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There are many processes that occur during the course of an analysis that are deserving of our attention. Interpretive, developmental and defensive processes are among the many phenomena that analysts may consider in working with their patients. More elusive than these are the patient's unconscious motivations and unformulated experience that are also part of psychoanalysis. These latter phenomena cannot be known but only speculated upon. Both analyst and patient share this inability to know. Yet to analyze is to construct a known experience. This dialectic tension in psychoanalysis, the attempt to grapple with what can never be known but must be constructed by patient and analyst, is the subject of Marilyn Charles' book Constructing Realities: Transformation Through Myths and Metaphors.
The title is apt in that, as Charles seeks to capture the ideas of object relations theorists such as Winnicott, Bion or Klein, she also applies a distinctly post-modern sensibility to her work. Past experience cannot be known, nor is memory certain. What exists for Charles and her patients is a felt sense of experience, and the transformations emerge as her patients are able to discover what feels true within themselves. Her clinical vignettes provide glimpses of the way that she attempts to be with, rather than fix or interpret the patient's experience, or in her words “to move toward something that is yet unseen” (p. 19). Part of the analyst's task is to find the patient in the experience by being with the patient, a process that Charles readily admits is not easy.