I believe there is both a science and an art, and beyond both of these, a mystery to doing psychoanalytic treatment. I have tried in my writing to capture all three of these dimensions. I do this in part by offering extended clinical examples that dramatize the immediate and long-term effects of given understandings and interventions, and the mysterious processes through which they emerge. 

My general psychoanalytic orientation is relational with a forward edge, combining and integrating influences from relational psychoanalysis, self-psychology, intersubjective systems theory, Bion, Winnicott, Loewald, Bollas, Ogden, Sander, nonlinear dynamic systems (complexity) theories and many other psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic authors and perspectives. 

It requires a real relationship between patient and therapist, established within each dyad’s unique analytic frame, to fully address the early traumas and other issues that bring a person to treatment. If an analyst possesses the necessary skills, that real relationship tends to evolve, albeit fitfully, toward becoming the relationship the patient needs to be able to address, and transform their relation to, past traumas and current struggles, and to help restart their capacity for “psychic breathing.” 

Walt Whitman, in his Preface to Leaves of Grass, wrote: “From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight; and from the hearing proceeds another hearing; and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man.” Whitman was writing about the social function of the poet in early 19th century America; but his poetic quote also captures something of the essential relationality and mystery of “good-enough” analytic treatment in the 21st century.