A PARTICULAR PERSPECTIVE ON IMPASSES IN THE CLINICAL SITUATION - FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING

We tend to think of impasses as manifest, if often puzzling events, bu t they may also occur quietly, disguised. The analytic process may see m to be moving on course-yet, on further glance, there can be subtle e vidence that some impasse, at times just emerging, may be, perhaps col lusively, evaded. Often outside the patient's awareness, cues to its o ccurrence may be expressed in the vicissitudes of affect or state or s hift in content. When such phenomena go unnoted as vital communication s, ultimately, a more dramatic eruption may take place; or, perhaps mo re insidiously, some central conflictual feature of the patient's char acter continues unexamined, unabated. The author suggests an alteratio n in how we think about impasses-how pervasive they may be, even as we may believe we are seeing the ordinary ebbs and flows of resistances and defensive processes. Drawing upon four clinical examples, the effo rt is mane to elucidate the link between our understanding and recogni tion of the presence of an impasse and our mode of analytic listening.