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The analytic experience — the subject of process notes2 — only exists in a dyadic relationship within the consulting room at a specific time. Outside this spatio-temporal setting, accounts of the experience — like the manifest dream — become a derivative production. While process notes have the great advantage of reducing clinical data into manageable form, they are filtered through the analyst, hence subject to distortion and condensation (Blacker, 1975, p. 51), and thus entail questions of symbolism, verisimilitude, memory, and desire. This essay addresses how we must explore these interrelated concepts, both in the writing and the presenting of notes to supervisors and colleagues.
The work of Jean Laplanche helps us locate process notes in a tension between hermeneutic and determinist approaches to signification and communication. Using this conceptual framework — and particularly the concept of the enigmatic message set forth in Laplanche's Interpretation Between Determinism and Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem (1992) — we can better understand the need to situate our accounting of the analytic experience as neither historical fact nor subjective construct, but