December 2019 "Intuition: An Emotional Foundation of Analytic Transformation" with Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA

Intuition, like emotion, cannot be seen, heard, tasted or touched. Yet we often say, “I sensed it.” Sometimes we might say, “I just knew it.” Intuition – sensing or knowing an emotional truth – is an essential element of psychoanalysis. It requires both the analyst and the analysand to have faith in their own experience. Experience itself, although a product of our senses and our minds, cannot truly be described. Like a dream, experience is transformed in the telling. In the telling, experience becomes manageable. Intuition is trusting one’s experience and using that experience to make meaning. Intuition uses imagination. It also unconsciously uses everything the analyst has learned from experience and training to bring order to the emotional chaos of living. This presentation uses Bion’s ideas of reverie and his models of transformation as well as a clinical example to illustrate his ideas about Transformation in O.