The availability of the analyst. Therapeutic relationship person, presence and mutuality

This book highlights an empirical-conceptual framework that compends ten years of rigorous and systematic research centered around the question: What is understood by the analyst's availability? Based on this question, the author developed a multidimensional construct that reveals its component qualities and functions, emphasizing the vital importance of the analyst's available stance in today's clinical practice. Her challenge was to put the construct of availability "into action"—that is, to "give a voice" to both analysts and patients. She places great emphasis on the premise that both are valid interlocutors capable of discussing, perceiving, and formulating different aspects in the co-construction of the analytical bond. Thus, she proposes a journey that provides an updated, extended, and more complex conceptualization which, in her view, is paramount. By identifying, delimiting, and discriminating the different components of this established construct, the analyst will be able to move between various instrumental positions, implementing different approach strategies according to the unique nuances each patient presents at different moments of the process. Ultimately, this exposes the complex intertwining that occurs between the subjective worlds of the analyst and the patient, which have been, are, and will remain a constant concern of professional practice. This demonstrates the need to test the analyst's critical thinking, which will materialize in a constant process of theoretical-clinical construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. This process will mobilize them to continue questioning a psychoanalysis that, facing the 21st century, demands involvement, evolution, and change.