Letter from the Editor

Maintaining psychological strain is not only something that we demand of ourselves, but also part of what we ask of the patient.

What is psychoanalysis if not a method to learn how to better live a life with strain? Strain signals something about the way two people are connected (and not connected). In the quotation above, Thomas Ogden chose the word strain to describe a particular kind of anxiety that arises when two people come together in the intimacy of a psychoanalytic treatment.

I think of psychological strain as a state of mind, felt as a pressure or energetic presence, that occurs along with what is consciously known or felt. This pressure can trigger an impulse to quickly do something to relieve the discomfort, which is why Ogden recommends that we restrain ourselves from dissipating the tension, whether it be by reassuring the patient, by speaking about the treatment outside a consultative arrangement, or by using substances or other addictive behaviors to relieve our inner discomfort. Sustaining this inner discomfort, which may mean tolerating being in touch with unknowable parts of ourselves, allows for the possibility of containing and understanding sources of the underlying anxiety in order to help our patients (and ourselves) move toward psychic growth.

Where is the mind located when two people come together? It takes up presence in the dynamically oscillating space between two people, an open system that shifts and changes in mutual development with the outside. Gilles Deleuze (2003) believes, similarly to Ogden, that transformation relies on moments when we are exposed to unknowable states. Deleuze's zone of indiscernibility is a state in which one can become so deeply identified with another person or thing that there is a separation from oneself while symbiotically merging with other people or objects.

Author Paul Auster (1982) writes about a version of that experience:

A. sits down in his own room to translate another man's book