Encountering Ehrenberg: Tracing the Development of Psychoanalytic Therapy at the Intimate Edge

Introduction

For a long time the notion of intersubjectivity was disregarded in the psychoanalytic community. Patients were treated according to ideals of technique that specified anonymity, abstinence, and objectivity. However, since the 1980s, there has been a revolutionary paradigm shift in the conceptualisation of psychoanalytic technique, largely influenced by Greenberg and Mitchell’s concept of the relational matrix (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988), where the classical one-person view of transference is superseded by a two-person view of the therapeutic situation. Within the realm of Relational Psychoanalysis, Darlene B. Ehrenberg, in her seminal work titled The Intimate Edge, redefines the locus of therapeutic action as occurring at the intimate edge of the analytic couple. She defines the intimate edge as

Ehrenberg’s quote captures how the individual’s struggle becomes one of maintaining connection to others while simultaneously differentiating from others. Working at the intimate edge is thus about clarifying the patient’s desire, and the dread against it, as experienced in the context of a relationship to an Other. Thus, it is not the patient’s internal dynamics alone that need to be analyzed, but also the relational configurations in which their resistances to connection emerge, as well as the individual’s (in)capacity to integrate different ways of connecting that stand in dialectical tension to one another (Mitchell, 1988).

The borderland between patient and therapist is thrust into the focal arena of therapeutic action, where the quality of contact between patient and therapist is affectively communicated. Most important, working at the intimate edge does not imply that the strictures of an asymmetrical therapeutic relationship are reversed, but that distance and differentiation can be identified and highlighted. This aspect of Ehrenberg’s working at the intimate edge will be explored in more detail later, as will the way in which her concept compares to and differs from other influential thinkers in the field of contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

The Roots of the Therapist’s Vulnerability

With the “intimate edge” (Ehrenberg, 1974, 1992) in mind, Ehrenberg (2004) invites us to see her as Darlene the graduate student. She unpeels layers of herself to the reader by exposing her vulnerability, such as how, after experiencing conflicts in her intimate relationship, she travelled by train to grieve in her mother’s arms. Once there, her mother held her with no words.

Decades later Dr. Darlene Ehrenberg finds herself as a therapist with brokenhearted people as clients, and draws on the manner in which her mother implicitly sensed her pain to offer a compelling way of working psychotherapeutically; that of us needing to find and provide our patients with the gift of wordless knowing.

Until recently, when confronted with the searing pain of human messiness therapists have upheld their role as wise, detached, and neutral. The notable Object Relations concept of the entwined baby-mother remains chasms apart from the one-step-removed stance taken by some therapists who tenaciously hold onto wordy interpretations as the holding balm. From a more contemporary relational point of view, “a good-enough mother” (Winnicott, 1953, p. 98) feels her infant’s pain, and she not only uses her warmth to soothe, but she is engaged, real, and truly herself. At the time of her distress, Darlene specifically sought out a personally meaningful holding, her mother’s holding. Darlene’s mother had carried her in a wordless incubation for nine months, and in turn, Darlene grew to know her mother from within these uterine walls at the most cellular level. Darlene has been inside this woman, who, as a girl, was “holocausted.” Unconsciously, Darlene knew her mother/girl-mother and knew that her mother knew what she needed at the rawest moments in her adult life.

Just as Darlene’s mother was able discern while comforting her daughter, we have found that when we work at the intimate edge, we need to be highly sensitive to the psychic changes that take place at the interface of our interactions with our patients. These interactions are defined by a helix of reciprocal, and often wordless, influences. Benjamin (2004) refers to this kind of affective resonance as the “one in the third” (p. 16), a kind of accommodation to a reciprocally influenced set of expectations in which each party surrenders a part of his or her subjectivity while simultaneously trusting that each can stay connected to the Other’s mind. Ehrenberg and Benjamin both posit that the therapist’s subjectivity is crucial to this wordless knowing, for she communicates her intention to surrender to the process of providing affective resonance, and without this surrender she would feel coerced or pressured to act in an accommodating manner. For Ehrenberg, working at the intimate edge means clarifying this kind of breakdown or complementarity (Benjamin, 2004) when it occurs by opening the affective interchange between patient and therapist for exploration. As such, there is a mutual creation, at least temporarily, of a potential place where difference can be enjoyed, rather than perceived as destructive or obliterating.

Ehrenberg’s own experience of holding with her mother is arguably a critical factor that influenced her theory and clinical practice. Ehrenberg’s compelling recollection of her mother’s wordless knowing of her pain refutes the idea that the therapist needs to verbally self-disclose to achieve a state of mutual recognition. Rather, Ehrenberg’s mother communicated her subjectivity in an entirely different way. In this type of holding, she conveyed her intention to surrender to her daughter’s emotional world. As the daughter receiving comfort, Ehrenberg was not oblivious to her mother’s surrender; it was the felt sense that her mother was willing to be impacted by her that allowed the daughter to trust that she could remain connected to her mother’s mind in this wordless holding. This is different from feeling coerced to respond in a particular way. This example also illustrates that shifts occur in the analytic pair without interpretation.

As relational psychotherapists, we attempt to understand what is going on inside the patient through the use of our own subjectivity, that is, our own bodies, thoughts, and feelings. However, this differs from the way in which, for instance, Object Relations theorists understand and use the countertransference. The Object Relations therapist uses her countertransference to comment on the patient-therapist relationship from outside of the interaction. As such, the therapist remains the expert by virtue of her knowledge of the patient, putting the patient in a position of either agreeing or disagreeing with the meta-communication. In contrast to this, the intimate edge is a process which the therapist together with the patient inhabits and moves with. From this perspective, the patient cannot be known from the therapist’s point-of-view; rather the therapist climbing inside of their interaction, and analysing this from the inside out, becomes both information for their process and the vehicle of the process (Ehrenberg, 1992).

Loosening up the Term Countertransference

Initially, predatory and potentially explosive connotations were attributed to the therapist’s own subjectivity (Freud, 1910). Countertransference was seen as a threat to effective treatment, and thereby the therapist was forewarned to guard against putting her unique personhood in the room. Through Heimann (1950/1989) and Racker’s (1957) work on complementary countertransference and concordant countertransference, a less defensive “on guard” position by therapists was taken towards countertransference. Countertransference needed to be recognised as an inevitable and integral aspect of the therapeutic engagement between patient and therapist. From an object relations stance, therapists were encouraged to identify and use their feelings towards understanding the patient’s unconscious to inform the patient’s treatment.

As such Object Relations therapists have used projection identification as the solution to their own affect. Yet through a conception of countertransference as projective identification (Klein, 1946/1997), the patient is redefined as a conjurer and the therapist as merely an innocent bystander who is pulled in against her will, which leads to therapists, often indignantly, claiming (after being in an entanglement) “the patient put this into me and I must feed it back to them.”

Yet, Ehrenberg takes the idea of countertransference further than merely a tool to effect change for the patient. She, alongside other relational psychoanalysts since the late 1970s, argued that the term countertransference assumes that it is hinged first upon the transference of the patient. This smacks of wishful thinking on the part of therapists. When it comes to intimately engaging with each other, the subjectivity of the therapist is as vulnerable and under the glare as the patient’s subjectivity. Countertransference is not only the creation of the patient within the therapist, but countertransference is also a cocreation, just as transference is a cocreation between both therapist and patient (Jaenicke, 2007; Orange, 1995), and as such, therapy involves co-transference between two individuals. Both individuals’ subjectivities slip and slide under the pull of relating. And, at times, the only thing which can be relied upon in the encounter is the grasping reflex of the therapist to make sense of what is happening. But the therapist’s turning to look into her subjectivity is by no means superiorly exempt or safely quarantined from the entanglements of the therapeutic endeavour, as the looking-into rests within the mutual heat of the moment. The therapist, too, invites the patient to tune into and express their subjectivity. Mutual reflection on one’s subjectivity cannot be barricaded from the mutual experience.

One gets the sense in Ehrenberg’s writings that the countertransference is not something that can be thought about, as Object Relations theorists would suggest. It arises in the cocreated moment born out of two people interacting at an edge at which their impact on each other becomes clarified. Work at the intimate edge cannot be taken for granted; it requires an active effort and curiosity on the therapist’s part to make visible interactional issues that need to be addressed and spoken about. This dynamic encounter is not arbitrated by a third which only the therapist can understand. Work at the intimate edge constitutes a joint process of understanding. Ehrenberg’s willingness to focus on the therapist’s subjectivity essentially challenges therapists to take full personal responsibility for their feelings and vulnerability, which enables them to transgress their own defensive operations and meet the other individual, their patient, at the intimate edge.

Inviting the patient to explore collaboratively what is going on not only inside of him but also inside of the interaction is in itself transformative, as it creates a context in which the complementary twoness of expert–patient, knower–known is displaced in favour of a more intersubjective system that acknowledges the patient’s agency and relieves their sense that the problem lies with them (Ehrenberg, 1992).

The process of achieving this kind of thirdness is similar to working at the intimate edge, where there is an unpacking of the positions of complementarity (or doer-done-to dynamics), which forecloses the establishment of a space in which tension and difference can be straddled (Benjamin, 2004). Both Benjamin and Ehrenberg understand breakdown as occurring when the tension between self-assertion and recognition caves in. Ehrenberg, however, is more frank about the way in which she breaks such impasses. She not only insists that patients share their immediate responses to the therapist’s actions, but by clarifying her position in the interactional dance, she emphasises the need for the patient to recognise the therapist as a person in her own right, a “like subject,” who will not be controlled, manipulated, or coerced. The mutual exploration of how, when, and why the patient and therapist attune to each other, respond to the other’s needs, or frustrate each other, becomes the vehicle for transformation.

In a similar vein to Benjamin (1988), Ehrenberg challenges the negation of the mother or therapist when the need of the patient is in the foreground. Both Benjamin and Ehrenberg argue that the subjectivity of the therapist needs to be acknowledged and seen as mutually valuable for the relationship and for the self of the patient. A relational therapist does not merely understand, interpret, and conjure up wisdom for the distressed individual. We allow ourselves to encounter our blind-spots, and in so doing allow our patients to encounter who we really are, warts and all. As a result, we begin to glide to the intimate edge, whilst allowing our patients to meet us at the cusp of this form of relatedness. Nonetheless, the professional mask of composure and the attendant stance of objectivity and “expertise” have an allure that is hard to forego.

Indeed, if Ehrenberg does not overvalue interpretation of the patient’s internal world, what does she do in the therapeutic situation?

Abandoning the “One-Step Removed” Composure

Ehrenberg (1995b, 2006) argues that there is no such thing as an impenetrable statue-like therapist or an innocent, immune, and objective participant, that such a position is deceptive, and can have potentially destructive consequences for the therapeutic encounter. As Hoffman and Aron (1996) pointed out, the therapist’s subjectivity is irreducibly involved in continual unconscious interaction with the patient. Thus, attention needs to be paid not only to the patient’s experience of the therapist, but also to the therapist’s participation in and impact upon the dyad. The patient’s internal object world inevitably coalesces with the therapist’s, and this needs to be played out and lived out, as opposed to merely interpreted. Within such exchanges Ehrenberg (1996) draws on her emotional availability and vulnerability towards her patients, and lets them know that they have had a real impact on her not only as a transferential figure, but also as person. In paying attention to the affective interchange as it occurs in the moment, Ehrenberg (1995b) avoids heading down a one-way street of coolly intellectualized interpretations. In the spaghetti-like embroilment of mutual vulnerability, Ehrenberg challenges us as therapists to stake out the level at which we are willing to emotionally risk ourselves in relation to our patients. Thus, authenticity becomes the centre of their therapeutic approach, and vulnerability here means that the therapist works from within her subjectivity, when it matters the most.

If we allow ourselves to be seen in the garb of wizards with special, all-knowing powers we wreak havoc when in an instance of painful chaos the patient pulls at our cloak for assistance and is met with the naked reality that we are just as human as they are. In contrast, in working with a particular patient in a more affectively honest and mutual way, Ehrenberg found that her “willingness to live through these experiences with her and to treat her as a person rather than as a ‘case’ was what mattered most to her and made it possible for her to take the risks she did” (1972, p. 73).

Another patient found it healing that Ehrenberg (1996, p. 284) did not wear “psychic rubber gloves” and as such she aimed to come in close to touching and being touched by her patients in ways where both were left knowing what it means to be painfully/wonderfully alive with a heart of flesh. In being open to being moved and demonstrating one’s willingness to lilo upon or ride out deep affect, we quell our patients’ fears of opening themselves up and touching their own true self. In this sense, the therapist’s countertransference becomes a valuable tool because it casts the therapist in their humanity and fallibility and in so doing not only unburdens the patient (I am like you) but also brings them closer together.

Ehrenberg asks that together, both parties remain in the thick of things, and when they cannot do so, to engage each other in reflecting on why it has become so difficult to be with the other. In other words, she invites the couple to actively explore the therapeutic stalemate (Ehrenberg, 2000). Once we become entangled and twisted up in unconscious communication with our patients, we need to set about intentionally untangling one another (Ehrenberg, 1984, 1986).

Her “direct affective engagement” (Ehrenberg, 1996, p. 278) not only means that both participants are responsible for and fully immersed in the transference-countertransference configurations, but that the to-and-fro of these relational shifts can be shared and thus processed. A collaborative space is cleared for both participants to “unpack complex interactive subtleties” (Ehrenberg, 2000, p. 585), in that both are co-instigators of the moment-to-moment psychotherapeutic interaction. In true two-person fashion, Ehrenberg goes beyond abstinence and denial and explicitly talks about the relationship at hand by reflecting on her countertransference and opening it up to the floor (Yalom, 2001). The therapist reaches out and shares the dilemma or struggle in the relationship and, in turn, promotes the patient offering his or her interpretation as to where the relationship stands. Herein, Ehrenberg (2003, 2010) refutes the idea that the therapist can colonize the patient’s internal emotional landscape with an all-knowing interpretation. Rather, she places priority on being sensitive to the unique moment between herself and the other person, and, therefore, does not foresee using a specific intervention. Ehrenberg (1992, 1995) draws on what she feels will honor the interaction between her and her patient in the moment, thinking through it, and in the instance of one patient, Majorie, an “emotionally dead” toddler, actively howling to capture her attention and to resuscitate her.

This quote emphasizes Ehrenberg’s relational psychotherapeutic stance; its locus cannot be banished to the inside of one “sicker” individual. We need to be willing to take meaningful emotional risks with our patients in order to reach them. Whether we howl, weep, lose our temper, self-disclose, keep still, stand our ground, or apologize, our action cannot be prescribed nor proscribed unless we have climbed into the interaction and determined whether it holds the potential to be destructive or constructive to the patient, our shared relationship, or to ourselves.

Though Ehrenberg (2006) is not against techniques such as free-association per se, she speaks of the need to be aware of the distancing and defensive quality that such techniques may present to both the therapist and the patient. In this way, the therapist may use interpretation, silence, and reverie, or adhere to non-negotiable frame considerations, to remain untouched and safely removed from revealing their reactions to the patient’s pricks and tickles. This could be seen as a form of defensively motivated false self functioning on the part of the therapist (Ehrenberg, 1996, 2003).

Moth to the Flame: The Threat of Desire, Vulnerability, and Intimacy

According to Ehrenberg (1992), toxic early relationships compel individuals to close themselves off to experiencing desire. For the desire to relate requires one to place oneself in a position of alarming vulnerability that may not be attentively met by the other. The individual not only steers clear of interactions that produce shame-laden affective states, but disavows the desire for intimacy. Need, dependence and tenderness are construed as dangerous, threatening, and grounds for humiliation and rejection. However, by definition, authentic intimate relatedness must occur through vulnerability in relation to an Other, and it is this surrender that has the potential to unfreeze the individual and thaw their sense of feeling “dead,” false, isolated and robotic within daily life. We believe that it is only in the context of being with a receptive Other that we come to know and be our true selves. Independence and self-reliance merely promise a brittle self.

In this light, therapy offers the fragile, frightened self a viable context in which to unfurl, awaken and enliven. The fountain of aliveness and all other attachment processes require an interpersonal context to evolve. “The ‘intimate edge’ becomes the ‘growing edge’ of the relationship” (Ehrenberg, 1992, p. 34). The “intimate edge” is thus never set in concrete; rather, it is like the tides coming to the shores, constantly in ebb and flow. When one risks coming in close, one finds not only the other but also oneself. Self-experience is built in the cradle of self-with-other experiences. A self can thus only be created within an affectively alive relationship that welcomes and houses inevitable conflict.

Neil

I (S.H., the second author), find myself remaining in the thick of things with Neil, a male in his 30s who had a traumatic childhood history. Neil’s father abandoned him after his birth, and his mother, tightly wrapped up in herself, was unable to provide her son with the cradle for connection and intimacy. He felt used and betrayed. It was a childhood lost at the hands of greedy “takers” and abusive authority figures. His mistrust and rage towards others continued throughout his adolescence, where his male high-school peers would recruit him into their clique as “it was always easier to pick up the girls” with him around. Neil was used as bait by his peers mostly due to his status as an outsider, as well as the intriguing air of charm and confidence he carried around. However, in an effort for self-protection, Neil found himself refusing, as he did not want to be used as a prop to satisfy the needs of others.

The first phase of psychotherapy was marked by a sense of deadness. I felt caught in a tortuous meandering of words and thoughts that culminated in a sea of lifelessness and boredom. We were excluded from a mutual engagement that held the potential to feel desirous, alive, and playful.

By the eighth month of psychotherapy, Neil started repeatedly asking me what was wrong with him. At the time, I did not realize that it must have taken tremendous courage to risk asking me that question. It was something which he had never done before. Instead of answering him, I chose to interpret his requests. I asked him what he imagined me saying, and he responded, “I want to know if I am bad, if I have a problem, or if it’s just the way my wife sees me.” I, in turn, asked him whether it mattered what I said as perhaps he wanted to elicit a final judgment from me confirming his badness.

His question did matter to him! Yet, I missed this by choosing to remain impartial and by withholding my subjectivity. My action suggested to him that it was shameful to engage me directly.

Neil relayed that at the age of 16 he had made a list of people who had hurt him throughout his life, and he imagined how he would kill them one day. He also added he was intent on buying a gun to kill his wife’s friends (“they will get what is coming to them”). He continued, “the day will come … the day will come.” At that moment I felt pushed into a corner, trapped, and paralyzed with dread. As we unpacked the subtleties of what had transpired more closely, it emerged that Neil’s powerlessness in response to my omnipotent desire to abstain from a more affective mutual kind of engagement shored up his painful experiences of being done-to by more powerful others. Furthermore, my desire to hold onto my power emerged from my implicit fear of feeling at the mercy of Neil the persecutor–a terror of being in the firing line of Neil the gunman. We were able to explore how my unconscious refusal to engage with Neil’s risky, self-exposing question, and the hurt that this had exposed him to, set up a doer-done-to complementarity in which the power dynamics had been reversed (Benjamin, 1988).

The enactment around my refusal to engage Neil, and the subsequent escalation of his murderous rage, revealed how we had protected each other not only from this hidden side of Neil, but also showed how my fear of directly engaging him, or confronting him, kept me locked in a power position that shielded me from feeling scared and unprotected in his presence. The more I stayed in this position, the more he asserted his rage, until the doer-done-to dynamics had been completely reversed. By setting a limit to his threatening behaviour, while also acknowledging the extent to which I had hurt him, we were able to move out of the impasse. We were able to open up to joint exploration our shared experience of fear, threat, and power in the consulting room. In sharing my subjective experience of the relationship, and the part that I had become aware of playing, we moved from a state of reacting to a space in which we could both hear each other and tap into those dissociated parts of ourselves that precipitated the breakdown.

When Neil and I caved into impasse, he felt as if the claim to thinking about our relationship was mine alone. My way of seeing him was the official one; the only one (Benjamin, 2004). His insistence to know what I thought of him not only attested to the fact that I had become the omnipotent, unyielding wizard, I had also hidden behind this part to protect myself from acknowledging that I was playing a more sadistic role. It was when we were able to recognize that I had recreated an earlier wound of his and mine that the complementarity dissolved (Benjamin, 2004), and he was able to express his hurt and shame more openly.

In the following session, Neil said, “I don’t like it that I always need to know what people think of me or expect from me. But I do it because I don’t want them to think I am bad.” He went onto to describe how a builder always needs to know exactly what tools are required before he can even remotely begin to build a house. I understand this as Neil’s need to have his anxieties and fears known by me before he can even begin to risk building a trusting connection with me.

Now, eighteen months into his therapy, Neil still huddles in his hole, afraid of hurting and being hurt. However, following the deconstruction of our mutual enactment the initial deadness in our process has given way to an intensified feeling of closeness and spontaneity. He is also gradually risking the degree of his vulnerability in tandem with my growing affection towards him. Recently, Neil has tenderly remarked, “You remind me of my best friend … the emotional connection is there.”

Actions Speak Louder than Words

Freud, in discovering the talking cure, found that it is the felt affectladen aspect of what the patient recalls that leads to resolution of the previously repressed trauma (Breuer & Freud, 1895). Without affect we cannot hope for a cure. However, Ehrenberg (1984) goes further and argues that it is not just the patient’s affect that needs to be aroused, but also the therapist’s emotions that need to be stirred. There needs to be a palpable affective interchange to kindle the healing. Slushing the affect to and fro spins the intimacy between patient and therapist.

This engagement goes beyond the more classical, rigorous techniques in which the therapist is more likely to interpret what her patients’ induce in her as such, “You conjured this up in me” (Gerhardt, & Sweetnam, 2001). For instance, less relationally inclined psychotherapists do not seem to share with their patients the impact patients have on them. Ehrenberg (1992) may say to her patient, “I don’t like to be threatened” whereas, the Object Relations therapist informed by projective identification might stop at, “You are threatening me.” One could wonder whether an Object Relations therapist’s patients ever glimpse the real person, not only who they make of their therapist. In contrast, Ehrenberg’s more relationally authentic and honest use of self tends to enliven the affective tone of the interaction.

Breaking Open to Desire

Ehrenberg (2003) does not infantilize her patients in that she resists assuming an all-knowing stance towards them, nor does she coddle them by being overly warm and attuned. In her ample clinical examples, she demonstrates how she fosters self-agency in her patients by pointing out that they themselves are responsible for their actions (or for choosing to disavow responsibility for their actions). As such, she conveys that she will not be controlled or manipulated by the omnipotent needs of the patient, and thereby she portrays resilience in surviving the patient’s aggression (Winnicott, 1947/1975; Benjamin, 1988). Yet, her playfulness and use of mutually enjoyed mirth affirms and bolsters the vitality of the patient and reflects the whole pleasant/unpleasant truth about the human condition (Ehrenberg, 1976, 1990, 1991). However, as Ehrenberg (1992) cautions this would need to be sifted through and opened up for mutual exploration of the transference-countertransference, as playfulness can easily disguise the therapist’s attempts at posturing or ridicule.

Ehrenberg (1984, 2004, 2006) demonstrates an unwavering commitment to being her real self with her patients and, if she appears inauthentic, she bears that responsibility too. This emphasis on personal responsibility conveys to patients the belief that they can function on their own behalf. Furthermore, in promoting the subjectivity of the therapist, Ehrenberg demonstrates that each is entitled to their own experience, even when it jars with the other’s experience of the interaction. No person is the sole “arbiter of reality” (Ehrenberg, 2003, p. 580). Such respect for individual subjectivity counteracts the need for patients with histories of emotional violation to continue to live out a compliant self that originated in their childhood. Emotional insight lies within the patient’s understanding and needs to be self-grown for insight to remain self-enhancing and transformational. Here Ehrenberg disrobes the traditional psychoanalytic therapist of their special powers–the potion of insight is not ours solely to dispense. By painstakingly staying at the intimate edge of the therapeutic encounter, the patient reaches insight on his own, and discovers resources and self-capabilities that were hidden until then. It is in the outflow of intimacy that self-capabilities germinate and thrive.

Furthermore, because our own blind spots form part of the intersubjective matrix, and these difficulties need to be negotiated relationally, our patients are enabled to examine their own blind spots without feelings of shame. If a patient is unwilling to discover their own contribution to the transference-countertransference dynamics due to shame-filled affects, then the therapist’s willing surrender to our countertransference permits the patient to comfortably discover and reveal hidden feelings. This form of self-disclosure is born from the two-person dimension of the therapeutic situation and not only deepens the relationship, but also allows the patient to encounter his own real or perceived transgressions without castigation, self-reprimand, or shame (Jaenicke, 2011).

Lily

Lily, a female in her late 20s, with a history of child sexual abuse came to me (S.H., second author) for once-weekly psychotherapy. In the middle phase of her therapy, she arrived for her afternoon session in a rather irritable and aggressive mood. I wondered what was occurring between us that had brought this about, and tracked my internal response to her mood as the session progressed. I became aware of feeling irritated and dismissive. I felt cornered. I recalled that while most of our previous interactions had been playful and spontaneous, this one seemed constricting and confrontational. I was also reminded of that part of her which she had previously referred to as “The Bachelorette.” The “bitchy raging monster” part that wielded power over men and stubbed out the kindled cigarette before it started burning.

At this moment in the session, I disclosed to Lily that I felt castrated and weak, and that her sarcastic responses seemed quite hurtful. It emerged that for some time now she could not get herself to feel vulnerable with me anymore. She needed to convey this by falling back on her trustworthy Bachelorette. As she remarked on her need to distance herself from me, I remembered feeling a diffuse sense of irritation in earlier sessions. In the previous session I had even enacted my irritation by responding to her news of her successful participation in a sporting event somewhat indifferently. I wondered whether Lily had sensed my irritation even before she needed to call on her Bachelorette.

Indeed, my disclosure and the subsequent elaboration of her stilted vulnerability in relation to me enabled us to examine the transferencecountertransference lock-down. We vacillated between victimizer and victim, winner or loser, my reality or your reality. Sharing my feelings enabled me to elaborate the impact her Bachelorette had on me, which facilitated Lily’s recognition of disavowing desire and her fears of humiliation in being seen by an Other in an intimate way.

Up until that point in our process, Lily enacted the Bachelorette in her need to have me know that while she was once able to risk being vulnerable with me, she was now wounded, retreating into her cocoon. Once I was able to understand that my irritation was not related to Lily taking control of the sessions, but rather a product of my own historical anxieties around being confronted with the vulnerability of significant female figures in my life, I realized that Lily must have been convinced that I did not want to know her more vulnerable self. We were continually crashing against each other. In these crashes, we were both willing and unwilling to see each other, and heading for collision/collusion. Because we were able to navigate the experience of her anger resulting from the encapsulation of her vulnerability in response to me, Lily was able to link her Bachelorette to a sadness of a painful bullying experience as a child:

“I have to dominate others, become bitchy and aggressive, because if I don’t they will hurt me … but then I end up chasing them away”. She continued, “I feel like someone is going to come knocking on the door and tell me that all your empathy and feeling things for me is untrue because it was all a fake, both on your part and on mine”. In this instance, Lily’s desire for me to feel for her was made explicit. Her yearnings for connectedness, along with her terrified expectations of loss, doom, and exploitation, became the focus in the final stages of our therapy.

As we reflected in our final sessions, Lily’s desire broke open, and in her fullness she shared her metaphor with me. Indeed, her creativity is one of the many things I love about her. Through the metaphor, she described her experience of being in psychotherapy with me:

Dancing at the Intimate Edge … Forty Years of Thrills

In this highly involved dance of relational psychoanalytic therapy, Ehrenberg (2003) does not resort to coercion, overexposure, or intrusiveness. She holds that an intimate relationship also needs to make room for self-definition (Ehrenberg, 1985), for the self to be private (Ehrenberg, 2003), and for the self to go into hiding, with the potential attendant desire to be come after by the other and be found (Winnicott, 1965/1990; Ehrenberg, 1992). Furthermore, she encourages the idea that the patient needs to set the pace of the interaction (Ehrenberg, 2003).

Ehrenberg’s elaboration of the intimate edge can be easily misunderstood as advocating a therapeutic intimacy devoid of confrontation, which breeds sought-after, regressive closeness and warmth. It can also be misinterpreted as an ad-hoc, dicey, off-the-cuff manner of deliberately inserting oneself into the patient’s psychic space. However, a careful study of her definition of intimacy reveals that it neither excludes conflict or confrontation, nor does it imply a treacherous openness to boundary transgressions on the other end of the spectrum. On the contrary, working at the intimate edge requires that the therapist be highly vigilant of and sensitive to the psychic boundaries demarcating the analytic couple.

Clarifying when the therapist’s response feels colonizing or coercive to the patient, or when the therapist feels coerced by the patient, is key to the sense of personal responsibility the therapist must bear when working at the intimate edge. The intimate edge is thus about the therapist’s selfdelineation and attunement to the patient’s ability to demarcate emotional boundaries. It is about staying true to the perimeters of what is or is not holding the interaction together, even if this means disclosure of the therapist’s personal reactions and limits. Moreover, closeness, which results from this kind of affective honesty, should not be viewed as antithetical to conflict since Ehrenberg’s numerous clinical examples indicate that closeness can be achieved in the storm of conflict (Ehrenberg, 1992). The therapist’s commitment to affective honesty and respect of the Other’s personal, separate integrity (the “edge” in the intimate edge) transforms the potentially destructive elements of conflict into a mutually generative attachment (the “intimate” in the intimate edge). In this sense, conflict is not opposed to intimacy, it is the needle that can both pierce and stitch the fabric of the interaction.

Ehrenberg’s therapeutic stance and deep knowing of the contemporary psychoanalytic endeavor has been described by highlighting key aspects, but her therapy goes straight to the heart of what it means to be a therapist. She states,