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How does analysis cure? Donna Orange offers us an example of psychoanalytic emotional understanding that comprises therapeutic action about which she has extensively written. In her discussion, Dr. Orange eschews several possible theoretical concepts, such as masochism, enactment, projective identification, and corrective emotional experience, as explanatory framework. She avoids application of these theoretical generalities to unravel the meaning of the particular stories presented here. In its stead, she uses herself, her embodied emotional memories, to link with Renee and with Renee's and my experience together. From this specific bond emerges her understanding of me and my patient. She beautifully illustrates that understanding another implies a “remarkable relation to oneself” (Gadamer).
She also vivifies Gadamer's hermeneutical circle of understanding. Gadamer describes understanding as having a circular relation between the whole and its parts. The anticipated meaning of the whole is understood through the parts, but it is in light of the whole that the parts take on their illuminating function. I first provided the reader with an anticipated sense of the whole when I described an anxious, perfectionistic Renee who sought therapy for her child. As parts of the story are revealed in this series of articles, I began to organize them into patterns: Renee's dichotomous worlds. Donna offers a reintegration of the parts into a more meaningful whole. My comprehension of my patient and our dyadic field is enlarged and renovated into another larger concentric circle of understanding.
Donna Orange then laments, what of my experiential world that contributes to the interplay between Renee and me? I turn first to Carol