Partners in thought

Thus the task of making the unconscious conscious is not best described as allowing oneself to accept
what is already there, but rather as freeing oneself to articulate or construct what one has refused to
think about. Unformulated experience is not “there” to be revealed.

Frequently a fusion must first occur inside the analyst’s experience, a fusion between the horizon of
what-feels-like-me and the horizon of part-of-me-that-feels-alien, the other in myself.

One understands conduct when one is able to imagine the self-state from which it arose and then grasp
it from within that context.

misunderstanding in the analytic situation… can be attributed to a dynamically enforced separation, or

dissociation, of the analyst’s relevant self-states. The analyst unconsciously denies himself access to the
context, to the state of his own self—to the other within himself—from within which it would be
possible to construct the experience of the analysand.

How does the hermeneutic circle work? Whenever we are trying to understand, we are working with
part–whole relations. We try to comprehend something new by grasping it partially, just enough to
identify it as an instance of something familiar, a meaning we already know. Then we project this
“whole” meaning onto the “partial” one we have constructed, completing the partial meaning—and the
circle.

our self-states are sometimes shaped around our identifications with the way those with whom we
interact experience themselves - concordant identifications, or identifications with the other’s ego; and
sometimes our identifications arise from the way other people have experienced those with whom we
interact - complementary identification, or identification with the other’s internal objects.

very early in life we begin to be different with different people, and often enough different with the
same person under different circumstances, each significant change in our world calling out particular
patterns of feeling, thinking, behaving, and being. We are familiar with the process by which, over time,
patterns of being such as these are internalized, so that even those self-states that originated in direct
interpersonal experience may come to be intra-psychic, thereafter to be elaborated and reconstructed
according to the purposes of the inner world as well as the outer one.

Not “what does s/he want?” but “what is his/her conflict?”