Premonition: Hope and Dread in the Analytic Hour

Analytic awareness of the process of meaning-making involves tracking premonitions and intuitions to their sources. As precursors of symbolic processing, premonitions are essential elements in any relationship, including the analytic relationship. They provide unconscious communication that informs and amplifies internal and external body and object relations. These relations facilitate depth and dimensionality between and within persons. They also enable the representational processes to establish psychic structure. When traumatized, a person can lose faith in these processes and defend against relationship. Exploring precursors of the emotional experiences of hope and dread enables the analytic dyad to re-vitalize lost potentials and the representation of experience. A clinical example is given to demonstrate the application of these ideas.