The Passionate Analyst: Intersubjectivity and the Function of Passion in the Analytic Process

In the work, a psychoanalytic definition of ‘passion’ is attempted, excluding it from the common use of loving passion or painful participation in life events. Focus is placed on the analyst's passion. Psychoanalysis addresses it mainly through Bion, who places it among the characteristics of the elements of psychoanalysis. Intersubjectively oriented psychoanalysis views it as a felicitous discovery emerging from the experience of blockage in which the analyst may find himself with his/her patient, and that involves a position of greater willingness and openness, rather than a defence perhaps implemented through a defensive use of the analytic technique itself. Passion describes the analyst's fundamental competence in establishing a dialogue with his/her own internal objects or interactive representations of Self evoked by the analytic situation. The hypothesis put forward by the authors is that passion, for the analyst, consists in the encounter with dissociated configurations of the patient's Self, which for the analyst can become his/her own Self-Objects that support him/her, especially in phases of particular impotence that the patient transferentially delivers.

KEY WORDS: Dissociation, unrepressed unconscious, analytic neutrality, Self-Object, passion, self-disclosure.