Maroda - Seduction, surrender, and transformation: emotional engagement in the analytic process

I want to thank Lew Aron for his tremendously generous support, which includes the invitation to participate in the Relational Book Series, and his careful reading and critiquing of the first draft of this manuscript. I am also thankful for his ongoing collegial encouragement and his appreciation for my ideas and ambitions. Lew Aron is that rare individual who views his colleagues not as competitors, but as collaborators in the advancement of psychoanalytic theory and practice. I also want to thank Stephen Mitchell, co-editor of this series, who has supported my work over the past few years, particularly in encouraging me to listen to my own voice, even if it strayed from the politically correct.

Practicing in Milwaukee does not provide me with many analytic colleagues and I greatly value my national support network, which includes not only Lew and Steve, but also the women of Section III, Women, Gender & Psychoanalysis, who invited me to join the board several years ago and whose members have offered their ongoing friendship, collaboration, and enthusiasm. It's nice to know that even when you have the misfortune of speaking at the same time as a star-studded panel of internationally-known analysts, there will always be some familiar faces in the audience.

I also want to thank Joe Reppen, who has probably done more to further my career than anyone else. Since inviting me to contribute to Psychoanalytic Books many years ago, I have done countless reviews in that journal, and have been offered opportunities to write as a result of Joe's faith in both my ideas and my ability to communicate them. He is always there for me, ready to discuss any idea or potential project, always with an openness and intellectual virtuosity that are invaluable to me.

It goes without saying that I am grateful to my patients for continuing to educate me about the therapeutic process and myself. I want particularly to thank the patients referred to in this book, especially "Susan," who gave me permission to write about them and who read and critiqued what I wrote, letting me know when I had missed the mark.

Lastly, I want to thank my partner, Nicole Horvath, for endless hours of listening to my ideas for this book and for her many creative contributions to my thinking, including the question from chapter one that she posed to me: Does psychoanalysis exist without the bad mother? She has inspired me to break out of my established ways of looking at things, constantly challenging me to see the world in new and different ways.

The reconceptualization of the psychoanalytic situation as a two-person event has caused dramatic upheaval in the analytic world. As we struggle to understand the many nuances associated with the transition from a one-person psychology to a two-person psychology, we naturally resist change as much as we embrace it.

The refrain of "This is nothing newpsychoanalysis has always accounted ably for both the intrapsychic and the interpersonal" has become a recognizably feeble attempt to maintain the status quo. Historically, the same was said about developments in self-psychology, infant research, feminist perspectives, the frequency and impact of early trauma, and the critical importance of countertransference.

Happily, those who want to cling to the past and keep psychoanalysis the same are in the minority. The clinical experience and research evidence accumulated over the past fifty years have given birth to new theories of individual development and, as a result, a new theory of psychoanalysis. And this new understanding of the role of mutuality has breathed fresh air and excitement into an analytic discipline moving dangerously close to extinction.

The problem confronting analytic theorists and clinicians today is not whether to change analytic theory and practice, but how to change them. For many years we have attempted to integrate new discoveries, particularly pertaining to countertransference and mutuality, within the existing analytic paradigm. The goal of treatment remained similar to that expressed by Freud over seventy years ago: making the unconscious conscious, and diminishing or eliminating the transference. And the main technical device used to achieve this goal was said to be interpretation.

As I pointed out previously (), as new discoveries were made there were years of vain attempts to ward off any threat to the analytic status quo. Everything began to be packaged and re-packaged as a "form of interpretation," until we finally admitted that we could no longer stuff the rounded repertoire of confrontation, questioning, emoting, empathizing and silence into the rather squared-off realm of interpretation. To my mind, it was a great relief when people started admitting, in print, that while the ultimate goal of analysis remained centered on self-awareness and integration, we were not limited to interpretation as the primary clinical tool for facilitating self-knowledge.