The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

The Emergence of Analytic Oneness is a profound and penetrating exploration of a fundamental dimension of analytic presence and patient-analyst interconnectedness that offers new possibilities for extending the reach of psychoanalytic treatment and working with some of the most difficult treatment situations. Eshel listens with a 'hearing heart' and gives herself over to being within the patient's experiential world and the grip of the unfolding analytic process. She has gone with her patients into black holes, dissociation, deadness, sleepiness, petrifaction, silence, longings, the depths of perversion, and the enigmas of telepathic dreams, while experiencing the emergence of patient-analyst two-in-oneness, with its challenges and mysteries. Drawing on Winnicott's posthumous writings and Bion's late work and going beyond recent analytic notions of intersubjectivity and witnessing to interconnectedness and 'withnessing, ' Eshel offers her own understanding of at-one-ment or "being-in-oneness" with the patient's emotional reality as the only state of analytic being that can meet and transform core unthinkable breakdown and mental catastrophe. The critical question here is to what extent the analyst is willing and able to open the boundaries of his or her psyche to the patient, especially in difficult, unbearable and devastated-devastating states. Eshel's clinical narratives are detailed, intense, theoretically grounded, and very moving. The Emergence of Analytic Oneness will be an invaluable guide for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students in these fields who want to extend their reach into deeper levels of disturbance in the difficult clinical work they do Cover Praise Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of contents Acknowledgments Copyright permissions About the author Introduction: On the emergence of analytic oneness—challenges and mysteries Part I. Within the depths of being: experiences in a new dimension Part II. The “voice” of breakdown Notes PART I: Within the depths of being: Experiences in a new dimension Chapter 1: The heart: Or, what’s heart got to do with it? A “hearing heart” Tustin’s “heart-break”—or, “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?” Dante and Ugolino in the Inferno—the unmet weeping of the broken-heart Case illustration: the gate of tears Concluding thoughts: heartbreak and breakthrough Notes Chapter 2: Two-in-oneness: Transformations in “O” What kind of analytic presence and “withnessing” would that be? Clinical illustration: saying it for the first time Further thoughts: transformations in “O”neness A closing note of fiction Notes Chapter 3: Into the depths of a “black hole” and deadness A theoretical-clinical context The analysis Discussion Note Chapter 4: Whose sleep is it, anyway? Or, Night Moves “In the grip of the process” Clinical material Discussion I. In the grip of the uncanny II. Interconnectedness Concluding thoughts Afterword Notes Chapter 5: A beam of “chimeric” darkness: Presence, interconnectedness, and transformation in the psychoanalytic treatment of a patient convicted of sex offenses The “chimeric” element in interconnectedness Case illustration Discussion Notes Chapter 6: Where are you, my beloved? On absence, loss, and the enigma of telepathic dreams Delving into the profound mystery of telepathy in psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis and telepathic dreams Case illustration: “You alone knew how to wait/search” The dream “In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers”: the telepathic dream between absence and loss Notes Chapter 7: Pentheus rather than Oedipus: On perversion, survival, and analytic “presencing” Contextualizing perversion in psychoanalytic thinking—drive, object-relations, selfobject I. II. III. Not in Oedipus anymore: perversion—autotomy and survival Is perversion treatable? Concluding remarks Notes PART II: The “voice” of breakdown Prologue: The annihilated last scream A Talmudic story Chapter 8: “For You have returned my soul within me with compassion”: “Presencing,” passion, and compassion in the depths of perversion, breakdown, despair, and deadness Compassion Case illustration Concluding thoughts: unless the bottom has been reached Epilogue Notes Chapter 9: The “voice” of breakdown: On facing the unbearable traumatic experience in psychoanalytic work The “voice” of trauma and breakdown Case illustrations Notes Chapter 10: From extension to revolutionary change in clinical psychoanalysis: The radical influence of Bion and Winnicott Bion Winnicott Clinical illustrations Concluding thoughts Notes References Index