Me/You

Where do "I" end and "you" begin?

Patrick Swayze thinks he knows the answer.

"This is my dance space; this is your dance space," he asserts, with confidence.

I don't buy that whole idea, though, that we exist as totally separate entities with precise boundaries (not that Patrick Swayze was making an analogy about human interaction, and not that I seek some permeable merging of self with Patrick Swayze, either, mind you) but as I live and love and experience the world, I'm coming to realize that the concept of "self" itself is a much more ambiguous notion than we tend to conceptualize here in the West.

I'm coming at this from the context of being a very green psychotherapist- in-training: what is my client's shit, and what is my shit, when I'm sitting in the room with him/her/hir? Will I be able to suss out what the client is expressing (or not expressing) from my own feeling states as they arise in our interaction? The operative technical terms here are the transference and the countertransference, which are generally used in a psychotherapy context, but can obviously be applied to any interaction we have with a particular person, or with people or institutions or objects more generally. Crudely put, transference phenomena are the projected feelings a client puts onto the therapist (or a person puts onto another significant person), in an enactment of unconscious, deeply ingrained relational dynamics. The classic example might be the client regarding the therapist as a parent figure and unconsciously acting out as if one was with a parent. On the flip side, the countertransference refers to the therapist's feelings toward the client, and is understood in a couple different ways. It can refer both to the therapist's personal unconscious processes being enacted with the client and to the therapist's conscious utilization of the feelings that are generated in the presence of the client in order to forward therapeutic ends. It's at this very early stage in my development as a therapist that I am beginning to understand how crucial these concepts will be.

This is a very simplistic representation of how I'm imagining the interaction I'm describing:



The main anxiety I'm feeling about beginning therapy with my first clients (which will be within about two weeks' time) is how to negotiate that intersection: when is that intermediate space well-boundaried and productive, and when is it a mushy-boundaried, collapsed space? Certainly, my boundaries with clients need to be kept quite intact, and just permeable enough in order to have a human, real interaction, but when might a collapsed space actually be fruitful, if not totally inappropriate, over-exposing, or detrimental to the curative work of the therapy?

Of course, these anxieties are not contained just to my work as a therapist-in-training. As a person moving about the world with all my particular emotional baggage, I do this delicate dance of intimacy all the time. How much of myself is melding into my lover, and how much of her is melding into me? Are we creating enough space for each other to be wholly ourselves, or are our personal boundaries becoming ever blurrier, to the point that we will dissolve into this indiscernible mass of Bree/Astrid – Brastrid? Astbree? And even in the face of this fear of overlapping, of losing myself, I experience moments when I want nothing more than to completely merge with her, stripped, both of us, naked bellies pressed as far together as possible before we come out the other side. Ah, sweet collapse.