From moments of meeting to archetypal consciousness: emergence and the fractal structure of analytic practice

Abstract

Moments of meeting occur when the analytic structure does collapse and the participants in the interaction “meet as persons relatively unhidden by their usual therapeutic roles for that moment. In the English speaking world, the most vigorous movement in psychoanalysis is characterized increasingly by an appreciation of the dynamics of interpersonal relations, and the value of detailed infant observation for guidance on the nature of those dynamics. Analytic consciousness can be seen to emerge from a process of amplification that extends over a longer time scale, consisting at least of an entire day, and, arguably, a much longer process as the analogical material used to develop the amplification of the individual experience is seen as evolutionary in nature. The amplification is always appropriate when dealing with some obscure experience which is so vaguely adumbrated that it must be enlarged and expanded by being set in a psychological context in order to be understood at all.