Response to Helen Grebow

My discussion focuses on the excellence and complexity of Helen Grebow’s presentation on the therapist’s experience of the uncanny, unsettling, even surreal nature of the verbal and non-verbal resonance that emerges in the analytic dyad. She explores how the analyst is able to grasp and translate the patient’s embodied and enacted experience, using data drawn from such sources as infant developmental studies, cognitive theory, neurological research, brain study, and systems understanding to conceptualize this mysterious experience of seemingly unnatural knowing. Yet despite her explication of these resources, we remain in awe of the process, in a state of uncertainty about how it all works. I turn to alternative resources for understanding this process of subsymbolic communication, including brief forays into the writings of Claudio Arnetoli on connectionism, neural networking, and parallel distributed representations; the contributions of Elizabeth Lloyd Meyer on the anomalous, on uncanny unconscious communication, and the bounded mind versus the radically connected mind; of the discussion of Bruce Reis on recognition and mutual recognition, and finally, on the work of William Coburn on psychoanalytic complexity.