In the Room Where It Happened: A Discussion of A. Joelson, I Think, Therefore I Am Not Alone: Thinking Obsessionally in a Relational World

Generously and graciously, Amy Joelson has invited the reader into her consulting room and into her prolific mind so that we can be as close as possible to her work with Cody. Just as Cody invited Joelson to think with him, it is only from up close that one can witness the unfolding of her long and patient work with this obsessional boy. Joelson could have easily shared her insights about Cody and described the peak moments of enactment and left it to us to piece together the rest on our own. Joelson’s writing and her evocative narrative style would have stood on its own. But this is an article as much about theory, therapeutic action, and the evolution of Joelson’s relationship to them as it is about Cody. She is “haunted” by the specter of classical psychoanalytic theory about obsessive thinking and its defensive functioning. Further, she is compelled to first explicate Freud’s thinking about obsessions before shaking off years of living therapeutically in its shadow before ushering us into a very different “room” in which Joelson reveals an integration of her newly acquired analytic theoretical sensibility. From Kohut to Sullivan to Stolorow and Atwood to Lachmann and Beebe and complexity theory, Joelson makes what feels like an airtight case for jettisoning the ghosts of the old haunted rooms to her present current and comprehensive theory. Beginning with the overarching premise that affect and thought are inseparably bound together in human relationships, Joelson systematically demonstrates how the complex integration of her new mentors and theoretical guides provide a theoretical framework to understand not only Cody’s struggles with his overheated mind but also his therapist’s orientation to that mind. Returning for a moment to Aaron Burr’s lament of exclusion while Hamilton and his group secretly conspire, Joelson masterfully reveals her theoretical stance on obsessional thinking, and when she is done, we are left with a beautiful, relationally developed clinical case example. Joelson re-enacts (not “enacts” necessarily, even though there is plenty of that, too) with Cody and with us, her readers, the details of their mutually co-created and interactive dance by which she helps her patient expand his repertoire of thinking and self-regulation. This discussion is meant to be an admiring reflection on Joelson’s application of post-Freudian theory on obsessional thinking as experienced from a clinical perspective. She, too, could be said to employ her own obsessional style to accomplish this ambitious task. Therefore, at the outset of this discussion, I would like to note the invaluable contribution Joelson makes to the growing body of psychoanalytic writing that demonstrates how child analytic clinical theory challenges, clarifies, and expands adult analytic theory. From the perspective of intersubjective theory, Joelson depathologizes obsessional thinking and demonstrates its adaptive aspects to promote self-regulation and secure attachment. As I read this article about obsessional thinking, I would suggest that Joelson amasses compelling evidence for the adaptive virtues of shifting our view of obsessional thinking via an implicit “enactment” between author and reader. While not typically used to refer to the experience between text and reader (Bromberg, 2006), enactment is here used to bring our attention to the vitality and potentially interactive qualities of works of writing. In an article about the overheated thinking of the