Impasses in the psychoanalytic relationship

In this article, I outline a psychoanalytic perspective on therapeutic impasses based on more recent developments in psychoanalytic therapy and on Winnicott's (1971) work in particular. This perspective suggests that many impasses result from clients' inability to participate in their own experience in a subjectively meaningful and affectively vital way. I argue that, in such cases, the therapeutic task becomes one of helping clients relate to events in a more personal and affectively engaged fashion through a type of therapeutic play in which the boundary between what is real and unreal becomes temporarily ambiguous. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol/In Session 56: 225–231, 2000.