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continue to build structure and enhance the ability to contain psychic energies (Lecours, 2007). Green captured this in his statement, “‘binding the inchoate’ (Green 1975, p. 9 ) and containing it, thus giving a container to the patient's content and ‘content to his container”’ (ibid, p. 7). Less known is that David Rapaport started writing about representations before Marty. In a continuing refrain throughout his series of papers on thinking, Rapaport (1942/1967b, 1951/1967c, 1957/1967d) emphasized the importance of thinking about thoughts. His major contribution was expressed this way: “Though the understanding of content is sufficient for everyday communication and for many needs of diagnostic and therapeutic practice, it is insufficient for understanding of personality and thought processes. Consideration of contents will have to be supplemented and reinterpreted into formal characteristics of the thought process ” (1951/1967c, pp. 432-433; italics added). In this way of working, any time patients name a vague something that was, as yet, unnamed, analysts attempt to represent it with a word. Any time analyst discovers and enhances meaning that previously resided in a suspended space, or captures meaning in a meaningful way to the patient, that seemed meaningful (to the analyst) but without meaning at the time (to the patient), analysis is on the way to building a representation. The representation that is built can be as delineated as a word, as complex as a metaphor, or as fleeting as Ogden’s waking dream. Whether it becomes something that is representable for the analysand, depends on many factors, including how close it comes to what is tolerable at that exact clinical moment (i.e., the patient's capacity to transform the elements of his familiar thinking into a new gestalt). After each intervention the analyst can see what the patient can make of it at that moment. If one calls it the work of the alpha function or of the ego function, decisive is whether the patient can allow the analyst’s interventions to work on his mind. Busch suggests that when most analysts champion the need to build representations as central to a psychoanalytic cure, they are describing changing simple representations into complex ones. That is, patients come into analysis due to a range of simple representations. These can range from psychosomatic states to repetitive actions to repetitive thoughts. Busch calls these simple representations as they lead to something akin to a stimulus—response reactions closer to actions than reflectiv e thought. Every boss becomes the same boss, and every potential partner becomes the same type. In simple representations there is not sufficient structure to halt the inevitability of action tendencies. Via interpretation, analysts and analysands build links to the plethora of unconscious factors that play a role in these simple representations, leading them to become more complex and sufficiently structured to impede immediate action. It leads to the possibility of what Birksted-Breen (2009) called “reverberation time”. While Birksted-Breen introduced this term to describe a process in the analyst that allows him to reflect on the patient’s multiple associations, enactments, and reveries, Busch believes the same process is a necessary outcome within the analysand.
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