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It seems to me that a sea change has been taking place in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts from varying perspectives have been shifting their lenses and perspectives to accommodate to and embrace phenomena varyingly described as non-symbolized, non-represented or non-verbal as well as areas of psychic deadness and non-aliveness. Whether from a classical perspective (Levine et al., 2013) or relational/interpersonal (D.B. Stern, 2019), there is a concern that there needs to be a widening of the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious, its formulation and the kind of technique and treatment that can meet these challenges. A thread that runs through these re-formulations is the expansion of the use of the analyst's experience and an appreciation that enactments, collisions (Slochower, 2006) and disturbances in the field of the treatment (Cooper, 2010) are not so much impasses or impediments to the treatment, but the thing itself, the emergence of unmet cries and undreamt dreams (Ogden, 2005) that, when engaged with and brought into awareness, are the very core of psychoanalytic healing. The treatment is now commonly viewed as an intersubjective endeavor and there is a profound tilt away from the reliance on interpretation and the analyst's objective knowledge of the patient to the use of the analyst's very being in relation to that of the patient and its potential vitalizing qualities (Alvarez, 1992, 2012; Schwartz Cooney & Sopher, 2021). Perhaps this is best captured as a tilt away from epistemological to ontological psychoanalysis (Eshel, 2019; Ogden, 2019).
It is in this context that I read Henry Markman's engaging and stimulating new volume, Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice in which the author develops a unique and personal language to describe his experience of the primitive, non-symbolized and de-vitalized states and communications that he meets in his patients (p. 5). Noticing Freud's observation that his technique “is the