Citation

Reis B. Int. J. Psychoanal. 2009; 90(6): 1359-1372.

Affiliation

New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 270 Lafayette Street, Suite 1209, New York, NY 10012, USA. bruce.reis@nyu.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Institute of Psychoanalysis, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00216.x

PMID

20002820

Abstract

This paper will attempt to broaden the conception of witnessing in analytic work with traumatized patients by extending the idea to incorporate the patient's developing and varied capacity for witnessing, as well as a witnessing that occurs within the analytic relationship itself. Actions occuring as part of traumatic repetition are understood to represent memory phenomena and are distinguised from dissociated self-state experience. These experiences are not therapeutically intended to be symbolized, but rather lived-through with the analyst, thus transforming the patient's own relation to the experience. I suggest that the scene in which this living-through takes place is the transference-countertransference matrix, and that it is the analytic encounter that allows traumatic repetition to take on the quality of a communication, an address to another, rather than remain meaningless reproduction. A clinical vignette illustrates the turning of trauma's imperative for witnessing into an address in the analytic encounter.

Language: en