Psychoanalyst as Mother - 2
Clinically, a post-Winnicottian generation of psychoanalysts has taken up the motherly banner and, unknowingly, the double bind attendant to its implicit attitude of “no one is going to tell you how to do it but you’d better do it right; otherwise…” (see Mothers and Psychoanalysts ).
At its extreme, this double bind is now sadly and unwittingly transformed into a theoretical justification and a privileging of the clinical picture of the analyst as melancholic.
Note for instance said analyst’s
- inability to relinquish the ideal, and hence dead, object (the unmediated and gratifying mother);
- identification with the dead object (analyst as substitute source of gratification);
- sadism inverted into self-deprecation (readiness to assume responsibility for every disruption in the gratification as index of the analyst’s empathic failure);
- self-exposure (analysis is the analysis of the counter-transference);
- narcissism (cure is contingent on an internalisation of the supposedly healthy analyst).
And the list goes on.
This entry was posted on 29 August 2007 at 9:06 am and is filed under MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Winnicott . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
