by Rebecca Shapiro, Psy.D.

At the start of my tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Impulse, some thoughts on beginnings, dead ends, and electricity in psychoanalytic therapy.

No psychoanalytic promise exists, at least, no concrete promise, no obvious symptom relief or circumscribed goal (infinite resistance). Psychoanalysis does not, by necessity, offer anything that limits its potential. Instead, psychoanalysis exists as a proposition that two people might converse. (In these times, perhaps, utopian daydream.) But what remains once the proposition is taken up via the initiation of an analytic therapy—that is, the desire to continue conversing—is, in my mind, the prototype for the idea of promise, which is really the declarative belief in a shared future. Two people joined by the desire for potential understanding.

Emphasis on potential. What has become understanding just as soon turns itself back toward the possibility of further understanding—one reason “insight” alone reveals itself as false analytic idol, and loss inevitably resides at the heart of analytic inquiry. In the irreducible nowness of psychoanalytic conversation, each iteration of a shared understanding is itself novel. No two analytic conversations are alike. All are sui generis creations elaborated out of the thisness of the present moment, borne between two individuals being-there together, in earnest, and not being-somewhere-else. To this extent, psychoanalytic interchange relies on a radical practicality emergent from its radical specificity.

Thus, how do I communicate this particular thing to this particular patient at this particular time? In the only way that presents itself given the correlates of our current relationship, which must be practical if it is not to become navel-gazing detachment, i.e., communication must be involved in dreaming the analytic hour versus commenting on its cognized fantasy (being-somewhere-else). This is conversation as process-based and action-oriented absorption—what I think it means, on some level, to work without memory or desire, or to surrender to being-with in the fugitive moment.

A favorite paper of mine is Winnicott’s (1966) “The Location of Cultural Experience,” which opens with a Rabindranath Tagore quote: “On the seashore of endless worlds, children play.” Winnicott, in his inimitable way, finds the paradox in Tagore’s text, demonstrating how creativity occurs at the limit between knowing and not-knowing, not by acquiring an epistemology, but by generating, in an embodied and consensual way, the vitalizing potentiality of a future. I think this is what psychoanalysis promises.

The flipside, however, might be a fatal attraction to living virtually in therapy (utopia found, stalemate), which sometimes feels like the sole place being-with prevails in our contemporary society.

What then of writing, its location and purpose? Text lives when encountered, mutually transforming reader and narrative alike. Similarly, Impulse encounters the NCSPP community, creatively transforming psychosociological life beyond analytic factionalism and our memeified economy of hate. For, as Derek Walcott (2004) writes, “The dialect of the scrub in the dry season / withers the flow of English. Things burn for days / without translation, with the heat / of the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows.”

For correspondence, rshapiro@ncspp.org.