Think about the impasse,’ she said. ‘You know that when there’s a deadlock it’s usually because the impasse serves some function for both the patient and the analyst. Think of this deadlock as an obstacle that the two of you have created. What purpose does it serve you?
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Basically, a therapist tries to get at the patient’s viewpoint. The professional listener says: “I am totally listening to everything that you say. You are not totally committed, nor do you need to be, to listen to everything that I say. You might hear many things that I say, that you say, or you might hear little of both. But we are each engaged in arranging different things. You are in a process of rearranging and integrating your new perceptions and calling attention to new ones for you to arrange and integrate.
Being bound does not entail being confined. While there might be a tension or some uncertainty as to who or what is in control, I do know that I do not feel as if I am a function of an algorithm, and that this is irreducible and uncontestable, whether or not at some other level of analysis it is illusory.
The therapist is seeing the situation differently, and that itself may be helpful. When therapist and client are not in the same narrative, there is space for change.
Like everyone else, psychoanalysts do get caught in the lawyer’s role; our job is to try instead to find a useful question. Our weapon against negativity is not persuasion, it’s understanding.
We don’t understand that our passions have something to do with life making sense. We also tend to focus on the problem at hand, as though it were a mechanical issue in need of engineering. We often fail to see how all parts of life are connected, and how difficulty in one area may indicate change in another.