The Psychoanalytic Mystic and the Interpretive Word.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Explicit and implicit psychoanalytic assumptions concerning the analytic cure include the old "insight/interpretation" versus "relation/experience" duality. A synthesis of these two stances, grounded in recognition of the long denied yet central mystical facet of psychoanalysis and the crucial role of words in the "talking cure" that psychoanalysis still is, recognizes these two aspects of psychoanalysis-mystical communication through psychic overlap and interpretive words-as deeply interdependent. Analytic interpretations emerge from the depths of a mystical experience of psychic unity (as well as separateness) resulting from, but also creating, the patient-therapist caesura. Words shape the contour of this closeness-separateness matrix on which psychoanalysis depends. Moreover, the moment of insight into the psychic reality of the other is shown to often depend on crossing the threshold of the nonverbal toward consciousness and language. Constant movement between verbalization and the nonverbal is illustrated with clinical vignettes stressing the interplay of the mystical and the symbolized, of interpretation and intuition.