This participation, however, is a way of being-with, not a formula for doing psychoanalysis. Where there was indifference, humiliation, rejection, shattering loss, and the like, compassionate psychoanalytic understanding does not simply replace or heal by intentionally providing new experience. Instead, when the analyst treats a person as endlessly worth understanding and his or her suffering as worth feeling-together, this attitude of compassion implicitly affirms the human worth of the patient. Instead of being preoccupied with the question of the patient’s recognition of the analyst as a subject, the psychoanalytic relationship accords to the patient, often for the first time, the dignity of being treated as the subject of one’s own experience (the reciprocity may come later). Because of their previous experience in life and in treatment, patients most often come to us expecting to be classified, judged, treated with rigidity, or exploited. If, however, we are not too intenton naming pathologies and defenses or with being right, but instead relentlessly seek to understand and accompany the sufferer, an implicitly interpretive system emerges. For me, close and compassionate listening is itself an important form of interpretation, dissolving the interpretation–gratification duality, and fully deserves to be considered psychoanalytic. It says to the analysand: “You are worth hearing and understanding.” This listening involves attention to the ways the patient’s experiential world has created suffering for the patient as well as for others in the patient’s life. Without leaving the patient’sside or becoming judgmental, we can understand how one could come to be so hurtful to oneself and to others. We can understand the simultaneous two-sided experience, so often dissociated, of being both hurt and hurtful. Recognizing context and complexity prevents reduction and judgmental attitudes and enables compassionate understanding. This may be a good moment to highlight a concept of accompanying the other that I believe important to fill out a concept of psychoanalytic compassion. Years ago, as I have mentioned, I wrote and spoke of witnessing outrageous mistreatment as an important aspect of the psychoanalytic profession. In recent years I have become more aware of the importance of simple accompanying that somewould contrast with proper “analytic” work and might disparage as“supportive” psychotherapy. Whether my patient suffers from anincurable, painful, and debilitating disease or from terminal cancer or lost a family member in the World Trade Center tragedy, I must not look for ways to see my patient as causing or even contributing to her own suffering; if I did so, I would be joining those who tell her just to accept it or get over it. There is no way to fix the situation or to“cure” the patient, so I must accept my own powerlessness to help. I must simply stay close to her experience, sorrowing and grieving and raging with my patient, even if this means that my practice feels very heavy to me. Even when the story is very complex—and it always is—a willingness to walk together into the deepest circles of the patient’s experiential hell characterizes the attitude of compassion (elsewhereI called this emotional availability [Orange, 1995]) that the process of psychoanalytic compassion requires.This psychoanalytic compassion, I repeat for emphasis, is not reducible to moral masochism on the part of the analyst, nor is it to be contrasted with properly psychoanalytic work, usually seen as explicitly interpretive. It is, instead, an implicitly interpretive process of giving lived meaning and dignity to a shattered person’s life by enabling integration of the pain as opposed to dissociation or fragmentation. A compassionate attitude says to every patient: your suffering is human suffering, and when the bell tolls for you, it also tolls for me.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:CjqMMVR63UMJ:www.psybc.com/pdfs/library/ijpsp_ForWhomTheBellTolls.pdf+"relational+psychoanalysis"+"self+psychology"+dissociation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=63&gl=au

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sorry, i don't know how to shorten links :-(