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The authors’ efforts at reaching the humanity within the analysis of Mrs. E and to find explanations that will address her evolving personhood are themes that exists in all the articles of this issue. In my prologue, I described that attention in an analytic relationship to patients who have been severely traumatized brings up the difficulty that they have had in embracing reality; the reality of themselves who are developing human beings as they try to find their voices and the reality that surrounds them where boundaries are actually distinct, but for them are dramatically distorted because of the disruptive intensity of their inner lives and difficulty in dealing with such disruptive intensity. Because of the analytic relationship, significant changes take place that lead to more coherence in the way patients deal with their inner lives including their experiences of reality.
The analytic relationship becomes an excellent setting to follow the transformations from a distorted to a more coherent view of themselves and the external world. A major stumbling block that analysts have had is their attempt to be true to Freud’s model, where he understood reality to be simply outside of the patient. Patients knew reality as a result of cognition and perception of the external world without going into the depths of the mind. He placed little attention to what is it like to be a whole person, an “I” who doesn’t simply perceive reality, but creates reality with the use of everything that is inside and registered from the outside. A whole person experiences himself as having value, as an agency with vitality, ideals, direction and capacities of self-reflection and reflexivity; by reflexivity I mean to feel like a whole person who is able to work with thoughts and feelings that lead to transformations and creativity. Without a useable concept of wholeness in the analytic relationship, the analyst is frequently left with only parts of the whole in analyzing patients. Frequently