Scenes That Write Themselves: Improvisational Moments in Relational Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Psychoanalytic concepts, in general, are sorely lacking in addressing the present moment phenomenon of the psychoanalytic encounter. The relational perspective has comparably suffered from not addressing the issue of temporality. This paper addresses this lack by focusing on the present moment of the analytic encounter with special appreciation for what is referred to as improvisational moments. Although such moments arise unpredictably, they capture something of both the analyst's and analysand's fundamental personality organizations. These are represented in how each one's experience of the past, present, and future are organized in “scriptlike” manners. The improvisational interplay of their “scripts” lends itself to “scenes” from which a coconstructed relational unconscious emerges, that is, a quality of “thirdness” that neither can lay exclusive claim to authoring. This moves them beyond the more typical one-way intersubjectivity of sustained empathic introspection I know what you feel into an experience of two-way intersubjectivity, I know that you know that I know what you are feeling and visa versa. Such improvisational moments move each one beyond the constraints of their personality organization into considering the heretofore unimagined, unthought, and unspoken. The outcome of such moments challenges each participant's respective personality organization, necessitating their accommodation of new structure. The latter phenomenon is referred to as a positraum. Such dramatic shifts then provide model scenes for further change that can be reintroduced in later moments of resistance in treatment. One among many seminal points in the article is how to cultivate improvisation via a relational ethic— a “hovering” set of questions about what is going on between the analytic participants, the use of improvisational play with being “the bad object” as opposed to becoming fixed in that role, and the place of reintroducing the past in present scene-work. Three separate cases illustrate these points. If the therapist cannot play, then he is not suitable to work. If the patient cannot play, then something needs to be done to enable the patient to become able to play after which psychotherapy may begin. —D. W. Winnicott All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances; each man in his time plays many parts. —William Shakespeare