You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The relational shift in psychoanalysis has given us wonderful and strange new ideas about the intersubjective processes that advance the development of mind and emotional balance in analysis. In accretion, these ideas imagine the relational processes by which we become most human. Identifying and exploring the complex functioning of empathy, mentalization, emotional resonance, and enactments in the therapeutic encounter have also stimulated new clinical strategies. Yes, these ideas have captivated the world of contemporary psychoanalysis.
But—and here’s the big “but”—illustrating relational ideas in all their interactional nuances has been problematic. So often, after reading a fascinating theoretical offering, I have been disappointed with the accompanying clinical examples. They often seem to fall back on familiar one-person presentations, skimping on the analyst’s interactional contributions and failing to capture the nuts-and-bolts processes that create unpredictable and ineffable meetings of subjectivities. It is almost as though one needs a novelist’s sensibility, specificity, and skill to express adequately the complex intersubjective experience.
Enter Chris Jaenicke in his newest book The Search for a Relational Home: An Intersubjective View of Therapeutic Action (2015). Jaenicke, an adherent of intersubjectivity systems theory, practices and writes in Berlin and writes, I will add, with a
poetic novelist’s sensibility. He is a vulnerable, self-examining, and compassionate analyst who concerns himself with the centrality of empathic-introspective modes of inquiry, affectivity, and the paradigm shift in psychoanalysis from interpretation to a focus on emotional resonance, trauma, and new ideas of ongoing and unpredictable co-created transferences.
Jaenicke sees analysis operating on two levels: the asymmetric and the bidirectional. The asymmetric includes the dimension in which we analysts—given our training, experience, ethics, and professional obligations t