Phenomenology in psychoanalysis: Still an open debate?

In a recent book Cristopher Bollas, one of the greatest contemporary psychoanalysts, tells about how he began to bring together phenomenology and psychoanalysis in the clinical setting at the beginning of his career. Working with psychotic patients, he realized that it was first necessary to “absorb” their view of reality before being able to reflect on the mad scenarios of psychosis. In what world did they live? How did they perceive it? Only by “mirroring” this back to the patients was it possible to offer them the experience of being in front of someone trying to understand their world view. Today, phenomenology has been spreading over psychoanalysis more than one can think it did in the past. The aim of this paper is to review and discuss the most relevant theoretical-clinical areas characterizing contemporary psychoanalysis in which phenomenology can claim a legitimate (or still illegitimate for someone) position. The main areas that will be discussed are: (a) the larger relational system or field in which human experience is continually shaped, i.e., the intersubjective matrix in which we are embedded; (b) the capacity to think about the “what” of the patients’ experience, rather than the “why” (especially with the most severely disturbed ones); and (c) the crisis of the primacy of interpretation in the analytical technique. Obviously, this review does not have the ambition to be exhaustive. Rather, it just wants to (re)open the discussion on a still controversial but very current topic.