I’m commenting today as an analysand, a graduate of two decade-long analyses, which I’ve written about in my forthcoming book, UNTANGLING: A MEMOIR OF PSYCHOANALYSIS. In it, I examine some of the same themes covered in Alice Sommatis and Roberto Vargas Arreolo’s papers. Which is why I so appreciated how they put into words an analytic experience I wasn’t quite aware I’d had but recognized immediately, not only of having had it but of the central role it can play in the resolution of an analysis, my own included.

Alice Sommatis’ exploration of “home” as wholeness and an expression of our need for security, belonging, and intimacy comes to life in her tender evocation of her work with Chiara, who arrives in her office emotionally “unhoused,” we might say, and with whom she gradually co-constructs an analytic home. Inside it, Chiara is able to internalize a true sense of home - that is, of being at home in the world and with herself.

Sommatis describes her analytic process with Chiara, beginning with their “lightning-fast connection” and her love for this bright, beautiful, and emotionally muted patient. As the two increasingly engage, Chiara delights in dream interpretation. When Chiara finally describes a recurring dream of herself in a lifeless house whose rooms imprison her, she and Sommatis track how the house takes on color in subsequent dreams, and eventually, Chiara can see through its windows to the beach beyond.

Sommatis’ language casts this analysis in an expressly feminine hue. That most female of images, Mother Nature, makes its appearance in Chiara’s dream vision of “a calm sea caressing her” and in Sommatis’ perception that “Chiara was raining, it was pouring” when she cried in session for the first time. The feminine appears again in Sommatis’ sense that she was sewing a quilt of Chiara’s life to help her connect the seemingly incompatible versions of herself. As the quilt’s motley squares become a warm blanket of protection, Chiara’s dream house turns into a cozy home where a maternal woman helps pregnant Chiara deliver her baby. This dream they do not fully interpret. The fullness of their final silence conveys the depth of their relationship and the transformative power of their analytic home. Sommatis says it was “one of the most moving silences [she] ever experienced.”

Most moving to me is how that moment of recognition is a rebirth for both analysand and analyst, who has grown comfortable with her authentic self, including her slouching posture and colorful expressions. Their silence brought to mind one of those moments Michael Eigen writes about, “when psychoanalysis is a form of prayer.”*

I’d like to refer now to my own analysis, where I hadn’t realized my analyst, and I had created an analytic home until year 9. It was during the pandemic lockdown when, like so many others, my analyst gave up her office. We decided then to meet – six feet apart – in my office in an outbuilding separate from my home.

I was apprehensive about whether this might be too much exposure in my already exposing role of analysand. Would the pictures on my wall, the work on my desk, the books on my shelves overwhelm me and distract her? But then there we were, she on the couch and me in a rocking chair across. She did not even seem to notice the room. After a moment, I was, as I had been in that late portion of my transference: rapt, and safe in her gaze.

I recognized we were lightyears from where we started, when my formal distance had been almost impenetrable and my connection to her, at least in my mind, transactional; I was paying someone with the skill set to offer new perspectives on my anxieties and nightmares.

However, this analysis had been a metamorphosis for me. My analyst had reached for me with enough attunement to my defenses that, almost without my knowing it, like Chiara, I began to co-inhabit our private space. By the time I allowed myself to know just how attached I was to her, dependent, and at times, quaveringly regressed, we had created a language so much our own that I often thought of us in session as jazz musicians riffing some beautiful melody.

Our analytic home was strong enough to withstand her move 1,000 miles away when we could see each other only via zoom. Though it took me months to come back from the dark of my anger at her “leaving me,” our sense of home lit up, as it did for Sommatis and Chiara, with the electricity of connection.

Roberto Vargas Arreolo’s discussion might be said to pick up where Alice Sommatis’ leaves off, his immersing us in the “metabolized and symbolic” process that is the mystery element in an analysis. His is a kind of micro account to Sommatis’ macro, representing the level where analyst and analysand confront the unknown. In Vargas Arreolo’s paper, psychoanalysis might be described more as a sensibility than a skill or an art, the locus of questions rather than answers. In the strangely “unpersoned” world he portrays, there is no patient, only the dreamer, who is unnamed and largely unknown, leaving us to wonder, why this anonymity? Why so little biographical detail? Readers may feel some shock, as I did, at the casual way he writes that at age 7 the dreamer’s friend Ernesto died, with no mention of how this happened. As readers, we may feel the dreamer’s struggle to escape, but from what exactly we are not told. We are left pondering: who is the dead child in the dreamer’s psyche? Does it represent the trauma of Ernesto’s loss?

Or, perhaps, of a childhood trying to escape the same fate? Or is it the symbolic dead child the dreamer carries within?

What we are told is that the dead child is an alter ego who, we understand, shares the dreamer’s suffering. Over time, presumably in their analytic home, the dreamer’s dreams show him reunited with Ernesto, escaping their imprisonment together. Resisting the impulse to interpret or make meaning, Vargas Arreolo “lets the dreamer’s experience guide the therapeutic process” and leaves the dreamer and reader to be worked on by the dream, only asking the dreamer the marvelous question: “what do you imagine will happen after this story”? Which repositions him as writer rather than subject, witness to his past instead of its victim; it provides an “horizon” beyond imprisonment, much like the one symbolized by Chiara’s “calm sea.” In Vargas Arreolo’s rendering, however, his focus is on the psyche freed from the archetypal where life is a “fairy tale” rather than a “destiny” grounded in reality.

Vargas Arreolo’s description of the dream is suffused with the language of fairy tale. It takes place in “the temple,” where a “riot” of those who’ve lost their faith is rapidly growing dangerous, reminding Vargas Arreolo of Freud’s reference to a parody of a bible story in which a soldier shouts “the General has lost his head.” The image suggests that Authority – including Freud, I presume – is dead. For the dreamer, the old structure has broken down and all hell has broken loose, as 5 happens in psychoanalysis. However, when “the dejected souls of men” single out the dreamer, he escapes with Ernesto, who appears at his side. Together, they run until they find a “house with a tremulous light” where they can rest.

The dreamer eventually dreams himself out of the fairy tale and into his destiny, a shift that is illustrated when he no longer moves in parallel with Ernesto but encounters him face to face, understanding himself to be the witness, and also the one in the dyad who survived.

Referring again to my analytic experience, I can identify such a symbolic dream moment somewhere in the middle period when my nightmares woke me screaming a couple of times a week, also waking my husband and our dogs. I began then to email my analyst to describe my night terrors as they were happening. Her warm insightful responses broke through my reserve to the point where I felt like I was holding onto her for dear life. As we identified the murderous dream figures as myself, trying to kill off the part of me I could not allow, all hell broke loose and I fell into a chaos of desperations. However, in time, like the dreamer, I “pronounced myself” in my nightmares, yelling things like “Go on, kill me, you Son of a Bitch” to my attackers, who gradually turned benign as I reconnected with the child buried inside, like Chiara and the dreamer did.

In important ways, Alice Sommatis and Roberto Vargas Arreolo’s papers are companion pieces, ultimately celebrating the mysterious unknowns of analysis as 6 well as the illuminative quality of an analytic home, inherent in the story of Chiara, whose very name means light, and of our dreamer, who reaches the “house with a tremulous light.” Both papers depict the inexpressible complexity of the psyche, where emotional forces are in constant play and where, often, our only language for it is metaphor, image, and silence.

*Michael Eigen, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, (London and New York: Free Association Books, 1998), p. 11. 7