You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I would like to thank the Dialogues committee for this opportunity to share my thoughts and to thank Dr. Mitrani for this intriguing, moving, and thought-provoking paper. I particularly appreciate her willingness to lean in the personal direction. This vivid and provocative material initially washed over me, and I got lost for a while in the textured narratives of the rich clinical descriptions. Eventually, I emerged from my entanglement with some associations, ideas, and thoughts. Like Dr. Bion and Dr. Mitrani, I, too, hope to offer my ideas without “resorting to abstraction” or leave you grappling with “meaningless manipulations of jargon.”
I'd like to focus my comments on three distinct images that emerged in Dr. Mitrani's paper. The first is the image of the photo album of empty rectangles; the second is the tears in the eyes of the analyst; and the third is the billboard slogan: “Fire Your Analyst! Call Your Mercedes Dealer!” While these are clearly distinct moments, generated from different and separate treatment and personal contacts, as I allowed myself to look at them from a certain axis or slant, they emerged as dream images in a shared field. I'll first share my thoughts about each of these images and, as I go along, if all goes well, I hope to articulate the associative thread that links them together in my mind and experience.
My ideas are loosely organized around the interplay of identificatory and reflective processes that in analysis facilitate what Benjamin (2004) refers to as a relationship of mutual recognition in which each person is experienced as a like subject — another mind that can be felt with — yet has a distinct, separate center of feeling and perception. These associations build on the view that the intersubjective challenge in analysis, and in all human relationships, of having a separate yet similar mind is to tolerate, yet not cling to, the difference, resist the desire to collapse the difference, find what is common and shared, and to