Mutual Vulnerability: Intimacy, Psychic Collisions, and the Shards of Trauma

In this paper, I explore the profound potential, and the challenges, of mutual vulnerability in psychoanalysis. I describe ways in which analysts are penetrated by shards of our patients' trauma, and how this interpenetrates with our own vulnerabilities and ungrieved losses (Harris, 2009; Levine, 2016). In my patient Lisa's fierce determination to come into being, and in our mutual efforts to survive each other's ruthlessness (Winnicott, 1969) we each struggle to recognize and own malignant not-me versions of ourselves (Bromberg, 1998), as we reach toward reparation, mutual recognition, and healing.