Ruggiero - Working with Borderline Patients

"Borderline patients force the analyst into a continuous work of auto-analysis, through which he can – in fact through the process of mirroring – encounter the other, the unknown, the disturbing element inside the self, in an inexhaustible process of re-attributing meaning in apr s-coup to elements which are not yet conscious, whose existence the analyst intuits sometimes only vaguely. The inevitable experiences of symmetry must not in any way allow a loss of sight, even for a moment, of the necessary asymmetry of the analytic relationship, and the fact that both self-analysis and the analysis of the countertransference need to be carried out in terms of the patient and in terms of the understanding of his internal world (Bollas, 1987). Only on this basis can the recognition of the contribution which the analyst brings to the analysis – with his strange subjectivity – foster a better understanding of the patient’s intrapsychic region and the connections between what emerges in the here and now of the session and the patient’s personal history, as he is rebuilding it in the course of the analysis, in a process of continual rewriting, transformation and integration between reality that is both internal and external, both intrapsychic and interpsychic." (p. 604)

Irene Ruggiero (2012) The Unreachable Object? Difficulties and Paradoxes in the Analytical Relationship with Borderline Patients, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 93, pp. 585–606