The Patient's and the Analyst's Victimization in the Analytic Process

Just as analysis engenders growth and new experience, it also partly allows for our lived experience of the universal aspects of victimization in intimate relationships between children and parents, romantic partners, and, of course, patient and analyst. In many psychoanalyses, the metaphor or experience of victimization is and should be relevant. In this paper the author examines how the analyst both unintentionally avoids and tries to expand the patient's ability to understand and integrate these experiences of victimization and agency. In trying to help expand the patient's sense of agency the analyst is implicated in internalized scenarios that become manifest through interpersonal exchange. In turn, the analyst is thwarted in his ability to understand these patterns and sometimes becomes entangled in them. The language of victimization partly captures an aspect of the analyst's honesty about the actual vulnerability involved in offering ourselves up for transference play. Patients are also victimized by their analysts' own personalities, which take us in particular directions in this enterprise. As analysts we are privileged to bear witness to the registration of new and therapeutic experiences but we also participate in the repetition and enactment of other painful experiences such as victimizing and feeling victimized along the way.