The Analyst's Unformulated Experience of the Patient1

INTERPERSONAL INFLUENCE CAN BE EFFECTIVE without being known. We take this for granted. Constant and mutual influence is the rule. We do not have to know what we are doing to affect others, and we do not have to be able to think about influence to accept it. Quite the contrary. The most profound interpersonal influence goes as deep as it does because it is not known by either party. We are most likely to participate unwittingly in precisely those interpersonal patterns we would describe as problematic—that is, if we could see the patterns well enough to describe them. This is no less true inside the consulting room than outside it, and no less true for the analyst than for the patient. We can only choose not to participate after we know what we have already been involved in. And by then the essential work has been done. This means that the spontaneous, unconsidered reactions of analyst and patient to one another may be the sole evidence, the footprints, so to speak, of the very influences which cannot be articulated by either participant, but which most need to be known. Sometimes, as with footprints, constructing the beast from the evidence would require so much speculation that the task is best left until more data accumulate. At these times, though the analyst may suspect that his direct experience reflects an entanglement in unseen interactive realities, he cannot see how to use his reaction. The links between his experience and the patterns he wishes he