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.
The authors discuss 4 verbatim sessions of a treatment of a difficult-to-reach patient who can be said in classical nosology to manifest a perverse narcissistic character configuration. The authors discuss the clinical material seen through 2 different lenses based on the classical and relational paradigms. The therapist, Michael Shoshani, worked in a rather classical psychoanalytic model in which perversion was understood in a 1-person or 1-mind mode. With this lens, perversion is seen as a result of the distorted primal scene in which the child is narcissistically inflated, creating the psychotic-like symbolic equation that the child is the father. The father is annihilated and the unique perverse world is created. In contrast, within the relational perspective, the authors see the intersubjective dynamic of mutually knowing and not knowing as being a paramount theme in the treatment of Mr. A. The known and unknown character that a child possesses of his mother's sexuality creates a potential for a relational third. The perversion is the experience of child and parent mutually feeling a
An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Conference in Athens, Greece, in July 2007. We thank the editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Elliot Jurist, as well as the two anonymous reviews for their helpful comments.
sense of being too full of mutual knowledge and not knowing each other at all, leaving a sense of suffocation and stifled vitality. The relational perspective strives to create a transformation from suffocation and stifled vitality to move to a third place offering potential, thus enabling the enigmatic, seductive encounter of the knowing and not knowing to create a sense of mystery, lying between fact and fiction and between sameness and difference, seducing one to want and be, to love while respecting the given universal boundaries.