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This condescending and attacking behavior went on for a long time and seemed to have the intention of debasing me, while simultaneously keeping me looking at him, although from the position of an unsatisfactory wounded supplicant, dependent, admiring and envious—reflection of his own maternal rejection and its consequences.
Maintaining emotional presence in psychoanalysis is no simple task. Not only does this presence act as the conduit between the unconscious of the analyst and that of the patient, but at times, the irrational, or perhaps erratic, swirling of these currents between minds can play tricks on us. We are drawn into the internal processes of the other without much warning: suddenly touched by an unknown, often frightening reality, we also have to contend with the deep fissures of our own mind. It can feel like a hijacking, or sometimes a slow, seductive movement, a pushing-away and pulling-toward, seemingly exposing one's most protected vulnerability by its uninvited illumination. As we hold up a mirror to the patient, they do the same to us: in our mutual yet separate reflections we find ourselves within the confusing and shifting landscape of who we were, who we are at that moment, and who we might become in an unknowable future. Paradoxically, we need to let go of ourselves in order for a state of being fully present to emerge. Who we are to the patient, and what we are to