Jayce Long
@JayceLong
Clinical Psychologist; 4th year Psychoanalyst-in-Training at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles ; http://n-c-p.org
No amount of book reading or class taking will prepare you to be with the depth of another’s despair, the magnitude of their rage, or the vastness of their sorrow.
… the person we are trying to help might expect to feel cured when we explain... In this kind of work we know that even the right explanation is ineffectual. The person we are trying to help needs a new experience in a specialized setting. — DW Winnicott Playing and Reality
In Winnicott's view, the analyst is encouraged to tolerate not knowing and, instead, to offer spontaneous and authentic responsiveness, the point of interpreting being to show the patient that the analyst is fully alive and imperfect. — Lewis Aron A Meeting of Minds
No, no one is supposed to “just trust” anything. Not how it works. It’s a complex human communicative interactive process, each one unique, and as your attempts at ‘critique’ reveal, reading and speculating about a topic doesn’t equip a person to thoughtfully criticize it.
So let me get this straight: Therapists are required to undergo their own analysis because they, too, are subject to unconscious bias, projection, and distortion. But when they interpret someone else’s unconscious, we’re supposed to trust those interpretations as insightful, not…
In the sequence one can say that first there is object-relating, then in the end there is object-use; in b/w, however, is the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development; or, the most irksome of all the early failures that come for mending. Winnicott The Use of an Object