On Recognition and the Linking Function of Image

Being “open” to the patient, achieving an authentic relationship of mutual recognition, means practicing analysis as an art of hospitality. The word “art” is not chosen at random, because it refers to a human activity that requires knowledge of certain rules and techniques. Not being “closed” to the other, in the sense of not rigidly defending oneself behind theories, and instead becoming emotionally involved, cannot be left to the analyst’s humanity and experience alone. The risk would be to give too much space to intentionality and “good will” and to be deaf to the discourse of the unconscious. The alternative to distancing attitudes, subtly moralistic and marked by suspicion, is for the analyst to take responsibility in the most radical way possible for his or her own unconscious participation in the “facts” of the analysis. The analyst must come to love the question more than the answer. By definition, the place where it is possible to see a given object from multiple and simultaneously “true” perspectives, and thus to give hospitality to otherness, is the dream image. However, it is not enough to listen to virtually everything, even what is presented as mere reality, as a dream. We must also read the dream as the dream dreamed by analyst and patient. In this way, we free ourselves from the “I/you” split, arrive at the unconscious “we” and rediscover the intrinsic and original openness to the other that is the necessary premise of our subjectivity.