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Book Review: Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys

A close reading of Philip Bromberg’s beautifully written work led me to an intensive reflection on my clinical practice, especially on moments when I had been in unconsciously dissociated enactments with patients and I could feel a sudden shift in awareness that awakened us both. Bromberg, one of the original proponents of the field of relational psychoanalysis, understands the mind as a non-linear relational process of meaning construction. He takes psyche to be an ongoing self-organizing system of multiple selves, and in a variety of lucid clinical vignettes (hence the subtitle of his new book Awakening the dreamer: clinical journeys) he sensitively portrays moments in which analyst and patient are involved in subtle changes of self states. We all know such moments well, when something shifts in the atmosphere of the therapy room and you have the feeling that a whole new climate is suddenly present. A usually dissociated self state has entered, taking the actors, analyst and patient, by surprise. This is frequently experienced as a change in the embodied felt presence of the analyst. Bromberg says (p. 131) ‘the analyst’s role is not to avoid personal participation in the process, but continually to monitor and use the immediate and residual effect of his personal participation as an inherent part of his stance.’ This stance culminates around the problem of self-revelation by the analyst. Because Bromberg holds that an analyst’s personal feelings are not his own property but belong to the linkage between analyst and patient, he maintains that self-revelation is not just allowed, but frequently imperative. In such cases refraining from self-revelation may lead the patient to experience the analyst as ‘not, personally, feeling the impact of the dissociated parts of the patient’s self that are trying to find relational existence’ (p. 134). Bromberg warns that self-revelation creates unpredictable spontaneous effects and should be based on the analyst’s authentic belief that the process will be served by the revelation. Such an authentic belief can be obtained only through a self-reflective struggle, which should be included in the self-revelation. He includes the caveat that the analyst must weigh his affective honesty against the affective safety of the patient. In one vignette around the termination of an analysis with a patient he calls Katy, Bromberg finds himself in a daydream of teaching his young daughter how to ride a bike, when after holding on and feeling her teeter, he can feel the moment when she takes off and rides on her own. After telling this to Katy, she goes into a reverie of her own, connecting to previously dissociated feelings. ‘Would she be able to terminate analysis with a sense of self that allowed loving attachment and assertive self-expression to coexist, or would [these states] . . . remain dissociated from one another to assure that her core identity would survive our separation?’ (p. 19). The analyst’s self-revelation awakened them both from a cocoon that had kept them unconscious of crucial self states within the termination process, thus preventing a natural tendency towards dissociative splitting. Reading Bromberg is like having an intimate supervision session while enjoying the poetic potential of clinical prose.