Moments of Meeting: A Self Psychological Approach

Abstract

In their attempt to understand what promotes growth in the clinical setting, the Boston Change Process Study Group retrospectively examined the microprocess of analytic hours and determined that moments of meeting (the events that rearrange the intersubjective experience for the dyad) are a powerful agent of therapeutic change. In this article, following a thorough definition of moments of meeting, I look at what clinicians can do prospectively in order to facilitate moments of meeting. In contrast to the Boston Change Process Study Group’s delineation of specific phases that comprise a moment of meeting and their belief that moments of meeting exist outside of standard technique, I suggest that when the therapist is empathically immersed in the patient’s subjective world, moments of meeting are an organic outgrowth of the process and within the bounds of conventional technique. Clinical examples illustrate how a self psychological approach including understanding selfobject longings, active engagement in the rupture repair sequence, as well as imagining one’s way into the patient’s inner experience lead to the unfolding of moments of meeting. I then contrast the moments of meeting that emerge from empathic immersion with the relational shifts that derive from other listening modes.