Integrating Contemplative Practice and Embodied Awareness in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Dissociative Anxiety

By Shoshana Ringel (USA)

Shoshana Ringel recently presented her paper, Integrating Contemplative Practice and Embodied Awareness in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Dissociative Anxiety, at the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP) conference this past October in Los Angeles. In her presentation, she discussed the ways in which contemporary psychoanalytic approaches investigate implicit processes in the patient/analyst relationship, often expressed outside the domain of words, interpretation, and insight (Stern et al., 1998). These implicit pathways include affective, somatic, and even transcendent states that are not readily accessible to symbolization and cognitive processing. The analyst’s participation through empathic awareness, contemplative listening, personal reverie, and enacted modes of engagement in the domain of self/other engagement provide a relational matrix through which implicit aspects of the patient’s self, as well as the analyst’s empathic responsiveness, can lead to a new experience of mutual transformation (Bass, 2009, 2014; Bromberg, 2011; Cooper, 2014; Kulka, 2012).

From a self psychological perspective, the intersubjective bond of the analytic dyad is rooted in an empathic matrix that allows for new self states to emerge, as well as the transformation of habitual self boundaries, often embodied in sensory and affective experience (Kohut, 1966; Kulka, 2012).  In this presentation Ringel described psychoanalytic treatment of dissociative anxiety, incorporating a mindfulness based, meditative process. The contemplative approach includes moment-to-moment awareness, the investigation of embodied and affective states, and a view of subjectivity as fluid and comprised of transitory and changing self states. The author addressed shared elements between Buddhism and self as well as relational psychoanalysis, including awareness, mutual inquiry, and transcendence, describing a treatment process in which the two models can be complementary.

Shoshana Ringel, PhD
1915 Greenberry Road
Baltimore, MD  21209
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