From the 'Green Woman' to 'Scheherazade'

This paper focuses on the becoming of a fundamentally new experience and development in psychoanalytic treatment. It is based on psychoanalytic approaches whose visions of psychoanalytic change theoretically and clinically incorporate the striving for a “new beginning,” “new opportunity for development,” “lifegiver,” and rebirth. The author argues that in creating a profound living transformation during treatment, it is not enough to confront the gap between the patient's unbearable past experiences and the new, more benign relationship with the analyst; nor is the patient's internalizing of this new relationship sufficient. To undergo profound change, the patient's destructive or traumatic split-off core experiences and the ensuing defense organization must be processed and modified within a new, actualized, and more able psychic space that is created by the patient-analyst's deep interconnectedness. This interconnected psychic space becomes the arena in which these unbearable past experiences in...