The analyst is, in her own way, dispossessed in the moment of acting as its site of transfer for me, and for reason that I cannot know. What am I calling on her to be? And how does she take up that call? GA 55
… Bollas makes the case that the analyst must not only allow himself to become used but even “be prepared on occasion to become situationally ill” (Bollas 204). The analyst allows hims to be deployed in the environmental idiom of the analysand at the same time as he develops a reflective and deliberate capacity for analysis within that difficult situation. … One patient speaks and then falls silent, leaving Bollas with a sense of aloneness and disorientation. When he finally gives voice to this sense within the session, it is to suggest that for and with him the patient has effectively recreated the environment in which she had felt suddenly isolated and lost as a young child. He asks whether she has asked him to inhabit this experience through her long pauses so that he can know what it was she then felt. What she offers, then, is less a narrative than a recreated scene of suddenly abandoned communication and a disorienting loss of contact.
There is a narrative dimension to his subsequent intervention since he asks whether this experience belongs to her past. The point, however, is less to reconstruct the precise details of the story than to establish another possibility for communication within the transference.
When he suggests that she has given him the position of re-experiencing her own experience of loss and absence, he communicates to her in a way that has not been done before, and the conversation that follows, explicitly thematizing this broken form of communication, constitutes a more connected mode of communication, working to alter the default scene of address.
The model of psychoanalytic intervention that Bollas affirms constitutes a significant departure from the classical notion of the cold and distant analyst who keeps every counter-transferential issue to himself. For Bollas, “the analyst will need to become lost in the patient’s world, lost in the sense of not knowing what his feelings and states of mind are in any one moment” (qtd in Butler 57).
Later he remarks that only when the analyst presents himself to be used by the patient is there any hope that the counter-transference can facilitate a new set of object relations:
“Only by making a good object (the analyst) go somewhat mad can such a patient believe in his analysis and know that the analyst has been where he has been and has survived and emerged intact” (qtd in Butler 57).
Bollas clearly suggests that the analyst must allow him- or herself to be impinged upon by the client, even undergo a kind of dispossession of self, as well as to maintain a reflective psychoanalytic distance and attitude.
His interpretations were meant to be played with — kicked around, mulled over, torn to pieces — rather than regarded as the official version of the truth. [Bollas qtd in Butler 57].