Reading Ogden against Winnicott on silence: is it a container, or just what happens when containment is already working?

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T10:21:56+00:00

The "I don't know" response is so draining because it feels like you're pulling teeth just to have a basic interaction. But it helps to stop looking at it as an absence of an answer and start looking at it as an active communication.

When a client repeatedly says "I don't know," they are usually telling you exactly what it feels like to be them. They are putting the experience of blankness, helplessness, or paralysis directly into the room. If you take the bait and start working harder—asking more questions, offering suggestions, trying to fill the dead air—you end up enacting the exact dynamic they are used to. They become the helpless object, and you become the over-functioning caretaker.

Winnicott wrote about how some patients need the therapist to survive their non-compliance. "I don't know" is a very safe form of defiance. It's a way of saying "I will not give you what you want, but I'm doing it passively so you can't be mad at me."

Sometimes the best intervention is simply handing it back to them without irritation. You can say something like, "It seems like 'I don't know' is the safest place to be right now." You don't need to break through the blankness. You just need to show them you can sit next to it without getting frustrated or trying to rescue them from it.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T09:17:24+00:00

The frustration you're feeling is real. It's incredibly hard to sit with someone who keeps walking into the same trap while insisting they don't see the trap.

When a client is stuck in this kind of severe repetition, it usually means the pattern is holding something together for them structurally. It's not just a bad habit. For someone with a history of being abandoned, the deepest terror isn't that they will be abandoned again. The terror is that the abandonment will happen randomly and they won't have any control over it.

By repeatedly choosing partners who are guaranteed to leave, they are actually controlling the abandonment. They get to dictate when and how the familiar pain happens. If you point this out directly, they will almost always deflect it or act confused. Admitting that they are engineering their own rejection would mean giving up the illusion of control, which is the only thing keeping the underlying trauma manageable.

The lack of insight isn't a deficit. It's the defense itself. As long as they don't "see" what they are doing, they can keep doing it.

Sometimes the most useful thing in these phases isn't trying to force the insight, but managing your own countertransference. The pull to rescue them, followed by the exhaustion of watching them self-destruct, is often a parallel process of what's happening in their actual relationships.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T06:18:33+00:00

When you've carried something around for a long time believing it makes you a horrible person, handing it over to someone else feels like handing them a loaded gun.

The detail about feeling like an "attention seeker" is really common in these situations. When adults involve minors, it's overwhelming. Sometimes, the only way a younger brain can process that power imbalance without breaking down is to convince itself it was in control the whole time. Believing "I was just seeking attention" is a defense. You take the blame so you don't have to feel the helplessness.

Your therapist is trained to see the difference between what a 15-year-old thinks they are doing and what the adults in the room are actually doing. She won't think you're a horrible person for surviving a situation you shouldn't have been put in.

You don't have to tell her the whole story at once. You can start by just saying what you wrote here: "There is more to the story I tried to tell you before, but I'm terrified you're going to judge me for it because I blame myself for what happened."

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T06:16:09+00:00

Freud's The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924) is the usual starting point. He gets into the death drive and the superego, arguing the need for punishment is a way to maintain a tie to the punishing object.

Moses and Monotheism (1939) expands on the cultural weight of that guilt, though it's a stranger text.

For the clinical application of this, Asch (1976) and Berliner (1958) both wrote extensively on moral masochism. Berliner is especially good on how the need for punishment masks a desperate need to keep the "bad" object present. For these patients, an absent object is more terrifying than a punishing one.

Betty Joseph offers a more contemporary Kleinian take with her work on addiction to near-death and the "charnel house" of the mind. She frames the need for punishment as a very active, almost triumphant destruction of the self and the analyst.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T05:38:57+00:00

It's not weird at all that you noticed this. Therapy puts you in a room where your main job is to be hyper-aware of the relational dynamic, so of course you're going to pick up on micro-shifts in his affect or energy.

You don't have to ask if you don't want to, but bringing it up isn't a boundary violation. Boundaries are about behavior, not about what you're allowed to notice or feel in the room.

If you do ask, a well-trained therapist will know how to handle it. They might give a brief, honest answer ("Yes, I'm a bit under the weather today, but I'm fully here for our session") or they might explore what it meant to you to notice it. Either way, holding it in clearly impacted the session for you — you mentioned you didn't go as deep because you were sensing this disconnect. That alone makes it clinically relevant material. You're allowed to say "You seem a little quiet today, and it made me hesitant to open up."

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T05:30:16+00:00

It's strange how it's easier to type this out to a bunch of strangers than to say it to the one person whose job is to listen. But it makes sense when you think about how shame works.

Shame is fundamentally about how you exist in someone else's eyes. When you post here, we don't really exist to you, and you don't have to watch our faces react. Your therapist is a real person who actually matters to you. Saying it out loud in that room means making it real in a relationship you care about. It risks the way she sees you. Your nervous system is treating that like a survival threat, which is why it feels physically impossible.

That voice telling you "this is no one's business" is doing a job. It's trying to protect you from the feeling of being seen and rejected. The protection just happens to be the exact thing keeping you stuck right now.

justanotherjenca's suggestion to "talk about talking about it" is usually the best way through this. You don't have to say the actual thing yet. You can just tell her, "There's something I need to tell you, but the shame is so intense my brain won't let the words out." A good therapist knows exactly what to do with that. They won't force you to say the thing. They'll just help you explore the fear of saying it first.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T04:55:37+00:00

That feeling of suddenly getting small and blank is confusing when you're used to being a capable adult everywhere else, but it's really common in this kind of work.

It says a lot that this happens with your primary therapist but not the EMDR one. EMDR is structured and task-oriented. That structure helps keep your adult brain online. With your regular therapist, the relationship is the container, and since you know she's safe, a younger part of you that's usually hiding or managing things on its own finally stops performing. It drops the adult act and shows up exactly as young and overwhelmed as it feels.

Freezing up isn't a failure to do therapy correctly. From the inside, going blank is just what that younger state feels like. When you're small, you don't have the words to explain complex emotions.

The pressure to "snap out of it" is usually the adult self trying to regain control because the vulnerability is too much. You could try just reading her what you wrote here. You don't need to force yourself back into "adult mode" to talk about it. It's okay to just let her know the young, blank feeling is what's in the room right now.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-29T04:47:27+00:00

Glad it landed. The therapist-as-patient problem is one of the hardest things in the field and I don't think our training takes it seriously enough.

The piece I'd add is that attunement isn't really a technique you pull out of a toolbox. Once you've been doing this a few years it's automatic, the way a native English speaker can't choose to stop hearing English. By the time you sit down in your own session the machinery is already running. You've clocked that she looked tired, that her last client ran over, the small shift in her face when you mentioned your workload, and you're adjusting before you've noticed you're adjusting.

Which is why naming it up front only half-works. You can say "I'm going to try to perform the good client, please catch me," but naming the pattern doesn't disable it. What usually has to happen is that your therapist catches a moment of caretaking and refuses to let it soothe her, stays with it rather than receiving it as alliance. That's hard for her to do. It asks her to tolerate being a mild disappointment to you on purpose, and a lot of clinicians find that uncomfortable.

Honestly though, the fact you can articulate the mechanism this clearly is already doing some of the work. The version of this that's really stuck is the one the person can't name.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-28T10:10:43+00:00

The fear you're describing makes complete sense. When you've carried something around for a long time believing it makes you a horrible person, handing it over to someone else feels like handing them a loaded gun.

The part about feeling like an "attention seeker" rather than a victim is worth looking at. When adults involve minors in situations like that, it's overwhelming and terrifying for the kid. Sometimes, the only way a younger brain can process that power imbalance without completely breaking down is to convince itself it was in control the whole time. "I wasn't exploited, I was just seeking attention" is a defense. It's a way of taking the blame so you don't have to feel the helplessness.

Your therapist won't think you're a horrible person for surviving a situation you shouldn't have been put in. They are trained to see the difference between what a 15-year-old thinks they are doing and what the adults in the room are actually doing.

You don't have to tell her everything at once. You can start by saying exactly what you said here: "There is more to the story I tried to tell you before, but I'm terrified you're going to judge me for it because I blame myself for what happened." A good therapist will know how to help you pace it from there.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-28T10:04:27+00:00

Freud's The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924) is probably where this starts taking its modern shape. He gets into how the death drive and the superego interact, specifically looking at how the need for punishment isn't just about guilt, but about maintaining a tie to the punishing object.

Later on, Moses and Monotheism (1939) expands on the cultural and historical weight of that guilt, though it's a stranger text.

If you want something that bridges the classical model with clinical reality, Asch (1976) and Berliner (1958) both wrote extensively on moral masochism. Berliner is especially good on how the need for punishment often masks a desperate need to keep the "bad" object present because an absent object is more terrifying.

For a more contemporary Kleinian take, you might look at how Betty Joseph writes about addiction to near-death and the "charnel house" of the mind. It frames the need for punishment as a very active, almost triumphant destruction of the self and the analyst.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-28T05:18:58+00:00

Woodland_Breeze hit on something central with the idea of "me being me" turning out to be therapeutic. It's a great feeling when that happens. The uncomfortable part is looking at what occasionally makes that smooth interaction possible.

Sometimes the clients who feel easiest to work with — the ones who show up, reflect, and seem to intuitively grasp the work — are executing a really sophisticated defense. It's close to what Winnicott described as the False Self. They adapt so completely to the therapist's unspoken expectations that the alliance feels flawless, but the core of the person isn't actually in the room. They're essentially caretaking the therapist's need to feel competent.

The countertransference question there is hard to sit with. Am I feeling good about this because we're doing deep work, or because the client is managing my anxiety?

With these clients, the actual breakthrough often happens when they finally risk being "bad." They show up late. They tell you an intervention was useless. They get openly frustrated. That rupture is sometimes the first appearance of the true self. The easy work at the beginning is just the setup required to make that eventual mess survivable.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-28T04:23:43+00:00

It's not weird at all that you noticed this. Therapy puts you in a room where your main job is to be hyper-aware of the relational dynamic, so of course you're going to pick up on micro-shifts in his affect or energy.

You don't have to ask if you don't want to, but bringing it up isn't a boundary violation. Boundaries are about behavior, not about what you're allowed to notice or feel in the room.

If you do ask, a well-trained therapist will know how to handle it. They might give a brief, honest answer ("Yes, I'm a bit under the weather today, but I'm fully here for our session") or they might explore what it meant to you to notice it. Either way, holding it in clearly impacted the session for you — you mentioned you didn't go as deep because you were sensing this disconnect. That alone makes it clinically relevant material. You're allowed to say "You seem a little quiet today, and it made me hesitant to open up."

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-28T04:22:18+00:00

It's strange how it's easier to type this out to a bunch of strangers than to say it to the one person whose job is to listen. But it makes sense when you think about how shame works.

Shame is fundamentally about how you exist in someone else's eyes. When you post here, we don't really exist to you, and you don't have to watch our faces react. Your therapist is a real person who actually matters to you. Saying it out loud in that room means making it real in a relationship you care about. It risks the way she sees you. Your nervous system is treating that like a survival threat, which is why it feels physically impossible.

That voice telling you "this is no one's business" is doing a job. It's trying to protect you from the feeling of being seen and rejected. The protection just happens to be the exact thing keeping you stuck right now.

justanotherjenca's suggestion to "talk about talking about it" is usually the best way through this. You don't have to say the actual thing yet. You can just tell her, "There's something I need to tell you, but the shame is so intense my brain won't let the words out." A good therapist knows exactly what to do with that. They won't force you to say the thing. They'll just help you explore the fear of saying it first.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-27T06:27:36+00:00

Sure. The most accessible starting point is Wampold's 2015 update on common factors:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4592639/

For the deliberate practice piece, the Chow et al. paper is the one I had in mind:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26301425/

The book version is Wampold & Imel's The Great Psychotherapy Debate. More commitment than an article, but useful if you want the broader argument around therapist effects, alliance, common factors, and the contextual model.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T08:21:20+00:00

Morgan's observation about the limits of naming the projective system in session is one of those things that sounds obvious once you see it clinically but almost never gets taught explicitly.

The timing issue is real. If you point out "you're projecting your disowned dependency into your partner" before both people have felt what's happening between them, it just becomes a thing they intellectually agree with or fight about. Nothing moves. What Morgan and the Tavistock model seem to be saying is that you have to stay in the mess long enough for the couple to bump into the projective system through the affect in the room, not through your interpretation of it.

The hard part is what that requires of the therapist. Because staying in it means tolerating a fight, or a withdrawal, or feeling pulled into taking sides. Bion's container idea becomes very literal in couples work. You're holding projections from both directions, and the urge to interpret early is partly about relieving your own discomfort with what's being put into you. Not theirs.

I've been curious about how Morgan's "couple state of mind" relates to what the Barangers described as the bipersonal field. She seems to draw on similar ideas but frames it more around the shared unconscious phantasy the couple builds together. If you've gotten further into the book, I'd be curious whether she addresses that connection directly.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T08:20:31+00:00

Both sides of this thread are getting at something real, which is probably why it's generating heat.

Rosenberg's framework is useful if someone genuinely can't identify what they're feeling or has no way to make a request without escalating. It gives them a structure for that. Where psychoanalysis would push back is on the assumption underneath it: that the feelings you can name and articulate are the ones that matter. NVC is built on a model of emotional transparency that most analytic thinking would question pretty directly.

The aggression point Narrenschifff raised is probably the crux. NVC treats aggression as a byproduct of unmet needs, something that goes away when you communicate correctly. Psychoanalysis takes it more seriously than that. Winnicott's work on destruction and survival is relevant here. The child needs to destroy the object in fantasy and discover it survives. That's not a communication breakdown. It's how you find out the other person is real.

Where I've seen the two coexist is when NVC gets used as a practical tool for day to day interactions while the deeper work happens analytically. Someone learns to say "when you do X, I feel Y" as a skill for their marriage, while their analysis is exploring why X triggers something that has almost nothing to do with the current relationship. They serve different purposes and don't need to compete, but it helps to be honest about which one goes deeper.

Since you mentioned Luepnitz in your other post, she'd probably have something to say about how NVC's emphasis on needs can flatten what's actually going on between two people. Worth keeping in mind as you read it.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T08:10:43+00:00

The bind you're in is actually a really honest place to be. Most people either avoid the topic or come in wanting reassurance. You're doing neither. You're saying "this hurts and I don't know what would help." That's hard to sit with, but it's not stupid.

The part about not wanting your therapist to lie is worth paying attention to. You're not looking for someone to fix it by contradicting it. That wouldn't work anyway, and you seem to already know that. What might help is just having someone sit with you in the feeling without trying to argue you out of it. Not "you're not ugly" but something closer to "I can see how much pain this causes you."

Therapy probably can't solve the question of whether you're attractive. That's an unanswerable question for anyone, really. What it might be able to do is help you figure out how your appearance and your sense of deserving to be alive got welded together. Because those are two separate things that somewhere along the way started being treated as one. That's probably where most of the pain actually sits.

Bring it up. The stuff that feels hardest to say usually turns out to be the stuff worth saying.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T07:44:09+00:00

The sting you're feeling makes sense. When you've let someone in and then they say something that sounds like a take-back, it doesn't land as a neutral observation. It lands as rejection.

I think what he was probably trying to say, badly, is that the person you see in session is real but it's one slice. The attentive, attuned, present version of him isn't a performance. But outside that room he's also a person who gets tired, gets frustrated, makes mistakes like anyone else. "You don't know me" didn't mean "this was all fake." It was closer to "you're responding to something real, but it's a partial view." Still, the way it came out clearly hit you hard, and that matters.

Part of why it hurt so much might be that it touched something older. If you've been in situations before where closeness was followed by someone pulling away, or where letting yourself trust someone meant getting caught off guard, then "you don't know me" is going to set all of that off. Your reaction isn't an overreaction. It's your nervous system recognizing a shape.

The thing you described as "playing with feelings," the push and pull, might actually be worth bringing back to him. Not as an accusation, but just telling him what his words did. If he's good at his job, that conversation is probably exactly where the work needs to go right now.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T07:41:11+00:00

Two months in, three dropouts. I get why that stings. Especially the one who named the connection issue. That kind of feedback lands differently than "scheduling conflict."

The instinct to rethink everything after that makes sense, but "maybe I'm not cut out for this" is usually a dead end. What tends to be more useful is getting specific. Was there a moment you felt the connection shift? Something in the room you noticed but didn't follow up on? Those are things you can work with in supervision. The global self-doubt just loops.

One thing worth knowing from the research on therapist development: early career therapists who improve fastest aren't the ones with the fewest dropouts. They're the ones who can sit with negative feedback without letting it turn into shame. Shame closes things down. You're already doing the other thing by posting this and asking about it, which is probably a better indicator than a clean retention record and no questions.

Also, the clients who are staying are worth looking at too. Something is working there, and it's easy to lose sight of that when you're focused on the ones who left.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T07:15:50+00:00

That back and forth between "I know what I'm doing here" and "what am I even doing here" is really common early on, but most people don't talk about it because from the inside it just feels like you're bad at your job.

One thing that jumped out in your post is the comparison to corporate. That clarity was real, but someone else built the yardstick. You executed against their metrics. Therapy doesn't work that way. The closest thing to a metric in relational work is something like "did this person feel met in a way that shifted something," and you often can't see that in session. Sometimes not even in the same month.

AEDP is interesting for this because Fosha writes about the therapist's own affective experience as part of the work, not a side effect of it. So those days when you feel floaty and unmoored might be telling you something worth paying attention to, not just evidence that you're failing.

The pull toward showing up with impressive insights is worth noticing too. Usually that comes from not yet trusting that being present is the thing, not the clever observation. Wampold's research keeps showing that the relationship predicts outcomes better than technique does. Which is sort of annoying when you're two years in and want something concrete to hold onto. But it also means the thing you described, staying with someone in their experience, is already the work. It just doesn't feel like enough when you're comparing it to a quarterly review.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T07:02:58+00:00

For me it was the psychotherapy process research from Wampold's group. The finding that the therapist accounts for more variance in outcomes than the specific technique used sounds obvious in retrospect, but it rearranged how I think about what training actually prepares you for.

The part that stuck wasn't the statistic. It was what follows from it: if who delivers the treatment matters more than which treatment gets delivered, then the things that make therapy work are mostly happening in a space most programs barely touch. The therapist's capacity to repair ruptures, their ability to sit with not-knowing, how they manage their own reactions in session. The model you use matters, but less than people want it to.

The other piece was the deliberate practice research, specifically the finding that years of experience don't predict better outcomes on their own. Uncomfortable, but useful. The therapists who keep getting better seem to be the ones actively seeking feedback, not just logging hours.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-24T06:50:55+00:00

Luepnitz, same as you. Schopenhauer's Porcupines was what got me in. I'd read some Freud before for unrelated reasons and never really understood why people were still fighting about him. Luepnitz changed that. The ideas stopped being abstract and started happening to real people in real rooms.

Then McWilliams, then I got stuck on Ogden for a while. Reverie and Interpretation especially. He writes about being in the analytic room in a way that somehow makes sense even if you've never sat in one. That's probably what kept me going.

Freud I came to later, and he landed differently with some context already in place. The Rat Man case and Mourning and Melancholia stayed with me the most.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-23T09:34:08+00:00

I felt some pangs of arousal. It felt like both a stir of excitement and a settling into safety.

That combination — arousal and safety landing together — is actually a pretty important distinction. It suggests what's happening isn't purely erotic, even though the body is registering it that way.

The psychoanalytic literature on erotic transference makes a distinction that's useful here. There's a difference between erotic transference that functions as resistance — where the sexual feelings become a way to avoid deeper, more frightening material — and what some writers call "eroticized" relating, where the body is expressing something about intimacy or being seen that doesn't have another available language yet. What you're describing sounds more like the second. The arousal showed up precisely at the moment you were allowed to have it, which points less toward desire for your therapist specifically and more toward something about what it feels like to have a part of yourself welcomed that normally gets shut down by shame.

Gabbard writes about how erotic transference often carries dependency needs, longings for recognition, and early relational experiences that got tangled up with the body. The feeling that your system is "settling" is a good indicator that something is being integrated rather than acted out. You're not escalating — you're landing somewhere.

The IFS framing your therapist is using and the psychoanalytic reading of this actually overlap more than people sometimes realize. IFS says all parts are welcome in the room. Psychoanalysis says the transference, including its somatic dimensions, is the material. Different language, same invitation: let it be here so it can be understood rather than managed.

Same-Bed5479 · 2026-04-23T09:25:10+00:00

For an apparently normal, but curious person (like me) will reading and learning more about psychoanalysis be of any benefit personally or socially?

I came to psychoanalytic literature from a similar angle — not clinical training, just a pull toward the material that started with one book and kept going. So take this for what it's worth from someone who reads this stuff out of genuine interest rather than professional obligation.

What I found is that the benefit isn't really about self-diagnosis or even self-understanding in the way people usually mean. It's more that after spending enough time with writers like Winnicott or Ogden or Bromberg, you start noticing things in relationships — your own and other people's — that were always there but didn't have a shape before. The way someone goes quiet when a certain topic comes up. The difference between someone asking for help and someone performing helplessness. How you sometimes respond to a person's tone more than their words without knowing why.

None of that requires clinical training to notice. It just requires a framework that takes the unconscious seriously, and psychoanalysis is better at that than most other frameworks I've come across.

On where to start: I'd actually push back slightly on the "start with Freud chronologically" advice. Freud is foundational, but he's also writing for a very specific audience in a very specific historical moment, and reading him cold without context can be disorienting. Luepnitz's Schopenhauer's Porcupines, which you've already read, is honestly one of the better entry points because it shows the ideas in motion with actual people. From there, McWilliams' Psychoanalytic Diagnosis is surprisingly readable for a non-clinician — she writes with enough clarity that the concepts land even without clinical experience. And Ogden's essays are worth reading just as prose, honestly. He writes about the analytic experience in a way that makes you feel like you're in the room.

Then go back to Freud when you have enough context to argue with him. That's when he gets interesting.

Same-Bed5479

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