The paper puts forward the idea that play is at work all the time in psychoanalysis. The play element functions continuously to sustain a paradoxical reality where things may be real and not real at the same time. This paradox is what allows the work of psychoanalysis to take place. The concept of play covers different activities with complex interrelations, and general definitions may be misleading. The essential element is the framework that makes the paradoxical reality possible. The logical structure of the play framework is investigated, and the paper clarifies the relations between the play frame, transference and enactment. Play and humour are compared. Spontaneity is the essence of both, and the criterion for analytic validity in both cases is whether they deepen the analytic process. The tragic and ironic aspects of psychoanalysis are related to the intrinsic connection between play and loss. The relation between play and games is discussed. The rule-bound quality of games can block more exploratory kinds of play, but it may be necessary to accept this, in order for analysis to feel safe enough. Clinical material illustrates the importance of the play framework, both in a case marked by prolonged hostile and negative states of mind, and in others where more straightforward playfulness was possible.
The author considers how Freud's original formulation of the sexual drive may be understood in contemporary terms. Parallels between psychoanalysis, art history and the social and natural sciences underline the idea of sexuality as a construct that can be revisited. The nature of sexuality depends on how its irreducible biological basis is interpreted by a particular society at a particular time. The importance of revisiting is illustrated by Klein's concept of a position, which revisits the theoretical construct of a developmental stage. Freud's own construction of sexuality is based on his view of drive as comprising source, aim and object. Freud, in the Darwinian climate of his time, considered the object in terms of whether it served the fulfillment of the aim, but his paradigm can today be understood more broadly than Freud himself was able to. A discussion of perversion shows that psychoanalysis has moved from seeing it as defensive against instinctual derivatives to seeing it as defensive against object-relatedness. This reflects a shift in the analytic conceptualization of sexuality in general. Freud's paradigm for the sexual drive can be reconceived in terms of source, aim and quality of relatedness to object. Such a view of sexuality also has implications for gender issues, for the comparison of male and female perversion, and for the relation between sexuality and love.
The analytic setting exists not only externally but also internally as a structure in the mind of the analyst. The internal analytic setting constitutes an area of the analyst's mind where reality is defined by unconscious symbolic meaning. Clinical examples illustrate how a secure internal setting allows flexibility in the external setting without sacrifice of its analytic quality. The internal setting can help analysts listen inwardly to themselves in a way that is free-floating with regard to their internal processes. This points beyond usual ideas of countertransference. An analytic encounter may stir up elements that belong to the analyst's psyche which, rather than impeding the analysis, can actively enrich it. Seamus Heaney's writings evoke comparisons between listening to poems and listening to patients, and a week in a patient's analysis is described in relation to these themes.
There is countertransference, not just to individual patients, but to the process of psychoanalysis itself. The analytic process is a contentious topic. Disagreements about its nature can arise from taking it as a unitary concept that should have a single definition whereas, in fact, there are several strands to its meaning. The need for the analyst's free associative listening, as a counterpart to the patient's free associations, implies resistance to the analytic process in the analyst as well as the patient. The author gives examples of the self-analysis that this necessitates. The most important happenings in both the analyst's and the patient's internal worlds lie at the boundary between conscious and unconscious, and the nature of an analyst's interventions depends on how fully what happens at that boundary is articulated in the analyst's consciousness. The therapeutic quality of an analyst's engagement with a patient depends on the freeing and enlivening quality, for the analyst, of the analyst's engagement with his or her countertransference to the analytic process.
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