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“I ask Jennie how she feels.” ‘I feel like a hole’, she tells me in a tiny voice. “Like you’re in a hole?” I ask her. ‘No, like I am a hole … ’
Sopher, “An Allegiance to Absence: Fidelity to the Internal Void”
What does it mean to feel like a hole—to be a hole? This evocative metaphor could represent the ruin of existence that once was, or could refer to something that has never been. Is it a state to be defined, filled, or surrendered to? In the past few decades, the accent in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about therapeutic action has shifted (though not exclusively) from accurately interpreting the truth of what was, to participating in the experience of what is, and what could be. Assaying this ontological trend, Ogden (2019) identifies a shift in a focus from the interpretation of dreams (Freud) to the experience of dreaming (Bion) and from interpreting the meaning of play (Klein) to playing (Winnicott). It is in this very spirit that, Vitalization in Psychoanalysis; Perspectives on Being and Becoming, seeks to further understand the experience of being un-alive as well as the process of becoming enlivened through psychoanalytic action.
In this edited volume of papers, coeditors Amy Schwartz Cooney and Rachel Sopher spotlight a dimension of relational psychoanalysis that is interested in the matter of what self psychologists have described as attention to the
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striving “forward edge” of the transference (Tolpin, 2002), while holding an awareness of its tension with the repetitive dimension, or trailing edge.
While mourning is considered an essential transformational process that appears across theoretical perspectives, Schwartz Cooney and Sopher’s project seeks to find seedlings of life in lifeless rubble. They distinguish—but don’t render mutually exclusive—the phenomenology of deadness that can come from survival of ab