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‘Maintaining an analytic stance’ means actively holding on to a particular frame of mind. Most commonly it refers to how psychoanalysts are with their patients, but it also applies to the state of mind needed for thinking analytically or reading analytic writings. Whatever the situation, there is work involved in sustaining it. There is a sense of tension—slight, maybe, but constant. There is always a tug in the opposite direction, a pull away from the analytic state of mind. When we look at something which is not quite within our normal range of vision and try to focus on it, the muscles of accommodation in our eyes have to work harder than usual and we become conscious of keeping a steady tension in them as we work to keep the object in focus. It is not painful or difficult. We might not even call it a strain. But the effort, the tension, of not letting the focus slip, is there. Keeping oneself attuned to the realm of psychic reality rather than ordinary reality requires a particular sort of effort. There is a resistance to be overcome.
A patient told me about how, as a girl, she would be frightened of burglars in the night and wake her father up. He would reassure her that there weren’t any burglars. This would make her more agitated, not less, and she would tell him she was afraid of dying, or of nuclear war. He would again reassure her, rather irritably now, that she was perfectly well, and there wasn’t going to be a nuclear war. The reason this was so unhelpful to her is that she wanted him to meet her at the level of psychic reality where her fear was real, and the necessary question was, ‘so what is she really, that is to say psychically, afraid of?’ He, however, was meeting her in terms of ordinary reality which showed him, and made him say to her, that there was nothing really to be afraid of. In order to see that there was something to be afraid of, and then to think about what it might be, he would have had to negate his ordinary way of thinking.
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