In The Session: Introduction

We are pleased to announce a new section of the journal that we are calling “In the Session.” In the Session will feature a psychoanalyst's description of a brief clinical moment that is remarkable for its striking, confusing, pleasing, upsetting, surprising, or disruptive features. The analyst in such situations can feel perplexed or anxious, perhaps temporarily stuck. Such moments often call for the analyst to pivot to another conceptual or technical approach, or to spontaneously do or say something out of the ordinary-in ways not anticipated. These are the moments we are interested in thinking about.

We will ask an analyst to depict such a moment-likely familiar to all psychoanalytic clinicians in one way or another-as transparently as possible. We will then ask two other analysts to write brief commentaries on that account.

For our inaugural In the Session, Henry Markman vividly depicts a vexing psychoanalytic situation that is both technically complex and emotionally demanding, for patient and analyst alike. To reach his patient, Markman has to search his own experience of disruption; this allows him to generate a novel way of working and relating to his patient, Matt. Donnel Stern and Shelley Rockwell offer sensitive and thoughtful commentaries from within their own theoretical frameworks, interpersonal and Kleinian, respectively.

The manner in which any one of us enters into the experience of another clinician says a great deal about how we consider all that is happening in the privacy of the analytic relationship. As Markman notes, the clinician presenting work wants first to be understood from inside the situation. This requires that the reader/listener be as attentive as possible to the complexity and strain of analytic work, taking neither a too-knowing view nor a too observational, distant perspective.

Our hope is that readers will put themselves as fully as possible into the material presented here in ways that can be resonant, evocative, and enlivening.