Control Analysis

In this paper I present three collections of a patient's words and phrases that I arranged in a particular form. I discuss how I arranged the words in this way as I was struggling to get a sense of what felt “emotionally true” in my work with this patient and how this process helped me to grasp her use of dissociation. I draw on Gergen's work for a cultural perspective on dissociation, on Winnicott's concept of psychesoma dissociation, and on Goldberg's additions to Winnicott's theory. I show how the use of omnipotent, narcissistic structures may mask the use of dissociation (by patient and analyst) and make it quite an elusive phenomenon. My focus is on the process I went through, clinically and in my thinking and writing, as I discovered my own and my patient's dissociated use of mind and emotion and grappled with how to find a reassociation between these psychic functions and their somatic base.