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I keep a small collection of found objects: smoothed river stones, rough-edged crystals, a bottle cap, a Monopoly piece, a bell, a small origami crane made from a candy wrapper, a delicate nest. These objects rest on the ledge of a large window that my patients and I both face.
After years of this static arrangement, the person who cleans the suite began rearranging the objects into a circle, with one shifting object placed deliberately at the center. At first, I was surprised, then irritated. The frame is mine to hold. I pay for this office! I would arrive Monday and return everything to its haphazard order. Month after month, this repeated.
After a while, I softened. The arrangement began to feel less like an offense and more like a quiet, playful communication – a small claim on the space from someone who also works there. I started leaving it and found the space was not entirely mine to control or determine.
One patient, after almost a year of glancing at the ledge, arrived holding a small stone that they turned absentmindedly throughout the session. On the way out, they walked to the window, silently found a place for it, and since then, they occasionally check to see if it’s still there. The stone joined the collection – theirs and not theirs, in liminal space that is mine and not mine.
Aron’s (1991) paper highlighted that the patient arrives as an active and natural reader of the analyst’s subjectivity, both material and symbolic, and what the patient perceives is not to be ignored, not merely transferential or fantasy, but essential analytic data. The patient who places their stone in the circle isn’t just contesting control; they are also making contact. And somehow, they can tell: this space (and I, hopefully) holds complex multiplicity and may eventually yield to make room.
Thirty-five years later, Aron’s invitation is still being realized. The analyst’s subjectivity, he asked the field to examine, was largely framed as personal and intra/inter-psychic/subject