The countertransference to autistic states of mind has been described as either boredom or disconnectedness (Boschan, 1987; Nissen, 2008; Ribas, 1998; Strauss, 2012). Boschan distinguishes it from a characteristically irritated, exasperated countertransference to narcissistic states of mind, while Nissen and Strauss underline the missing unconscious communicative element (again, a ‘something missing’.) Gomberoff et al. (1990) recommend alertness to the countertransference for detecting the establishment between analyst and patient of a mutual autistic object that arrests the analytic process, analyst and patient having become partially fused without the analyst noticing. Apparently in marked contrast, other authors write of a pressure to expel, get rid of or ‘abort’ the patient (Polmear, 2008; Strauss, 2012). Baranger et al. (1983), albeit without reference to autistic states, attribute certain violent ruptures of the analytic situation to parasitism, an extreme form of unnoticed ‘bastion’ whereby the analyst feels ‘inhabited’ by the patient.
fake news
>>11767205During a session a few months into her treatment, Katja rapped out: “I should go up to people and speak to them, and I don’t, so . . .” She then fell silent.Her statement confused me by its ambiguity about who was speaking. On the face of it, Katja thought she should go up to people and speak to them. Yet her tone, at once bitter and satirical, implied a satire of some “other”, held up for scorn and ridicule. This rapid-fire, officious voice was Katja’s second vocal register, like (I imagined) her mother’s; her usual one was a soft, hesitant, placatory voice, as of a little girl. I knew that Katja did not go up to people and speak to them, not ever, nor did she meet anyone’s eye, but always shuttered her eyes with her eyelids. She always assumed, she had sometimes told me in her ‘brisk’ voice, that if anyone wanted to know her they would come and speak to her, and since no one ever did it was clear that no one wanted to know her. When she was 3 her mother had gone to see the kindergarten teacher, “to tell her to make the other children play with me”.On another occasion Katja said again: “I should go up and speak to people and I don’t.” This time I asked: “Who says so?” To my astonishment, she answered promptly: “You do”.Well! Now, I had once suggested that Katja was leaving out of account the effect on others – kindergarten children then, others now – of her refraining from approaching them. She seemed to have re-framed this intervention as a resented injunction that she “ought” to make overtures to others.
>>11767208The idea that Katja could make overtures to others (recommended in the past by teachers and parents) forced on her, I saw in retrospect, the idea that she existed separately and outside these ‘others’, and – worse – disrupted her attempt to establish an illusion of symbiotic union with me. I think that her solution was to identify herself with a brisk, no-nonsense voice, a sensory property originally of her mother and now, along with the hated view it expressed, attributed to me. In Green’s words, “Here, identification is alterity taken into account and then eliminated” (Green, 1999)There was no longer any ground on which to address Katja’s hostility to the object’s view (that she herself could make overtures to others) since she had now identified herself with it and, in the sensory domain of the vocal register, with the object.
>>11767208I smell plagiarism
>>11767211I pointed out that Katja had utterly changed the meaning of what I had originally said. My attempt to talk to her about the way that her practices get in the way of her being in ordinary contact with a person has been turned into a mechanical formula about “stopped emotions”, and instead of using what her doctor and I put on offer, she applied a mechanical solution, the stopping of her antidepressants, omitting from her memory of what I had said all reference to a person. She replied: “That’s how my mind works.”For future reference, I shall refer to the session just described as the “vacuum session”.
Katja opened the next session immediately, telling me she had just been watching the birds in the park. It is spring, the mating season; one of the birds was driving off coots. She mused that they may all end up getting killed, because of bird flu. She supposed it will have to be done, but [she paused] – it still seems a shame. I interpreted that Katja sees life and dominance, but then disease and death. The birds which are so beautiful and vibrantly alive also represent aspects of herself which she finds it necessary to kill off, though she thinks it is a shame.Katja, silent, then replied that that is just the way things are. I agreed. Katja muttered that I see only bad things about her. I replied that I see in the birds so very much that is valuable in her: she protests, however, that I am not supposed to notice the killing off. Katja answered that I must be bored with her, that people get frustrated and grow to hate her, and she knows I will not tell her what I really think of her. I interposed, quietly, that I just had. She stopped suddenly, and I added that she had mentioned the birds being in the mating season, and that the boredom she refers to is the sterility that happens when she kills off any productive, generative discourse between the two of us here.Your fortune: Better not tell you now
these people think of themselves as intellectual jejeje
>>11767215Katja didn't change the meaning of his words. she merely extracted the intentions of his attempts to influence her and returned them back to him without bullshit. him being unawre of it implies that he's either menlely deficient or that he's intentionally mispresenting his own intentions to subvert the results of his findings
>>11767223The revelation of the perverse twist Katja had given to my original attempt to talk to her about her daily recourse to sensation- based practices did shock me, when I saw that she exploited what I had said to justify the continuation of her use of autistic objects and shapes and to justify her jettisoning of her psychiatrist’s prescription. No doubt some sharpness in my voice and diction will have betrayed the sharpness of my reaction to discovering this.The shocked outrage I experienced did eventually allow me to register and recognize the experience as a communication, by way of projective identification, of shocked outrage in Katja.Your fortune: Very Bad Luck
>>11767233 (very nice dubs)he should stop tormenting people smarter than him and start using autistic shapes on his rectum
