Psychoanalytic Collisions

Psychoanalytic Collisions details the various ways in which the analyst's wishes (both professional and personal) collide with the less-than-perfect actualities of everyday clinical work. The collisions in question are often rooted in the analyst's own illusions: illusions of therapeutic possibility in the face of ordinary human existence or illusions of therapeutic selflessness in the face of one's "immutably self-centered humanity." Such collisions may complicate nonclinical professional activities such as writing, in which the analyst's desire to develop a personal idiom collides with self doubt and the imagined rebuff of teachers and colleagues. Other collisions coalesce dyadically in the consulting room. They may reflect sharp dissonance between what the patient needs the analyst to feel and what the latter actually feels, as in discrepant experiences of erotic desire.They may grow out of colliding idealizations of analyst and patient, each of the other. And they may arise in the wake of traumatizing life events that destroy the shared illusions on which treatment has rested.