You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Estelle Shane and I were inspired to create this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry by a panel organized by Joseph Lichtenberg at the American Psychoanalytic Association: Safety for the Analysand, Safety for the Analyst, Safety for the Dyad (cf. Segalla, 2013). Lichtenberg asked the panelists (Estelle, Arietta Slade, the late James Hansell, and Evelyne Schwaber) to wrestle with the question of what exactly safety is—a feeling, an emotion, or an atmospheric something? He said he views safety as “an aspect of the frame, one that applies to the entire domain of how we interact in an analysis” (Segalla, 2013, p. 993). As Elizabeth Carr and Janna Sandmeyer note in their contribution to this issue, “Exploring the Vicissitudes of Safety and Danger in Psychoanalysis: Developing Trust Through Mutual Engagement,” in a “sometimes fractious psychoanalytic field, the importance of safety is one of the few areas of near consensus” (p. 557).
In the article Lichtenberg contributes to this issue, “Reflections on Safety,” he expands on his question. Safety, he thinks, is an affect and a general state/ambiance that emerges from complex conditions in childhood—a “sense of power as compared to helplessness, the absence or cessation of physical danger and health risk, the acceptance of one’s intentions by another as compared to rejection, the abundance of resources … as compared to their unavailability, and the sense of connection and belonging as compared to isolation and loneliness” (p. 569). Joe then goes on to parse a crucial question: “What lived experiences in the first year of life contribute to a sense of safety, both as a moment-in-time experience of security, and as a general sense that the child (and later the adult) is able to be and do in the world safely?” (p. 569). He finds twelve of these experiences, all emergent in relational experiences with early caregivers. When these experiences go well enough, they provide the “potential of a life-long arc of underlying security, and f