication in the analytic setting he called the “x-phenomenon,” which involved “a certain patterning of unconscious knowledge …in both the analyst and the patient [my italics] whose goal is to sabotage the analysis.” (in Kohon, 1986, p. 269).
… only a change in the analyst's inner attitude will enable to patient to move forward psychically. The moment the analyst becomes aware of his or her attitude and is freed from it then the patient perceives it. That is to say he or she perceives a change within the self and may make declarations to that effect without knowing the cause. (in Kohon, p. 269)
All this operates, said Symington, because, on an unconscious level, the analyst and t