Abstract:The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is an interpersonal/relational psychoanalytic account of some relationships between dissociation, time, and unformulated experience. Trauma, and the dissociation to which trauma leads, freezes time, which makes it impossible to formulate certain kinds of new experience. Instead, potential new meanings remain unformulated. The route of clinical access to frozen time is the interpersonal field: to thaw time and allow new experience, the ways in which the interp… Show more
“…As noted by Stern (2017), Laplanche and many other French writers translated Nachträglichkeit as après coup . The term après coup expresses the idea that psychic life is an endless creation and recreation always performed in the present (ibid., p. 516).…”
Section: Contemporary Approaches To Dissociationmentioning
confidence: 95%
“…Dissociation does not involve rejecting from consciousness an experience that is already created. Instead, ‘Dissociation means not creating the experience in the first place ’ (Stern 2017, p. 503, italics in original), and unconsciousness can be understood as comprising unrepresented states or unrepresented subjectivity instead of rejected, repressed formed experience (p. 504). Resonating with James’s ‘free water of consciousness’ metaphor that was previously described (James 1890/1983), Stern focused on non‐symbolized, unformulated experience: it is potential experience, what experience might become; it is vague, primitive, global and affectively charged.…”
Section: Contemporary Approaches To Dissociationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…For Stern, patient and analyst co‐create their experience of the analytic situation and the environment in which it becomes possible to think certain thoughts and not others and to have certain feelings, perceptions, experiences (Stern 1997, p. 101). Commenting on the role of the field for symbolization, Stern remarked, ‘In my frame of reference, it is the nature of the interpersonal field, conscious and unconscious, that determines which possibilities attain symbolic form and which others never take shape’ (Stern 2017, p. 505). Similarly, for Bromberg the role of the analyst is ‘to maintain dual citizenship in two domains of reality with passports to the multiple self‐states of the patient’ (Bromberg 1996/1998, p. 287), while the analytic relationship is characterized as a ‘negotiated dialectic between attunement and confrontation’ (p. 288).…”
Section: The Field and The Emergence Of Symbolizationmentioning
The archetypal images of separation and dissociation are very present in Jung’s model of individuation, and Jung proposed a dynamic relationship between conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche of analyst and analysand. In addition, numerous contemporary authors emphasize the multiplicity of the self and the emergence of the field created by both participants, allowing for symbolization and transformation. I describe here my attempts to reach the encapsulated psychic split of a client. Defeated in my search for any conscious, developed self‐state that could readily match his, I had to nurture the field of our relationship, where a child was imprisoned and allow space for daydreaming. The field ultimately supported the emergence of a primitive part of me matching his, which he required to safely mirror his experience. In staying and dreaming within this field of longing, we reconstructed his initial trauma. The defeat of my ego and the response to the multiplicity of Mark’s states through the sustained reverie of holding a child, a single archetypal image, stirred the good mother in me, forged a container for non‐rational, affective somatic psychic splits, and initiated psychic changes.
“…As noted by Stern (2017), Laplanche and many other French writers translated Nachträglichkeit as après coup . The term après coup expresses the idea that psychic life is an endless creation and recreation always performed in the present (ibid., p. 516).…”
Section: Contemporary Approaches To Dissociationmentioning
confidence: 95%
“…Dissociation does not involve rejecting from consciousness an experience that is already created. Instead, ‘Dissociation means not creating the experience in the first place ’ (Stern 2017, p. 503, italics in original), and unconsciousness can be understood as comprising unrepresented states or unrepresented subjectivity instead of rejected, repressed formed experience (p. 504). Resonating with James’s ‘free water of consciousness’ metaphor that was previously described (James 1890/1983), Stern focused on non‐symbolized, unformulated experience: it is potential experience, what experience might become; it is vague, primitive, global and affectively charged.…”
Section: Contemporary Approaches To Dissociationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…For Stern, patient and analyst co‐create their experience of the analytic situation and the environment in which it becomes possible to think certain thoughts and not others and to have certain feelings, perceptions, experiences (Stern 1997, p. 101). Commenting on the role of the field for symbolization, Stern remarked, ‘In my frame of reference, it is the nature of the interpersonal field, conscious and unconscious, that determines which possibilities attain symbolic form and which others never take shape’ (Stern 2017, p. 505). Similarly, for Bromberg the role of the analyst is ‘to maintain dual citizenship in two domains of reality with passports to the multiple self‐states of the patient’ (Bromberg 1996/1998, p. 287), while the analytic relationship is characterized as a ‘negotiated dialectic between attunement and confrontation’ (p. 288).…”
Section: The Field and The Emergence Of Symbolizationmentioning
The archetypal images of separation and dissociation are very present in Jung’s model of individuation, and Jung proposed a dynamic relationship between conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche of analyst and analysand. In addition, numerous contemporary authors emphasize the multiplicity of the self and the emergence of the field created by both participants, allowing for symbolization and transformation. I describe here my attempts to reach the encapsulated psychic split of a client. Defeated in my search for any conscious, developed self‐state that could readily match his, I had to nurture the field of our relationship, where a child was imprisoned and allow space for daydreaming. The field ultimately supported the emergence of a primitive part of me matching his, which he required to safely mirror his experience. In staying and dreaming within this field of longing, we reconstructed his initial trauma. The defeat of my ego and the response to the multiplicity of Mark’s states through the sustained reverie of holding a child, a single archetypal image, stirred the good mother in me, forged a container for non‐rational, affective somatic psychic splits, and initiated psychic changes.
“…As Britzman (1998) has claimed, the challenging and unpredictable nature of the transference presents a "compromised and condensed time" (p. 33), perpetually bringing our emotional past to bear on the present of reading. Similarly, Stern (2017) has argued that, "the mind is not constructed on a linear, forward-looking basis" (p. 515), and although we typically turn to the expectations of chronological time to plan our lives, it appears that the unconscious operates upon a qualitatively different set of rules, which Stern described in relation to the concept of kairos time: "Past and present, in this view, are ceaselessly in the process of constructing and reconstructing one another" (p. 503).…”
Section: Comics Reading and Condensed Temporalitymentioning
In this paper, we wonder how comics – through its play of absence and presence, and as unique multimodal merger of visual arts and literature – may allow readers to engage in a particular kind of psychic work, involving the influence of memory and unconscious life on reading experience. We thus discuss an explicitly psychoanalytic understanding of reading comics, paying particular attention to the mental movements of repression, projection, and reparation. Drawing on readers’ experiences with Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories, we also consider how the formal elements of comics reading might allow readers to work through the effects of potentially difficult personal histories.
“…With all this in mind, we can say that in the absence of attunement and containment, intense primitive affects can’t be integrated and are split off, forming complexes or areas of ‘unformulated experience’ (Stern 2017). They can also manifest as somatic flashbacks or be enacted.…”
In this paper I attempt to show how deep engagement, which is gradually developed within the relational container, can facilitate access to the psychoid dimension of the unconscious characterized by a quality of interconnectedness. The resulting synchronistic experiences can support and strengthen this container as well as having profound re‐connecting impact on the people involved. With this in mind, I suggest that openness to this dimension can be very important in working with the issues of loss, abandonment, aloneness and mistrust in human connections – the symbolic domain of the orphan. Although none of the patients I describe in this paper were actual orphans, symbolically the orphan theme featured significantly in their processes, in that early relational trauma left them feeling profoundly alone and unable to trust human contact. For this reason, the most important yet difficult challenge of the work was to help them restore their sense of connectedness to themselves and to others. I consider the role of attunement and reverie as the basis for facilitating this openness and propose that such openness can be seen as a feature of the analytic attitude in its own right and that it constitutes a unique contribution of the Jungian approach to working with early trauma.
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