Mutual Training of Developmental Trajectories: The Shaping of Dialogue Between Analysts in Conference Space.1

Presenting our case in conference space, we find ourselves in the middle of two developmental trajectories: the historical development of psychoanalysis, and the personal development of the analyst. While in clinical space psychoanalysis had some success in developing a working method, and the clinic became a ‘psychoanalytic-space’, in ‘conference-space’ there is a mixture of mainly medical-philosophical-religious practices; ‘conference-space’ is not a ‘psychoanalytic-space’. In very general terms, the developmental trajectory of the analyst tells the story of dialogical difficulties within the external world, which are taken into the clinic for further development, and then a reconstituted dialogue is brought back to the external world, in hope of ‘using’ it in a kind of intermediate-transitional-psychoanalytic space. Many times, however, the analyst finds himself in a ‘disaster area’, the result of a collision between the two unsynchronized/untuned developmental trajectories: the developmental-historical phase of psychoanalysis, does not match the personal development of the analyst. In the past 10-15 years, there are signs of a possible future mutual-tuning, between the two trajectories; a time of importance for psychoanalysis. While the developmental history of inter-subjective-relational school in psychoanalysis is in the very heart of the general line of development of psychoanalysis, it is in the last two decades that the analyst was moved into a central-position, pronouncing a new reading of the development of the analyst and his ‘voice’, his identity; the analyst becomes less of a one-authoritative figure, and more of a partial expression of multiple-alternative mutual figure. This is a meeting point for the two developmental trajectories. The rephrased Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, speaking postmodern relational language of love and life, meets the Ferenczian line of personal development of the analyst, and for the first time in the history of psychoanalysis, they can really have some mutual development.