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Dear Bjørn
We already once had the opportunity for discussions in Bergen in 1998. It is a pleasure to be able to continue our discussion. Your absolutely clear and sensitive paper awoke the following thoughts in me.
I agree with your statement that “today we may even speculate on whether the neurosis proper really exists or ever had existed”. I also agree that “the so-called psychosomatic patients' affective arousal is not linked to a meaningful and emotionally experienced self-representation”. However, I do not agree with your claim that psychoanalysis leaves the so-called developmental failure untreated.
You claim that traditional psychoanalytic verbal discourse does not get to grips with the subjective experience of these states of unmentalised affects. I do wonder whether such traditional psychoanalytic verbal discourse even exists anymore, as analyses have become more prolonged; it sounds as if this verbal discourse has been made into a scapegoat in recent times, something to point a finger at when analysis seems difficult.
You set the collaboration between patient and analyst, in which unconscious meaning is sought out, in opposition to the patient's need for experiencing a quality of being. In my experience, such an opposition does not exist. The analyst listens with his “third ear” for associations, including those which are not expressed in words but rather in the analysand's gestures, his tone of voice and mood. Long analyses allow the patient the experience of being heard and understood (which Killingmo underlines in his paper) within a two-person setting. Through his familiarity with his own self-experience, the analyst can simultaneously perceive and recognise both the analysand's self-experience and the instinct-driven conflicts of infantile sexuality in the transference situation. The analyst's interpretation and the symbolisation he uses in his work of understanding do not operate simply on a verbal level but also as affective and kinesthetic symbolisati