The Psychoanalytic Mystic and the Interpretive Word.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association October 1, 2022 Alice Bar Nes 3 citations
Psychoanalytic cure involves a synthesis of the old duality between insight through interpretation and healing through relational experience. This synthesis recognizes a long-denied mystical facet of psychoanalysis: mystical communication through psychic overlap is deeply interdependent with interpretive words. Analytic interpretations emerge from the depths of a mystical experience of psychic unity and separateness, shaped by the patient-therapist caesura. Words give contour to the closeness-separateness matrix on which psychoanalysis depends. Insight into another's psychic reality often requires crossing from the nonverbal toward consciousness and language. Clinical vignettes illustrate the constant movement between verbalization and the nonverbal, stressing the interplay of the mystical and the symbolized, of interpretation and intuition.