Getting to Permeability: Discussion of Richard Geist’s and Meredith Nocek’s “Permeable Boundaries: Therapeutic Benefits”

In this discussion of Permeable boundaries: Therapeutic benefits by Richard Geist and Meredith Nocek, the author articulates the way in which Geist’s and Nocek’s ideas about permeable boundaries and the transformative intimacy that they facilitate express an expansion of Kohut's ideas, an expansion that the era in which his theory evolved would not have tolerated. The author, endorsing the concept of permeable boundaries as a pathway to transformative internalization in treatment, questions the notion that they can only arise organically. She draws from the original article to point out ways that the therapist can and should assume responsibility for facilitating permeable boundaries when they do not arise organically. The author points to the therapist’s role in intentionally establishing a regulating “side by side feeling”, the therapist’s openness to her own vulnerability, her achievement of a level of empathic immersion such that the analyst can actually feel the patient’s experience within herself, and the establishment of a therapeutic dialogue which leads to the emergence of ideas that are novel to both patient and therapist, as ways in which the therapist can evoke a permeable boundary for the sake of deep transformation.