The Analyst's Sensitive Presence

This term refers to an often-neglected component of the transference/countertransference interplay that concerns the analyst's élan towards his patient, the quality of his investment. This aspect plays a particularly important role in narcissistic and identity-related issues, but it is active in every analysis.

Here is an example. It concerned a young woman with a painful history combining early narcissistic and sexual traumas. As is classically the case, she tended to repeat both of them beyond the pleasure principle in her affective life, which stood in striking contrast with her brilliant professional career. She felt a constant need to test not only the constancy of the analyst's investment during his absences, but also the nature and quality of his presence during the sessions. From thereon, they moved on a ridge line between two major dangers: disinvestment on one side, and instinctual drive violence on the other.

During this difficult process for both partners, the analyst felt on a day-to-day basis that presence and absence, passivity and activity, should not be opposed term for term, but on the contrary that they formed a complementary pair underpinning his functioning during the session. As much as it was important for the analyst to let himself follow his inner movements associated sometimes with bodily sensations or with quasi-hallucinatory experiences, equally he soon realised that the quality of his presence, including physical, of his way of speaking, of choosing his words, of expressing them neither too strongly nor too neutrally, played a central role. At certain moments, he was almost painfully sensitive to his own bodily presence, and this feeling formed the basis of the constructions communicated to the patient as well as his way of putting them.

In a session that took place during a particularly critical period of her analysis, the patient declared that “it had gone on long enough” and that she preferred to return to her solitude rather than run th