Title/Paper: Psychoanalytic Companioning - a paper published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2016, pp 698-712.
Author: Robert Grossmark
Dates: Saturday, May 11 - Thursday, May 23 , 2019
Moderators:

Rina Lazar, Adrienne Harris

Roni Baht – Israel
Duncan Cartwright - South Africa.
Stavros Charlambides - Greece
Lisa Director - USA
David Lichtenstein – USA
Juan Jose Martinez Ibanez – Spain
Maria Jose Mezzera -Chile
Donnel Stern - USA
Anne Marie Swan - Australia
Maria Tammone – Italy

This paper will be a wonderful introduction to Robert Grossmark’s book, also called The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst. In that book, his perspective on treatment and on work with trauma is very clearly developed and clinically illuminated.

Here in this essay, we are asked to consider subtle but deep alternatives to the usual accounts of the interweave of the individual and the intersubjective.

Drawing from eclectic sources across different branches of psychoanalysis but with a strong attention to Balint and his version of object relations, Grossmark asks us to attend to the transactions analyst to patient in extremely subtle ways.

Grossmark suggests that, when working with patients and states where there is no self-other definition and therefore no mutuality, the path to healing and growth is via companioning the patient into the darker, more regressed and unformed states of illusion and merger rather than via the promotion of separateness and relatedness, which, he proposes, will accrue from within the companioning register. The analyst works from within an unobtrusive relational position.

Companioning. Accompanying. These are the terms that he draws on to engage us in thinking about clinical work, perhaps with all patients, but certainly with patients often in dire states of dissociation.

A number of questions can and will be addressed.

What are the range of clinical strategies for working with trauma?

How to work without retraumatizing patient and/or analyst.

How to think with and about the kind of patient who feels to himself or herself, barely alive, barely present in body and mind.

Companioning. Working with careful and quiet but attentive attunement. What is the relationship of these forms of analytic listening to play, to enactment?

We engage these questions and others that may emerge in our discussions, listening to Robert’s use of the clinical, bringing our own examples. And broadening the range of technical engagement within a relational perspective. Or rather, a relational landscape. Unobtrusive attunement opens new terrain on our complex multiply configured relational landscape

The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0202.

The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s Board of Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts.