“I Never Knew I was a Democrat”: Discovery and Co-creation In Psychoanalysis*

For most of the twentieth century, the discovery of unconscious experience was a central goal in psychoanalysis. As postmodern currents gathered force, there has been a shift toward the co-creation, rather than discovery, of unconscious experience. Dissociative experiences that emerge in therapy are, in some sense, not previously known (and therefore could only have been created). Yet, they often feel like dramatic discoveries. A case is presented that illustrates how patient and therapist created a relationship in which (a) the therapist slowly lost a conflicted state and dissociated his own self-interest; (b) the patient participated in helping the therapist discover the version of himself he had become, which collapsed the dissociation and allowed his internal conflict to reemerge; (c) this created a new interpersonal context, both safer and more demanding for the patient, in which the live presence (and not merely, inferred existence) of her dissociated selves emerged. These selves had a transitional status in which the question of discovery and creation was “not to be asked.” Because they emerged nontraumatically, even playfully, these selves did not crowd out other “self-states,” thereby allowing the patient to think about these dissociated states.