Between Action and Inaction: The Space for Analytic Intimacy

Introduction to Ms. R.’s Treatment

Early in my work with Ms. R., I had to respect her need to protect herself by staying emotionally distant rather than challenge her defenses. She was reluctant to grasp that her dream of a turtle in a shell was about herself, though she had often referred to herself as being in a shell (Coen 2005). Steingart (1983, 1995) strongly advised that patients evincing pathological play need to be taken as they present themselves, with no initial challenge to why they are doing so. Pathological play refers to fixed repetitive activity that avoids change or insists on the reality of the unreal. It was a major theme of my paper (Coen 2005) that the analyst must begin the treatment of remote, schizoid patients by first accepting how the patient has had to become who she is before attempting to modify this. The analyst must also respect the schizoid patient’s need for affirmation and validation. Persistent verbal interpretation of destructive narcissism, as with thick-skinned narcissists (Rosenfeld 1987), risks damaging schizoid patients, who are very thin-skinned. The analyst must find a way to share a common reality with them (Bateman 1998). Analyst-based statements (Steiner 1993) or playful engagement (Coen 2005) are helpful noninterpretive techniques.

Ms. R. and I certainly could talk about why she’d had to learn to live within her shell. Eventually, she grew to the point of asking me to run away with her, to love her more than I loved anyone else. She was in a new place. As a child, she had not felt much love from her mother or father. Now feeling safer, she was opening up what she had needed to keep so closed within herself. When Ms. R. talked about our running away together, I insisted (unfortunately, I have come to realize) that we would not act. John Hall, a colleague in a study group I was in, asked me why I had needed to set limits with my patient. I could only sputter something about colleagues who had succumbed to such temptations. Another colleague, Arthur Schore, who knew me quite well, helped me grasp that I had joined my patient in an anxious, dangerous version of closeness. As I resumed my struggle against the remnants of dangerous closeness that dwell within me, ¹ I could help my patient do so too. To feel safe with opening up loving closeness between us, I had to convince myself that I would not act. Then I could even enjoy my temptations. At the session following the one in which I had set limits, she told me a dream: She was yelling contemptuously at an immigrant dressmaker with an accent because he hadn’t completed the dress she needed for an important social event. She felt ashamed, surprised at how biased and berating she was, how much she wanted to demean this man. She never behaves like that! She knew I was Jewish, as many tailors have been. I now see that I had pushed her away too much, as if we were on the verge of an affair rather than helping her grasp how much she wanted to feel like my beloved daughter. She had good reason to feel hurt, rejected, and angry. She may have been showing that I had failed to help her feel like my adored daughter. Perhaps she was exposing me to show how vulnerable she had made herself with me. And shouldn’t we also imagine that we had gotten to know each other well enough for her to picture me in her dream as my father?

Toward Analytic Intimacy

Freeing ourselves to approach analytic intimacy requires us to contend with the versions of real and psychoanalytic parents that dwell in our heads. Smith (2001) has described the analyst-at-work’s use of identifications with the analysts who have influenced him. To shift toward new ways of being with our patients, we need greater autonomy from our forebears, greater reliance, comfort, and pleasure with our own ways of being with our patients. I’ll tell you some about my struggles to manage the impact on me of my mother’s trauma. I’ll show you some of my pathway from dread toward comfort with intimacy in analytic work with Ms. R. I’ll emphasize that feelings do not have to lead to action or inaction, that the magical action of having an affair with a patient will not change either the analyst’s or the patient’s neediness. Then feelings, including loving, sexual, intimate feelings become the stuff of analysis, not the prelude to boundary violation. Opening up the space between action and inaction increases the analyst’s capacity to recognize, respect, and dignify the patient’s feelings and his own. By dignifying feelings, patient and analyst become more subjects, less objects, more fully human, able to explore what they want with each other. That makes analysis fuller, richer, and more effective as together they focus on how to best help the patient.

Analytic treatment, analytic writing, analytic discussion have helped us become more comfortable with experiencing and using our feelings and needs at work. But here too, as with every major shift in psychoanalysis, we have lagged behind the times. We have needed to learn from the tensions and struggles in our larger world. We had to do that to face the Holocaust and racism, to respect women and feminism, and homosexuality and gender variation. I’ll show you some of what I’ve had to learn outside the office about dignity, respect, and love. And I’ll show you how I’ve used my treatment, my personal experiences, and my learning from others to become more comfortable with analytic intimacy.

I begin with a rereading and reworking of my earlier stance. In 2007 and again in 2010 I wrote with considerable concern about analyst’s emotional overinvestment in patients. I was concerned about analysts’ narcissistic temptations with patients who in some way seemed special to them. In 2007 I warned about the risks of boundary crossing and violation when an analyst is too narcissistically invested in a patient. A colleague chided me for the “superego-ish” tone to my paper, so different, she pointed out, from my more usual accepting attitude toward affects and needs. She meant that I was focusing too heavily on analysts’ need to restrain their narcissistic temptations to share in the splendor of celebrity patients. Clearly I hadn’t heard Henry Friedman, discussant of my paper at APsaA, say that I wasn’t leaving room for analysts to become caught up in such temptation. About my superego-ish tone, I responded that I intended to make the audience anxious about the potential for transgression when analysts become too excited by their patients. Then they could be better prepared to catch themselves. When I began writing the present paper, I hadn’t remembered that experience. Now I can see that then I was too focused on the analyst’s superego at work. I even wrote about it (Coen 2010b), though not fully satisfactorily. I wasn’t ready to grasp what my colleague was trying to tell me. I can see that I needed a superego-ish presence to protect us/me from the dangers of needing too much from needy patients. I warned colleagues, not myself, about such dangers.

In 2010 I wrote about patients’ action defenses to heighten their narcissism and omnipotence as protection against intense need of the analyst (Coen 2010b). In that paper too I warned that preoccupation with patients derives from the analyst’s need and vulnerability. My counsel now seems simplistic, much too either/or. It didn’t allow for analyst and patient sharing an intense emotional experience that benefits both. Yes, we know that analysts are supposed to grow through the work they need to do on themselves with the patients they treat. I can now see that I was too worried about what I wanted with my patients. I could not just use my feelings to inform the analytic process. I focused too much on a restraining superego, on guidelines and risks.

Caught Up in Temptations

Of course, analysts need to be sufficiently comfortable with their temptations so they don’t hinder closeness and intimacy with the patient. But most of us have believed that analysts’ safety comes first: we must secure ourselves against dangerously alluring pulls, like Odysseus with the Sirens, listening without succumbing to temptation. In a 2010 panel (see Jacobson 2010) I did try, at least in part, to go in the other direction of encouraging colleagues to talk about their temptations behind the couch. Two excellent analysts on the panel, Michael Parsons and Dominique Scarfone, were uncomfortable doing so, regarding their temptations as mere reactions to their patients’ desires. Joyce Slochower’s “The Analyst’s Secret Delinquencies” (2003) helped inspire that panel. Slochower criticized herself for gazing at a photograph of her adorably smiling ten-year-old daughter during a patient’s session; she contrasted reverie and the deliberateness of her gazing. She imagined that her patient had not held her attention, just as he had not held his parents’. I imagined that Slochower, her guilty self-criticism aside, would be able to feel she wanted to help her patient feel what he, and now she, had missed of the joys of feeling like an adored and adorable child. I wanted to relate the analyst’s longing to what was going on right then between them. Was Parsons correct that temptation for the analyst must mean he is getting away from “free-floating attention” to his patient’s process? Scarfone remarked that the analyst becomes host for the patient’s demons, even as he joked about analysts being turned into pigs, an allusion to the spell cast by Circe on Odysseus’s men. He continued the Odysseus metaphor: the analyst courageously fastens himself to the mast to bear what the patient lets loose upon him. Might analysis not require that both patient and analyst become caught up in temptations? At the time, I was minimizing the fact that I too was made anxious by temptations. All of us were too busy protecting ourselves, holding fast for fear of where we’d go. None of us could say comfortably then that where we went emotionally would be our way of following, and resonating with, our patient’s associations.

In 1992 I thought I had become freer to let go of such restraints—up to a point. In The Misuse of Persons: Analyzing Pathological Dependency, I insisted that pathologically dependent patients would have to give up their eager submission to an idealized other, who would forever remain responsible for them. To do so required rebellion, mutiny, lots of anger. I did not see then, as I can now, that I still needed protection from wanting too much from my patients. Yes, of course, we certainly do need the APsaA ethics handbook, ethics courses at our institutes, a moral compass to which we lovingly adhere. I admire how Elio Frattaroli (2001) draws on his love of Bruno Bettelheim, Robert Waelder, the Jesuits who taught him the spirit of Catholicism, and his parents and family to frame the values that inform his work with patients. He has a lovely model for how he should be with them. Misuse will not occur. We all need such a loving superego to hold and guide us to be the best people, the best analysts, we can be. As you’ll see, I needed to do what Elio had done.

A Bit of My Biography Explains My Need for Protection

I know some, not enough, about my mother’s trauma from pogroms after the Bolshevik revolution, when Cossacks raped and murdered Jews in the Ukraine (Budnitskii 2012). I know some about my mother’s terror of starvation and loss, about her own mother’s death of starvation when my mother was an adolescent. I have no idea how my mother and her older sister survived on their own for five years after their mother’s death until their father and brother brought them to America. I cannot imagine how my mother managed to attend high school, which must have been in a small Ukrainian city at a distance from their shtetl. I know some, not enough, about misusers on each side of my family. Neither side of my family could confront this openly, discuss it, or stop it.

I needed to become more comfortable with my need, love, and hate, so that I could welcome them in my work with my patients rather than live in dread that my feelings might get out of hand. My family had been misused, and some of them could in turn misuse others. ² Of course, this pattern can pass from generation to generation unless it is acknowledged and managed. I had to master and reject my temptations to misuse patients for my needs rather than theirs. I needed to disidentify with misusers, to so hate such behavior that I vowed I would not tolerate it in myself. My patients deserved to be treated with respect, dignity, and love, certainly not to be misused, as they may have been, or as I may have been.

Then I could be pleased with emotional openness in me and in my patients. Openness, exuberance, passion become wonderful quests rather than dangerous paths toward undoing. I had to grasp that opening up and sharing intense closeness with Ms. R. was good for me, as well as for her. And not only did such intimacy not derail the treatment; it was in fact the very thing that enabled my patient to heal. I had to move from dread of desire and intimacy toward acknowledging that my dread impeded my patient’s analysis, that we both needed to be in this together. This is what I mean when I say that I needed to do what Elio had done. I needed to fashion a more loving attitude in me toward myself and toward my work with patients. What a wonderful shift it has been to feel loving toward myself and my patients. To accomplish this required that I be able to trust that I had confronted, managed, contained my temptations to misuse others. Then loving and feeling loved felt good not dangerous. I’ve described a move from the metaphor of fear of misuse by Sirens to its personal, historical anlagen in fear of misuse by intimates to freeing myself from this doer/done-to dynamic (Benjamin 2004). Free of fear of turning into a pig/misuser permits even joyful listening to the Sirens’ song without having to be tied to the mast.

Ms. R. and I Two Years Later: Process Material

Ms. R. enters, wearing a sleek black suit rather than her usual formless outfit. She looks good.

Tasks for Analysts on the Path Toward Analytic Imtimacy

It is not clear how analysts are to tolerate what they can’t stand in themselves in order to help their patients. What analysts cannot bear to see and preserve in themselves, writes Donnel Stern (2010), they will be unable to keep finding in their patients. Alternatively, analysts will force what is unacceptable in themselves into their patients, as parents do with children. Then, Stern believes, enactments with patients will occur that both express and hide what analysts cannot face. He uses Sullivan’s concept of “not-me” (1953) to contrast the more forceful pressure exerted in having to extirpate an aspect of oneself from merely pushing it out of consciousness (repression). With milder dissociation, though not with stronger dissociation, Stern believes, another part of ourselves will be able to reclaim the horrifying, unbearable aspect of ourselves that we must so fiercely put outside ourselves, regardless of what is being dissociated. Robert Caper (1997) has advised us to hold on to our love of psychoanalysis and of ourselves as psychoanalysts while analyzing in order to persevere with what is unbearable for analysts. Steiner (2000) has noted in passing that Caper’s use of the phrase “love for psychoanalysis” omits mention of any hatred of psychoanalysis. Martin Bergmann (1997) believed that Freud’s love for psychoanalysis “immunized” him against sexual transgression. Our ethical stance (Frattaroli 2001; Scarfone [Panel 2010]), love of psychoanalysis, and multiple perspectives toward ourselves can help us tolerate what feels so repugnant within ourselves. But our love of psychoanalysis must also include our hatred of psychoanalysis; the two must coexist (Steiner 2000; Kanwal 2010; Kravis 2013). We can hate psychoanalysis for the demands it places on us, just as we can esteem it for asking us to know ourselves. Such self-knowledge is often painful; we can resent the interminable challenge (Freud 1937) to remain responsible for what we would rather eliminate in ourselves. We can hate psychoanalysis for asking us not to live out our dark side, but to acknowledge, contain, and manage it. That is the challenge in allowing ourselves to resonate as fully as we can stand with our patients’ unconscious and our own. To do so requires that we continually confront what we most do not want to face in ourselves, what we have had to keep most sequestered. But when we do so, despite the pain, we also esteem psychoanalysis and ourselves.

Lessons about Respect and Dignity from Outside Psychoanalysis

It is imperative that people be accorded respect and dignity, outside the consulting room as well as within it. This obvious fact can so easily be lost. Susan Levine’s Dignity Matters (2016) accords dignity its place. Human dignity is a basic right, a vital need, to which every human being is entitled. Many have been robbed of such personal affirmation. Although basic human dignity can never be abrogated, violating others’ dignity subverts the perpetrator’s own dignity. Helping perpetrators acknowledge the harm they have done to others—as well as to themselves—seeks to restore dignity to them. This is a brief reference to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s interviews (2003, 2015) with Eugene de Kock, the infamous white brutalizer and torturer of black South Africans during apartheid, and to Jessica Stern’s with a terrorist imprisoned for life in Sweden (2014; see Coen 2016).

Many times I have recounted Donna Hicks’s story (2011; Coen 2016) of her restrained young Palestinian student telling, in a dialogue workshop of Middle Eastern students living in Boston, of her grievous hurt at age six. She had imagined that her grandfather, believing he would soon die, wanted to say goodbye to a dear old friend in East Jerusalem. She had seen this revered grandfather humiliated by a young Israeli soldier. Each time I imagine myself as the grandfather, I cry. The six-year-old granddaughter (I can easily imagine my own granddaughters), enraged, runs to the soldier, scolding: “He’s my grandfather! You can’t yell at him!” A six-year-old needs to revere her grandfather. No one should interfere with that, certainly not a young Israeli soldier. And the grandfather needs to be accorded respect and dignity. We all do. It is tragic that Israelis and Palestinians, filled with terror, rage, and hopelessness, have had such difficulty according each other respect and dignity. An Israeli student in this group responded painfully to the Palestinian woman’s story. The Israeli student had been able to think only of terrorism and destruction. Despite his explanations for intense border security, his people had harmed the Palestinian girl and her grandfather. Acknowledging this was brand new for him. What a difference it was to balance his country’s need for protection and security against such injuries to the other’s self-esteem.

Bringing Respect, Dignity, and Love into the Consulting Room

Don’t we psychoanalysts need to treat our patients with similar respect, dignity, and love? Salman Akhtar (2016) emphasizes preserving the dignity of the consulting room and the analyst’s respectful attitude toward the analytic space and his work. I don’t recall another analyst’s saying so clearly why the analytic space needs to be protected from desecration. Alcohol, condoms, sex, pornography, marijuana defile the consulting room. From this stance of guarding the sacredness of the analytic space, analysts must remain aware of their need to manage and master their temptations to cross or violate their patients’ boundaries. Making the analytic space holy may help us do so, if we can resonate with what we have cherished about our own received traditions. Akhtar helps us preserve our dignity as psychoanalysts. Then we can celebrate this psychoanalytic space by infusing it with our patient’s and our own intense feelings and needs, safe in the knowledge that they will not turn into action. Reverence does not preclude desire and passion.

Ms. R. and I One Week Later

Ms. R. begins a session by telling me a dream: “I had a lovely dream which was long ago so I can’t remember it. It was about John Lennon. He was sitting in back of me. I had my hand out and he had his hand out. We were making music, a melody. The John Lennon dream is about you. I like the image. John Lennon is the Upper West Side Beatle.” (My office is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.)

I ask her what the song is, which she doesn’t associate to, just mentioning that it’s something we’re making together, a song we both know intuitively. In the next session, when she talks about trouble sleeping, I ask whether she found out what the John Lennon song was, as I did.

No, she didn’t look it up. She asks what the song was and laughs when I say “I want to hold your hand.” She’s touched that I took the time at the end of my day to look this up for her and her treatment. She feels sad and cries.

Psychoanalysts Against Misuse!

Why can’t we psychoanalysts insist that we will not be misusers, not take advantage of our patients who have allowed themselves to become vulnerable in their treatment with us? When the analyst has been misused and is tempted to misuse others, the identification with the misuser needs to be—and can be—fought against vigorously. I repeat that I needed to disidentify with misusers, to so hate such behavior that I vowed I would not tolerate it in myself. This conscious choice can be very effective, even though, of course, temptations persist. The analyst needs to reject the opportunity to misuse, in any way, the patient who is now making herself so vulnerable in this treatment with him. On the contrary, here now in analysis is the opportunity to help a patient become the best person she can be. Knowing there will be no sexual action, no misuse of the patient, intimacy with the patient becomes safer. Not only sexual misuse! We all have images of vulnerable people, usually but not only children, being misused by a more powerful, stronger person. We have that in our families, we have that in our nations, we have that between races and ethnic groups. It is so easy to take advantage of weaker people. It can be very exciting to misuse someone weaker, more vulnerable (Coen 1988). That’s why misusers do it! If misuse has occurred in one’s family, repeating it can become tempting, exciting. But so too can it be for soldiers at war to rape women—and men. For prison guards to rape and beat prisoners. For Nazis to humiliate, dehumanize, and murder millions of Jews. For white Americans to enslave, humiliate, dehumanize, and kill African Americans. For Afrikaners under apartheid to destroy the value and lives of black South Africans.

How do we stop the cycle of one group misusing another? How did Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, José Mujica (former president of Uruguay), Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi effect such a turnaround? Add our own Anna and Paul Ornstein, Henri Parens, and Chris Abani (a writer/poet, severely tortured during the civil war in Nigeria, who spoke at the 2016 APsaA University Forum). How do they forswear doing to others what was done to them? How do they instead seek to be the best people they can be and engender a similar goal in those around them? Why can’t we analysts do the same?

Escape from Negativism toward Intimacy

So, of course, I had to become fascinated with helping engage negativistic patients so they could risk craving care from others. In 2003 I wrote the following about negativism:

A focus on the nonexistent mother affirms her ongoing importance—a mark as much of trauma as of inability to relinquish her. Why does the patient sit vigil over the nonexistent mother if not to bring her, or some incarnation of her, back to life—at least as one pole of desire, some of the time? Because such patients are afraid to hope and care, hopelessness and negativism seem much safer. I can conceive, in contrast to permanent, total destruction of the vitally needed object, a partial deadening of hope and desire that the patient fears reawakening. Then hopelessness and negativism are better viewed as compromise formations than as veridical renderings of the patient’s core affects . . . [pp. 480–481].

I view play with more schizoid negativistic patients as playful attempts to move the patient’s bleak hopelessness about life, with or without the bad object, into something more positive, right now with the analyst. I see this as a way to acknowledge the positive in the negative, to welcome the patient to the possibility of enjoying the interaction with the analyst. . . . In playing with a destructively negativistic patient, the analyst shows that there is more to the patient than the negative, that there is something positive in, and behind, the negative [pp. 483-484].

Since then I have come to feel much more comfortable with sharing, feeling, not always telling, intimate feelings with the patient I describe here—and with others. I have been surprised, in contrast to what I wrote in 2007 about narcissistic temptations to cross boundaries, at how caught up emotionally I became with this patient and others. In contrast to what I wrote in 2007 and 2010, I am now much more eager to examine what I feel and want with my patients, without pressure to make my feelings and needs disappear. Yes, I still have to sort out what part of my emotional experience is just about me, not related to my patient. But it has been helpful to be able to resonate with my patients more comfortably, to explore how and why my emotional experience is connected with theirs. I would not describe this simply as a kind of analytic third, though it certainly is something the two of us constructed between us.

Why do need and temptation have to lead to action—or inaction? Like the patients I wrote about in 2010, it can feel as if action can make one feel omnipotent, able to change whatever seems unbearable. On the other hand, if we become convinced that action will not change our neediness or get rid of our temptations, action loses its magical appeal. That should be a key analytic goal, for the analyst as for the patient. Then need and temptation between patient and analyst are just the stuff of analysis, to be welcomed, examined, worked with. Having an affair with a patient will not get rid of the neediness in analyst or patient. It will persist. Instead, the analyst needs to help his patient accept the forcefulness of her neediness.

I can see parallels between my patient’s need for caring, from a mother and a father, and my own. To the degree that I could tolerate intense need in me as a basic, never disappearing part of me, I could tolerate my patient’s similarly intense need. Then we could share within this treatment space her wishes, as well as mine, to be loved by a mother and father. This was mutually sustaining. I did not talk to Ms. R. about my loving feelings. But I certainly would tell her that she was afraid to acknowledge that we enjoyed each other, enjoyed being together, worked well together. I became consciously aware that helping her feel better about herself as a woman also allowed me to imagine helping my mother do so. I could enjoy the new her as a more enthusiastic mother and woman. Less afraid of needing and enjoying my patient’s aliveness, I could welcome it. That was good for both of us. Better not to have to set rigid guidelines about what is safe or not safe for us to feel.

It became very sad for Ms. R. to recognize how hungry she had been for attention and caring, how much she had sexualized misuse ⁶ by her family. She had had to pretend that family members were flirting, playing, teasing her in good-natured fun to feel cared about, not angry. She exaggerated and distorted her needs as bad, evil; her curiosity about me was “stalking.” The more she contrasted those forcing her to do what they wanted—especially now with me in the analytic transference—with those showing genuine love and concern for her, the more angry and sad she felt. And the more she could shift toward craving a mutual, reciprocal relationship in which each person respects and loves the other without excessive, selfish misuse.

Commentary

I now think that I became caught up in identification with my patient’s need to feel loved and her terror that her needs would be infringed upon. The sexual pressure and tension distorted and made much more dangerous—for both of us—her wishes to be a beloved daughter. In this dangerous transference-countertransference, father and daughter misuse each other as sexual objects. Neither of us could imagine a reciprocal relatedness that was good for us both. As we learned more about her father’s failures with her, we came to grasp how essential it was for her to feel like her father’s (and mother’s) beloved daughter in the transference with me. She felt terrified that when she made herself vulnerable, the other person would take her over. It took some time before we could see beneath the image of sexual possession by a man, to also grasp more fully her mother’s efforts to erase Ms. R. as a daughter, reducing her to mother’s doll, servant, slave. We had already seen that she could feel like father’s toy. Neither parent had helped her feel like a beloved daughter. She feared that if she had an orgasm in the presence of another, that person would proclaim, “You’re mine!”

Some of the time, Ms. R. enjoyed calling herself my girlfriend, feeling possessive of me, able to announce confidently that I would miss her when she was gone. She and I would each use her metaphor of a father-daughter dance to talk about how well we danced together. Closeness and intimacy between us offered Ms. R. the opportunity to mourn how unloved she had felt and to grasp how driven and terrified she had been by the wish to be loved. She saw how much she had fought against intense need, how hard she had tried to pull herself away from others. The more she believed that action would not eliminate her neediness, that she had to live with it as best she could, the less afraid she became. Then analytic intimacy became less dangerous for her, as for me. When she became able to remain in the room with me while having loving and sexual feelings, we could explore further the danger of my power over her or hers over me. Now with her feeling much better about herself and safer with me, her fear that I could do as I wanted with her, that she would have to comply to retain my approval, moved beyond possible sexual misuse. Now we could both feel “You’re mine!” as a horrible obliteration of her as a valuable, separate person. This derived both from maternal emotional misuse and paternal impingement and lack. The danger posed by her father was magnified by sexualization of his interest in her in order to counter his stiff remoteness (Coen 1981). She had had to protect her separateness within her shell from intrusion by either parent. This excluded another person from her loving and sexual desires. Now feeling less compliant, she could even imagine herself as the invader. ⁷ Opening herself up to sharing mutual pleasure, caring, and love with another was a major new accomplishment for her.

Coda

In “Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” an APsaA University Forum in 2011, Edward Tayler, Lionel Trilling Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia, invited us to “behold and see” through his eyes and to listen to him read Shakespeare’s “matchless poetry.” How wonderful to approach this play—or our analysands—by watching and listening and letting ourselves be carried away by “giddy oscillations,” as Tayler put it. In an earlier APsaA presentation, ⁸ Robert Pinsky advised us to approach a poem the first number of times one reads it by listening only to the sounds, allowing oneself to reverberate with them, long before one tries to find meaning in the poem. This is what we analysts hope to be able to achieve in listening to our analysands: to allow ourselves to be carried away, not to be constrained by reason, to “o’erflow the measure,” as Shakespeare’s Philo puts it (Anthony and Cleopatra, 1.1.2). Even Freud (1912) told us to “simply listen,” which we’ve been too uncomfortable to do. Overflowing, exuberance, passion, desire, openness, vulnerability, need, love, hate, loss—these are the stuff of life, of psychoanalysis, of great literature. To master and be mastered by the other and the passions between them—lover, analyst, patient, text, character, author, reader—bring richness and joy to life. Respect, dignity, love between patient and analyst prepare for such openness, vulnerability, and exuberance. This is so much better than patient and analyst each hidden within their shells.