Communicating Incommunicado

Standing in the spaces: essays on clinical process, trauma, and dissociation by Philip M. Bromberg. (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1998, 328 pp.)

ONE OF MY FAVORITE PASSAGES IN THE COLLECTED WORKS OF Harry Stack Sullivan involves a visit with Sullivan's elderly father:

During my father's period of being a widower, I visited him. On this occasion, we sat and talked in the room which I had always liked best in the house. In the process, I noticed that the old gentleman was getting a bit distracted. In my usual fashion I went over the context of our conversation and found nothing at all offensive to him. And so, in the margin of my mind, I grew more and more puzzled over what was clear to me as some unsatisfactory mental state in my father. Finally he said, “Well, what do you think of the wallpaper?” On hearing this question, I was able to vividly recall that in an hour and a half's conversation, I had studied every damned line at which the wallpaper came together. I had not only observed that it was new wallpaper applied since my last visit, but I had made a minute study for any poor workmanship or regrettable defects in its application. But that had in no sense disturbed my consciousness. It required this intervention by my father to attach any awareness in my mind

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either of the new wallpaper or of the great care with which I had been studying it [Sullivan, 1956, p. 172n].

Sullivan's point was that what he had just identified as “some unsatisfactory mental state” in his father was the unwitting by-product of Sullivan's own fastidiousness, which had occurred habitually and outside his own awareness.

One way to understand the recently published collected works of Philip Bromberg, an interpersonal analyst trained at the White Institute, is that he out-Sullivans Sullivan. If Sullivan sat and stared at the spaces from a distance, Bromberg gets up, walks right over, and imaginatively steps into them. Standing in the spaces is Bromberg's phrase to describe “a person's re