“Heard with the eyes” : Personal equation and fluid self-state communication in the therapeutic relationship

All psychoanalysts, regardless of their diverse theoretical backgrounds, fully agree that the transference and the counter-transference are correlated and indispensable to the therapeutic work. Within the Jungian model of treatment, right from the very beginning, the analyst enters into an extremely significant and meaningful analytical relationship, with all its emotional, mental and formal potential. The analyst's most difficult task is that of guiding the other individual towards his or her own subjectivation, individuation. It is both clear and understandable that, within this model, each outbreak of idiosyncrasies, projective and introjective emotional compulsions and/or personalistic ideologies, disintegrates the therapist's subjective quality and seriously interferes with the analyst-patient relationship. Everything the analyst says and does in analysis, when it comes about, is personal, exquisitely personal. The counter-transference is neurotic when it degenerates from personal to personalistic, that is, when the relational tension drops and the analyst reacts as opposed to acting or not acting. And by "acting or not acting" we are referring to the ability to contain one's own and the patient's emotions, so as to keep the interpersonal relationship free. Within the field of this transference / counter-transference dynamics, the "personal or real" relationship manifests something of its own, that can be accounted for by the Jungian theoretical model. The transference / counter-transference dynamics is what the therapeutic alliance rests on, and the analyst cannot but be an object of the patient's investments and projections. This simple statement places before us the idea that the analyst can be an object invested by projection or a subject who receives a projection. An analyst who understands the profound importance of the concept of the personal equation as an expression of the analytic relationship, can for instance sense his or her patient's depressive identification, but without actually becoming depressed, insofar as his or her permeability is elastic but elective at the same time. As well as being a container, the analyst must also think of him or herself as a filter, capable of establishing the right distance of pathos. It is a particular modulating skill that involves the patient's unconscious contents just as much as it does the patient him or herself, one whose aim is to avoid getting caught up in extreme oscillations: those that go from massive identification to sidereal and freezing disidentification. We will consider how contemporary psychoanalysis has undergone important changes with regard to the idea that analysis should attempt to restore the mother-child relationship. Its focus is instead directed towards the need to offer – in the area of the transference – an experience that is appropriate to the patient's current circumstances, one which structurally corresponds to the self-object, an object that can activate and promote development, and which the analysand should have found during childhood in the maternal "environment". Clinical vignettes will illustrate how the therapist's awareness must be directed towards the external and the inner simultaneously in order to perceive the patient's splitting.