by Lisa Koshkarian, Ph.D.

KINSHIP

A novel and disorienting developmental period led me to my first psychoanalyst. She seemed to make a lot of effort in selecting just the right, clever phrase or interpretation which might capture my experience. It felt like I was at a wine and chocolate tasting, being offered a splash and a morsel at a time, with my analyst awaiting either my approval or rebuff. If the latter, back to the drawing board she went. Something about this made me feel worlds apart from her. 

My next experience with an analyst occurred during my first grad program in Chicago when I was grappling with a painful breakup. She sat across from me, motionless and silent. I could scarcely perceive her human presence. I felt all alone. I can articulate now what I had by no stretch been able to frame back then: I needed to be joined in my plight by someone who was willing to show me their permeability and bona fide personhood, different from but analogous to my own.

Another several years later, a colleague who had “just the right analyst in mind” for me must have understood that I had been viscerally craving this humanity. As “three’s a charm” prophesizes, this new analyst was wonderfully imperfect from the start. He was perhaps a minute late, had a couple coffee mugs strewn about, offered spontaneous irreverent humor and uttered at least one expletive by the end of that first session. As he saw into my soul, it was his realness, his spontaneity, and his candor that let me know that I was not alone. With him, I could find that wished-for universal place of belonging. There are a multitude of ways to establish oneself as a fellow human. Who and how he was, had worked for me.

When I commune with a psychoanalyst, I first and foremost want to be met as a fellow human. This foundation is not pathologic and it isn’t something to be idiosyncratically analyzed. Authentic co-forming of a relationship can only happen if what is implicitly or explicitly acknowledged is that we are each humans, subject to the same properties of vitality, deadness, courage, fear, potency, and vulnerability. Also, that we are at each other’s mercy. We are kin, and we are interdependent. I want psychoanalysis to organize more around the inherent qualities which bind and bond us to one another as sentient beings. I believe that the survival and flourishing of earth and its species depends on this orientation (Koshkarian & Larralde, in press). If we embrace our kinship, it may liberate us and foster our thriving in manifold ways. I wonder if my psyche might have been set free sooner had I been coupled with a sense of kinship in those first two analyses.