The Sleepy Analyst Struggles to Awaken: Dissociation, Enactment, Regression, and Altered States with Trauma Patients

Abstract I assert that embarrassment, shame, and concern for professional reputation have inhibited analysts from discussing their struggles with countertransferential sleepiness, a phenomenon presumably more widespread than is generally acknowledged. Analysts may thus be insufficiently armed with understanding of this vexing predicament to which our work can leave us so vulnerable—its causes, trajectories, and even, potentially, its usefulness. Building on McLaughlin’s 1975 paper on the topic, I acknowledge the analyst’s sleepiness as a defense against affect in the patient and analyst, and explore it as an enactment of parental unavailability and abandonment and a primitive communication from the patient about early states of psychological deadness and unintegration. Noting a recent trend in the relational literature toward valorizing engaged and enlivened registers, I consider the problems and potentials of dwelling in a distanced and deadened intersubjective field.