Through The Unknown, Remembered Gate: Journeys Into The Labyrinth

The image of the journey into the labyrinth is a poignant and powerful one for the analyst. Each new individual—each new encounter—takes us further into reciprocal journeys as the path of the other intersects our own. This interplay often has the feel of a multi-dimensional palimpsest, in which I am continually reworking the enigmas encountered by my patients through my own being. Experientially, this is often quite perplexing, as I find myself traveling some familiar path, long since taken, and wonder at the re-finding of myself within it. Hadn't I already traveled this road, some time back? As I have tried to find my bearings within the layered workings of patient-in-analyst and analyst-in-patient, the initial feel of this recursiveness, for me, was of an endless circle—a heavy image, with little room for play. Each image evokes its own metaphors, consigning meanings and proscribing possibilities. It was only as I began to notice the disjunctions between the current journey and the ones before that the path came to seem more like a spiral, in which the recurrent sense of familiarity was both true and illusory. It was never quite the same path; I was never quite the same person. The role of analyst adds further dimension to these representations, as we travel our own experiences of the roads depicted by our patients in their journeys.