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Throughout the health care reform debate that occurred in the United States in 2009, President Obama reiterated: If you are satisfied with the health insurance program you have, you can keep it. If not, it is desirable to have an alternative. Mel Bornstein was not satisfied with the analyses he had, so he found an alternative in his regular organized program of self-analysis. Nor was Mel satisfied with the theory that guided his analysis, so he found an alternative in pluralism—essentially creating his own experience-near theory amalgam.
Mel begins his article by telling the reader what he has discovered. For his patients, himself, and many of us, the goal is to embrace all of life. The process is to take possession of injurious traumas and reveal them in an intimate relationship. Note the active verbs: embrace, take possession, and reveal. The key is at the end: an intimate relationship. While the key is stated at the end, maybe the key, the intimate relationship, is also the beginning, middle, and the neverending.
An intimate relationship requires the capacity and willingness of two people to participate. The arid quality of Mel's second analysis guided by neutrality, abstinence, and anonymity, is painful to read, and to remember. We analysts can only read Mel's article through our own experience, and where the pain is shared, the story achieves an intimacy between teller and reader. Intimacy comes easily to some analytic pairs and is more difficult for others to achieve. Humiliation and shame—powerful affects that in the past have often largely ignored as centrally motivating emotions—exist on both sides of the couch. Consequently, analyst and analysand can each hide from themselves and each other—analysts behind a theory of technique, patients behind a wall they often don't even know they have created.
An artifact for me as reader and discussant of Mel's paper is that I have an intimate relationship with Mel. As friends and partners, we have created and worked toge