Performative and enactive features of psychoanalytic witnessing

The transference as the scene of address

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8972203
AutoresBruce Reis (0000-0002-1572-5229, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis270 Lafayette Street, Suite 1209New York, NY 10012USA, autor correspondente)
Ano2009
Volume90
Fascículo6
Páginas1359-1372
Data de publicação2009-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe International Journal of Psychoanalysis (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0020-7578 • E-ISSN: 1745-8315
EditoraTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00216.x
PMID20002820
OpenAlexW2145138302
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas31
Referências citadas18

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

Countertransference · Epistemology · Performative utterance · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Psychotherapist · Relation (database · Repetition (rhetorical device · Transference · Vignette · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Computer Science · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology