You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I would like to talk with you today about Winnicott's 15-year treatment of Masud Khan. I approach this topic with a hint of trepidation, concerned I might be ‘rushing in where angels fear to tread’. I am well aware of how charged and, perhaps, painful this issue is for some people. But I also think that one way we can express our devotion to analytic work and pay tribute to Winnicott's singular contribution is by candidly and carefully examining both his and our own successes and failures.
I believe that analytic work proceeds not only by the careful and deliberate interpretation of unconscious psychic elements but also through nondeliberate and unpredictable aspects of reciprocal influence within an ‘interactive matrix’ (Greenberg 1995). One way of extending Betty Joseph's (1985) idea of the ‘transference to the total situation’ is to include a careful examination of how each analytic dyad generates a psychic field to which both participants unwittingly contribute. This is one reason why no two analyses can ever be alike. While engaged in psychoanalytic work, we all inevitably participate in a particular transference-countertransference matrix that sometimes revolves around mutually resonating areas of vulnerability. Patients not only teach us about ‘pathology’ and the ‘workings of the mind’; they also introduce us to dissociated aspects of ourselves. I hope we can see our way into discovering how Khan's and Winnicott's experience - including their mutually resonating areas of vulnerability - might have some bearing on our own.
Certain analytic dyads, I believe, generate relational turbulence that requires the analyst to rethink theory or grow emotionally so as to become more available to help the patient in a deeper way. But this potentially