Accommodating Brandchaft: Theory and Transference in Analytic Training

This article describes a challenging case involving a patient’s pathologically (or unconsciously) accommodating his wife, within a rigidly organized marriage—an affective inflexibility that also led to dyadic constriction. As the author/analyst (a candidate when I wrote the article), in attempting to make clinical use of Brandchaft’s concepts of unconscious accommodation, I found myself stuck in dyadic repetition, my patient apparently more keen on short-term fixes than engaged vulnerability (parallel to the patient’s antidotal use of online pornography, the presenting symptom). I feared I was not only failing the patient, but also my beloved theorist, in unsuccessfully integrating Brandchaft’s theories into the analysis. In the end, however, it was this vexing anxiety and frustration that illuminated my repetitively paternal transference—not only toward the patient, but also the idealized Brandchaft and his theory of accommodation! Understanding these parallel paternal transferences led to my deeper empathic attunement to the patient, similarly organized, rather than the seeking of results that would justify my sufficiency. A Brandchaftian emancipation began to manifest, only after the analyst surrendered concepts of how such process should or ought to proceed. This expanded attunement to the patient’s frustrated (and fraught) yearnings, in turn, relaxed some of his self-protections, as the patient began to believe, gradually, in the possibility of an authentic relational home.