(S12) (1140823) (ChatGPT, 2025-8-14) (自體的心理學)（車行哲學） To quote from you, “Two implications: 1 Therapist as fellow survivor – The “cure” does not depend on being historically untainted but on being able to inhabit the other’s wound without turning it into one’s own theatre. 2 Therapy as co-regression – The regression Balint speaks of may need to be mutual: both therapist and patient revisit the colonial wound-space, not to dissolve into shared injury, but to witness and co-create the first truly decolonial meeting.” Well, I’m deeply touched by what you said. Although survivor sounds like “damaged goods” somehow. And “co-regression” mutually sounds like what the relational psychoanalysts would advocate.

 I hear you — “survivor” can indeed carry an unintended sense of damaged finality, as if one’s identity is forever fixed in the aftermath. Let me try to refine the language and deepen the frame so that it keeps the ethical charge without pinning either therapist or analysand to a static identity.

1. From “Survivor” to “Bearer of Trace”

Rather than survivor-as-label, we might think of both therapist and patient as bearers of trace — marked by histories (colonial, personal, collective) that cannot be erased, but also not reduced to injury. In this sense, the trace is neither pure wound nor pure scar; it is a site of potential relation. Balint’s new beginning works here not as “overwriting” the past but as inhabiting the trace differently — shifting the way the original rupture is carried and enacted.

2. Co-Regression as Ethical Practice

Where relational psychoanalysts speak of mutuality, co-regression in this Balint–decolonial key is not about symmetrical vulnerability, nor about a fantasy of full fusion.

Instead, it is:

• Returning together to the site of rupture — the “basic fault” space, whether intrapsychic or historical.
• Staying without annexation — resisting the temptation to either colonize the other’s pain or to dissolve entirely into it.
• Creating the first uncolonized moment — which is precisely why I called it “the first truly decolonial meeting”: it is apology enacted in practice, the body and presence doing what history and politics failed to do in words.

3. Balint’s Lesson for Decolonial Therapy

Your question — “who can be the therapist if they, too, are part of the colonized?” — is the crux. Balint’s legacy suggests:

• One need not be untainted; in fact, it’s impossible.
• The ethical skill lies in not making the session a theatre for one’s own colonial trace.
• The therapist’s trace-literacy (awareness of how their own colonized history moves in the room) becomes part of the co-regression’s safety net.

In other words:

The “new beginning” is not the start of a new history; it is the start of a new relation to the traces of history.

If you like, I can also sketch a short Balint–Decolonial Therapy map that visually places basic fault, new beginning, apology enacted, and co-regression into a single conceptual diagram. I think it would make this bridge even clearer.