Fresh Glimpses of the Patient

Writing on the interweaving of the intrapsychic with the intersubjective, André Green holds that “the essence of the situation at the heart of the analytic exchange is to accomplish the return to oneself by means of a detour via the other” (Green, 2000, p. 12, italics in the original). Such a trajectory, of course, concerns both analyst and patient and is determined by transference–countertransference dialectics.

Regarding the analyst, an important factor in this trajectory is his receptivity to the patient and to what the patient brings. This issue is not new. Freud himself, as early as 1912, advised the analyst “to turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient” (Freud, 1912, p. 115). However, receptivity is not necessarily a given for the analyst. Ferenczi was the first to draw attention to analysts’ lack of attention “to the highly emotional character of the analysand's communications, often brought out only with the greatest difficulty” (Ferenczi, 1932, p. 1).The reason for this could lie first in the unavoidable “disturbance that is sparked in the analyst by his interaction with the patient” (Lia, 2017, p. 85). Michael Parsons believes that analytic work “arouse[s] powerful inward responses in all analysts throughout their careers” (2006, p. 1183), obviously due to this interaction.

Listening to one’s own feelings and listening to the patient are of course regarded as a prerequisite of analytic exchange. Nevertheless, they also represent the fruit, if not the goal, of a long, perhaps lifelong, effort on the part of the analyst. In their article “Searching for Bion: Cogitations, a new Clinical Diary à la Ferenczi?,” Franco Borgogno and Silvio Arrigo Merciai follow W.R. Bion in his personal journey towards “a kind of listening more authentically centered on his own thoughts and emotions and those of the patient during the analytic encounter.” The authors believe that this struggle evolved together with Bion’s “s