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Healing through the Search for Truth: The Well-Tempered Analytic Situation. Jean-Pierre Bienvenu, pp. 399-420.
By revisiting different metaphors utilized in the French-speaking and English-speaking literature to describe the link between the psychoanalytic setting and its therapeutic action, Jean-Pierre Bienvenu assesses fundamental components of the analytic situation for their capacity to foster and contain a process of illusion, which will paradoxically yield an intimate experience of truth. Put together, the metaphors of the nuclear reactor (Laplanche), the maternal reverie (Bion), the child playing alone in the presence/absence of the mother (Winnicott), the dream space(Green), and the improvisational theatre scene (Bienvenu) offer a comprehensive portrait of how the analytic situation functions.
For the illusionary process to be beneficial to the ego, a parallel process of disillusionment must be set in motion, but in a dose tolerable for the analysand, who gradually accepts being confronted with certain “truths” about him -or herself. Bienvenu notes that our psychoanalytic understanding of truth has migrated from its original definition as historical truth via the psychical truth of unconscious fantasies, and toward a conception of truth that emerges from a form of creative intersubjectivity. De M'Uzan's notion