Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Approach

by Joyce Anne Slochower

In Holding and A Relational Perspective , Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the analytic holding environment. She presents a fresh, thought-provoking, and clinically useful integration of Winnicott's seminal insights with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic contributions. Seeking to broaden the concept of holding beyond work with severely regressed patients, she addresses holding in a variety of clinical contexts and focuses especially on holding processes in relation to issues of dependence, self-involvement, and hate. She also considers clinical work with patients "on the edge" - patients who seem deperately to need a holding experience that remains paradoxically elusive. Slochower begins her study by questioning the therapeutic limitations of an interactive style. There are times, she proposes, when certain patients simply cannot tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate subjective presence and instead need a holding experience. Though this holding function is essential to work with difficult patients, it enters into the treatment of all patients, whether as figure or ground. Slochower's relational understanding of holding leads her to consider the impact of holding on patient and analyst alike. Throughout, she emphasizes the analyst's and the patient's co-construction, during moments of holding, of an essential illusion of analytic attunement; this illusion serves to protect the patient from potentially disruptive aspects of the analyst's subjective presence. Slochower's case vignettes helpfully illuminate the intersubjective aspects of the holding process, including the clinical picture when a holding frame fails. She elaborates her thesis by considering the therapeutic function of holding in mourning. And she concludes her study with a cogent examination of the theoretical and clinical limitations of working with a holding process. A welcome reprise on an essential Winnicottian theme, Holding and Psychoanalysis broadens and deepens our understanding of the therapeutic role of the analyst's holding function.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology

204 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

Reviews

[Antigone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holding is a method available for use in psychological treatment. It is an approach adopted by therapists who find themselves confronted by a particularly vulnerable patient. Arising from the studies of noted object relations theorist Donald Winnicott, the creation of a "holding environment" is an analyst's attempt to mirror the safe, supportive, and attentive dynamic that exists between an attuned mother and her child. This is a powerful interactive experience and one that, it is posited, lays the foundation for optimism in all future human-to-human exchanges.

Joyce Anne Slochower, a visiting clinical professor at New York University's Department of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, has written a richly-delineated and illuminating work on the subject of holding in the therapeutic process. She speaks to both the model and the metaphor, then examines situations of particular difficulty for the analyst - such as holding a self-involved patient and the holding of ruthlessness and hate. (When given a safe enough space, what is repressed will often rise to the surface.) Also addressed are failures in holding, the holding function of mourning, and a fascinating chapter she titles "On the Edge," which deals with patients "who seem to remain on the perimeter of the treatment experience, forever returning to states of mistrust and despair about themselves as well as the analytic process."

This is a short book, less than two hundred pages, and designed for those possessed of more than a passing acquaintance with psychology and the treatment dynamic. However, should you find the subject of interest? It would be hard to locate a better modern-day treatise on the method than this.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meditative, lovely.