Dissociation and the Interpersonal Self

Changing Conceptions of Unconscious

“…Rela tional configurations refer to templates of ongoing interactional patterns that the patient has experienced in relation to key figures, which begin very early in life and are usually consistent throughout development. These configurations are usually unarticulated or dissociated (Hirsch, 1994) and lead to expectations that the present and future will be the same as the past. Thus, we anticipate and pursue what confirms our unar ticulated templates of what the world is like and, in so doing, repeat the past and maintain personal equilibrium at the expense of engi^ing in new experience.…”

“…By struggling to give voice to the unformulated, the patient and analyst imagine missing links in experience (Bromberg, 1993)· This is, perhaps, the essence of working with dissociated experience. Self-other configura tions that have been dissociated are lived out in two-person transferencecountertransference enactments and are approximations of the patient's unformulated experience (Hirsch, 1994). In the classical perspeaive, there is an assumption that the analyst can know the "truth" of that which has been repressed and can both discover and articulate it by him or herself.…”

Reflective Activity and its Measurement

“…It is primarily associated with psychotherapy and research methodology rather than with the study of individual differences. It has also been used to describe the clinician's self-critical stance during the process of psychotherapy (Sullivan, 1954;Hirsch, 1993Hirsch, , 1994 and a method of investigation in the conduct of ethnographic or other forms of participatory research (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994;Goffman, 1972). In contrast, reflective activity involves the inclination to be both, self aware and situationally aware while interacting in the environment.…”

Beyond the Dialectics of Love and Desire

“…Relational theories view resistance as attachment to the past (Hirsch, 1987(Hirsch, , 1994Mitchell, 1993), and thus to the safe and familiar models of reality and sense of I, with the corresponding subjective states and pat terns of relating. Bromberg (1991) has noted the fluidity between various subjective states, in health, and the compulsive protection of the familiar subjective states, in pathology.…”

“…49-50] The observing-participant model of psychoanalysis best fits the unidentitied-identitied, being-doing dialectic functions of the self It views the analyst's expression of both as central to the analytic dialogue. Hirsch (1987Hirsch ( ,1994Hirsch ( ,1996 has extensively discussed how analysts unwittingly lose 498 GLADYS BRANLY GUARTON, Ph.D. their usual position as observers and inevitably become participants in the dramas that characterize their patients' life histories. Analysts become participants when their familiar subjectivities (or separate identities) be come embedded in their patients' internal relational configurations, and enact with them a significant character in their patients' familiar patterns of relating.…”