Self-Disclosure and Psychoanalytic Meaning: A Psychoanalytic Fable

Feeling helpless and cut off from a patient, the analyst Jacobs (1995) disclosed something of his emotional experience:

I told Mr. D that I thought I knew from my own feelings of the moment what, as a child, he must have experienced trying to make contact with a father who was utterly unreachable. I said that when he went into one of his periods of withdrawal, as he was doing now, I felt myself completely cut off from him, as though a wall of iron had come between us. … He had become, I said, the father sitting in darkness, the father who, in his hurt and anger, shut out the world, (p. 244)

Jacobs (1996) found that “this new way of speaking, intense and personal, in turn, had a powerful affect on Mr. D. … Somehow my words pierced that shell. Altering his defenses, they worked on my patient in a way that scores of interpretations similar in content had not” (p. 20). The patient also acknowledged the success of Jacob's communication: “I heard what you've said before, but you seemed to be speaking words—something abstract and analytic, not felt and genuine” (p. 19).

So often when we speak, our listeners hear only words, which do not accomplish their purpose of establishing meaning. Our intervention seems correct and our timing in synch, yet the patient is left untouched. We may justify our technique by concluding