Prologue: The Analyst's Involvement in the Creative Aspect of Analysis

The importance of the analyst's creative involvement in the treatment process has grown with the evolution of psychoanalysis. My intention in this issue is to bring together contributions on the analytic process from the common viewpoint of the analyst's creative involvement that, when synthesized, may help generate additional theory on the analyst's use of self. In considering the full range of what analysts do in treatment, explicitly and implicitly, to help promote progressive emotional communication, further thought is given here to the psychology of creativity in the analytic context.

Arthur Robbins, in his article “Playing Along the Porous Edge of Chaos and Discipline: Pathways to the Creative Analytic Process,” develops a rich thesis on creative analytic dialogue by highlighting the personality dynamics and developmental cycle of the analyst as relevant to his or her creative motivation/intervention, giving the reader a remarkably effective experiential sense of the analyst's oscillating affect states and involvements in the creative part of analysis. This nonlinear depiction of analytic process merges with a conceptual emphasis on the vital dimension of affective mirroring in examples from his psychoanalytic practice. Affective mirroring (providing patients in analytic therapy, and analysts in a supervisory group, with metaphorical understanding via affective resonance with their experience that may ultimately encompass interpretation) is importantly distinguished from empathy in promoting a loosening of the patient's layers of protective adaptation.

Michael Eigen, in his article “Distinction–Union Structure,” builds out the relevance and, indeed, centrality to treatment of the analyst's creativity in holding and integrating opposite or multiple emotional tendencies expressed within oneself and the patient. Eigen recognizes what he calls distinction–union tendencies as inte