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.
In this brief discussion of Koichi Togashi’s paper, “Trauma, Contingency and the Psychoanalytic Zero” presented at the 2019 IAPSP Conference, in Vancouver, Canada, I will also make use of another paper of Togashi (2020), “Surrender and Silence.” I’ll bring in this latter paper just in those places where I believe it furthers and elucidates Koichi’s thesis in “Trauma, Contingency, and the Psychoanalytic Zero.”
I would contend that Togashi offers an entirely new way to understand a rare but yet familiar clinical experience where change happens apparently out of nowhere in the context of a mutual silence, following which, unaccountably, a warm and productive connection emerges. To bring in my own experience, many years ago a five day a week analytic patient who, a year into what I considered an analysis that just couldn’t get started, suddenly in one session became silent, and the silence lasted for many weeks. I tried in vain to re-engage the patient, but then, in subsequent sessions following a consultation with Paul Ornstein, I became silent as well. In our mutual silence, my patient was able to convey to me nonverbally that something important was happening between us, and then, unceremoniously, we resumed our conversation in what I now recognize as a more relational, mutually interactive mode. I never understood what happened. I spoke to Paul Ornstein about it in a second consultation, and Ornstein told me about a similar experience he had had with a patient who flew in to see him from out of town weekly, never speaking at all beyond the usual friendly greeting, and then at the end of a year, warmly offered his gratitude for a helpful experience that could now end, as he’d gotten what he needed. Paul didn’t understand it either, but since then I’ve had a few similar experiences, which Togashi has clarified for me with his work.
The beautiful paper on Trauma begins with a set of mysterious questions. Togashi first describes an evocative photo image of a little girl w