Analysis as Experience

This paper follows on from two recent papers of mine (Southwood, 1973), (1974) and although there is no time here to summarize these papers adequately, I must refer a little to what I have already said in order to orientate you for what I am going to say today.

In the previous papers I made the point that human behaviour cannot be properly understood on a purely one-body, biological model. It is necessary to realize and make use of the fact that each individual is taught to communicate symbolically by his mother (usually) on a basis of mutual identifying, and that this gives him an awareness of himself and his experiencing as well as a capacity to report rather than merely to react physically to stimulation. This introduces a factor into human behaviour that does not exist with lower animals. It is still biological but more than what we usually understand by that word.

Since psychoanalysis operates by communication between two people as distinct from biological interaction, an understanding of it requires a model, a basic picture of what goes on, of what is experienced when two people talk together. By taking as a basis the process of learning to talk, and appreciating that it is the ability to talk which leads to self-awareness, awareness of others as beings like ourselves and awareness of what we call 'reality', we can see the process of analysis as an extension of the work begun by the mother when she initiates her baby into a communicative relationship.

In the present paper, then, I want to show in more detail how our analytic work can be understood as a process of bringing the patient's experiencing into the communicative relationship through mutual identifying, sharing of experience and finding words to represent what is going on.

This mutual identifying is a fact of experience sui generis and cannot be described in terms of other experiences or resolved into simpler elements. The 'here and now' feeling that one understands the other and is understood by that