What is Psychoanalysis?

There are many ways to describe psychoanalysis. What I write here reflects my thoughts at this particular point in time located within a wide context of analytic thinkers. In freely associating to the question, “What is psychoanalysis?” I offer the following.

Psychoanalysis (PSA) is a creative endeavour: Being creatively engaged is not solely excitement/pleasure, but the soil in which psychic pain can be metabolized. Painful affect is transformed not primarily by naming, but through the enlivening experience of creating that in itself promotes healing. Patient and analyst are forming a space for an unfolding connection that has the potential not only to transform emotional pain, but to generate a lively connection with, and ongoing development of, the self. The analyst’s emotionally alive presence offers to a patient an object relationship with potential where the patient might risk coming to life rather than remaining frozen in psychic stasis.

PSA is the art of inquiry woven together with meaning-making — an aesthetic dimension of the mind that allows for discovery and creation. PSA takes place in an aesthetic register in order to bring forth meanings that matter. It involves the ability to take nothing at face value, to have a questioning mind, to seek deeper understandings hidden in, by, plain sight. We go against the grain, challenging the ingrained, seeking novel connections between disparate “facts.” PSA is a continuing practice of extricating ourselves from anything rote, or remote, in order to arrive at a place of spontaneous interchange, surprising truths, painful realizations, weaving all this into an understanding that can welcome the unwelcome, and relish the emotional immediacy of one’s experience.

PSA is play in the sense that one can let one’s mind play with possibilities; we engage metaphor where flexibility of mind forms images that capture emotional truth and that can stir the soul. Although interpretation can be very powerful, PSA is also about invitation — an invitation to a vital exchange and a meaningful narration of the self. PSA is a deep listening to what is being said, what is not being said. It involves flexibility and fluidity of both thought and affect in interaction.

PSA centrally aims at expanding the containing capacity of the analyst, the patient and the analytic field. Uniting Winnicottian and Bionian thinking helps me to focus on containing as not solely about modulating pain — making unbearable affect bearable. PSA is more than ameliorating distress; it is an ongoing process of expansion of the personality in many respects, towards a greater sense of personal vitality. Like the patient, the analyst must be a fully embodied participant for this process to unfold.

I see PSA as an erotic project (Elise, 2015, 2017, 2018). Extending from Kristeva’s (2014) conceptualization of maternal eroticism, I have developed the formulation of a parallel analytic eroticism — a libidinal vitality such that verbal narration retains a link to embodied affective life. I view the erotic as an important ingredient of the clinical situation — an investment that partakes of the analyst’s as well as the patient’s creative self. We hope, in communication sequences derived from two-person improvising, to retain a connection to the erotic energy that derives from maternal eroticism, embodied and moving both physically and emotionally. A metaphor that is evocative for me, and that I have used in my theorizing, is that of dance, employed to convey an embodied, affective resonating, a rhythm, a sequence of emotional movement where certain patterns signify crucial themes which can then become a choreography of that analytic dyad.

PSA is about finding each patient, helping each patient to be found, to find his or her self through a finding of each analytic couple — a relationship that provides the matrix for the patient to locate an undefended experience of self and to be more aware of the defensive strategies that hide this self. PSA is a search for, and hopefully a revealing of, an experience of authenticity. We seek through compassionate and passionate curiosity to engage in a deep exploration into the development of the personality, how it has come to be shaped. In what ways does that shape express the unique and valuable individuality of the person? In what ways does it interfere with the patient’s well-being and rewarding unfolding of life? What is in the way; what other way might be found? We are searching for what is, what has been and also for what can become. Each patient/analyst pair both shape and are shaped by the analytic space. Sometimes it is necessary to establish a location for the patient to inhabit. Rather than a game of ‘hide and seek’, it is a serious matter of lost and found (finding).

PSA is perseverance; a steadiness, steadfastness of purpose, courage, commitment; a passionate investing in the mobility of the self and the capacity for change; attention, and intention, a being with, and a bringing together. It is pain, excitement, humility, hope. PSA is patience, immense patience, and kindness, and respect. The analyst needs to stay alive in the face of much that is deadening, that works toward stasis; this effort takes tremendous libidinal energy, stamina, fortitude, poised readiness, and, in addition to receptivity, the ability to come forward and to initiate when needed. I think in terms of analytic approach; to ‘approach’ conveys an image of embodied activity — to move toward — that can include recognition of a need to be still or even to step back in the service of promoting greater contact.

PSA requires a hello, which may take days or years, and a good good-bye, with a long time in between where we do not give up. We work to envision a future seeded in the present that will afford a space to look back. PSA is a conversation that lasts well beyond termination and that rests in the capacity to be humble in the face of the sadnesses of living while not refusing the potentials for joy.

Elise, D. (2015), Eroticism in the Maternal Matrix: Infusion through Developmentand the Clinical Situation. fort da, 21 (2): 17-32. -------(2017), Moving from within the Maternal: The Choreography of AnalyticEroticism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65: 33-60.-------(2018), A Winnicottian Field Theory: Creativity and the Erotic Dimension ofthe Analytic Field. fort da, 24 (1).-------(in preparation), Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field.Routledge.Kristeva (2014). Reliance, or maternal eroticism. Journal of AmericanPsychoanalytic Association, 62: 69-85.

Dr. Dianne Elise is a Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty member of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, a Training Analyst member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and she has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

Her over 30 publications include papers in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Japa, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender & Sexuality, and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. An essay elaborating the idea of a Winnicottian field theory appeared in fort da this Spring 2018, and she is currently working on a book of her papers for Routledge, titled, “Creativity and the Erotic dimensions of the Analytic Field.”

Dr. Dianne Elise is in practice in Oakland, California.