'From Resemblance to Identity': The Internal Narrative of a Fifty Minute Hour. Interdisciplinary Seminar with Margot Waddell

Abstract

This paper arose from the conjunction of a supervisory session with long-standing tussles of my own, both around the nature of what we call 'identity' and around some of Bion's central clinical conceptualisations.

Writing the paper was a way not so much of pinning down, or pinioning (and thereby closing off) the conceptual flow, but rather of helping myself to get the 'gist', to use Bion's word, of what he was getting at.

At the heart of the paper is what is meant by 'coming into mind' through the process of creative communication. An analysis that had become stuck in the endless routine of the past, aggrieved bones of a failed marriage is seemingly reawakened in the present by the analyst's capacity, through 'reverie', to be in touch with his patient's emotional experience at the time, and through the patient's capacity, in turn, to move into a different mental register from that of the past. A meaningful pattern slowly emerges.

Speaker Biography

Margot Waddell is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She works in private practice and was for many years a Consultant Child Psychotherapist in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic, London. She teaches and lectures both in Britain and abroad. The second edition of her book, Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Development of the Personality, was part of the Tavistock Clinic book series, of which she is the editor.

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