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 Vitalization in Psychoanalysis, Amy Schwartz Cooney and Rachel Soper curate a rich and compelling collection of essays that capture the current zeitgeist of relational psychoanalysis—a focus on the novel and emergent experience that creates something emotionally alive between patient and analyst. In vivid clinical stories, the twelve contributors synthesize a broad range of ideas, from object relations theory, infant research, field, and complexity theory, to illuminate therapeutic processes that court aliveness in stalled or deadened treatments. The authors, primarily aligned with relational psychoanalysis, embody a creative, intersubjective sensibility. In this spirit, I highlight areas of overlap with an intersubjective system or relational self-psychological perspective, less emphasized in this volume, to stimulate dialogue across theoretical orientations.
Inspired by the writings of Anne Alvarez, a contemporary Kleinian/Bionian child psychoanalyst, the coeditors look to “relationalize” Alvarez’s notion of “reclamation,” an active stance on the analyst’s part to call the patient into emotional contact. In The Thinking Heart, Alvarez (2012) describes three modes of therapeutic action directed to meet the patient’s developmental capacity: the explanatory level (“why because” interpretations), the descriptive level (the “whatness” of experience), and the intensified vitalizing level. This last dimension, the vitalizing level, addresses the need of patients who struggle to have any feelings. Seemingly emanating from the therapist, a sense of “countertransferential urgency” motivates the therapist to draw out and (re)claim the seriously withdrawn or “undrawn” patient with urgency and an insistence on meaning.
Building on Alvarez’s work, Schwartz Cooney and Sopher conceptualize the notion of a “vitalizing enactment,” a generative moment often initiated by the analyst in the here-and-now encounter that “potentiates underdeveloped affects and capacities for the patient