What makes a conversation a psychoanalytic encounter? Is it a consulting room? Is it a couch? Perhaps it is a flow of free associations that is thought of in an analytic way? Or is it a work with the transference?
In their presentation at the Ferenczi’s 150th Anniversary Conference in Budapest, training psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist João Adolfo Nogueira together with his colleague, psychotherapist and psychiatric nurse Luís Miguel Vieira, engage the above questions. Below is a commentary on this presentation, discussing their clinical experience of working in the project ‘Consultations without Walls’, which began in 2019 and is ran by the Manicómio Association, based in Lisbon. There, as they state: “a new paradigm emerges from associating the open space (open space sessions) and art, and building a different therapeutic setting where the unconscious is resymbolized”.
The project proposes a psychoanalytic encounter in the museum space; the conversation often happens while walking, and the changes in the museum space are unexpected for both the analyst and the patient and vary from session to session. It is up to the patient to decide whether to sit or walk and how to use the museum space. Analytic work is to follow. The function of art is seen as a metatongue, “a catalyst of non-conscious contents that lead us to follow the footprints that the unconscious leaves in the other, learning to follow their path (Monteiro, 2023)”.
This requires, first, a rethinking of the analytic space for the analyst. João and Miguel argued that in the usual setting, an analyst “makes himself safe”. In the familiarity of the space, filled with objects, books, and the sameness of the light and even colours, there might be a growing sense of “analytic numbing, preventing, in some way, the return to the naturalness of time suspended”.
Taken out of their analytic room, analysts face the necessity to shift their position: “by working in creative spaces, the space does not imply an active posture of the therapist, in fact, it is the analysand who chooses the real path he is taking, and the therapist follows his or her footsteps (Gutiérrez Peláez, 2018).”
Another important shift in the setting is that the flow of associations is situated in different spatio-temporal coordinates. “The invitations are fluid, because in the exhibition space, the randomness of the objects and of the route to be taken has no script, they are the result of the moment. This is the time to go through the space of what is physical and mental. The space-time, the space of encounter, where the elements are recombined in order to have access to what is there, is the unique dimension of each person. What remains is the created possibility, the human matrix, of the encounter, and giving meaning to what apparently has no meaning”. The function of the container, thus, lies in the capacity of the space to evoke the associative process, rather than being achieved via repetition of the sameness of the analytic space.
For João and Miguel it is aligned with “[their] clinical experience in this context seems to favour this recombination, since the environment is loaded with symbolisms which derive from representations of the non-conscious, as if we were always facing expressions of the oneiric universe and which frequently pass the barrier of the individual’s active critical defences, and may favour the access to mental material, less accessible and capable of being thought, catalysing the alpha-analytic function (Bion, 1994).”
Reconfigurations of the frame that João and Miguel offer in their presentation are important for the FREEPSY project. The experience they bring offers alternative spatio-temporal coordinates for psychoanalytic settings. Instead of the traditional space of the consulting room, the space for the psychoanalytic encounter is transferred to the field of language. In that sense, museum walls as such do not provide space. Rather, they mediate the conversation. For the analyst, being displaced from the temporality of their consulting room and working in the museum is a shift that activates the creative process.
The full text of the presentation is available here:
References:
Bion, W. R. (1994), Estudos psicanalíticos revisados. Tradução: Wellington M. de Melo Dantas. 3 ed. Rio de Janeiro: Imago.
Gutiérrez Peláez, M. (2018), Confusion of Tongues, A Return to Sándor Ferenczi; New York: Routledge.
Monteiro, I. (2023), Hansel and Gretel looking for footprints, Watercolour on paper.
