Vulnerability and courage in psychoanalytic treatment rooms – the conversational turn in sight

Modern psychotherapeutic process research uses terms like “disorder” and “intervention” for the description of what psychotherapists do. But these technical terms overlook an essential dimension. Psychotherapeutic processes are better described as an evolving and self-organizing conversation driven by the participants’ imagination while on the other hand participants’ imagination is stimulated by talking to each other. The courage to expose one’s own vulnerabilities is balanced by the stability of the psychoanalytic discourse.

Thus, the conversational turn in analytic research demands fine grained attention for the description of imaginatively driven conversational organisation and the stimulation of imagination while talking in the treatment room. I will use transcribed sequences from a short-term therapy and from a psychoanalysis, conducted by two prominent psychoanalysts and add an example of a session conducted by myself. What is found in these examples is a recurrent pattern which can be described in single steps. I hope that such analyses can contribute to show how interwoven organization and imagination are. While talking people are thinking about thinking people and they cannot avoid organizing their talk.

Bio

After studying psychology in Heidelberg and social sciences I became a fully trained psychoanalyst and social scientist in Göttingen, I was head of a research center in a clinic for psychotherapy and psychosomatics, practiced psychoanalysis for more than 40 years and after many years as professor for social psychology at IPU, I retired end of September 2020.

Selected publications

• Buchholz, M. B. (2014). Patterns of empathy as embodied practice in clinical conversation – a musical dimension. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00349

• Buchholz, M. B., Bergmann, J. R., Alder, M.‑L., Dittmann, M. M., Dreyer, F., & Kächele, H. (2017). The Building of Empathy: Conceptual 'pillars’ and Conversational Practices in Psychotherapy. In M. Kondo (Ed.), Empathy – An evidence-based interdisciplinary perspective: https://www.intechopen.com/books. Open Access: InTech. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.69628

• Buchholz, M. B. (2020). Seeing the Situational Gestalt – Movement in Therapeutic Spaces. Gestalt Theory, 42(2), 1–31. Retrieved from DOI 10. 2478/gth-2020-0011

• Dimitrijevic, A. (2020). “At my core, I am a psychoanalyst, but … ”: An interview with Michael B. Buchholz. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2020.1782986

• Dimitrijević, A., & Buchholz, M. B. (Eds.) (2021). Silence and silencing in psychoanalysis. Cultural, clinical, and research aspects. Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY: Routledge. Relational perspectives book series.

• Kirsch, M., & Buchholz, M. B. (2020). On the Nature of the Mother-Infant Tie and Its Interaction With Freudian Drives. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 596. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00317