To Dare or not to Dare? Questions about Terror in the Psychoanalytical Field, or Goldilocks Meeting Scheherazade

Abstract

From a dynamic field’s perspective, the presence of terror in the analytical encounter should be faced as a product of both parties' interaction on a stage where their mutual projective and introjective identifications interplay in such a way that it is difficult to say precisely who the terrorist is and who is the terrorized. At different levels of experience and by different ways of expression, both patient and analyst will be facing the unbearable and the unknown of terrifying emotional experiences about their potentially catastrophic (transformational) encounter; both having to decide either to evade it, giving way to terror, or daring to transform it telling the story (Primo Levi). Goldilocks and Scheherazade are proposed as fairy tales' characters that can be casted by the analyst as useful instruments or metaphors to think over his/her responsibility in this process of telling the story, fostering the process of working through the analyst’s position in the field both, as a terrorized and as a terrorist, enabling the field’s capacity to transform terrifying experiences in fairly tales.