Stuart Pizer (USA)

The Shock of Recognition: What My Grandfather Taught Me About Psychoanalytic Process.

In: Goodman, D. et al (eds.), Psychology and the Other. Oxford University Press (in press).

I present key transformative moments with my grandfather during childhood and early adulthood to illustrate the fundamental experience of intimate recognition that formed the basis of my psychoanalytic ethos. As a psychoanalyst, I seek to engage in a potentially transformative recognition process that may foster profound and lasting state-shifts and open previously inaccessible realms of intersubjective relatedness, affect regulation, and reflective understanding. This paper extends previous work on therapeutic negotiations in the face of a history of misrecognitions and the relationally nonnegotiable. And I emphasize an essential aspect of the analytic attitude that I term “generous mentalization,” which, in later writings, I redefine as the analyst’s “generous involvement.”

“Put Down the Duckie!”: Analytic Vigor, Rigor, and Relinquishment.

In: Ben-Shahar, A.R. & Shalit, R. (eds.) Therapeutic Failures. London: Karnac Books (in press)

Using as metaphor the enchanting Sesame Street video segment titled “Put Down the Duckie,” I offer a meditation on various self-comforting assumptions the analyst may well have to “put down” in the face of emergent surprises in clinical process. I tell the story of a patient to whom I lent that video as an enactive interpretation, and the crisis that ensued after I shared with him the draft of a paper in which I explored the therapeutic impact of that active intervention. The patient’s experience of shock at reading my narrative proved irreparable. The therapy ruptured. I could no longer present the story of our work together. So, chastened in my enthusiasm, I turned to a consideration of the unpredictable risks of writing about patients, the comforting rituals with which a therapist may retreat from vulnerability, our belief in our ability to predict future contingencies in the emergent interactive field of any treatment relationship—in short, the necessity of relinquishing our own “duckies.”

Stuart A. Pizer, PhD, ABPP
152 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
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