4 Therapeutic Action as the Creation of Meaning
When repeated interpretations of the analytic interaction catalyze little movement, patient and analyst may think they are back at the start, but in fact they are not in the same place as their early encounters. The patient, now aware of the meaning of her habitual ways of relating, is not satisfied to continue them. Awareness of the circularity moves the analytic dyad into a relationship in which the old patterns are unacceptable, but no new configurations have emerged. As the patient now questions his reliance on historical transference patterns, the analytic relationship loses its previously defined form and leaves an ambiguous space where there was once a pattern of relating.
As we saw in
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