From Imitation to Spontaneous Living: Commentary on Farhi

NINA FARHI'S compelling and at times harrowing account of her arduous psychoanalytic journey with Anne, and the complex theorizing that frames it, has a great deal to teach us about working with our most disturbing and disturbed patients. It raises a variety of complex questions about the psychoanalytic process itself. These include questions about the surprising, even shocking ways an analytic process takes hold, the role of enactments in both creating and working through impasses, and how patients and analysts forge the most fundamental changes in one another through the creative, largely unconsciously determined challenges and encounters that constitute the fabric of a psychoanalysis. I would like to touch on a few of these issues in the discussion that follows.

As Farhi notes at the outset, it was probably not at all incidental to the process that followed that she was herself a freshly minted psychotherapist when Anne entered her consulting room for the first time. The unconscious determinants of how any given patient selects any given analyst to work with are subtle, profound, and often overlooked, sometimes discerned, if ever, many years into an analysis. The patient's choice of analyst is among the first creative acts of the process, the point at which the patient is choosing and shaping the “medium” in which her analytic work will take place. Would an analytic process have been possible at all with a more seasoned Farhi? She raises the question from both sides, suggesting that Anne's and her own interest in joining one another in psychoanalytic work was generated in important ways out of their mutual newness:

Anne certainly captured my interest. And the fact that I had only just begun practicing as a psychotherapist, and was therefore voracious for experience, sustained that interest. In effect, she had succeeded in finding her

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psychic counterpart, a therapist constrained as she was, at her absolute beginning. [p. ]

The “dialogue of unconsciouses had begun” (