Touching Limits in the Analytic Dyad

Abstract

The matter of limits and boundary violations by both parties in the analytic dyad remains an unsettled technical and ethical concern, whether touching has to do with actual physical contact or is expanded in its meaning to include its psychic equivalents. Touching, probing, and breaching of the idiosyncratic perimeters of the private self of one by the other in the dyadic intimacy are necessary components of the healing contact but pose an inevitable liability for violation, disruption, and damage. Clinical data remind the analyst of the near-physical impact of words. And the data sometimes speak for the legitimate place of restrained forms of physical contact, as nonverbal necessities of analytic communication, in critical instances in which a viable analytic engagement could not otherwise be sustained.