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Dear Editors,
Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context,
I wrote a discussion and a letter, both of which were published in the journal, and now feel compelled to write a second letter about Geist’s and Nocek’s paper on permeable boundaries because a positive aspect of their paper has been overlooked. This has to do with the heightened emotional intimacy they convey in their writing as a direction in which psychoanalytic writing needs to evolve.
At the very start of my discussion, Adrift without a Psychanalytic Rudder, I stated, “As a positive contribution, the experience-near description of their mutual love for each other expands the degree of intimacy in psychoanalytic writing about analytic love”. I reaffirmed this at the end of my discussion where I stated “The co-authors succeed in their stated intent to ‘bring us viscerally and intuitively into their therapeutic world.’ Their courageous attempt to metaphorically express deep, mutual empathic immersion and love enables us to experience their feeling for each other ‘viscerally’ as they intended. This, I believe is the direction in which psychoanalytic writing needs to evolve in the important area of analytic love.”
In response to my discussion, Dick and Meredith disagreed that their paper is about analytic love. However, the very intimate emotional quality of their paper is, in my opinion, a positive contribution to psychoanalytic writing regardless of which emotion is portrayed. Setting aside my substantial criticism of their paper for a moment, their paper raises an important question: Is this the direction that we want psychoanalytic writing to take?
I propose that this is a worthwhile topic for a broader discussion, including how we determine the framework necessary to ensure that the communication of this level of intimacy is psychoanalytically relevant and ethically sound.
Although I believe their paper is deeply flawed in a number of ways, I hope as a community we can open this up for examination and discourse rather