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Heinz Weiss shares detailed process examples from selected analytic sessions some years apart. The analytic work with Mr. T, a traumatized man with claustro-agoraphobic anxieties and concrete thinking, was challenging: at times. Mr. T’s discourse was an impermeable stream of external details. He presented himself as a perpetual victim, mistreated and ill-used. His words could become penetrating missiles, things-in-themselves; his thinking, fragmented, confused. His narcissistic shell admitted no need for the analyst, no responsibility for his difficulties with others. In general, he pushed away the analyst and his attempts to understand. We recognize the long-lasting effects of trauma in his concrete and undifferentiated thinking, problems with affect regulation, an impoverished emotional life, and proneness to action. Analysts struggle with understanding the meanings and implications of these issues and trace them to the earliest stages of development. Many analysts argue that our usual technical approaches are inadequate - beyond interpretation - leaving us in need of modifications in technique, or looking for fresh ideas. Hence, we turn to containment, witnessing, transforming unverbalised thoughts into words, naming affects, empathic attunement, reconstruction of the past (See Boulanger, 2005; Greenberg, 2019; Krystal, 1978; Levine, 2014.)
Weiss, however, struggles to be able to think and to hold an analytic stance and to remain steadfast to his usual approach - a Kleinian one - of interpreting what he felt was going on in the patient’s mind (and his own) about the present situation between the two of them. He tells us of their mutual deadlock. I will return to this prolonged state of affairs, we might say enactment, or as Weiss says, “talking past each other,” where the analyst re-enactsthe role of a cruel, reproachful object trying to force critical comments into the patient's mind.
The consistent line Wiess takes in his interventions is his focus on aggression: