The Risk of the Revelatory State

Abstract

Patients enter states that in their spontaneity and deep interiority have qualities of the revelatory. I propose we recognize such a state as a clinical event: The person is in a state of intense internal receiving of self. We might think of it as a state of internal communication happening as the person speaks. The person feels real to herself. Her relation to her mind in this revelatory moment is easily intruded on—even by ventures of play. When the state is gone, it is gone. I single out this clinical moment from moments that are cocreated and happening within an analytic third. I argue that in the revelatory moment, a patient builds capacities to be present for pain, desire—for raw experiences ordinarily difficult to access. The state makes a strict demand on the analyst. I see it as a moment of object usage—that is, it is a moment of risk with the analyst. This moment challenges and deepens our understanding of Winnicott’s usage formulation.

These risks simply must be taken by the patient.

—Winnicott (1969, p. 714)

My aim is to describe states of intense, spontaneous responsiveness to one’s mind as clinical events. Such a state is a thing in itself—a force for growth, an experience longed for, a capacity. Early trauma greatly interferes with this capacity. But also, it is a capacity that develops with use. Clinically, the state emerges from the ongoing work and relationship. The moment I describe might last 2 minutes or 20. I think it is usually affecting for the analyst, but it is also easy to miss as distinct. There is a shift in register. What the person says might be odd, confused but also notably apt, full of loss but vital, contradictory, hopeful, or condensed as in a dream. She is close to raw material ordinarily not accessible her—to anger, longings, fear, love, sorrow. The material is, of course, her. She is receiving herself. We might say she has found an internal witness. We might say that for this brief time, the communication the analyst listens to is primarily internal, within the patient. The analyst misses the significance of what is happening if she thinks of the moment as cocreated or shared, or as calling for an expression of empathy. This is a problem on a practical level—these acutely spontaneous states are exquisitely sensitive to intrusion, and when they are lost, they’re lost. Trying to get back into them is like trying to reenter a dream after being wakened.

Shared discovery of language and meaning, mutual ways of being with another—these form the basis of the psychoanalytic engagement. But at this moment, another event is under way. I propose that calling this state revelatory is the best way to show that it is an event and to give it dimension. Revelatory is the English language word for knowing and feeling something for the first time, with some kind of internal action making this sudden integration possible. Revelatory suggests a twoness, with one part of mind revealing, and the other receiving what is revealed as a revelation. Calling something revelatory sounds idealizing, but actually it is a specific definition. The revelatory moment is: new, spontaneous, it feels real, and it belongs to the person having it. Psychoanalytically, we might call it a state of radical noncompliance.

In Winnicott’s object usage theory, radical noncompliance is emergent, potentially transformative, and it is a dynamic between two people. Although I think of a clinical revelatory moment as internal, it makes sense to me as a moment of usage. Winnicott’s usage dynamic makes it possible to see that the states I describe are not the isolate experiences they would seem. Strangely, it is the opposite. By going more deeply into ourselves we take the risk of finding the realness of the other. That is a paradox of usage, and it is a lot to unpack. I will just say now that usage has its own mechanics and forms of success and failure, and these explain the clinical revelatory moment. They show it to be a uniquely healing and uniquely fraught patient/analyst dynamic.

Winnicott (1969) opens “The Use of an Object” by placing object usage theoretically in line with transitional experiences. As Michael Eigen (1981) describes, with usage “the core sense of creativeness that permeates transitional experience is reborn on a new level” (p. 413). This is how usage is written about, and undeniably, usage has its origins in transitional phenomena. But a revelatory usage is also distinct in terms of what we consider potential space. For example, I want to be clear that it is not a moment of play. An analyst’s venture to play would intrude on the moment; even the most precarious play calls a patient to engage with the analyst’s mind. If the patient responds to this call, and she probably will, her revelatory state is over. The analyst’s venture would be misapprehending the significant other event happening. There is a radical edge to this kind of usage. I suggest we see this edge when we see its deep relation to Winnicott’s concepts of aloneness (Winnicott 1958) and healthy communication between subjective objects (a patient’s silence while communication with subjective objects happens) (Winnicott 1963).

This discussion is about elusive, authentic dimensions of being. One way I hope to locate this register is by bringing in the original writer as an analogue to the patient in a revelatory moment. With “original writer” I mean no one category of writing—it could be fiction, nonfiction, theory, poetry. Roughly speaking, these are writers to whom things are revealed as they write. Such writers produce the kind of text that “invariably says more than its writer knows,” as philosopher Stanley Cavell (2003) describes, “so that writers and readers write and read beyond themselves” (p. 95). There are useful parallels between Cavell’s writer/reader experience and the patient/analyst experience in the revelatory moment. Original writers move into and out of these states; the states can’t be willed.

Before moving onto a clinical vignette, I want to give an example of a revelatory dynamic under way—that is how I read this scene of analytic restraint. The analyst is Antonino Ferro (2009, p. 225), and in his vignette he sits with his patient Filippo. Filippo is talking about painful material in a condensed, exuberant, richly associative way he has not used before. “I am astonished at the transformations taking place,” Ferro tells us. I imagine Ferro’s thinking also becomes richly associative, these states being contagious. But Ferro is careful. “I do not make use of these reveries of mine.” Not until the end of the session does he give a one-sentence unsaturated interpretation (“it is my cue to interpret,” Ferro tells us before telling the interpretation he gives). As I see it, Ferro’s astonishment and his restraint recognize both the force and the fragility of Filippo’s state. I believe Filippo feels (if not consciously) the recognition Ferro’s restraint enacts: Something very important is happening, now. I believe this is how Filippo’s intense, spontaneous state keeps going. Considering what happened in this session, Ferro quotes James Grotstein’s warning about the “dangers of [the analyst’s] curiosity.” We need “to ‘trust the [patient’s] truth or instinct drive.’” And “‘we need patience as a virtue.’” (Grotstein, 2007, p. 142) Ferro offers Grotstein’s delightful observation that when patients are in such states, we analysts are like actors being told by Hollywood producers, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you!” (2007, p. 142).

I want to explore the don’t call us, we’ll call you! clinical moment as a form of intense internal engagement along the lines of what Marion Milner (1969) describes as patients engaged with “a force in them to do with growth, growth toward their own shape, also as something that seemed to be sensed as driving them to break down false inner organizations which do not really belong to them” (pp. 384–385). The aliveness of such moments could happen in pain so rawly expressed that it seems to call out, or it could happen in the kind of imaginatively and affectively new engagement with material that Ferro finds astonishing in his session with Filippo. I want to conceptualize how this aliveness in these particular moments belongs the patient. I will argue that an analyst’s reception of this privacy is its own intense form of engagement. ¹

What am I Supposed to do With This?

The principal [of object usage] is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to be able to encompass what is known or become aware of it with acceptance. (Winnicott 1969, p. 711)

In our early months of meeting, Julie was wry, self-critical, sharply observant, and I could not get a sense of how to work with her. ² She was in her late 30s, blocked in an important writing project, and she had become a mother the year before. Julie described being intense and emotional “in an messy way” in early adulthood, and while she made it clear she was not interested in being messy now, I felt her tenderness for this earlier self. She questioned why she should engage in a writing project given her numerous difficulties with writing. Actually, I could glean from her narratives that an esteemed colleague was poaching from her work, in one case baldly. In our sessions, Julie’s response to the poaching was aggression-free. When I noted this, she was not very interested in the question. I got the sense Julie had an intensity and clarity—a capacity—that slipped in and out of dissociation. This was largely unavailable to us in our sessions. But it was available to Julie in those times she was able to write the kind of writing a colleague wanted to claim as their own. She was so-so about coming to analysis, and her husband had been encouraging her to begin therapy since her postpartum depression, which had lifted. Now a depression was back. There was significant intergenerational trauma in Julie’s family. She was the sibling closest to these relatives, and her family in general did not express strong feeling. When Julie’s eyes did tear in session, she would say, “What am I supposed to do with this?” The question was genuinely asked, and I would feel her irritation with me.

In the scene I am about to describe I was silent. I might have made some highly unsaturated comments, ³ and these may not have intruded on Julie’s state, but that’s not how it happened. I will stay close to how Julie told it to me. About 6 months in, Julie told me about seeing a painting at a Van Gogh exhibit when she was in her 20s. In the small painting a dark-haired man gazed out. She saw it after going through rooms of paintings “of everyone with averted eyes.” As Julie remembered it, the first room showed paintings of a young woman always in profile, gazing down or away—she looked depressed. In the next room there were more paintings of people with averted eyes, alone, or in groups, and even when gazes weren’t technically blank and averted, they still seemed so to Julie, each in its own way. Among these, Van Gogh’s self-portraits looked out with wild, lonely directness. The terrible thing was how the museum misunderstood the painting of the postman’s wife. In the paragraph next to the painting, it said Van Gogh was painting a mother’s love and devotion. The baby was out of the painting and the seated mother stared down to the side dully, her face closed. This is the face that the baby in the unpainted foreground would have looked up at from the cradle. On her lap the mother held a slack rope for rocking the cradle. It was horrible the writer got this wrong—didn’t people see anything? Then Julie went around a corner, and there was the small painting alone on its own wall. A dark-haired man with a beard gazed out, his eyes keenly interested, kind, intelligent. “He saw Van Gogh. Van Gogh loved him. I burst into tears,” Julie said, crying now. “It was so beautiful, I don’t know. Why this . . . I don’t know. I feel terrible.”

Someone saw what Julie saw, and that person gave the small painting its own wall. She was not left with the pain of being alone with seeing and knowing. It was one of those clinical moments when you think, yes, this is how this person suffers. It was as if wry, self-deprecating Julie had straightened in her chair and now, for the first time, gazed at me directly. Though in a concrete sense this was not how the moment between us looked. Julie cried and talked disjointedly as she laid out the scene and kept going. I felt I was watching feeling swell within her to the point of pain at its hugeness. Sharp aloneness comes with such excess and its inexpressibility. It is problem of management when you have such capacity to be moved. (And maybe we all have that capacity.)

Things Julie said in those 5 minutes had the wild aptness of images from dreams. Her extended pauses felt precipitous, and I wanted to move in, not leave her alone. When she talked again, I felt surprise and dismay at the strength of my impulses. I felt excited, protective, irrelevant—feelings that actually don’t go together very well. Julie’s capacity to stay near overwhelming feelings that could barely be represented disrupted me this way. The moment felt vivid and there was a feeling of incompleteness. Some of that comes from being close to the kind of experiencing Walter Benjamin (1968) describes as “decisive elements remain[ing] beyond all communication—quite close and yet infinitely remote, concealed or distinguishable, fragmented or powerful” (p. 79). But I think, too, the incompleteness I felt was my experience of Julie’s assertion of separateness.

Julie’s experience at the museum gives a way of thinking about a quiet and basic form of suffering—that of not able to receive one’s own powerful feelings. I think of an internal gaze averted, leaving Julie with an inert pain that did not feel like pain. At the time she spoke, I thought of her continual question, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

There was a lot of material in those averted gazes and the nonaverted one and in the risk she took with me. There was her intergenerational trauma and how Julie, the child who saw the pain in the dissociated gaze of some family members, carried this without being able to know what it was she carried. But she recognized the dissociation Van Gogh was compelled to paint. If I had talked about any of this then I would have called Julie back from where she was going. I imagine her pausing, becoming aware of me in the usual way and considering what I said. The risk Julie took by being so separate would be over. I have done this when patients are in revelatory states more times than I can say. I have acted from some state of feeling moved, disrupted, curious, anxious, enlivened, and irrelevant and joined in with thoughts of my own. I say something, the patient says something, we have an exchange, maybe a creative one we both value, or we seem to. But the person’s state of intensely receiving her mind is over. And in truth, there would be a drop in energy and avidness that I believe we both felt, just not very consciously. If we were to become more conscious of the loss (it is possibly an aching loss), what would we make of it? As analytic failures go, this is such a quiet one, and analytic couples can be so good at covering it up with their connectedness.

How to give dimension and urgency to such a scene? I am speaking now of a shift of register in the analyst. In the scene with Julie I was able to make the shift to being used, in the sense of object usage. In the generalized scene I just described, I could not. This shift in register is a shift into a form of restraint. This restraint is not just making room for a patient with silence or an unsaturated comment. It is active and emergent in ways I hope to find language for in this paper. My argument is that the patient in the revelatory state is in a state of risk with the analyst. The analyst may not receive the patient’s state for what it is: an achievement of internal spontaneity, by its nature an assertion of separateness. The analyst’s missing this may be due to the analyst’s own feelings of being opened up, or her anxious concern, or her difficulties with being left alone, or her difficulties with the rawness of the affect now available to the patient, or her mistaking the nature of the moment, or her sudden envy. Because of any of these or a combination, the analyst is not able to be used.

If the patient’s revelatory state is not received by the external other who matters a good deal, it risks becoming an existential repetition. For the adult, the ancient experience of there being no external, metabolizing witness to the child’s overwhelming experience is now its own trauma. We live with internalized refusals or incapacities to be a witness, with internalized blank stares. With these come inert pain, compliance, persecutory anxieties. Winnicott’s “unthinkable anxieties” and Bion’s “nameless dread,” which come from catastrophic failures in the parental environment, describe the most extreme states of this suffering. There is a version of the unthinkable, the nameless, when patients say, as they so often do that if they let themselves feel something they are just beginning to feel that it will never stop. Elsewhere I have suggested (Ballantyne 2018, p. 87) that dread’s relationship with unrepresented trauma is one on one. We analysts can try to empathically connect with a patient in the midst of dread but we will find them otherwise engaged. A person is alone with her dread. Maybe what is happening is that she has arrived at this point and once again found no inner capacity to receive very painful, disruptive experience. When patients are able to shift into a revelatory state, they have the chance to build the capacity to be their own receiving witness.

In a very out-of-awareness manner, they are on a mission. I want to be clear that I do not suggest that the lone (paradoxically lone) mission is more transformative than the shared one of cocreation. But it allows a particular nearness to the uncontained. It is the aggressive venture of separateness which the other might deny, and so it is an enactment of finding who the other is and of what can be ventured further.

I cannot help but see Julie’s scene at the museum as a waking dream that poses a question about who the analyst is in the revelatory moment. When Julie burst into tears at the museum she was startled by a mix of pain and joy that felt intensely real. As she described the scene, there were three important figures: herself, the man gazing out with keen, open interest, and the curator who gave the small painting such importance, a choice that startled Julie. Which of these two is the analyst? If I were talking about the cocreative work that largely constitutes and enlivens the psychoanalytic experience I would answer that the man gazing out is the analyst. Obviously! I’d say the curator is the analytic setting as a third, or it is an intersubjective third in which both analyst and patient are curator. But because I am talking about the revelatory, my answer is different. I see the man gazing out so keenly as a part of Julie, an internal figure found when she turned the corner after all those averted gazes. The curator who knew to give the small painting its own wall is the analyst. The way the curator is at once absent and very present in the scene captures the paradox of analytic listening and restraint when patients find states of intense responsiveness to themselves.

The question of what constitutes analytic restraint is long-standing and continually evolving. I want to note Robert Grossmark’s compelling work on being an “unobtrusive” analyst with patients “who barely experience continuity of self or subjectivity in themselves or others” and who are quite impaired in their ability to symbolize verbally. Grossmark is very protective of these patients’ inner world; he is careful that his subjectivity not impinge, particularly in a verbal form. He talks of “companioning” patients’ “arisings” that “announce their presence in alternate registers—motoric, sensory, hallucinogenic, oneiric, reverie, and above all, action” (Grossmark 2018, p. 3). His unobtrusiveness is a “receptivity to patients’ experiences of deadness, nonexistence, being in bits” (Grossmark 2012, p. 631). He does also describe patients quite able to engage intersubjectively but who have “unspeakable, and profoundly non-related parts of themselves that can find no expression in language” (Grossmark 2018, p. 3). In my terms it could be a revelatory moment when these nonrelated parts do begin to integrate and find expression in a jagged, highly idiosyncratic way, and I would argue that fragile internal receptiveness of the self, or of a part of the self is now happening for the patient. But fundamentally, Grossmark and I are talking about different clinical moments and challenges. He describes persistent states of not yet aliveness; I describe very alive states that are achieved and moved out of. He describes “joining” and “companioning” the patient “into areas of non-developed, non-related, and non-represented inner life” (Grossmark 2018, p. 4). I describe the discontinuous moment I realize the patient just leapt ahead. Not only does she not need to be joined in her revelatory moment, she can’t be joined unless I insert my subjectivity and call her out of her spontaneous internal engagement. He describes a nonimpingement of subjectivity that takes the form of “mutual regression” (Grossmark 2018, p. 2). I describe a nonimpingement based on my recognition that what is happening is not mutual. And yet both approaches are forms of restraint, both are predicated on protecting the patient’s interiority, both are concerned about compliance.

Object Usage

The subject says to the object: “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: “Hullo object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.” “You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” “While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.” Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived. (Winnicott 1969, p. 713)

“Winnicott’s clinical legacy,” Peter Goldberg (2021, p. 789) writes, “is surely this: it is more important to facilitate and catalyze an imaginative experience of self, and of creative apperception, than it is to deconstruct and interpret and analyze.” Winnicott’s main hope was to “foster a kind of experiential robustness of self.” And, “The exercise of aggression is linchpin to the creative apperception of the world.”

Goldberg’s language captures the simultaneity of these states. Imaginative experience of self, creative apperception, and experiential robustness of the self are nearly interchangeable. That is, imaginative experience of self and creative apperception are experiential robustness of the self. This is the condition in which they happen. My interest is in how these robust moments of self are a dynamic of risk with an other. The moment is an assertion. It is aggressive. It happens experientially—is alive and immediate and cannot be willed.

Writers have varied widely in how they have understood and applied Winnicott’s usage concepts of attack, aggression, destruction, risk, survival, receiving, finding the externality (the realness) of the other. “It is very difficult to write about because so much of what lies at its core is merely suggested,” Thomas Ogden (2016, p. 1243) writes of “The Use of an Object.” Winnicott “leaves critically important ideas in a highly elusive form.” Still, the usage formulation is exact in its outlines. Usage is the patient bursting out of introjective/projective ways of being with the analyst. This is the subject’s I destroyed you! moment in the hyperbolic infant/mother scene of usage. What Winnicott means by destroy is complex and largely has to do with fantasied destruction. Up until now, the patient’s relation with the analyst has been one of relating, an experience that compliance belongs to. With usage a new dynamic begins, and it’s the dynamic of “the subject placing of the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control” (Winnicott 1969, p. 713). This is how we find the other to be external, separate with her own properties, not a “bundle of projections.” Such a transformation cannot be done through symbolic means; it can be enacted only through the patient’s nonhostile aggression. Winnicott calls this moment of aggression “the attack.” The analyst must survive it—not retaliating, not anxiously withdrawing. The analyst might not survive.

Ogden (2016) makes vivid the question of analytic survival in times of real clinical crisis, when the attack is on the analyst/treatment and no meaning can be made. He explains, “The patient feels trapped in a solipsistic, confining world and feels “the drive” to battle his way into external reality” (p. 1255). Notably, Ogden sustains Winnicott’s rigor on the question of survival. “The Use of an Object” is shot through with the possibility of analytic failure, as when Winnicott (1969) writes, “Mothers, like analysts, can be good or not good enough; some can and some cannot carry the baby over from relating to usage” (p. 712). In his most recent paper on usage, Ogden (2016) advises analysts to acknowledge when they are not surviving and to end the treatment (p. 1243).

In the writing about usage by Michael Eigen, Emmanual Ghent, and Jessica Benjamin, the focus is more on the subjective experience of the patient in the moment of usage. It is less clear in their writings than in Ogden’s how dire the moments of attempted usage are, or if they could be considered dire. Benjamin (2010) develops usage as a “specific transformative process” and sees Winnicott’s work in the paper to be “highly generalizable” (p. 245). Her very influential concept of recognition aligns with usage.

Recognition is not imposed but rather a relieved appreciating that this separate person does not need to be omnipotently managed by a caretaker child desperately trying to suppress or regulate his own needs. . . . This idea of recognition follows Winnicott’s notion that analyst’s subjectivity arises by disconfirming the patient’s fantasy of “destroying” a weak or retaliatory object. (Benjamin 1990, p. 33)

Usage as Eigen and Ghent write about it is more rare, or it seems more to be an event. This is in keeping with how I see a revelatory usage. Eigen (1981) writes that usage happens in an area of faith. It is an “experiencing which is undertaken with one’s whole being, all out” (p. 413). It is “a sense of the real that explodes all adaptive and manipulative attempts in principle. It is all out, nothing held back, movement of self -and-other feeling past representational barriers” (p. 416).

Ghent (1990) writes of usage as a form of surrender and describes a yearning. “There is, however deeply buried or frozen a longing for something in the environment to make possible the surrender, in the sense of yielding, of false self” (p. 107). He quotes Marion Milner’s (1969) writing about a “relentlessness” and a force for growth toward “a different way of functioning; and a way of functioning which is essential if something new is to be created” (pp. 384–385).

Ghent and Eigen describe internally driven states that that are quite powerful. As these are moments of usage we know these states are also quite contingent. The other’s response is everything. The nature of that response, how it feels to the analyst, is not these writers’ focus. As I will talk about in the next section, in general survival is defined by what it is not in the usage literature. I am going to try to make a positive statement about what survival of the revelatory state is in terms of what is happening within the analyst. Instead of surviving I will use receiving. Receiving feels active in terms of receiving unyielding newness.

Winnicott described usage as an external dynamic and this is how it is written about. In my sense of revelatory usage, it is an internal dynamic as well—a state of intense internal receiving of self that is precarious in its own right. This internal receiving and external usage are simultaneous. The person’s intense internal receiving of the issuing of her mind while she is still talking with an external other is usage of that other. Elsewhere I have proposed that Winnicott’s usage is, among other extremely significant things for psychoanalysis, a dynamic for the moment of origin, of newness in the mind that requires an other (Ballantyne 2018, p. 88). These states of originality are—as Winnicott described usage to be—a leaving behind of omnipotence with its fantasies of being destructive and of the false promise of control through compliance. They are the aggressive launch of powerful feelings and a risk taken with another.

I stress the risk because this dimension is so not obvious clinically. But in usage as I read it, risk is the mutative force. It is a nonsymbolizable possibility being enacted between two people, under what is being said or done. It is the aggressive push toward feeling real to oneself, a mild-sounding term Winnicott employed for something longed for, precarious, transformative, always in tension with unconscious accommodation to the other—to the projective other or to the real other.

To see the aggression it takes to speak from such deep interiority, I think we need to go beyond seeing usage as a progression in transitional phenomena, though it is certainly that and a great leap. To see how imperiled such interiority is and to appreciate Winnicott’s great protectiveness of its privacy, we need to see how usage is related to Winnicott’s (1958) “The Capacity to Be Alone,” and to his 1963 paper, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites.” To think about this I bring in the original writer as analogue, the writer who reveals things to herself as she writes—when writing is going very well. In such moments, these writers might fit Eigen’s description of being engaged with “a sense of the real that explodes all adaptive and manipulative attempts in principle.” I believe Winnicott was in such a state when he wrote “The Use of an Object.” ⁴

Aloneness

[Winnicott] had a very ambitious project: to radically revise analytic theory, staying involved with these predecessors while “creatively destroying” many of their basic ideas. (Seligman, 2021 p. 492)

This was the middle of the final decade of Winnicott’s life . . . [he] showed more and more daring in his raids on the unknown. (Rodman 2003, p. 284)

I want to go where I find myself both drawn and driven. (Winnicott, in a 1968 letter to his sisters the year he wrote “The Use of an Object,” 2 years before his death, quoted in Rodman 2003, p. 322)

In his papers on aloneness and on communicating and not communicating, Winnicott is in a dualistic inside/outside register. With “usage” he opens a new register that is distinct in its dynamic from that inside/outside dualism. In the papers on aloneness and communication with subjective object, the patient’s privacy is conceptualized as an essential and necessary “hiding.” With “The Use of an Object,” Winnicott conceptualizes a privacy that is contingent on an emergence from hiding, a revealing that can be effected, and at risk, only through nonhostile aggression. With usage, revealing oneself is now an assertion of privacy, of otherness that must be received by the object. Here, Winnicott introduces a new register on which patient and analyst meet. It is a new, paradoxical dynamic of intimacy. ⁵

In the much earlier “The Capacity to Be Alone,” Winnicott’s (1958) introduces an aloneness that requires an nonimpinging other and he is definitive about its worth: Aloneness (paradoxical) is the basis of a person’s spontaneous experiencing of the contents of her mind, a state of feeling real to herself. Winnicott lays out a dualistic sequence: The nonimpinging other is first external, then it is internalized. In its earliest form, with the early infant, aloneness happens when this nonimpinging other is reliably nearby. The infant enters a nonanxious state of “ego-relatedness” (p. 418) in which she is free to experience the issuing of her mind. Winnicott explains, “In the course of time, there arrives a sensation or impulse. In this setting the sensation or impulse will feel real and be a truly personal experience” (p. 418). And a paragraph later, “A large number of these experiences form the basis of a life that has reality in it instead of futility” (p. 419) Earlier he has told us, “The pathological alternative is the false life built on reactions to external stimuli” (p. 418). Futility, false life—these specters haunt Winnicott’s writings about feeling real to oneself, as if he never can be sure his reader grasps just how endangered spontaneity is, and how high the emotional stakes are. With mature aloneness, the person experiences the spontaneous issuing of her mind in the presence of an other, only now this is an internalized other. This silent state of aloneness is a “highly sophisticated phenomenon” (p. 416).

Five years later in “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” Winnicott (1963) is still working from his dualistic, if paradoxical, model of aloneness. He writes of a “healthy non-communication” in the clinical situation that happens when the patient is engaged in silent internal communication, a “communication with subjective objects” (p. 184). Again, Winnicott is emphatic and definitive about what makes feeling real possible. In development it is “the individual’s communicating with subjective phenomena, which alone gives the feeling of being real” (p. 188). In this paper, Winnicott talks of the incommunicado and the realness that must never be found, of the subject as isolate, of the need to hide. ⁶ His discussion of how the object comes to be objectively perceived prefigures his object usage formulation but stops short on the most critical point: He only allows for a healthy noncommunication (a communicating with subjective objects) that is silent. Once the patient communicates verbally with the analyst, communication with subjective objects stops. The inevitable unconscious accommodations begin. There goes feeling real. This dualism is not much softened by Winnicott saying there is a third form of communication, the intermediate inside/outside area of “cultural experience of every kind” (p. 188). Even here, the need to hide dominates. “In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends. The urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found” (p. 185).

Do artists of all kinds really have a prevailing need not to be found? This is not to question the privacy of interiority, nor the deep anxieties attending creativity, but to note what Winnicott leaves out here: the urgency to reveal what can hardly be revealed. While it is true original writers tend to produce elusive work, it is also true that they are “drawn and driven” to reveal dimensions of being that are uncontained and resist representation in language, as Winnicott was. This is what Rodman (2003, p. 284) calls Winnicott’s “increasingly daring raids on the unknown” in his final years. It is what Isaiah Berlin (2013) describes in his lectures on the Romantics:

I wish to convey something immaterial and I have to use material means for it. I have to convey something which is inexpressible and I have to use expression. I have to convey, perhaps, something unconscious and I have to use conscious means. I know in advance that I shall not succeed and cannot succeed, and therefore all I can do is get nearer and nearer in some asymptotic approach; I do my best but it is an agonizing struggle in which, if I am an artist. . . . I am engaged for the whole of my life. (p. 102)

Berlin (2013) describes the great contribution of the Romantics: They defined “the metaphor of depth” (p. 130). Depth is “unembraceability”; it is “inexhaustibility.” When writing about Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin (1968) captures this capacity to stay with the uncontained while in relation with the reader: “His parables are never exhausted by what is explainable” (p. 124). This was a tribute from Benjamin, who was himself an author whose writing has the inexhaustible quality Berlin describes. A writer, or a patient, cannot stay with the uncontained while being concerned that his thoughts are explainable. Kafka was after bigger game than being understood. Both Berlin and Benjamin describe a form of noncommunicating that is an intense, decentering form of communicating.

One might apply Benjamin’s description of Kafka’s parables to Winnicott’s (1969, p. 713) “I’ve destroyed you! I love you!” theoretical manifesto. This enigmatic infant/mother scene is certainly never exhausted by what is explainable. And it is the only example of usage Winnicott gives us. In Seligman’s (2021) celebration of Winnicott’s capacity to write material that we do not understand but which leaves us “deeply affected and with newer and deeper understanding,” Seligman dryly notes, “the central dynamic of object usage is the apparently incomprehensible ‘(3) Subject destroys object. (4) Object survives destruction. (5) Subject can use object’ (Winnicott, 1969, p. 126)” (p. 492).

The scene is both a staging of a developmental moment and an analogue for a moment of usage between analysand/analyst. “Now I am forever destroying you in fantasy,” the infant tells his mother after joyfully proclaiming his new capacity to love. He has found he can destroy her in fantasy—he can move beyond unconscious accommodations to her as he responds spontaneously to his mind—and she is still there in the external world, undestroyed, real. The infant’s aggression can be received internally because it was received externally. He found it does not actually destroy. He can now receive the spontaneous contents of his mind in an entirely new way. Winnicott’s (1969) narrative voice moves in on the scene. “Here fantasy begins for the individual” (p. 713).

In “The Use of an Object” Winnicott (1969) now paradoxically defines relating as “an experience of . . . the subject as isolate” (p. 712). Now, we have a new nonisolate experience: usage. We have usage as a core enactment of risk between two as a patient takes the internal and external risk of approaching regions of her mind that are barely representable in thought or feeling (this is how I read it here).

In the earlier papers, Winnicott had not yet brought aggression into this question of feeling real to oneself. Risk was not yet the active element, the chemical agent it will become with usage. He had not yet opened the possibility of being engaged with an external other while in states of communication with subjective objects. That is, being engaged with an external other who would survive or not survive, receive or not receive.

I want to be clear that I am not talking about a psychic retreat but, rather, a noncollapsed state that is found. When they can get there, original writers write from such states of nearness to joy, confusion, excitement, terror, hope. Similarly, the patient speaking aloud from a revelatory state is on the edge of a new experience with her mind. Also, she is on the edge of a new experience with her analyst, who may fail at the thing happening. It is a core paradox of this kind of usage (which so readily slips back into relating/compliance) that in moments of deep internal engagement we are extraordinarily sensitive to our effect on the other—the other from whom we turn in order to have that engagement. In the analyst’s restraint (and expression, posture, silence and perhaps in the analyst’s highly unsaturated offering) the patient feels her impact.

On Overhearing

What is it to be in the presence of the new? We are altered by the new, or it does not exist for us. Still, this begs the question of what it is for the analyst to experientially engage with a patient’s revelatory state. Winnicott described survival by what it was not—not retaliating, not withdrawing, not altering technique in such a way that showed unsturdiness. Ghent (1990) provides a more comprehensive list of nonsurvival: “retaliation, withdrawal, defensiveness in any of its forms, an overall change in attitude in the direction of suspiciousness or diminished receptivity, and finally, a kind of crumbling” (p. 122). We might find a positive description of revelatory usage when Benjamin writes of recognition that “It is certainly true that recognition begins with the confirming response that tells us we have created meaning, had an impact, revealed an intention” (p. 37). Yes, the person in the revelatory state is on some level aware of making an impact. But that description is problematic for the revelatory because the revelatory state by definition is not seeking confirmation—not seeking understanding, not asking for validation. That freedom is part of its exuberance. “The object that survives is qualitatively not the same object present at the attack’s outset,” Eigen (1981, p. 415) writes. But how is the object not the same? To use Goldberg’s language, what is the analyst’s role—what happens to the analyst—during a patient’s experientially robust moment of creative apperception?

I find the beginnings of an answer in an original writer’s distinction, one that feels psychoanalytic. The distinction is John Stuart Mill’s (1860): “Eloquence we hear, poetry we overhear” (p. 95). Mill’s eloquence and poetry roughly line up with object relating and object usage. Mill arrives at this distinction in an essay, after struggling with the question of how deeply creative work (poetry) is essentially different from work that is maybe creative and maybe exceptional but not deeply creative (eloquence). He explains that “poetry” happens in prose, music, visual arts, science, as does “eloquence.” The “peculiarity of poetry,” Mill writes,

appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself . . . and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. (p. 96).

Mill’s poetry is defined by an internal communication happening during creation. With his description of feeling “confessing itself to itself,” he posits an internal receiving other there in the moment of intense creative apperception. He is hyperbolic when he talks of the poet’s utter unconsciousness of the listener. Elsewhere he makes it clear that the poet (writer, poet, composer, painter, architect) creates for an audience generally. So the projected internal audience is present for the poet as she creates “poetry.” That is, the projective/introjected audience is there for Mill’s poet to be unaware of as she creates. In contrast, eloquence is in direct relation to the projective/introjective audience. It seeks to “court sympathy” from that audience or to influence or to “move [the audience] to action” (Mill 1860, p. 96). In the rough grouping of eloquence with relating, eloquence is relating at its finest.

Mill’s hearing/overhearing distinction suggests we do not hear the deeply creative (for which I will substitute the revelatory) because it is not talking to us. The person in a revelatory state is not attempting to be understood by us, to convince us, to be loved by us. She is not engaging with projections and introjections of what we need and can grasp and can bear. Deep creativity can only be overheard. Mill’s conceptualization suggests that when we stand before particular paintings that affect us, we experience a shift in state. We engage with the internal communication happening as the painter painted. We overhear the painting.

There is a dark paradox here, and it is a dark paradox of usage. If we encounter “poetry” but we do not experience a shift in state to receive the unyielding newness of its creativeness (if we do not overhear), is it deeply creative? Yes, if it is a painting—the creativeness has happened, someone else will see it. But clinically, no. The authority of the revelatory state is not authority if the analyst does not receive it. Jessica Benjamin (1990) notes this paradox about clinical assertions of separateness. “The need for recognition entails this fundamental paradox. In the very moment of realizing our independent will we are dependent on an other to recognize it” (p. 37).

In the very condensed opening line to the usage scene, Winnicott (1969) states this more strongly. “The subject says I destroyed you! and the object is there to receive the communication” (p. 713). Here, something happens to the subject and something happens to the object and it happens simultaneously. How can the subject’s I destroyed you! with his unyielding newness be received? The moment of newness is a moment of destruction of ways of being. The mother in the allegory must be broken into by this new authority, this new imposition of will. To receive, she must be altered in that these aspects of the infant now exist for her, are real for her. Only then can they really exist for the infant.

We see this in clinical material. The analyst is silent or gives a highly unsaturated response. There has been a drop in register in what the patient says, now a condensed quality. There is probably a peculiar incompleteness to be borne by the analyst. What is happening to the analyst? There is a contagion to internal receptivity. I have already imagined Julie’s museum scene in terms of a triad: Julie, the curator, and the man in the painting. At the risk of sounding fanciful, I also imagine the scene as a triad consisting of: Julie, Julie’s intense internal receiving of self, and me. I imagine myself in relation to Julie’s internal receiving of self. Its sudden existence, its largeness and its spontaneity suggest a capacity for internal receiving that is large enough to receive my own movements toward the raw, the richly associative, the immaterial, the uncontained. To move or disrupt someone with newness and daring (as with art) is to summon the other’s own creative experiencing of self. Being affected in this way, the analyst summons a continued, deepening internal receiving in the patient. The analyst has shifted register. This reciprocity will continue after the revelatory moment has passed, when the two begin to engage again. We might even say the analyst has now found she can use the patient.

Conclusion

Winnicott insisted that feeling real to oneself was deeply, invisibly longed for. With his concepts of aloneness (Winnicott 1958) and of healthy noncommunication in a session (a patient’s silence while communication with subjective objects happens) (Winnicott 1963), he made intense experiences of realness essentially private, as they could only happen away from the inevitable unconscious accommodations to an other. I argue that with usage he introduced a new register of what constitutes privacy. Now internal turning away from the other (from unconscious accommodation to another) happens while communicating with (using) the other. Now feeling real is not insured by hiding, it is discovered by the aggressive risk of revealing. Now in order to go more deeply into herself, the patient needs the analyst to receive her (the patient’s) turn away. Now the patient’s move inward, toward intense internal spontaneity, is simultaneously the move outward, toward finding the analyst to be real, external.

The analyst cedes something when she is present for the patient’s revelatory state. When she is disrupted, moved, thrown off, she cedes the dialogic. The dialogue is happening within the patient, who has found an intense receiving of self. The analyst now overhears. Winnicott’s dynamic shows how finding an internal witness is a state of risk with another. I describe an answering movement toward internal receiving of self happening in the analyst. On some level, the patient feels this happen.