C. Bressi

AIR Universita degli studi di Milano

 Personal Equation and Fluid Self-State Communication 1161
“Heard with the Eyes”: Personal Equation 
and Fluid Self-State Communication in the 
Therapeutic Relationship
Cinzia Bressi
(Italy/UK, BJAA)
Dear Colleagues,
Before reading my paper, I would like to introduce myself. My 
name is Cinzia Bressi and I am a doctor, a professor of psychiatry and 
psychotherapy at the University of Milan. I am Chair of psychotherapy 
hospital services at Milan’s university hospital where I work, and I 
also have private practice as a Jungian analyst. I am currently member 
of the British Jungian Analytic Association, BJAA, one of the four 
associations of the British Psychotherapy Foundation, of London.
The considerations I shall outline here extend from suggestions in 
the paper presented by Nadia Fina, which I found extremely interest-
ing and rich in content. In the wake of these considerations, I would 
like to begin by asking a question: how does the analyst’s personal 
equation “act” in the transference/countertransference dynamics that 
develop in the analytic relationship?
Jung saw the analyst’s personal equation as being subjective prej-
udice that risked not being subjected to transformative criticism 
(CW16). On this basis, he postulated types of personal equation 
that are based on the predominance of one function of conscious 
orientation or the other.
But what did Jung understand by “subjective prejudice”? He main-
tained that it was a product of an individual’s accumulated self-expe-
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encounter, or better still, Jung (ibid.) described the personal equation 
in psychotherapeutic practice as a collision between an individual mind 
and environmental conditions, thus representing a subjective edition 
of general experience.
The encounter between an individual and his self-experience makes 
him unique, but also subject to acting according to his subjective 
prejudice when interacting with another individual. Out of this derives 
the need to observe both oneself and the world, the relationship both 
with one’s own inner experience and that of the other, after having 
worked on the self at length and on the development of subjectivizing 
and individuative thought.
1162 Cinzia Bressi
Jung wrote that a therapist could be totally unable to perceive 
in a patient what he did not see in himself, or alternatively, that his 
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towards objectives that are actually his own or else condemning the 
patient for what he rejected about himself (CW16).
It was Jung, once again, who observed that each therapy was a single 
“dialectic process” in which the analyst as a person was involved just 
as much as the patient. And, if the analyst feels a hit or is tripped up by 
the patient, it need not be a bad thing, as he can heal to the extent that 
he himself has been injured – and here we can recall the mythologem 
of the “Wounded Healer”.
As I was writing these lines, it came to mind that in the Adult 
Attachment Interview by Mary Main, R. Goldwin and Erik Hesse 
(2003), which I frequently use given that I work with adolescents and 
their parents, there are several questions that are extremely impor-
tant when assessing what the wounded child did during his childhood, 
who he sought out and how he behaved when he was emotionally or 
physically hurt or ill. “What would usually happen?” “How did you 
react to the pain?” “And your parents, how did they respond?”
This helps us to observe what today’s adults, who are unable to 
“maintain” a relationship with their adolescent child, were like as 
children: they would shut themselves in their bedrooms and put a 
sticking plaster on by themselves, thus “protecting” themselves twice 
over, by going somewhere they held was safe and by providing their 
wounds with “protection”, crying alone, not asking anyone for help, 
except, perhaps, their brothers or sisters, on occasion.
It is during the times of physical or mental pain that a child seeks 
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“hold” the child. These experiences, which are essential to strength-
ening, developing and giving direction to the child’s nuclear Self, call 
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The experiences that belong to today’s mothers and fathers were, 
and still are, being dismissed and excluded. Or rather, these children, 
who are now parents, would look to their parents for some concrete 
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treatments, which perpetuates the sustenance only of the split-off 
parts of the Self, the parts that could not be penetrated by thought. 
States of mind which distance pain through dismissiveness, or states 
of mind that were witness to these individuals’ anger and confusion, or 
even to their being overwhelmed at times by traumas and their own 
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enting less achievable. In response to the question: “In your opinion, 
why did your parents behave as they did during your childhood?” the 
answers are banal, jargon, psychobabble, or canned statements, as they 
have come to be known.
 Personal Equation and Fluid Self-State Communication 1163
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which patients’ attachment styles and mental states are at the core of 
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hers attachment style.
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tion that was a useful source of information about the patient’s state 
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in ways that were out of line with what he knew of himself, but 
syntonic with what he knew of his patient” (1996:165). He then went 
on to explain that “the whole analytic situation is a mass of illusions, 
delusions, displacements, projections and introjections” (1996:172, 
also referred to by J. Knox, 2011).
As observed by Jung and developed by contemporary psychoana-
lytic thought, the analytic process features verbal actions, non-verbal 
actions and interactions. Levenson (1983) places the language of 
speech and the language of action together, to the point that one is a 
transformation of the other. So the analyst’s inevitable continuous 
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the observer is inevitably part of what is observed.
For example, Levine (1994) has pointed out that the analyst’s inter-
pretations always hold some performance or action-like qualities, in 
that the analyst’s words are a kind of an unintentional action. I would 
like to highlight this, as enactment belongs to the analyst’s subjective 
responses that are intrinsically related to his or her psychology, which, 
as I stress, is not personalistic but personal. And, dynamic interaction 
processes of destruction and reparation in the analytic relationship are 
the result of the analyst’s, as well as the patient’s, active unconscious 
contribution (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002).
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compromised during mutual enactments. As Donnel B. Stern (2008) 
has observed, when the analyst is blindly involved in the relationship 
with the patient because of an unconscious motivation, he can men-
talize neither his own experience nor that of the patient. In such 
situations, I believe that in addition to the analyst’s personal equation, 
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non-representable part of the patient’s mind, is also of extreme 
importance.
During an enactment, if the analyst reacts directly to the patient’s 
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are the same is consolidated (psychic equivalence). But if the analyst 
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provoked into reacting to it, as has already been pointed out by Nadia 
Fina using different words, and if this experience can be transformed, 
1164 Cinzia Bressi
mentalized and given back to the patient, then enactment will not 
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functioning. And the sensitivity and empathy coming from the analyst, 
when shared meaning is being constructed with the patient. will boost 
the therapeutic alliance.
Since enactments are the only form of representable dissociated 
material, they are, nevertheless, a tremendous source of information 
about the patient. I therefore agree with Donnel Stern that under-
standing and insight are not essential when responding to projective 
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off and unthought aspects of the patient’s experience that he/she is 
totally unable to express in words, working solidly on the unconscious 
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has provoked is indeed preferable. Much of this experience is not 
verbalized, it is dissociated and it is laden with affect.
Jean Knox has extended this idea with her suggestion of “devel-
opmental attunement” (Knox, 2011:166), which requires the analyst 
to use his or her own countertransference reactions to identify the 
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From countless studies, we are aware that non-verbal affective trans-
actions, such as the analyst’s facial expressions, posture, movement, 
and emotional tone of voice, play a fundamental role in unconscious 
emotional interactions. According to Schore, these “co-create an 
intersubjective context that allows for the structural expansion of 
the patient’s orbitofrontal system and its cortical and subcortical 
connection” (2003: 264).
This observation takes us back to attachment theory, which claims 
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dynamics between the Self and the other (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002).
In order to modulate affect regulation, the analyst’s tone of voice, 
body language, facial expressions and gestures are all extremely 
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containment right from the look in the analyst’s eyes, before he/she 
even utters a word, and then from their tone of voice: in essence, from 
everything the analyst is. The personal equation thus becomes not just 
an encounter between the Self and life experience (as Jung puts it), but 
also the ability to be with the patient regardless of aggressive content, 
fear or terror with no name that the analysand may have transferred 
into the analyst’s Self. Negotiation between isolated subjectivities can 
thus take place and gradually begin to replace the patient’s dissociative 
shell (Bromberg, 2008). Conditions can thus be created so that the 
little girl who has violently knocked her head against the glass table 
 Personal Equation and Fluid Self-State Communication 1165
in the living room, recognizing only the blood that is gushing out of 
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go to seek “protection” in her bedroom, but will be able to obtain 
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identity does not depend so much on others’ approval but on others’ 
recognition, that is, on the accurate perception they bear of the way in 
which we experience ourselves (Bromberg, 2008).
As analysts, if we receive our analysand’s pain and terror without 
reacting or without seeking to change them, then these islands of 
affective reality, these parts of the Self that were initially dissociated, 
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through symbolic ability and verbal forms that are expressed within a 
relational context.
When one of my analysands, as I was showing him into my consult-
ing room just a few minutes after the scheduled time of our session, 
said: “I thought you had forgotten about me”; or when another, after 
one of her sessions had been rescheduled, became visibly agitated and 
said in a disturbed voice, “so it’s true that you are leaving … and what 
about me …?”, I cannot but think, given that I know their life stories, 
about the extent to which a developmental trauma is still active in 
their lives as it is in the here and now of our relationship.
During the early stages of life, if some parts of the Self are sys-
tematically disavowed, then continuing to exist in another’s mind – and 
therefore in one’s own eyes – like the child Self in front of his parents, is a 
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stability, the nuclear Self, which underpins procedural memory, will 
continue to employ early models of attachment based on how much 
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the relational existence of several aspects of the nuclear Self, then 
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I believe that in the analyst’s personal equation, the development 
of his own nuclear Self, that is, when the analyst was “his parents’ 
child”, cannot be overlooked. This image generally continues to evolve 
throughout life though reshaping itself so that the Self can change and 
become integrated into an individual pattern, which, for the most 
part, is not dissociated.
It is for this reason that the pain and terror passed on to the 
analyst’s Self by the patient needs to create the real danger of the 
person’s destruction. The analyst must leave some time and mental 
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himself, also according to what he can see in his patient’s eyes – a 
child in front of his parents – what are these dissociated parts that are 
asking to be born out of and in the relationship.
For this reason, the communication between the analyst and the 
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1166 Cinzia Bressi
be isolated, even within the relationship, and this will lead to repeated 
collisions between the patient’s and the analyst’s subjectivity. This 
repetition itself means that a relational process will be generated out 
of these collisions, where the “new” will create a space between the 
two players. Bromberg referred to these collisions as “safe surprises”, 
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cuitry” being activated in not-too-safe conditions, according to LeDoux 
(1996). Under these conditions, the failures of the past are repeated 
in the analytic relationship with “something extra” that belongs to 
the patient’s developmental drive. And it is out of these emotional 
storms that the analyst’s Self has taken upon it, that the new can 
suddenly emerge. And using Jung’s words, the new will emerge in the 
therapeutic relationship out of the old that has been either dismantled 
or surmounted.
The heart of these analytical aspects is the dynamic relationship that 
Jung called the transcendent function, where the “union of conscious 
and unconscious is consummated” (Jung, CW9). In other words, the 
transcendent function can be interpreted as a constant, dynamic 
confrontation and “integration of explicit conscious information and 
memories with the more generalized knowledge that we accumulate 
uncounsciously in the internal working models of implicit memory, a 
key part of which constitutes the sense of Self” (Knox, 2011, p. 179). 
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as well as to relational experience, which will then go on to contribute 
to the patient’s process of individuation. 
Until the individual shall authentically and entirely perceive him/
herself in the eyes of the other.
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Heard with the eyes : personal equation and fluid self-state communication in the therapeutic relationship

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Heard with the eyes : personal equation and fluid self-state communication in the therapeutic relationship

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