Episode 5: Up Against The Limit: Staring Into The Void

Episode 5: Up Against The Limit: Staring Into The Void

From Three Associating: Adventures in Relational Psychoanalytic Supervision by Gill Straker, Rachael Burton, Andrew Geeves

June 15, 2025 · 29 min · Season 5 · Episode 5

About this episode

Andrew navigates the complexities of embodying a patient's unarticulated traumas while exploring the implications of silence in therapy.

In this episode, Andrew finds himself embodying traumas the patient has experienced but has placed an explicit prohibition on articulating. During his therapy sessions with Rob, Andrew respects this prohibition. There is much else to speak about and the session feels lively. However, after every session Andrew feels strangely dead, reflecting a limit on his capacity to comfortably process powerful affects when words are off limit and the patient wishes to screen off pain and to avoid facing into the void. Questions are raised about the perils of going along with the patient's wish not to speak the unspeakable as well the dangers of not doing so. All the while, the affective registration of Rob's screened off trauma persists at somatic and affective levels in Andew as an embodiment of Rob's traumatic memories. The power of this is barely tolerable and Andrew feels doomed if he does speak and doomed if he doesn’t, but in the supervision he explores the possibility of a third way and finds a way out of the binary.

People in this episode

Host: Andrew

Topics covered

  • trauma
  • psychoanalysis
  • supervision
  • affect
  • communication
  • embodiment

Keywords

  • trauma
  • psychoanalysis
  • affect
  • communication
  • embodiment
  • therapy
  • supervision

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