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The subject of the psychoanalytic process has received a great deal of attention throughout the history of the field, yet one of its essential components, the experience of a feeling of “presence” in the encounter between the patient and analyst, has not been studied as thoroughly as many other elements regarded as central to psychoanalytic practice. To begin this brief inquiry into the subject of “showing up” and the experience of “presence” in psychoanalysis, the author has chosen two closely linked quotes. Although they are drawn from times quite separate from one another and from our own uncertain time, together they point across time to an essential link that characterizes the current moment in our world and, inevitably, the experience in our consulting rooms with our patients. In combination they serve to call attention to the complicated nature of the phenomenon of “showing up” in psychoanalysis, as well as the broader subject that involves the experience of presence in the analytic hour and its central importance to considerations related to the establishment of an analytic process and the nature of therapeutic action.
The first of these quotes is drawn from an 1885 letter to his future wife, Martha Bernays, in which Freud wrote the following:
All my thoughts and feelings about the world in general and about myself in particular have been found unworthy of future existence. They will now have to be thought of all over again … that stuff settles around me like sand-drifts around the sphinx. (Freud, 1961, p. 127)
Christopher G. Lovett, The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, 63 Kenwood Avenue, Newton Centre, MA 02459
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Submitted for publication October 8, 2025; accepted October 17, 2025.
Page 161We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do[es] not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. (Mary Shelley, 1818/1831, p. 16)
These three statements ca