The Centrality of the Analyst’s Vulnerability to Interactive Regulation and Therapeutic Movement: Discussion of Paper by Paolo Stramba-Badiale, Titled, “Affective Attunement, Vulnerability, Empathy: The Analytic Experience With Veronica”

With the first couple of readings of Paolo’s text, I found myself unable to be the self I usually am able to be when I read the work of a colleague … focused, enthusiastic, and quick to detect the organizing strategy of the writer, to grasp the major points of the writing and contextualize them within the history of psychoanalytic practice and theory. Rather, I found myself struggling to stay with what was unfolded by Paolo’s words and the images they painted. With my third reading, I found myself calling on all of my strength of attention to make notes and find a way to think, to reflect about what is so effectively being conveyed on these pages, but about which I was having such difficulty sustaining an emotional connection. Late in this reading, I suddenly stopped and found myself wanting to do anything but read on. I became aware that, previously, I had been affectively numb, but now I was beginning to feel something … a sense of being flooded and painfully pressured to bear witness to the scenes that Veronica described for Paolo and he for the reader.

In a flashpoint shift, a tipping point (nonlinear systems jargon), everything changed. In that sudden micro-moment of reversal, I shifted from some cold, distant place, a dissociated space of numbness, into an embodied experience of painful emotional overstimulation with which I found myself battling—battling to hold vitality in the face of deadness, to hold a sense of coherence in opposition to a force that would shatter and fragment, fog and dissipate any structure to my experience of the experiences of Veronica, to my experience of Paolo’s experiences of Veronica’s experiences. Right then, in my embodied struggle to sustain organization, focus, feeling—to be in the next moment something of who I am/was, feeling in the previous moment, some sense of continuity—I shuddered into a painful, and yet releasing, surrender to what I wondered and began to believe might be the kind of state, or torrent of states and state