Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Volume LXVIII, 1999

GETTING COLD FEET, DEFINING

“SAFE-ENOUGH” BORDERS:
DISSOCIATION, MULTIPLICITY, AND
INTEGRATION IN THE ANALYST’S
EXPERIENCE
BY JODY MESSLER DAVIES, PH.D.

This paper attempts to explore the fate of the analyst’s mul-

tiple self/other organizations during times of heightened
countertransferential enactment. It is suggested that such
countertransference activity involves the “de-homogenization”
of otherwise indecipherably integrated self/other constella-
tions, evoked independently or in response to, but always in
interaction with, the patient’s own unique organization of
multiple centers of psychic awareness and unconscious recep-
tivity. An extended clinical example is used to illustrate the
theoretical conceptualization.

Back in the “olden days” of psychoanalysis when analysts really be-

lieved that they knew what they knew, and meaning was something
that one looked up in a dictionary rather than negotiated interper-
sonally, the one thing that analysts of all persuasions spoke about with
even greater certainty than anything else was their ability to analyze
and resolve transferences and to understand their own occasional,
conflictually based countertransferences. Our current psychoanalytic

The author wishes to thank Drs. Lewis Aron, Irwin Z. Hoffman, Stephen A.
Mitchell, Jonathan Slavin, and Marion Tolpin for their helpful comments on earlier
drafts of this paper.

184
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 185
milieu recognizes the simple naïveté of this statement and, one hopes,
appreciates the nuances and complexities of real working through
and psychic change with a steadily growing sophistication and subtlety.
We now recognize the transference-countertransference process
as intrinsically and irreducibly interactive. “An interactive matrix,” as
Greenberg (1995) has termed it; “irreducibly subjective” as Renik
(1993) has described it. Transferences are not distortions but com-
peting, oftentimes conflicting, organizing schemas or interpersonal
fantasies lying at the foundation of each participant’s unique striving
toward self-integration. They are sets of expectations which nourish
the essential illusion that we live in a predictable world populated by
knowable people. Transferences are not necessarily displacements
from the past. Although they begin in our earliest formative relation-
ships, such meaning schemas reorganize and reconfigure themselves
throughout the life span in accord with ongoing interpersonal expe-
rience. As organizing schemas, transferences are not resolvable. Per-
haps expandable, perhaps malleable to a certain extent, renegotiable
in new contexts, but at the same time, entrenched in their devotion
to old object ties and familiar outcomes. We therefore no longer
emerge from our treatments “cured.” We seek, rather, to familiarize
ourselves with our conscious and unconscious preconceptions, thereby
opening the door to new experience; to expand and enhance our
familiarity with aspects of self previously unknown or unformed; and
to seek and find others who will depart from the expected, those who
will know us and touch us in a myriad of previously unimaginable
ways.
Implicit within this conceptualization of the transference-coun-
tertransference process is a model of mind which I have articulated at
greater length elsewhere (Davies, 1996, 1998; see also Bromberg,
1996; Mitchell, 1993; Pizer, 1996) but will repeat here briefly in or-
der to put the present discussion into context. It is a model of mind
which replaces the more linear, topographically organized, repres-
sion-based structures of classical analysis with a dissociative-integra-
tive continuum along which mind, indeed the individual’s experience
of self at any given instance, reconfigures itself in accord with the
present interpersonal moment. This model of mind involves viewing
psychical processes as a kind of confederation of multiple, dynami-
186 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

cally interacting, but otherwise autonomous sub-organizations of in-

ternalized self and object representations which move in and out of
conscious prominence depending upon the evocative potential of the
current interpersonal moment. Within such a model, analysis of the
transference involves allowing the interpersonal present, as it exists
between patient and analyst to fill the moment, to invite a suspension
of integrative processes and a temporary, iatrogenic intensification
and exaggeration of particular constellations of self/other organiza-
tion within the therapeutic dyad. The goal of such an analytic agenda
is to invite into interpersonal enactment those dissociated aspects of
self/other experience that have been rendered unconscious by dint
of the individual’s striving toward a state of equilibrium and integra-
tion. By making them conscious within the analytic relationship, pa-
tient and analyst potentiate a more inclusive redefinition of particu-
lar aspects of self/other interaction.
If we hypothesize the regular occurrence of such heightened dis-
sociative process within the transference – the “de-homogenization”
and intensification of particular self/other dyads – then it stands to
reason that the analyst will be as swept up into the disorienting vortex
of such potentially fragmenting forces as will the patient. An inter-
mingling of disentangled, highly evocative patient/therapist self states
will seek out alliances and misalliances in the ever more complex
arena of transference-countertransference enactment. Such an ana-
lytic process requires that the analyst maintain an awareness of the
multiplicity of self/other organizations that may infuse the treatment
relationship, as well as an openness to the emergence of her own
partially dissociated self experiences in relationship with or in response
to the patient’s shifting transference experiences.
Given the intricately choreographed intermingling of multiple
self states, the multitudinous intersecting points of patient/therapist
strength and vulnerability, which call to each other within intensely
evocative and highly interactive relational analyses, it is indeed sur-
prising that so little has been written about the analyst’s increased
vulnerability to disorganizing and potentially fragmenting dissocia-
tive processes within the transference-countertransference space. In-
deed, it is the aim of this paper to pursue just such a project: to ex-
plore via an extended clinical vignette and some preliminary theo-
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 187
retical musings the fate of the analyst’s areas of pain and vulnerability
within the clinical encounter. How do we manage our own shifting
self states within the analytic work? How do we maintain an awareness
of multiplicity as a backdrop against which iatrogenically intensified
countertransferential states will emerge and temporarily assume cen-
ter stage? What form of safety, of holding, and potential space do we
ourselves require in order to manage our vulnerabilities and fears in
this most intimate of encounters? Can we keep our vulnerabilities out
of our work? Indeed, should we? Does the analyst’s safety-seeking af-
fect or even implicitly guide her clinical choices? Does the patient
assume any responsibility for the analyst’s unconscious psychic safety?
I hope that there are few among us who still hold any illusions
about their reasons for doing analytic work. The old notion that the
analyst, by dint of training analysis, now holds some privileged access
to superior mental health seems a form of rather arrogant self-pro-
tection and denial. We are who we are, most of us would now agree,
in order to repair our ailing internal objects and heal ourselves and
keep healing ourselves, over and over again. In a paper which seeks
to deconstruct the myth of the invulnerable analyst, McLaughlin
(1995) states:

…what each of us needs from the other, whether on the couch or

behind it, is at depth pretty much the same. We need
to find in the other an affirming witness to the best that
we hope we are, as well as an accepting and durable respondent to
those worst aspects of ourselves that we fear we are (p. 434).
Traditionally, we have expected this to be true for the patient. We
have come to find it to be true for the analyst as well. Acknowledg-
ing this, we can be more ready to see how our needs suffuse all that
we are and do in the work, and how we must endlessly be self-ob-
serving to discipline and optimize these tendencies that are both
our strength and our liability (p. 461).

In discussing the analyst’s vulnerabilities to countertransferential self

state dissociation, I will make several assumptions. First, that as practi-
tioners doing analytic work we seek to create not only a safe haven for
our patients, but strive, also, to create a transitional space in which we
ourselves have the most optimal access to our own unconscious pro-
cess. I refer to “safety” here not in the regressive sense of avoiding
188 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

painful places but in the more Winnicottian ideal of holding, con-

tainment, and non-retaliatory expectations. Indeed, I will suggest that
out of the myriad of possible directions at any given point involving
clinical choice, we will often be unconsciously directed in pursuing
aspects of the clinical encounter that we hope will optimize our own
sense of safety, creativity, and the rich efflorescence of unconscious
process and play.
Finally, I will suggest that rather than coming into the analytic
endeavor eschewing our own need states and personal self-interests
(see also Slavin and Kriegman, 1998), we must evolve a theory of
clinical technique for relational analysis that recognizes the analytic
encounter as one in which there are two participants coming together,
attempting to create an optimal space in which to experience and
process multiple aspects of who they both were, are, and might yet
hope to become. We seek ways of reaching and touching each other,
of nurturing, exciting, soothing, arousing, and ultimately healing the
places that hurt. Within this intersubjective space, the analyst, too,
wants to be reached, known, and recognized.
Of course, I realize that the clinical responsibilities to reach, rec-
ognize, and know are by no means symmetrical. The patient’s feel-
ings, needs, and conflicts over both are almost always in the fore-
ground of the analytic work, and the most essential responsibility is
the analyst’s to help the patient. However, I will maintain, at least for
myself at this point, that the most meaningful and potentially muta-
tive psychoanalytic work proceeds on an unconscious trajectory to-
ward a place in which the analyst’s unconscious processes, the desta-
bilization of her more integrated “professional self” (see Mitchell,
1997), the creative use of self-state shifts and temporary
intensifications, can occur without the threat of overwhelming, po-
tentially fragmenting anxiety, humiliation, or retaliatory expectation.

CLINICAL EXAMPLE
Consider the following series of clinical vignettes involving a patient I
will call Daniel. Daniel was twenty-seven years old when he first came
seeking psychotherapy with the vague sense that he needed some help
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 189
“putting things together.” Indeed, my first impression of him was of a
young man for whom nothing quite went together: clothes somewhat
wrinkled and mismatched, long arms and legs that didn’t quite work
together in coordinated motion, thoughts that seemed scattered and
undirected. He came for the first time on a bitterly cold day, and
some of the first things that struck me were the thin socks and sandals
he wore on his feet. Though I asked him about this, he simply replied
offhandedly, “Oh, I never, ever get cold.” Daniel was exceedingly
bright, remarkably well read, and potentially attractive under his some-
what rumpled, ragged, and disorganized exterior: an interesting com-
bination of creative genius and neglected little boy. I entertained both
fantasies.
Daniel took to analysis as if he had been waiting for this moment
all his life. Within the first month he was coming three and then four
times a week, a schedule he has maintained to this day. However, de-
spite the manifest eagerness, there was an odd, disconnected quality
to the story of his life as it emerged in the first months of working
together. In telling his story, Daniel seemed to be relaying a series of
separate, unrelated events -- well remembered, even emotionally full,
but oddly disjointed from other occurrences or from any overriding
attributions of meaning that would enable him to draw conclusions
or construct any patterns of motivation and significance. There was a
kind of intermediate dissociative process between the awareness of
certain events and the attribution of meaning to those events. For
example, Daniel told of coming home from school one day, around
the age of fifteen, to find his mother lying on the kitchen floor with
the gas on, all the windows closed, and a towel stuffed into the door-
jamb. “You mean she had attempted suicide?” I naïvely asked. The
patient looked shocked and then tearful. “Do you really think that’s
what she was doing?” He was incredulous.
And so, much of the early work involved weaving together the
disparate, dissociated pieces of Daniel’s story. Mother was episodi-
cally severely depressed, hospitalized intermittently, and given shock
treatments when all else seemed to fail. The prevailing images were
of mother lying in a darkened bedroom, heavily sedated, completely
unavailable; of Daniel, himself sitting outside her bedroom door lis-
tening to her crying, feeling simultaneously enraged and utterly in-
190 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

ept; of a sadness and despair that was too heavy, too large for him to
begin to comprehend, let alone manage. Occasionally, mother would
emerge from her internal hell and swoop down upon Daniel in a
feverish, desperate, frenetic attempt at some compensatory mother-
ing. Here he remembered a physical stiffening of his body, a terrified
attempt at “keeping her out,” of managing his yearning and desire.
He came to understand through the analytic work that fending her
off was more than his badness, more, even, than his rage at her. It was
also a self-protective awareness that taking her in would only lead to
another abandonment, another heartbreak. And he already felt him-
self to be on the edge. He remembered the despair that would inevi-
tably follow his inability to “be nourished” by mother during her epi-
sodic appearances, and he began to speculate about the connection
between such moments and his current bouts of depression and in-
terpersonal withdrawal. Daniel expressed frustration at the time con-
straints of analytic hours, my coming and going like his mother –
“swooping down upon me with so many goodies, only to disappear
again at the end of the hour!” We watched with a growing mutual
interest the intricate dance of desire, yearning, dependency, humilia-
tion, and withdrawal that defined the borders of our analytic relation-
ship.
Daniel rarely spoke about his father, but when he did, he sketched
the image of a man who was often away from home, avoiding contact
with his depressed, mentally ill wife, drinking too much, highly criti-
cal and emotionally unavailable to his needy young son. “My job was
to take care of mother so that he didn’t have to,” Daniel would ex-
plain. “I was expected to do her bidding, to do all of the things my
father refused to, to be compassionate and understanding where he
could be outraged and disgusted.” I was troubled by Daniel’s descrip-
tion of his relationship with father, for although his words were in-
sightful, he would become somewhat dissociated whenever he spoke
of him. His eyes would become heavily veiled and opaque, a look I
have become used to referring to in my own mind (coined originally
by a patient of mine) as “dead eyes.” “Dead eyes” look inward only;
they see only internal spaces, as if transfixed by some kind of horror.
“Dead eyes” always make me worry, in a now familiar way, that some-
where a child has been betrayed. But Daniel spoke only of neglect
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 191
and loneliness.
My relationship with Daniel became very intense very quickly.
From the outset there seemed a meeting of metaphor and of mind
that led to the creation of an imagistically and affectively fertile ana-
lytic space. He seemed to take in everything I said with appreciation
and gratitude, often commenting on how remarkable it was that I
knew “exactly” what to say and how to say it, so that he could use
pieces of his emotional life that had before seemed overwhelming.
Indeed, he had learned well how to breathe life into a needy and
depressed mother, but unlike his mother, Daniel’s appreciation af-
fected me. If Daniel’s “father eyes” were “dead eyes,” his “transfer-
ence eyes” bespoke an intensity of desire and faith that began to make
me feel both deeply nourished and decidedly uncomfortable. Was I
promising too much? Were my comments too deep and penetrating?
Could this kind of idealization be worked through slowly or was it
destined to splinter and shatter irrevocably? Indeed, would the whole
thing become eroticized in a way that would spiral out of control?
Had that happened already?
Although I worried about the atmosphere of mutual seduction
that seemed to be going on between us and the almost manic fervor
with which Daniel embraced his unconscious, the analysis, and me, I
was also aware that something deeply and mutually enriching and
emotionally resonant lay at the heart of this analytic process. I tried to
move between these two experiences, one of deep immersion and
faith in our ability to work through what would come and the other
of impending transference-countertransference catastrophe, with at
least a modicum of equanimity, but this state of mind was often illu-
sive.
As the facts of Daniel’s story deepened within the context of our
particular analytic relationship, some of the clues which had eluded
understanding emerged more clearly. With time, I was allowed to peer
into Daniel’s “dead father eyes” to a relationship of truly profound
neglect and sadistic emotional abuse. It appeared that Daniel’s fa-
ther would disappear for weeks at a time, even when his wife was most
depressed, leaving his son in an essentially empty house, with a mother
utterly incapable of caring for him. Even this barren environment
was, however, to be preferred to times when father ruled absolutely
192 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

and vindictively through the intoxicated haze of alcohol-induced psy-

chotic rages. Father’s raison d’être at these times became the relent-
lessly sadistic humiliation of his young son. Daniel described with ex-
cruciating attention to psychic twists and turns the consummate skill
of his father’s cruelty and his own childhood victimization. Here at
last was a place of some emotional intensity and intrapsychic concor-
dance between Daniel and me, for such childhood experiences of
burning humiliation and inexpressible rage were not unfamiliar pieces
of my own growing up years. Not identical, to be sure, but close enough
in their affective harmonies to resonate deeply and to open intricate
intrapsychic passageways between us. Such shared areas of what Elkind
(1992) has termed “primary vulnerability” must, it seems to me, un-
consciously guide the analyst’s sense of direction even before it can
be articulated consciously. When such points of unconsciously reso-
nating psychic vulnerability are brought to the fore, I believe that we
can retrospectively see how they become nodal organizing lynchpins
in the organization of transference-countertransference processes and
clinical decision making.
In looking backward from this point, I could see how I had always
tended to deal first with Daniel’s basic proclivity to experience need
and desire as profoundly humiliating. In the past I had intellectually
explained this by believing that as long as need and humiliation were
so intricately intertwined, everything he took in from me would be
internalized with a commensurate sense of shame and defeat. It was a
repeated attempt to climb out from under the paranoid-schizoid po-
sition to a place of some enhanced mutuality where the profound
neglect that marked this patient’s inner world could find nourish-
ment outside the borders of shame. I believed myself, at this point, to
be in touch with the multiple voices in which Daniel could speak and
with which I could respond. Again in retrospect, I believe I was more
in concordant touch (Racker, 1968) with the patient’s experiences of
shame and humiliation than with the potential for a complementary
countertransferential reaction; that where such experiences have been
inflicted, there lies in wait an identification with the aggressor that
could make him the object of my own wish to humiliate and shame,
and could also make me the victim of his rageful need to do unto
others precisely what had been done to him.
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 193
My own experience of a kind of dissociated countertransference
response came one afternoon when Daniel was relaying in gut-wrench-
ing, affectively nuanced detail the extent of his father’s sadism. He
began to recall an incident which had been unavailable to him be-
fore, and as he spoke, he began to shake rather violently and uncon-
trollably. He seemed frightened by this unexpected reaction, and I
tried to reassure him by suggesting that the shaking might be inti-
mately involved in some way with the memory he was trying to articu-
late. Indeed, what Daniel was about to describe was an incident that
occurred when he was about seven or eight years old. His father re-
turned home one night, particularly drunk and particularly enraged,
only to find his wife again sedated and unavailable. Daniel remem-
bered crying because he was tired and hungry, and there had been
no one home to feed him or put him to bed. Father flew into a rage
and began beating his son, calling him a sissy and a weakling, saying
that he needed a man to toughen him up, to teach him how hard life
could really be. At that point, Daniel recalled how his father had or-
dered him to remove all of his clothing, including his shoes and socks,
and had locked him on the family’s back porch for what he remem-
bered as an interminable length of time. It was the middle of winter
and the porch was covered with ice encrusted snow. Daniel was still
trembling. “It was so cold,” he whispered.
Now, although I have heard many such horrific stories from my
patients over the years, many in their concrete manifestations far worse,
this story, coming from this patient, in the context of our particular
relationship, was among the hardest to listen to. The next thing I
knew, I was standing next to Daniel’s chair wrapping a blanket around
his shoulders, not quite sure how I had ended up there. I did remem-
ber reaching with a disembodied arm into the cabinet where I kept
the blanket for my own occasional use, and then getting up out of my
chair, but these were not considered actions. For me this was the most
striking aspect of this countertransference enactment. Not that it oc-
curred – for I could easily imagine thinking about doing something
like this and then deciding that it was or was not the best course of
action at the particular moment. (This could be debated at another
point in a discussion of action and interpretation. Did the action open
up or close off exploration?) But for the purposes of this paper, it was
194 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

the lack of just this kind of thoughtful consideration, the lack of con-
scious awareness that several alternatives might be open to me, the
inability to consider the multiple meanings that such a gesture would
have to my patient, that seemed remarkably inconsistent with the way
my work usually goes. This was clearly an action that had proceeded
from one naked, exposed, and humiliated child to another. It was an
action that occurred from well within one particular transference-
countertransference constellation and not, as we prefer to work, from
an ever-moving point amidst several simultaneously interacting per-
spectives.
But Daniel was no slouch. As he left the session he stared at me
intensely. “You know this place,” he said. I nodded. “It explains a lot
about the way we can talk to each other,” he continued. “Yeah, I think
it does,” I responded. I then asked him if he had a blanket at home in
case the shaking came back. “No, you forget,” he said with his usual
sense of irony, “I’m the guy who never gets cold.” “I didn’t forget,” I
replied, “I was just thinking that if our work goes well, you may find
yourself needing one.”
It would be hard to communicate how recognized and known I
felt by my patient in this session, particularly in the last few moments;
how healing this exchange felt for me, both in what I took from
Daniel’s understanding of my countertransference and in what I felt
able to give to him. The problem lay in the fact that it was one-dimen-
sional and in my lack of preparedness for what came in the session
that followed. My total immersion in this one transference-counter-
transference paradigm left me blind to the other unattended-to places
within this particular intrapsychic landscape, places more clearly dis-
cernible from outside the transference-countertransference enactment
of the moment.
From the minute Daniel entered his next session, it became ap-
parent that the mutuality and intimacy of the day before had been
transformed. He stared at me with icy rage. “You’re pitiful,” he be-
gan. “You think you’re so self-aware...all of you analysts...that you can
be so giving and caring...Well I know it’s all a crock of shit...You do
what you do so that you can feel good about yourself...it has nothing
to do with me...You must have been feeling pretty good about your-
self last night...did you bother to think how I was feeling?”
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 195
As it was difficult to capture the power of the day before, it would
be equally difficult in this paper to capture my shock, my hurt, the
visceral sense of being deeply wounded that I felt in this moment.
Daniel, of course, had no way of knowing that he was no longer speak-
ing to his analyst, but had reduced her in his outrage to a humiliated
young girl, not only caught feeling secretly good about herself, but
arrogantly confusing a generous and caring gesture with the basest
and most self-serving of motives. My patient had no way of knowing
that he was treading dangerously close to troubled waters, and I was
destabilized enough to be of little help in making this apparent or
using it constructively. Struggling mightily to emerge from the role
of victim to this sadistic humiliator, I, unfortunately, turned the tables
again, retreating to that purely interpretive position on high, avail-
able to all of us at our most vulnerable moments. “Well,” I countered
(in what was surely one of my worst clinical moments), “it would ap-
pear that you’ve had some difficulty holding on to the intimacy that
we were able to create here yesterday. I suppose that it’s something
we’ll have to keep working on.”
It was quite a mess, and it stayed that way for some time. I did
much thinking, talking, dreaming, and remembering in my efforts to
help the two of us out of the place into which our work had descended.
Daniel, for his part, was fighting, too, to rediscover the trust and bal-
ance that had been so reliable a part of our work before these events
transpired. Once past the hurt, we were both able to acknowledge
how broadened a picture of what it meant to be a humiliated child
had been provided by our mutual enactments; how both of us could
see and respond to the hurt child within the other, but how each of
us, too, had demonstrated an ability to turn this victimization into a
finely honed weapon of assault. What did it mean to take pleasure in
giving to another? To what extent was it generous, to what extent self-
serving? Were these two mutually exclusive? Did they cancel each other
out? The different self states which marked different transference-
countertransference constellations each took their place in the fore-
ground to be explored, felt to the fullest, fantasized and imagined
about with a freeness that had not been possible before. Having al-
ready enacted the best and the worst that we could be with each other,
there seemed so much less reason to hide in our attempts to under-
196 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

stand the multiple meanings of our interaction.

Ultimately, Daniel and I were able to reconstruct his internal ex-
perience on the night I had reached out to him with the
blanket. Although he recalled feeling seen and touched and nour-
ished, he also described a parallel experience of being too
quickly penetrated and then exposed in his inability to reject
my offer of warmth. He could acknowledge having seen through to a
vulnerable place within me; how angry this made him, probably
because of his mother’s depression; and how frightened he had
been of seeing me, of feeling himself to be an equal, of feeling
himself to be a man, of feeling his own potential to touch, penetrate,
hurt, or overwhelm. Ultimately, what he could not see through
the haze of his humiliation, and what I had been unable to help
him to see through the haze of my own, was how touched and
nourished I had felt by his understanding of my experience in that
session and in the broader context of our work as reflected in
that session. It was, in the end, this insight, the ability to hear
and truly apprehend his effect on me, that seemed to carry
the greatest potential to change what had transpired between
us from an experience of penetrating exposure and vulnerability, a
paranoid-schizoid flip-flopping of only one needer and only
one giver, to a moment of true mutuality and intersubjective
recognition in which Daniel and I both felt held and nourished.
I cannot provide any closure to this story. Daniel’s is still a treat-
ment in progress. But I will close with an exchange we had toward the
beginning of this winter. Daniel was talking about something I could
not quite attend to when suddenly I blurted out, “You’re wearing
boots!” Gone were the socks and the sandals. He grinned broadly.
“I’ve been waiting to see how long it would take you to notice.”
“Has it been very long?” I felt a moment of concern. “Oh, I think I’ll
let you worry about that,” he said, reaching for a healthier, more play-
ful, even flirtatious version of his sadism. “So tell me about the
boots,” I continued. “I don’t know. My feet have been getting cold
lately,” he shrugged. “That’s amazing,” I said, probably grinning too
broadly. For Daniel countered much too quickly, “But don’t get
too excited. It’s only the toes!” “Toes are good,” I told him, “I’ll take
the toes, and we’ll work from there.”
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 197

DISCUSSION
The psychoanalytic milieu in which I grew up and was trained would
require that I look carefully at Daniel’s response to my clinical inter-
vention and ask honestly how this reaction speaks to the “rightness”
or “wrongness” of what transpired between us. Did the emotional
attunement of that night, Daniel’s ability to speak openly and directly
about parts of me that he had not allowed himself to engage before,
his sense of being held and warmed – did these reactions imply that
the transference-countertransference enactment between us had been
a therapeutic one? Conversely, did his rage, contempt, and
assaultiveness on the following day suggest an action that had been
too penetrating, too affectively overwhelming, either incorrect or at
the very least premature?
The difficulty here is not in articulating an answer, but with the
question as so formed. For it rests upon a model of mind that I be-
lieve to be no longer compatible with contemporary psychoanalytic
theory in general and our understanding of the transference-coun-
tertransference matrix in particular. The question presumes a linearly
organized mind in which we address ourselves as analysts to the out-
ermost layer of preconscious material primarily. From this place, the
patient can respond in a more or less integrated way to both the affec-
tive attunement and the psychodynamic accuracy of the analyst’s in-
tervention. As clinicians working with this model, we look for a well-
modulated emotional response and an enhancement of associative
material in order to feel confident that we are on the right track.
My own clinical experience would suggest, however, that no in-
tervention and no patient response are ever so immediate or so clearly
tied to the patient’s subsequent response. Though we construct our
clinical interventions with certain conflicts in mind, we have, in fact,
little control over where they ultimately land. Much like the seeds of
a wind-blown dandelion that scatter and take root in places unknown,
that which emanates in interpretive form from the analyst’s particu-
lar intervention, her own construction of conscious, preconscious,
and unconscious experience with the patient, seeds the patient’s con-
scious, preconscious, and unconscious places in myriad ways that may
198 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

not become fully knowable (to the extent that they are ever fully know-
able) for years to come. Likewise, the patient’s response resonates
with so many different parts of us that we are never in a position to
objectively evaluate any one particular intervention from any one point
in the treatment situation. We are confronted with a model of mind
based on a loose organization of multiple experiencing and reacting
centers, and a new psychoanalytic humility born of the need to ac-
knowledge that we can never be quite sure, at any given moment,
who within the patient is listening and who within the analyst is speak-
ing.
So my own answer to the question of whether this particular in-
tervention with Daniel was right or wrong would be to suggest that it
was neither right nor wrong but both right and wrong to each of those
parts touched by the moment. It emanated from multiple parts of my
own being and immediately reorganized, like the turn of a child’s
kaleidoscope, the operative organizing relational matrices which gath-
ered themselves around it. The analytic function, to my way of think-
ing, does not involve constructing the precisely accurate intervention
at any one clinical juncture, but, rather, the holding within the ana-
lytic space of multiple patient/analyst levels of reaction and meaning,
separating those reactions out from reactions wedded to the past, and
thereby creating a new, more openly creative space for constructing
emergent levels of emotional reactivity and meaning.
Daniel, the seven-year-old boy, provided me with a unique oppor-
tunity to forever change the way in which he would remember that
horrible night of such traumatic overstimulation and psychic desola-
tion. He opened a psychic doorway between us to a new kind of ma-
ternal experience that could nourish and warm him, an experience
that would ultimately carry the potential to enliven both his body and
spirit. I am convinced that Daniel, the boy, will never again remem-
ber that night with his father with quite the same affective despair, for
it will always be associated in memory with another night, between
us, in which his terror and need were more fully apprehended and
responded to. For Daniel the seven-year-old and me as mother, that
particular clinical moment could not have been more “right.”
However, Daniel also saw a frightened and humiliated young girl
who responded out of her own need to be rescued and warmed, a girl
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 199
who was too young and too frightened herself to be of much use in
taking care of him. He was left with the frightening perception that
we were children together, and still no one was at home to be a par-
ent, to care for him. Perhaps no one was “running” the analysis. He
did not want a sibling or another damaged adult whose needs he
would have to worry about. Daniel with another damaged child and
Daniel with his damaged, depressed mother were two other relational
paradigms that organized themselves around this clinical moment
and informed the emotional response to it. In holding these rela-
tional experiences, we were able to understand more deeply those
aspects of his current interpersonal world that resonated with these
transference-countertransference paradigms. We came to understand
his attraction to and contempt for “needy” others, the way in which
the stimulation of “neediness” within him was always ensconced within
a passive feminine identification and accompanied by a profound sense
of shame and mortification.
Daniel the seven-year-old also saw me as the sadistic, self-serving
father, exploitive and cruel, stripping him of his defenses and reduc-
ing him to a shivering shell. He fought with me, competed with me,
wanted nothing to do with me. At times he viewed the analysis itself as
a trap in which to ensnare and humiliate him. He attributed to me
the basest of Machiavellian motives; he raged at me and at times with-
drew out of fear that he might do me real damage. Indeed, where I
felt humiliated by his rage, my contemptuous response was not com-
pletely dissimilar to his father’s, and where my agenda was to be a
nurturing mother, it was clear that my needs as well as his were being
served. Here we were able to explore his episodic rage reactions, as
well as the tremendous difficulties with authority that had plagued
Daniel’s professional and academic lives. Equally important was
Daniel’s ability to begin to apprehend the aggressor inside of him-
self, that part of him who could be brutally contemptuous and pen-
etratingly perceptive in his reactions when threatened.
But Daniel was not a seven-year-old boy. And Daniel as adult man
experienced my “too accurate” perception of his terror and despair
as intensely humiliating – its stimulation of years and years of unmet
preoedipal yearning as penetrating in a way that threatened his very
organization of self, particularly with regard to male gender. In re-
200 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

sponse to his emotionally absent mother and his abusive, sadistic, out-
of-control father, Daniel had fashioned a male gender identity based
on an omnipotent denial of all need states, a form of complete con-
trol and mastery of his destiny and desire. Any crack or fissure in this
fortress automatically reduced Daniel to the shivering little boy on
the back porch, and there was sorrowfully little middle ground be-
tween the success of his omnipotence and the dissolution of his expe-
rience of a masculine self. To want the blanket, to want me as giver of
warmth, was incompatible with being and feeling like a man. These
were the present interpersonal issues which emerged in Daniel as
adult man in relation to an emotionally responsive mother. However,
where Daniel’s need to reject such nurturance became overwhelm-
ing, I believe that I resorted to the position of the little boy, who
couldn’t stop trying to reach out and heal his depressed mother. I
could feel an almost frantic need to get through and sense some emo-
tional responsiveness on his part. I could feel anxious and alternately
despondent and enraged when these efforts failed. Where my efforts
to heal became too penetrating, I believe that this was the operative
transference-countertransference paradigm.
As Daniel is not a little boy, so I am not his mother. We therefore
struggle as well with the relationship between adult man and adult
woman as separate centers of mature desire and agency. Daniel is
convinced, and remains convinced as I write, that for me to have seen
him so often reduced to states of humiliation and terror, to have wit-
nessed his inability to cure his mother and to control and ultimately
defeat his raging father renders him, in my mind, an eternally de-
feated, whining, and hopelessly pitiful child. He believes that I will
never see him as an attractive and sexually potent man. Likewise, to
desire me as a woman he will never have immediately sends him back
to the frigid porch, defeated, humiliated, and castrated. On my part,
as adult woman within this analytic relationship, I search for ways that
are neither too stimulating nor too possessive in which to let Daniel
know that the defeated little boy is only one small part of my overall
vision of him. I struggle with how to let him know that I admire the
courage which he has brought to our analytic project and with which
he has faced such devastating childhood terrors; that I am touched
and not repelled by the vulnerability I have been permitted to see;
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 201
and that I feel honored rather than burdened by being chosen to
accompany him on this most extraordinary internal journey. I be-
lieve that it is part of my job as his analyst to let him know that these
things enhance rather than reduce his potency and attractiveness as a
man. But I must do this in a way that does not bind him to me in
incestuous re-enactment, but rather sets him free to express his de-
sires where they can be more fully met.
These are only a few of the many, many relational matrices that
organized themselves around this one particular clinical moment be-
tween Daniel and me, and this was only one out of countless mo-
ments that have transpired and continue to transpire between us. The
clinical work which emerged from these interactions involved the full
participation of the entire “cast of characters” I have described.
The bereft little boy, the humiliated little girl, the mortified
little boy, the depressed mother, the “swooping down”
overwhelming mother, the available nurturing mother, the
absent father, the sadistic and abusive father, etc., all became an
improvisational troupe of players whose active participation in the
analysis of different transference-countertransference processes en-
abled the clinical material to live itself out in the room, in a sense
bringing the unconscious to life in what transpired between
us. Each participant took his or her turn in the foreground of the
clinical work and was afforded the opportunity via this kind
of “therapeutic dissociation” (Davies, 1996) of remembering the past,
experiencing the present, and imagining the future, unencumbered
by the need to create an illusion of integration and linearity. I have
tried to use this clinical material to demonstrate the constant break-
ing apart, reorganization, and reinterpretation of self/other states
that become the basis of any relational analysis: the dissociation, mul-
tiplicity, and reintegration that create the emergence of new modes
of emotional reactivity and meaning schemes for both patient and
analyst alike.

CONCLUSIONS
I am aware that the clinical material I have chosen for this
paper raises the important question of how much control the analyst
202 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

can and should maintain over her own unconscious process within
the intersubjective domain and over the ultimate direction
of the psychoanalytic process in general. As I stated at the outset
of this paper, I believe unequivocally in the analyst’s
responsibility for the fate of the psychoanalytic endeavor with each
patient. But where we must become immersed in our own and
our patients’ internal processes simultaneously, where we must live
and breathe there in order to know those places more fully,
temporary suspensions of intellectual, verbal, fully conscious
processes will occur for the analyst as well as for the patient. As
Freud (1915) stated so long ago,

It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. of one human be-

ing can react upon that of another, without passing through
the Cs. This deserves closer investigation, especially with a
view to finding out whether preconscious activity can be ex-
cluded as playing a part in it; but, descriptively speaking, the
fact is incontestable (p. 194)

It is not my intention to suggest that such experiences of rela-

tively unmediated responsiveness become a reified aspect of psycho-
analytic technique, that they are to be actively sought after or mim-
icked in the analytic situation. My point, rather, is to suggest that they
are endemic to the analytic situation and will indeed occur regardless
of one’s theoretical orientation, model of mind, or years of personal
analysis. They are, I believe, intrinsic to the mutual deep immersion
in intrapsychic and intersubjective spaces potentiated by psychoana-
lytic work at the deepest levels of experience. My point is to suggest
that they will occur whether we pay attention to them or not, and, in
line with our psychoanalytic values, I believe that where prospective
control and decision making over the direction of the analytic pro-
cess temporarily eludes us, a scrupulous retrospective attempt at un-
derstanding and integration becomes part of our professional task.
Our new psychoanalytic milieu has ceased to value verbal insight
and understanding above all else. Though we continue to rely on
such processes, we have finally come to understand and accept the
ineluctably interactive nature of psychoanalytic work. We seek a level
of emotional resonance and empathic attunement that will facilitate
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 203
the emergence of intense, deeply moving affect states and interper-
sonal fantasies. Where I have offered some deeply personal clinical
material, I have done so, in part, in order to demonstrate the inextri-
cably intertwined presence of the intrapsychic and the interactive
throughout the analysis of transference-countertransference processes,
the constant infusion of unconscious fantasy into the therapeutic re-
lationship by both participants in the analytic process.
As any treatment progresses, the analyst’s immersion in her own
internal psychic process must deepen and more freely engage in a
fanciful and creative play with that of the patient. This is not a way of
thinking more accurately about the nature of the particular analytic
process, but rather a completely different manner of experiencing, a
way of being with the patient and with oneself that brings into en-
hanced focus those aspects of unconscious or unformulated experi-
ence (see Stern, 1983) which could not otherwise be psychically rep-
resented and elaborated. The creation of such a “psychic dreamspace”
(Davies, 1997) recognizes the limits and borders of rationality and
form, the constraints of language and definition. Though we no longer
hold to the unconscious as a fixed psychic structure containing the
archives of the patient’s historical past, we do seek the creative efflo-
rescence of unconscious fantasy that retains a kind of primary process
sensibility, as first described by Freud (1915). In this sense such a
dreamspace of mutual unconscious participation and influence in-
volves a sense of timelessness, a multiplicity born of the absence of
internal contradiction, an emphasis on the processes of displacement,
condensation, projection, and introjection, and the preeminence of
psychic over external realities. In short this is a place in which fantasy
rules, omnipotence survives, and boundaries fade. The impossible,
the unimaginable, and the irreconcilable reign freely.
Like the explorers of old, we travel with our patients across this
great and hazardous divide, from conscious to unconscious, from sec-
ondary to primary process modes of experience, in order to bring
back the riches of far-off, fanciful places that we could not otherwise
begin to imagine. We avail ourselves of what is beautiful, exotic, and
enriching. We bring back such riches, integrating them into too old
and too familiar ways of life, creating new schemas, emergent modes
of being and being with, of construing experience and imbuing it
204 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

with fresh meaning.

As analysts we become, with time, more seasoned travelers, famil-
iarizing ourselves with the terrain of conscious and unconscious spaces
and with all of the intermediary stops along the way. We recognize
that the quality, shape, and texture of each journey, the relative suc-
cess with which we are able to traverse potential space, to reconfigure
conscious and unconscious experience, to bring rationality to chaos
and fanciful imaginings to our thought, all rest on the unique pairing
of each particular patient/analyst dyad. As fellow psychoanalytic trav-
elers on this highly personal and perilous journey, patient and analyst
together come to realize with some trepidation and dread that we are
oftentimes dependent upon each other for safe passage through these
transformational straits. We must therefore negotiate in ever more
effective and reliable ways how we will confront conflict and survive
dangerous encounters. With each successful negotiation, the patient
becomes less afraid of all that is new. However, the analyst grows safer
too and becomes able to rely upon the developing analytic skills of
the patient. Here I believe the analyst becomes a more hearty ex-
plorer, willing to take greater risks, to confront more intense dangers
in order to enrich and enliven the quality of the overall journey. She
comes to understand via a finely tuned unconscious communication
that the patient has become able to provide certain critical holding
functions for her, and she thus becomes capable of undertaking for-
ays into the deeper recesses of her own unknown and irrational places.
It is not my intention to suggest that we burden our patients with
such a responsibility for our well-being, that we communicate to them
as a formal part of psychoanalytic technique that such is their respon-
sibility. This would be unconscionable. Rather, I am suggesting that
the analyst will often unconsciously make clinical choices which are
designed to heighten her sense of safety. As I was inclined to focus my
work with Daniel around issues of shame and humiliation even be-
fore the full unconscious meaning of these issues became clear to
both of us, I believe that analysts are often able to understand only in
retrospect how they have chosen to emphasize certain clinical issues
over others in order to pave the way for the more emotionally intense
countertransference issues that they unconsciously recognize as lying
ahead. Here, the analyst unconsciously maximizes her own ability to
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 205
rely upon the patient’s analytic skills when the psychoanalytic terrain
becomes individually impassable. She may seek, first, to work through
patient issues which touch upon her own areas of conflict and vulner-
ability, so that she can more effectively immerse herself in a deepen-
ing and intensifying analytic process. Surely we must recognize that it
is not the patient’s job to care for her analyst, to make her feel safe
when the going gets rough. However, it is our job to recognize that as
the therapeutic relationship deepens, taking a turn at caring for the
analyst is precisely what the patient wants to do, and needs to be able
to do in order to survive otherwise impassable hurdles (Searles, 1979).
I often tell my patients that there are some life experiences which are
simply too traumatizing and too overwhelming to be experienced
and processed alone. We do not seek to become dependent upon
each other; at these moments we simply are. The nature of the jour-
ney renders us inextricably intertwined for its duration. We create a
place of such mutuality and interdependence, for only within such an
interdependent place can we truly articulate and define the borders
of our own agency and desire. Perhaps the recognition that such
mutuality lies at the heart of a deepening analytic process is what we
have always meant by the evolution of a therapeutic alliance.
Loewald (1979) describes his vision of the analytic relationship:

As a special form of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis constitutes a

unique mode of personal relationship. It shares certain aspects
with other kinds of personal relationships, for instance with those
between child and parent, patient and physician, student and
teacher, between friends, and between lovers (p. 372).
The psychoanalytic method of treatment requires simultaneously
unusual restraints and endurance of frustration together with an
uncommon quality and degree of spontaneity and freedom – and
all this, although in different ways, from both partners (p. 373).

Perhaps, as presaged by Loewald, the question which most con-

sumes contemporary analysts is how often and how far we may allow
ourselves to wander on any given analytic journey, with any given ana-
lytic patient, without becoming dangerously lost along the way. Given
our emphasis on mutuality (Aron, 1996), on the intrinsically interac-
tive influence of patient and analyst upon each other (Mitchell, 1997),
206 JODY MESSLER DAVIES

on the qualities of unconscious immersion, playfulness, and sponta-

neity, how do we define the “safe-enough” borders that mark the ap-
propriate limits of this most unusual relationship?
“Safe-enough” analyses are not easily defined. They depend in
large measure upon the particular dyad involved. However, the effort
to formulate the question and the commitment to ask it of ourselves
on a regular basis becomes, for me, more essential than the impos-
sible task of articulating a precise and theoretically reified answer.
What answer we can begin to frame as a working model of both possi-
bilities and limits in the psychoanalytic relationship will, it seems to
me, be composed of an oscillating rhythm of points and counterpoints,
a balance between moments of adventure and risk that enhance one’s
sense of mastery and competence and the moments of necessary re-
treat to safe havens in which we regroup and refuel in preparation for
the next challenge. Hoffman (1998) has referred to this as the dialec-
tical interplay between ritual and spontaneity in psychoanalytic work.
Any analysis consists of infinite moments, some remarkable, most
not, in which conscious controls are temporarily loosened and sus-
pended, in which new constellations of self/other experience emerge
into consciousness, followed by attempts at defining, naming, and
integrating these previously unconscious schemas into an enhanced
understanding of our current interpersonal experience. I become
concerned when I read about “mutual analyses,” “mutual regressions,”
or “analyst surrenders” that do not make clear that although we lose
ourselves again and again in our own unconscious vulnerabilities, the
regression in psychoanalysis is primarily (though not exclusively) the
patient’s, and the focus must keep returning (though it will and must
wander) to the patient’s unconscious process. This is the only way I
know to ensure that the analytic work we do will involve a full affec-
tive, cognitive, physiological integration of previously dissociated re-
lational experience, and not a downwardly spiraling, out-of-control
regression, more consistent with dissociated re-enactments and re-
traumatizations.
Such a psychoanalytic journey, from self state to self state, be-
tween past and present, from unconscious to conscious modes of ex-
perience, oscillating in focus between self and other, is a dizzying,
destabilizing, and occasionally overwhelming project. As analysts we
 DEFINING “SAFE ENOUGH” BORDERS 207
strive to keep our itinerary in mind, to maintain our orientation, to
know more or less in what direction we are heading. We attempt to
strike the optimal balance between the reliable and trustworthy main
highways that will clearly get us where we are going and the scenically
enriching back roads that will determine the beauty and quality which
we will ultimately remember about the experience. I believe that the
analyst must be prepared, given the complexity of what she is about,
to feel lost and out of control, to sometimes “wander” in an effort to
find herself again. Indeed, if we do not lose ourselves along the way,
we will conduct a trip in which we see only the known and familiar
spots; we will never happen upon those special moments of unex-
pected delight hidden off the beaten track. All of us who have trav-
eled can remember with unequaled delight those moments of mean-
dering, somewhat lost, of turning an unfamiliar corner to be amply
rewarded for our momentary anxieties by the breathtaking vision of
exquisite and completely unanticipated vistas. For me, my psychoana-
lytic work with a patient never feels quite right unless our journey has
included at least several such moments, experienced and shared to-
gether.

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