The Intersubjective Safety/Danger Dialectic

Safety, or more accurately the feeling of safety and its inverse, danger, is an experiential variable that has received relatively little attention in the psychodynamic literature and discussion. This changed in January of 2013 when Joseph Lichtenberg, M.D., convened a panel during the annual winter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association to discuss the question of safety for the analysand, the analyst, and the dyad. As the reporter (Segalla, 2013) on that panel, this discussion shifted my attention and thinking toward an aspect of therapy and psychoanalysis often taken for granted-the way we take oxygen for granted-all around us but rarely directly discussed or explored. This article attempts to articulate this thinking and some thoughts about bringing the question of safety and danger into the psychoanalytic dialogue.