The Analyst’s Generous Involvement: Recognition and the “Tension of Tenderness”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractI define the analyst’s generous involvement as inherent to human encounter and a necessary element of therapeutic process. When the analyst’s generous involvement goes missing, it can be read as a sign of disengagement and disconnection. Using as metaphor H. S. Sullivan’s concept of the “tension of tenderness,” I argue that the analyst’s recognition of a need or affect state in the patient evokes an internal tug constituting the analyst’s need to provide for what has been recognized. I elaborate on what the analyst’s generous involvement is, and what it is not, including countertransference pitfalls and corruptions that may masquerade as generosity. I engage a relational conversation with the radical ethical ideas of Emmanuel Levinas. An extended clinical vignette illustrates the challenges and conflicts entailed in the analyst’s finding an analytically useful form of expressing the tug of generous involvement in the immediate moment. Notes1 CitationFerenczi’s (1932/1988) “cure through love” made him the widely recognized healer of last resort. His writings, so prescient and tacitly influential of many trends and concepts in contemporary psychoanalysis, were nearly expunged from the psychoanalytic literature and community until recent decades. His open and vulnerable explorations—in process, technique, and thinking—are both inspiring and disquieting. He is within psychoanalysis an original voice of generosity toward his patients. Yet his spirit of generosity, so worthy of note, seems so alloyed with projection of his own yearnings and idealizations, masochistic susceptibility, and reaction formation that I have not used his work as a conceptual model or an exemplar of generous analytic involvement.2 I thank David Goodman, Ph.D., for this idea (see CitationLevinas, 1985, p. 99), as well as for his generous conversations about Levinas (personal communication, June 2012).Additional informationNotes on contributorsStuart A. PizerStuart A. Pizer, Ph.D., ABPP, is a Founding Board Member, Faculty, Supervising and Personal Analyst, and former President, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis; Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Faculty, Supervising and Personal Analyst, Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia; Visiting Faculty and Member of the Advisory Board, Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis; and Honorary Faculty, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. He is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Associate Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He is a Past-President of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. His book Building Bridges: The Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis was published by The Analytic Press in 1998. He is in private practice in Cambridge, MA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".