“Aerial Kiss Attack”: Affect Communication, Demystification, and Analytic Self-Disclosure: Discussion of Barbara Pizer

In a 1997 paper, “When the Analyst is Ill: Dimensions of Self-Disclo-sure,” in which she describes the decision to inform all of her patients of her breast cancer in 1994, Barbara articulates a framework for thinking about various analytic disclosures in different clinical contexts. While not intended as an exhaustive schema, Barbara's contribution sought to remind us that self-disclosure can be a disciplined dimension of our analytic function, even as it carries with it inherent responsibilities for its impact and consequences. Barbara defines three overlapping yet distinguishable dimensions of disclosure: “inescapable” disclosures, the naming of the elephant in the room; “inadvertent” disclosures, the spontaneous and unreflective enactment of an aspect of the analyst's subjectivity; and “deliberate” disclosures, the mindful choice of the analyst to share with the patient a feeling, a piece of information, a poem, a chain of thoughts, as a provision of usable “other-than-me substance.” Barbara is seeking to remind us of the ceaseless tensions and precarious balancing between freedom and accountability, spontaneity and constraint, in the analyst's disciplined clinical work.

Barbara's more recent paper describes her risks and rationales in venturing a deliberate self-disclosure to a patient under extraordinary circumstances. Here she reminds us of the complex and contradictory contingencies and principles with which the analyst must wrestle in both the urgent, emergent clinical moment and the personal reflections and analytic process that follow. It is indeed a bedeviling idea for us to contemplate that sometimes to not disclose may be as mystifying in the analysis, and as compelling toward collusive dissociations, as it can be in family life. How many of our patients deploy a kind of cognitive slippage to