A Novelist’s Sensibility in Chris Jaenicke’s The Search for a Relational Home: An Intersubjective View of Therapeutic Action

Abstract

T he relational shift in psychoanalysis has given us wonderful and strange new ideas about the intersubjective processes that advance the development of mind and emotional balance in analysis. In accretion, these ideas imagine the relational processes by which we become most human. Identifying and exploring the complex functioning of empathy, mentalization, emotional resonance, and enactments in the therapeutic encounter have also stimulated new clinical strategies. Yes, these ideas have captivated the world of contemporary psychoanalysis. But—and here’s the big “but”—illustrating relational ideas in all their interactional nuances has been problematic. So often, after reading a fascinating theoretical offering, I have been disappointed with the accompanying clinical examples. They often seem to fall back on familiar one-person presentations, skimping on the analyst’s interactional contributions and failing to capture the nuts-and-bolts processes that create unpredictable and ineffable meetings of subjectivities. It is almost as though one needs a novelist’s sensibility, specificity, and skill to express adequately the complex intersubjective experience. Enter Chris Jaenicke in his newest book The Search for a Relational Home: An Intersubjective View of Therapeutic Action (2015). Jaenicke, an adherent of intersubjectivity systems theory, practices and writes in Berlin and writes, I will add, with a