The analyst’s speech must be the creation of a person who is alive in that moment. Living human speech is as difficult to come by in the analyst’s spoken use of language as it is in written prose or verse.
Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (Kindle Locations 156-158). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
Among the most astute comments concerning what it means for an analysis to be alive has come (as one might expect), not from an analyst, but from a novelist and essayist, speaking in 1884 about the art of fiction:
The good health of an art which undertakes to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. [Henry James 1884, p. 49]
James’ statement about the novel (and implicitly about the relationship of writer and reader) has important relevance to the art of psychoanalysis and to the understanding of the relationship of analyst and analysand. The idea that above all an analysis must be interesting is for me both self-evident and a revolutionary conception (cf. Phillips 1996). To be interesting, the analysis must be free to “exercise ,” to shape itself and be given shape in any way that the participants are able to invent. The freedom to “exercise” is the freedom to experiment : “Art lives upon discussion , upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt , upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” (H. James 1884, pp. 4445). When the analysis is alive, it unselfconsciously manages for periods of time to be an experiment that has left the well charted waters of prescribed form; it is a discussion fueled by curiosity and by variety of attempt; it is an endeavor that depends upon genuine exchange of views and comparison of standpoints.
Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (pp. 7-8). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
…I believe that the analytic task most fundamentally involves the effort of the analytic pair to help the analysand become human in a fuller sense than he has been able to achieve to this point. This is no abstract, philosophical quest; it is a requirement of the species as basic as the need for food and air. The effort to become human is among the very few things in a person’s life that may over time come to feel more important to him than his personal survival.
Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (Kindle Locations 184-187). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
Fusions of trauma and nourishment mark all lives. Sometimes the balance tips very much to one or the other side. Trauma may be so severe that nourishment becomes less and less possible. Personality becomes so occupied with dealing with wounds that little is left over. Difficulties are even greater when trauma becomes nourishment. Still, there are cases in which deep lines cut by trauma provide access to depths that are otherwise unreachable. In such instances, nourishment follows trauma to new places. We wish things could be otherwise…easier. But we have little choice when illumination shines through injury.
Nevertheless, we do nourish each other and continue nourishing each other. Something comes through. We procreate and create, build cities and cultures, and nourish affections and creative efforts. That our nourishing efforts contain social and psychic poisons, that, to varying degrees, we ourselves are toxic, is part of the challenge we find ourselves forced to face. Our faith – ever tested – is that facing this challenge well brings us to places we could not have found otherwise, and that some of these places are very worth the trip.
Michael Eigen, (1999) Toxic Nourishment, p. 225. Karnac Books.
But the truth is independent of us. Psychoanalysis is an attempt to know what it is that interrupts us, or makes it impossible to think clearly or to have any respect for the facts that are available to us ; it is an attempt to investigate what it is in ourselves that causes so much trouble, not because we cause the trouble but because it is the only thing about which we can say anything at all.
Bion, Wilfred R. (2005-06-09). The Tavistock Seminars (Kindle Locations 1481-1483). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
Now, I’d like just to mention the term “free-floating attention”. The idea being that this is the term for the appropriate state of mind of the psychoanalyst. No countertransference, no nonsense of that sort, free-floating attention. Or, as I have put it, get rid of your memory and your desire, so that you expose yourself to the full treatment. Now, you can see why I haven’t pressed this point very much, because the nearer that you can come thanks to your own personal analysis and so forth, to being as receptive as possible, the more you are going to appreciate to the full, the blast of an experience of this kind when you are actually there, when you are really exposed to it. It is, I can only say, “indescribable”.
(2013-07-31). Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision (Kindle Locations 1688-1693). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
authentic analysis 