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.
Chimeras and Other Writings offers a timely selection of the writings of Sheldon Bach, an eminent psychoanalyst whose work spans and reflects the history of contemporary Freudian theory. There is perhaps no other figure whose views are more central to the evolution of what has become the dominant Freudian alternative to classical psychoanalysis in North America. Bach's impact is perhaps less obvious than that of others (e.g., Mahler, Kohut), in that it took place not through the introduction of a new conceptual framework, but rather by elevating the importance of paying close attention to subjectivity, to states of consciousness. Since his early writings in the 1970s, Bach has invited the reader to consider aspects of experience that might at first seem banal, like whether a patient feels centered in his own subjective experience or is overly conscious of how he is experienced by others. Rather than looking beyond the merely subjective toward implications in terms of abstract psychic structures, Bach's writings instruct us to consider our patients' subjectivity on its own terms.
One of the most distinctive hallmarks of Bach's perspective, so readily apparent throughout his oeuvre, is that we understand best, and are most effective clinically, when we begin by entering a person's experiential world. It is only through immersion in a patient's subjectivity that we come to appreciate what has gone amiss, which so often involves painful, disturbing discontinuities of experience. Some patients are unable to integrate subjective and objective perspectives, others have experiences that never seem to accrue over time or suffer from a basic disconnect between mind and body. Moreover, it is precisely through an immersion in the other's experience that therapeutic change takes place. To state it from the patient's standpoint, it is only by continually finding oneself at the center of the analyst's mind, over a long period of time, that painful discontinuities in experience beco