Recovery

The “fitness effect”: this is how a patient ironically described the immediate experience of effort and pleasure in the session. It is a defensive formula, obviously excluding presence, the relationship with the other and the analyst, unless the latter is confined to a “mirror effect” whose purpose is to bring the narcissistic claim to its term; and unless time, space and the object of the transference are incarnated in everything, the space of the session, the fixed framework and the rhythm, and that the purpose is to induce the subject to engage in associativity, providing him with a field of tonic wandering between the inside and the outside, an autonomous and autoerotic field almost without danger. Can lightness and movement be considered as acceptable gains of analysis? Would recognition of well-being then only be possible by running the risk of denying the most fundamental gain of analysis? For if analysis permits the patient to a better conscious sense of well-being, can it change the patient's relationship to his feminine attachment figures, incarnated by the object of the transference? Does this flaunted sense of well-being not signify that the subject refuses to play an honest game, to rely on the other and to resist him, to desire to be loved and to fight against the abandonment that this desire implies? In order to be effective, does the method not require the acceptance of a certain state of dependence of the ego with regard to the drive impulse aimed at the object-analyst? It is certainly necessary for a sufficiently libidinalised and tolerable cathexis of the shared work to develop, but can this be expressed in terms of well-being? Are we not in a logic of avoidance?

The question is no less pertinent when the atmosphere of the session and the flow of words follow the opposite course, when associativity is irregular, constrained and anguished. The liberating effectiveness of the work and its healing power are no longer assured. Thus, to provide an image