Analyzing Disavowed Action: The Fundamental Resistance of Analysis

Abstract

Several detailed analytic hours illustrate how, with the analyst's full participation, patients use the words, setting, and activity of analysis to gratify the very wishes they are analyzing, and so disavow the work of analysis. These gratifications, which are hidden in plain sight, are themselves disavowed in the apparent pursuit of analytic understanding. In this way the patient's and the analyst's use of the analytic situation becomes the fundamental resistance to the work itself. This process shares features in common with perversion. The painful but necessary task for both analyst and patient is to analyze this process as it is occurring, moment by moment, in the real time of the hour.

Commentary on José Bleger’sTheory and practice in psychoanalysis: psychoanalytic praxis

“…Although he does not use the term, Bleger’s dramatics and his vision of the psychoanalytic situation as a gestalt or field combine to prefigure by many years contemporary theories of enactment. His view (shared by many in the Rio de la Plata) remains controversial today; enactment is ubiquitous and continuous throughout every analytic encounter (see Levenson, 1972 and Smith, 2006 for differently framed but similar perspectives). Bleger likely would not be interested in debates about whether enactments are a useful source of information about the analysand or about the analysis; for him, they are the only source of information because there is nothing else to be observed.…”

The body in the analytic session: Focusing on the body–mind link

“…An understanding of bodily representations and functions in terms of perversion can be achieved even when the patient responds negatively to such an interpretative approach (for example, Baker, 1994; Good, 2006). 2 Similarly, the tendency to understand the so‐called erotic transference in purely defensive or manic terms (for example, Smith, 2006) involves neglecting to explore certain levels. Indeed:…”

Perverse Dreams and Dreams of Perversion

“…What is remarkable about a psychoanalytic definition of perversity, however, is the element of time and process, for it is in the evolving trans-ference-countertransference complex that perverse defenses are more clearly divulged. Generally out of the analyst's awareness as it initially unfolds, the perverse transference-countertransference comes to be understood "after the fact" of often subtle or elusive, perverse complicity against the analytic process (Jiménez 2004;Ogden 1996;Smith 2006).…”