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Analysts are students of trauma, the destructive influence of the past, and fantasies about the self based in a life's challenges and cataclysms. They are also students of the potential of moments in a two-person process to give birth to something new in their patients. Such moments only exist, paradoxically, in the context of the past: there is no present moment of emergence without its being “backgrounded” by the past and by the self's fantasies, informed by them.
Currently, some of the discourse of relationality reads as “in love” with the present moment and the possibility of novel emergence. In its most radical form (e.g., Benjamin, 2004; Nahum, 2005; Boston Change Process Study Group, 2010), the present moment of emergence has gained so much power that it now appears independent of the past and of all the formations of the patient's mind that are the inheritance of this past. If all moments in an analysis are “co-constructed” by patient and analyst, the past can seem to vanish as can these matters: What are the organizing principles of this mind, or its contents?
Donna Orange's The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice is an effort to assert a “hermeneutics of trust” as the foundation of the psychoanalytic process, and to propose a new philosophical basis for psychoanalysis. Here, the basis of the psychoanalytic
process is refounded not on the principles that organize the patient's mind or form its contents but, instead, on principles of dialogue that create new moments for the patient, and, in particular, the traumatized patient, “the suffering stranger.” Orange distinguishes her own position from that of a “classical” analyst, an authority who believed she or he is an “expert” on the patient. She tries to show that a nonauthoritarian position of open receptivity, rather than “classical” analysis's remove from the patient and critical inquiry into his or her motives, makes the best home for work with this suffering stranger.
The Suff