Co-Thinking

Daniel Widlöcher has suggested the term “co-thinking” to describe a reciprocal process of the development of associative activity that is made possible by the double fundamental rule in the analytic situation. The involvement of the thinking person of the analyst, through the induction effect that makes him the receiver of what is thought by the analysand, invalidates the idea of “pure” listening: the roles of “interpreter” and “interpreted” are thus made more complex, for the analysand also “listens” to the analyst. The task carried out by the psychoanalyst/observer thus consists in perceiving an effect of transmission induced by the analysand. It is situated beyond words, for although they are conscious, words acquire their meaning within the associative contextual network, which implies the employment of preconscious and unconscious elements. Thus, co-thinking may be considered as the vehicle of unconscious to conscious communication, the illocutionary framework of which the interplay of the transference and countertransference is a part. The author contends that the term “co-thinking” should provide a response to the questions raised by the “vague” and scarcely Freudian character of terms such as “intersubjectivity” or “empathy”, and also stands in contrast to a model of attentive listening to the “plays of the signifier” alone.

For him, the session should be considered as the locus of a succession of mental acts that are associated with each other. “What in a given event and context gives birth to the following event is the force of meaning [the associative force] that evokes this new act; it is not a matter of temporal causality, but rather of a mutual attraction” (Widlöcher, 2003, p. 61). The association between two thoughts may thus be explained by their latent connection, their structure and by the cathexis of this link, the actualisation: a double mechanism is thus involved. The associative dispositions depend on formal analogies, past habits or purposive i