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Your analytic patient enters the session with a drink and a chocolate doughnut. He reluctantly offers you the doughnut. As you overcome your surprise you annoy him by breaking off a piece and eating it as you return the remaining doughnut without comment. This scenario is played out session after session. If this is something you might do, then you'd have handled this situation as Joseph Newirth did. The analytic rationale for his seemingly nonanalytic response is supplied by Newirth's Between Emotion and Cognition: The Generative Unconscious.
The experience of reading The Generative Unconscious is unusual. In most books, each chapter seems to build on the previous one in a progressive movement of ideas. In The Generative Unconscious, however, each chapter approaches very similar subject matter but in a different form. In the language of Matte Blanco, which Newirth draws on in the book, it might be said that each chapter is “symmetrical” to the others. In one sense, it feels as if you've traveled over the same ground, yet your interest is engaged, and the ideas become enlivened and deepened. Thus, one chapter explores the creation of meaning in relation to failures in the development of subjectivity; the next chapter discusses Newirth's concept of being a subject. The following chapter develops the concept of psychic reality, which is another way he talks about subjectivity or the creation of meaning. Each chapter is both equivalent to and more than the preceding chapters. The flow of concepts in The Generative Unconscious forms a chain of equivalences that looks something like this: psychic reality—subjectivity—person as subject as opposed to person as ego or self—being able to productively use projection, identification, and enactment—sense of power (omnipotence)—ability to symbolize—ability to play and undergo other