Correspondence: Lewis A. Kirshner, MD, 306 Harvard Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. e-mail: lewis_kirshner@hms.harvard.edu

¹Associate Clinical Professor, Harvard Medical School. Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.

Abstract

In this paper, I make use of the term figuration, which relates to the process of giving shape to unconscious contents in the form of meaningful presentations. My interest is in how traumatic experience succeeds or fails to become psychically figured and thereby susceptible to elaboration and absorption through intersubjective process. I argue that the process of figuration always occurs in an actual or implied intersubjective context and involves, thereby, a central feature of an exchange between subject and Other. These concepts are discussed and applied to a case report of an analytic psychotherapy involving a traumatic dream and its sequellae.