Seeing the End

What does one see in transcribed sessions? What can be seen when the verbal becomes tangible? Do we see pieces of our own analysis between the lines, or perhaps even parts of ourselves, as analysts? Do we see Mrs. C, or do we miss Mrs. C? Even further, what can be seen (and missed) in a computer analysis of the transcripts that allows a different kind of vision—being able to scan in an instant hundreds of sessions, and to see the patterns of interaction in a particular session at a glance.

When reading through all the papers written for this issue of DIVISION/Review, it can feel like one has opened the door to not one but several analyses. Like an Ingmar Bergman movie, we are left to witness Scenes from an Analysis. Who is on the couch? Mrs. C, the analyst, or the reader? Perhaps these sessions are nothing more than a projective identification test in disguise. It is perhaps also tempting to imagine a recording of our own analyses and what we might make of others reading our play-by-play.

“All the world's a stage,” wrote Shakespeare, “And all the men and women merely players/They have their exits and their entrances/And one man in his time plays many parts…” Mrs. C and her analyst have played and continue to play many parts, and rarely the same one twice. They become who the listener, or better yet, reader, wants and needs them to be. This re-reading of a confidential, transcribed, psychoanalytic session is a means to an end, to explore how one might listen to Mrs. C, differently from her analyst, or might supervise this analyst with respect to intervening, or hearing something important in what she is saying that he, at least on the surface, seems to miss.

Certainly, for an analysis to happen, there needs to be a patient who speaks and an analyst who listens and who perhaps, from time to time, thoughtfully responds. Both parties are also encouraged to be fully alive and present in the room, and the transference and countertransference are invited to unfold in the anal