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.
We decided to conclude this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry: Safety—The Patient, The Analyst, The Dyad, in which our topic has been reviewed historically and explored so movingly, and perhaps definitively for this moment in time, by our contributors, Joseph Lichtenberg, Elizabeth Carr and Janna Sandmeyer, Roger Segalla, Jr., Hazel Ipp, Amy Eldridge, and Joye Weisel-Barth, with a case discussion† that vividly captures what Segalla has called the “safety-danger dialectic dynamic” (this issue, p. 576) and places us live in the midst of it in all its complexity.
Estelle treated Oliver a long time ago. He was a man who had been traumatized as a child and who experienced helpless rage at his therapist because he was convinced that she neither knew nor understood him. Her case discussion illuminates so many of the themes explored by the articles in this issue, for example the disorganizing effect that traumatic affect and fear has on each of member of the dyad and on their relationship, the stall in development when fear and rage saturate the climate in the room, the responsibility of the patient for the safety of the dyad and furthering the work. By “voting with [his] feet,” as Carr and Sandmeyer felicitously call it (this issue, p. 560)—Oliver kept coming—he contributed all that he could for the furtherance of the analytic work if it was to be authentic.
Estelle and Oliver found their way out of their impasse by their commitment to each other, their endurance, tolerance, in effect their good will. And Estelle’s relentless honesty. She faced Oliver’s escalating onslaughts head on, without shrinking from them in spite of her own fear. And Estelle was ultimately able to find the words to help her patient mentalize and integrate the experience that had emerged in the consulting room and, by thus doing, helped Oliver to contain it, following implicitly Slade’s recommendation (2014). Estelle and Oliver both grew from their immersion in their cocreated cauldron of fire and their