Awakening the Dreamer : Clinical Journeys 
asked by noreason on November 22, 2006 2:12 AM
One classic follows another. In Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys, Philip Bromberg continues the illuminating explorations into dissociation and clinical process begun in his seminal Standing in the Spaces (TAP, 1998). Bromberg is among our most gifted clinical writers, especially in his unique ability to record peripheral variations in relatedness - those subtle, split-second changes that capture the powerful workings of dissociation and, as such, chart the changing self-states that analyst and patient bring to the moment. Three interrelated contentions weave their way through these essays. For Bromberg, a model of mind premised on the centrality of self-states and dissociation not only offers the optimal lens for comprehending and interpreting clinical data; it also provides maximum leverage for achieving true intersubjective relatedness. And finally, this manner of looking at clinical data offers the best vantage point for integrating psychoanalytic experience with the burgeoning findings of contemporary neuroscience, cognitive and developmental psychology, and attachment research. But these essays are no esoteric attempt at theory construction for its own sake. Bromberg consistently brings the reader into the felt human experience at the heart of the clinical encounter. Dreams are approached not as texts in need of deciphering but as means of contacting genuine but not yet fully conscious self-states. From here, he explores how the patient's "dreamer" and the analyst's "dreamer" can come together to turn the "real" into the "really real" of mutative therapeutic dialogue. The "difficult," frequently traumatized patient is newly appraised in terms of tensions within the therapeutic dyad. Such patients, Bromberg finds, sense dangers within the dyad that the analyst unwittingly heightens. And then there is the "haunted" patient who carries a sense of preordained doom through years of otherwise productive work - until the analyst can finally feel the patient's doom as his or her own. Laced with Bromberg's characteristic honesty, humor, and thoughtfulness, these essays elegantly attest to the mind's reliance on dissociation, in both normal and pathological variants, in the ongoing effort to maintain self-organization. Awakening the Dreamer, no less than Standing in the Spaces, is destined to become a permanent part of the literature on therapeutic process and change.
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For the practicing clinician, "Awakening The Dreamer: Clinical Journeys" is an exciting trip into the shared reality of the interpersonal field in which psychoanalytic treatment takes place, and into the critically important dissociated aspect of that field. The book is a totally engaging read, clinically alive and wonderfully erudite, drawing on the history of psychoanalysis, literature, poetry, and neuroscience. Both clinically and conceptually, it provides an indispensable frame of reference that will deepen even treatments that appear "routine," but Bromberg's perspective is most breathtakingly powerful in helping the analyst reach the many so-called difficult patients currently finding their way into our waiting rooms.
From the vantage point of what is experienced as "me" at a given moment, a patient's "not-me" self-experience, because it cannot be formulated cognitively or linguistically, is communicated through enactment in the interpersonal field of the analysis --a shared dissociative experience that requires the co-participation of the analyst in processing it. By Bromberg's willingness to share with the reader his most intimate thoughts and feelings as he describes his actual work with patients in evocative detail, he provides the reader with an extraordinary window into the enacted channel of affective communication that links dissociated self-states in patient and therapist while what we call "the work" is going on.
Bromberg vividly portrays how the optimal analytic relationship involves an ongoing process of collision and negotiation between the subjectivities of the participants and is thus "safe but not too safe." In this relationship the analyst allows himself to perceptually experience and contain the existence of his own "not-me" states and eventually share the details of his subjective "awakening" with his patient while simultaneously communicating his attunement to the issue of how affectively "safe" this self-revelation is feeling to his patient. The analyst is in effect disclosing his personal encounter with a "not-me" self-state in the patient, and by so doing he allows that aspect of the patient's self to feel recognized relationally and thereby begin to "awaken" too. An increased tolerance for surprise gradually replaces dissociative defenses against potential traumatic shock because verbal meaning, including that of "safety" is negotiated rather than unilaterally defined by the analyst. By the therapist's surrender to the domain of personal reality --his own and the patient's-- for which no words exist, those areas of the patient's subjectivity that have been traumatically invalidated, find a relational context through which "not-me" can become part of "me," and participate creatively and spontaneously in the process of living.
This book by Philip Bromberg, "Awakening The Dreamer: Clinical Journeys," is a remarkable accomplishment, a courageous and inspiring example of clinical writing at its best that should be read and reread by therapists and psychoanalysts of all persuasions.
From the vantage point of what is experienced as "me" at a given moment, a patient's "not-me" self-experience, because it cannot be formulated cognitively or linguistically, is communicated through enactment in the interpersonal field of the analysis --a shared dissociative experience that requires the co-participation of the analyst in processing it. By Bromberg's willingness to share with the reader his most intimate thoughts and feelings as he describes his actual work with patients in evocative detail, he provides the reader with an extraordinary window into the enacted channel of affective communication that links dissociated self-states in patient and therapist while what we call "the work" is going on.
Bromberg vividly portrays how the optimal analytic relationship involves an ongoing process of collision and negotiation between the subjectivities of the participants and is thus "safe but not too safe." In this relationship the analyst allows himself to perceptually experience and contain the existence of his own "not-me" states and eventually share the details of his subjective "awakening" with his patient while simultaneously communicating his attunement to the issue of how affectively "safe" this self-revelation is feeling to his patient. The analyst is in effect disclosing his personal encounter with a "not-me" self-state in the patient, and by so doing he allows that aspect of the patient's self to feel recognized relationally and thereby begin to "awaken" too. An increased tolerance for surprise gradually replaces dissociative defenses against potential traumatic shock because verbal meaning, including that of "safety" is negotiated rather than unilaterally defined by the analyst. By the therapist's surrender to the domain of personal reality --his own and the patient's-- for which no words exist, those areas of the patient's subjectivity that have been traumatically invalidated, find a relational context through which "not-me" can become part of "me," and participate creatively and spontaneously in the process of living.
This book by Philip Bromberg, "Awakening The Dreamer: Clinical Journeys," is a remarkable accomplishment, a courageous and inspiring example of clinical writing at its best that should be read and reread by therapists and psychoanalysts of all persuasions.
reviewed by 78704 on November 28, 2006 4:57 PM