Shared Experience: The Psychoanalytic Dialogue

This book presents a way to formulate, from several points of view, "Psychoanalysis as an encounter between two persons", and highlights the aspects of symmetry and affective exchange of this encounter where analysis is seen as a relationship between two minds. In this shared experience the study of the mind of the Analyst and of his method of work grows in importance as the source of benefits and misdirections which can be exchanged in the encounter with the patient.

In this context, the patient has an active role as an attentive and sensitive observer of the Analyst, signaling errors and showing the road to be taken. This change in the concept of psychoanalysis has evolved through many years; from the Analyst acting to open the patient within himself, while at the same time struggling against his own resistance to change, to a vision of a "Couple at Work". Psychoanalysis is now a "shared experience", in which the listening and creating of internal space to the other, within the self, is the instrument and the journey.

The aim of analysis is not the discovery of hidden truths, but rather the recover of alienated areas, new beginnings of natural development, and the construction of new meanings.

The editors and contributors, all from the Centro di Psa Milanese, are members of the Italian Society of Psychoanalysis and of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

'In this volume the contributors from the Milanese Society show themselves to have gone through their own "growing pains" of psychoanalytic development and arrived at their diverse personal ways of getting closer to dealing with what is thought and felt to be the most important. They have gone through the struggle of slavish devotion to foreign models of psychoanalytic practice and xenophobic rejection of alien viewpoints; they have arrived at distilling that which they considered the most valuable and marrying this to their own thoughtful and intuitive personal understanding.