Abstract
Danièle Brun is an eminent French psychoanalyst whose work has explored feminine identity and gender issues in a series of books. Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Paris-Diderot, she is the founder of the Research Center of Psychoanalysis, Medicine, and Society. A Part of Oneself in the Life of Others, her most recent work, is a long essay in which she explores the intricacies between her clinical practice over the years and her personal life.
The interest and the difficulty in reviewing this work is that its discourse lies at the intersection of theory, clinical practice, and subjective association. In its intimate style and hybrid form, the essay reflects the three components of our daily psychoanalytic interventions. Thus, the tone of intimacy mixed with her subtle theoretical touch brings the reading of this book close to the analytic experience. By eschewing a metapsychological or scientific approach, the two stances most often taken in today’s psychoanalytic literature, Brun brings the reader to the core of the analytic process, within which the unconscious of analyst and analysand interact.
While she does not call this exchange intersubjective, Brun’s observations are precisely directed, as the title of her essay indicates, at the point of junction between the unconscious impact of the analysand’s life on the analyst’s and vice versa. This mutual influence, which intersubjectivists have theorized as the third analytic space, 1 is explored by Brun from within daily life events rather than from the transference.
The book starts with a personal anecdote that made Brun realize that her life had begun to look like her patients’ lives. At a theater, she unexpectedly met a former colleague with whom she had worked for years in a child oncological center. The two colleagues had not seen each other for several years and shared their misfortunes before the show: one of them had fought cancer herself; the other (Brun) had lost her daughter. Cancer and the loss of a child were part of the two analysts’ daily professional environment. From this specific situation and others, Brun explores various instances when analysts’ and analysands’ lives overlap.
With scrupulous attention to similarities among external events (see the chapter “Similitudes”), Brun notices patterns that raise new clinical questions. From her experience with parents and sick children at the oncological center, from her personal experience of child loss, and from Freud’s experience of Sophie’s death (1920), she observes an enigmatic sense of incredulity about our beloved’s disappearance that can turn into a self-punishing wish for death. Brun started to study this issue of incredulity (see the chapter “Incrédules”) when, in her practice at the hospital, she heard parents’ disbelief when informed that their child was in remission. To support her reflections on incredulity, Brun interprets Freud’s observation on the play of his grandchild rolling a dreidel and uttering aaaa (da, here) and ooo (fort, there), as an expression of disbelief from the child that the mother is gone: in the game, Freud’s grandchild makes his mother and himself appear and disappear (1920, pp. 14–15). From these examples, Brun goes on to speculate that the wish for our own death (that of the child within us) is a way to overcome our grief.
From these intellectual free associations, Brun organizes her essay around what could be called an intersubjective experience illustrating the various forms of unconscious influence between analyst and analysand. Using clinical vignettes, Brun develops paradoxical ideas about relatedness to the other.
Against the consensually expected empathy, Brun claims that being “outside oneself” (the chapter “A l’écart de soi”) might provide the opportunity for a significantly mutative psychoanalytic move. According to her, a dissociative state due to real traumatic situations (death, sickness, suicide, displacement, separations) may lead to inconceivable explorations between analyst and analysand. Brun’s work validates, without direct acknowledgment, much of the contemporary psychoanalytic literature on dissociation, which is viewed as a form of relatedness through “not-me-ness.”
Another form of dissociation she observes is the body reaction. Rather than invoking a causal relation between psyche and soma, Brun thinks sickness in fact creates a rupture, a dissociation, in their relatedness. The body becomes an outsider, unheimlich, and follows its own disregulation, leaving the psyche helpless and powerless. Brun argues that one can physically identify with the dead body of someone cherished and that this experience makes us feel outside our body. She illustrates this argument with poignant clinical examples of patients whose analysts had died and who resume analysis to recover their own body.
Brun defines psychoanalytic work as a movement back and forth, within and without, the transference between oneself and the other. The timelessness of the mutative connections among the analyst and her patients is the main argument of this essay.
However, Brun also evokes situations of alterity in this dyadic vision of the analytic work (the chapter “La part de l’autre en soi”). Brun takes supervision as an illustration of intrusiveness of an additional player in the unconscious identifications of analyst and patient. Money can also be understood, according to Brun, as an intruder in the relationship, inasmuch as money is the guarantee of the illusionary nature of the analytic relationship and is at the same time a reminder of its limited reality: the analyst has a separate life. Finally, Brun concludes in her last two chapters that the psychoanalytic dyad (la communauté, in Maurice Blanchot’s terms [1984]) transcends the limits of the here and now of the process and leaves traces of the other in analysand and analyst that endure over the years. In this very personal essay, Brun has retraced the links left over time, and après-coup, between the circumstances of her life and her patients’ lives.
Beyond the novelty of a new genre in psychoanalytic literature, this biographical essay on a clinical practice brings to the fore the role of the analyst’s mind and body in the patient’s treatment. The courage Brun displays in such an honest professional and personal exposure is edifying and worthy of admiration.
