Since its establishment as a profession, psychoanalytic practitioners have struggled with understanding the true nature of their work. Many remain devoted to Freud's medical model (Freud, 1958) and aspire to establish a logicalpositivistic basis for psychoanalysis. Others view the field more broadly, and consider psychoanalysis a distinctively humanistic discipline. This paper suggests that the bifurcation may be resolved by focusing on clinical as opposed to theoretical psychoanalysis-an emphasis that illuminates its artistic elements. Psychoanalysts' work may be likened to performance artists, primarily because they work to create an experience in their patients. In addition, they give with their psyche-somas, reminiscent of how actors use their bodies as instruments; they face each session in a fashion akin to how painters face the white canvas or writers the blank page; and they choose from an infinite number of possible models for coconstructing ways of understanding their patients' experiences. Regardless of past or future theoretical differences, psychoanalysts provide creative, transformative experiences most accurately described as transformational encounters. Psychoanalysis is a verb, a process. While it alleviates pain caused by various mental disorders, it also assists individuals in discovering their individuality, authenticity, and singularity. In support of the artistic foundation of the psychoanalytic process, the paper includes three scenes that demonstrate how patients experience precipitous, essential breaks in their repetitive, internal dramas, resulting in them experiencing themselves as beings, capable of change. It thereby demonstrates how psychoanalytic practitioners This article was published Online First July 28, 2014.
As part of a broader scholarly and political effort to unify clinical psychoanalysis, the author argues that psychoanalysts' presence, engagement, and framing constitute the three overarching features of their work. Additionally, patients' propensity to turn inward, alternatively known as psychic retreat or narcissistic withdrawal, provides a similarly unifying way to view psychoanalytic patients. Narrowing the investigation to a phenomenological one, the author tapers the exploration further by studying the psychoanalytic process as it unfolds in real time. After addressing the problems of diffusion in professional identity and psychoanalytic theory that have plagued psychoanalysis from the start, the author presents three case examples into which he integrates Kafka's short story "A Hunger Artist." These vehicles are utilized to demonstrate how such nomenclature provides the basis for a more cohesive understanding of how psychoanalysts work.
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