Mirta writes;
Irma Brenman Pick talking about the interaction between the patient and the therapist says “ …in so far as we take in the experience of the patient, we cannot do so without also having an experience. If there is a mouth that seeks a breast as an inborn potential, there is, I believe, a psychological equivalent, i.e. a state of mind which seeks another state ok mind. …To imagine that this split-off emotionally won’t return is contrary to the very theories we hold in relation to mental life’’

Our patients trigger feelings and reaction in our minds. When we work with them we inhabits the world where the patient lives in and because of what it is projected into us we have to play several characters that are very different from who we are, from our real self.
To be the object and the container of the patient’s projections implies hard work for the mind of the psychotherapist and the risk is the erosion of the therapist’s self. Sometimes with some patients we go through feelings of depersonalization and we surprise our self asking “Is this what you see in me, who I am?” In analyzing patients our minds are our tool and we need to take care of it. We need to find ways to “clean” our instrument and to repair the erosion that our self undergoes when we work.
 I hope we will have the opportunity to think together about the challenges that our practice pose to us. Saturday Dialogues is an excellent space for discussing and sharing the dilemmas, challenges and difficulties that we find in our daily practice.

Please join us!

Mirta Berman-Oelsner, PsyA-FIPA is an adult, child and adolescent psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice since 1969. She is a full member and Training and Supervising Analyst of the International Psychoanalytic Association and a certified child and adolescent psychoanalyst. She is the author of numerous papers, including Elena Evelson Award, best paper on Child Analysis "The Multiple Functions of Sight".
She  moved to Seattle 7 years ago, since then she has been a faculty member of COR Northwest Family Development Center and Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society.

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