Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity and Trauma

The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis

Werner Bohleber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912627
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

'At last we have a book that provides a comprehensive overview and assessment of the intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis, showing its logical and clinical limitations and exploring its social and cultural determinants. Bohleber emphasizes the clinical importance of real traumatic experience along with the analysis of the transference as he reviews and broadens psychoanalytic theories of memory in relation to advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Psychoanalytic ideas on personality, adolescence and identity are re-thought and updated. Bohleber brilliantly presents a unique understanding of malignant narcissism and prejudice in relation to European anti-Semitism and to contemporary religiously inspired terrorist violence.'- Cyril Levitt, Dr Phil, Professor and former Chair Department of Sociology, McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario. Psychoanalyst in private practice, Toronto, Ontario

Part I
The Intersubjective Paradigm in Psychoanalysis and Late Modernity

Chapter One
Intersubjectivity without a subject? Intersubjective theories and the Other

Introduction

In the past decades, a change has been under way in the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, as an exclusively intrapsychic perspective has given way to an intersubjective understanding of the analytical situation. Indeed, nearly all schools of analysis have now come to embrace interactive concepts, and such concepts (e.g., countertransference, enactment, and projective identification) have established themselves as dominant within psychoanalytic clinical theory. Countertransference, for instance, has unfolded in a dynamic that has continually expanded the term conceptually and that has resulted in bringing the analyst’s own subjectivity largely to the fore. Renik (2004) has taken a further step forward arguing that the use of the concept of countertransference has led to a naïve underestimation of the role of the analyst’s own subjectivity in clinical work. Some go so far as to deem this change a paradigm shift within psychoanalysis: in the wake of the narrative turn of the 1980s, it is argued, one can now discern a “relational turn” in psychoanalysis (Mitchell, 2000). At present, concepts in keeping with this perspective continue to come to the fore, including “intersubjective encounter”, “moments of meeting”, “mutual recognition”, “authenticity”, and “spontaneity”, among others.

In the original subject–object paradigm, the two sides are reciprocally related. If one side is active, then the other is considered passive. While this complimentarity can be reversible, mutuality is categorically excluded (see Benjamin, 1998). In intersubjective conceptions of the analytic process, however, the analyst and patient are thought of in methodological terms as part of a subject– subject relationship, a relationship structured more by symmetry than polar complementarity. In conceptualizing this relationship, the term “mutuality” is thought to provide a more useful term than symmetry for characterizing that which is shared in intersubjective positions (Aron, 1996). In distancing themselves from the so-called “classic” perspective of one-way influence, intersubjective analysts emphasize the inevitability of a mutual and reciprocal two-way influence between patient and analyst.

The attention to this “in-between” position in the analytic situation largely explains the appeal of intersubjective perspectives. Aron (1996) compares it to Winnicott’s “potential space”, in which a mutual, creative co-construction of meanings can come about:

Meaning, in the analytic situation, is not generated by the analyst’s rational (secondary) processing of the analysand’s associations; rather, meaning is seen as relative, multiple, and indeterminate, with each interpretation subject to continual and unending interpretation by both analyst and analysand. Meaning is generated relationally and dialogically, which is to say that meaning is negotiated and coconstructed. Meaning is arrived at through a “meeting of minds”. [ibid., p. xii]

Indeed, the aim of this intersubjective position is to move beyond the conception of an isolated monadic mind (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992). At the same time, however, these models pose the danger of conceptually watering down, and ultimately dissolving, the individual subject in an intersubjective context. In order to avoid sinking into a theoretically untenable position of melding and fusion, by necessity such intersubjective theories must elaborate on the elements of difference, separation, and autonomy in the mutual relationship (as in Aron, 1996).

Analysts subscribing to this intersubjective approach have also criticized and challenged the position of the analyst as an objective, observing expert and clinical authority. Indeed, when insights are co-created by the analyst and analysand, the analyst is, strictly speaking, no longer the expert. It is the patient, however, who seeks help from the analyst; the latter is therefore vested with both the authority and responsibility of an expert in carrying out his duties, and, as a result, any partial symmetry in the analyst–patient relationship is necessarily supplemented by a relative asymmetry. The balance of therapeutic efficacy in intersubjective theories has also shifted, moving away from an emphasis on the analyst’s verbal interpretation and towards the pole of interactive influence by way of experience.

The shared, the other, and the experience of the present

Intersubjective conceptions of psychoanalysis fault classic metapsychology both for an entrenchment of subject–object modes of thinking and for a positivist reductionalism. This critique is taken the farthest by Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, who have continually built upon their intersubjective variant of psychoanalysis over the last several years (I am referring here primarily to Stolorow & Atwood, 1992 and to Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997). These writers disparage previous psychoanalytic conceptions for operating according to a theory of the mind that posits it as atomistic and isolated. Two-person psychology, they argue, has fallen into the same trap; it can only conceptualize intersubjectivity as two separate minds “bump[ing] into each other” (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 68). Not only does our deepest sense of self emerge ontogenetically from interactions with primary objects, they argue, but it requires life-long interactive support to be maintained:

The intrinsic embeddedness of self-experience in intersubjective fields means that our self-esteem, our sense of personal identity, even our experience of ourselves as having distinct and enduring existence are contingent on specific sustaining relations to the human surround. [Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 10]

They draw on Hegel’s phenomenology for support in presenting one’s individuality as something that emerges from, and is maintained by, the “interplay between subjectivities” (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 6). The fundamental components of subjectivity are no longer the ego, id, and superego, as in classical structural theory; instead, subjectivity consists of so-called “organizing principles”. These include, for instance, the emotional convictions that the individual has formed throughout his life as a result of his or her experiences with the emotional environment. Beebe and Lachmann (2002) similarly refer to “patterns of experience”, which are organized as “expectancies of sequences of reciprocal exchanges” (p. 13). These consist of successive co-constructions formed during pairings with an other. Such organizational principles (or patterns of experience), it is claimed, are often unconscious, either in the pre-reflexive (in keeping with the modern conception of the implicit unconscious) or the dynamic sense. According to this formulation, the encounter between two subjects in the analytic relationship is an interaction between “organizations of experience” (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 9), from which a distinctive, extremely tightly woven psychic system emerges. In this interaction, both subjectivities are, in at least one respect, equal participants, in the sense of creating the interaction together; at the same time, however, the interaction is organized asymmetrically, as the analyst assumes the task of providing orientation, while the patient, as an other, attempts to reorganize his experience. It follows that a patient’s experience cannot be examined in isolation, but only as part of a jointly constructed intersubjective field. Resistance is therefore not seen as the individual behaviour of the patient, and the task of interpretation is not to uncover the causes of resistance in the patient him or herself; rather, the question is “how analyst and patient have co-constructed this logjam” (ibid., p. 76).

With this, we arrive at a central problem of intersubjective conceptions of the analytic relationship. In order for something to be examined, it has to be shared by each partner and be common to both: “What they do together is a product of their experience in the unique intersubjective field they create together” (ibid., p. 18). Hence, it is said of the analyst and patient that “The intersection [allows] them to create a space where the unbelievable [can] be explored together” (ibid.). The partners do, in fact, differ, however, in the way in which they have structured their experience, though these differences and contrasts appear solely as something that stands in the way of an understanding and as something to be ignored or eliminated. A subject–subject relationship is centred on the encounter between two clearly distinguishable subjects, hence, on that which the two can share with each other. The otherness or foreignness involved remains theoretically undefined, however, and does not represent further material to be examined in the relationship. Clinical theory, and its associated treatment technique, can serve as a sort of hermeneutic pre-understanding (Vorverständnis) to help us focus our efforts to understand the otherness of the Other; here, however, it is seen as an obstacle, which is more apt to obscure or distort the encounter than to promote comprehension. In this sense, it is argued that the rules of therapeutic technique only serve to “replicate massive structures of pathological accommodation . . . in both patient and analyst . .. The purpose of the rules is to induce compliance, not to facilitate the interplay of subjective worlds and perspectives” (ibid., p. 25). Hence, it is argued that no attention is paid to those particularities of the relationship for which rules do not apply: “technically oriented thinking blinds us to the particularity of our patients, of ourselves, and of each psychoanalytic process” (ibid.).

Stern (2004) goes yet a step further in the direction of a clearly discernible intersubjectivity. For him, intersubjectivity is not solely an inter-mental process, but a discrete primary motivational system similar to that of attachment or sexuality. As such, it regulates the psychological feeling of belonging as well as of being alone. The human mind is, then, no longer considered independent and isolated. Likewise, we are no longer considered the sole owners, masters, and guardians of our subjectivity. Instead, we find ourselves constantly in dialogue with other subjects and their consciousnesses, and our mental life is “co-created”. Stern refers to this continuous co-creative dialogue as an “intersubjective matrix”, which he defines as “the overriding crucible in which interacting minds take on their current form” (ibid., p. 78). The basic unit of this “intersubjective matrix”, formed by an intersubjective consciousness, is the “present moment”, which stages the intrapsychic event in which two subjects encounter each other. This intersubjective encounter in the here and now of the present moment is marked by a specific temporality: both subjects simultaneously assimilate an experience, creating a temporal connection that makes them part of one and the same structure. Such an experience is often only implicitly conscious.

While psychoanalysis persists in viewing the conscious as self-evident and the unconscious as unknown, Stern reverses the two, regarding the implicit intersubjective consciousness as the primary component of that which is unknown/that which is to be clinically and therapeutically examined and illuminated. Indeed, to the extent that psychoanalysis has ever been concerned with events in the “present moment”, it has viewed them only as events or enactments in which patterns of the past are staged. In intersubjective approaches, however, the present relationship comes to be viewed as a central element of the therapeutic relationship in its formative power as an encounter. Likewise, transference and countertransference come to be seen as special cases in a much broader intersubjective relationship. The emphasis on experience is thereby shifted away from the comprehension of past patterns as they reappear in the here and now between the analyst and patient, and towards present experience, which becomes part of a new constellation in the intersubjective matrix at the moment of encounter between subjects.

Stern is critical of psychoanalytical treatment technique for far too hastily departing from the present moment of encounter and experience in order to search for meaning. He distinguishes between in-depth experience, which is lived, and understanding, which seeks to explain. In order for explanation to come about, lived experience must be caught up with after the fact (après coup) and transposed into language. “Usually psychoanalysis is more interested in the (re)construction than in the happening (if knowable)”, Stern argues.

After all, it is the (re)construction that revises and changes the happening into a psychodynamically pertinent psychic reality. In a sense, psychoanalysis is so focused on the verbally reconstructed aspect of experience that the phenomenal gets lost. [ibid., p. 140]

I have tried to show in the intersubjective theories of Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, and Stern, how the weight lies on the particularity of the jointly constructed new experience between two subjects. As we have seen, here the context, or the intersubjective matrix, becomes a fundamental category. To take this to an extreme, one could say that the subject is thereby reduced to a contingent effect of contexts.

Here, it could and should be objected that we are always more than our contexts and more than a co-created subject. The self disappears in its independent function as author and active agent and as an autonomous, self-determinant agency. In this way, the holistic thinking in terms of subjects that has become commonplace in the intersubjective paradigm obscures the psychodynamics traced in structural theory. Hence, the intrapsychic dissolves in the intersubjective, whose formative concepts consist of intersubjective “organizing principles” and “patterns of experience”. Absent in this theorization is an ego, specifically an ego that is dependent on unconscious forces but has nevertheless acquired a certain degree of autonomy. Primarily, when addressing something stemming from the recognition of one’s own unconscious, while also following the ego-ideal as an individual guideline, this allows the ego a certain amount of freedom from its integration into the intersubjectively structured environment.

Intersubjectivity and alterity

Many intersubjective conceptions, mainly those of North American origin, exhibit an inadequate understanding of the position of the Other in the intersubjective relationship. However, the assumption of an intersubjective dialectic of self and other, as posited in continental philosophy, has been fruitful for a number of newer psychoanalytic conceptions. Indeed, the intersubjective turn of psychoanalysis cannot be understood apart from the philosophical movements of the past century. In their attempts to overcome Freud’s Cartesian dualism, for example, Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, and Stern, all explicitly made use of Husserl’s phenomenology, invoking both his positing of the ego as intersubjectively constituted and his views regarding consciousness and intentionality, according to which consciousness is a priori directed towards something. Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics was likewise highly influential in shaping and enabling this intersubjectivist trend.

Psychoanalytic intersubjective theories flourished in Germany as early as the 1950s and 1960s, and their influence endured well into the 1980s, but they have been forgotten in Germany and were never noted in North America. (Presented in more detail in Bohleber, 2003.) “Encounter” [Begegnung] was a key concept in philosophical anthropology throughout the 1950s, first introduced into psychotherapeutic theory by Ludwig Binswanger and Viktor von Weizsäcker, among others. The concept was based on social–ontological models of a philosophy of dialogue, which had been articulated in the work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner, and others as early as the 1920s. (In the following, I call upon the excellent study by Theunissen, 1977.) The philosophical trend towards intersubjectivism that these developments reflected ran contrary to traditional German Idealism, which was built on the assumption of an abstract subject. The place formerly occupied by the abstract subject was now occupied by the actual human self. Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is characterized by a similar turn from the abstract subject. In formulating a concept of origins, similarly, Buber (1954) replaced the originally philosophically isolated “I” with a “between” [Zwischen], describing the phenomenology that resulted from this substitution as a phenomenology of the encounter [Begegnung]. It is not an “I” and a “You” as already complete entities that bring about an encounter, according to Buber; instead, these entities spring purely from the action of the encounter itself. The “I” does not become a person by way of the “You”; rather, the coming into being of each one takes place in the encounter. In this way, the encounter of “You–I” is afforded the standing of the true subject. For Ludwig Binswanger (1942), a person is always located within a framework of meaning and interpretation, and this framework must first be made explicit before the position of psychoanalytic examination and the understanding of human psychology can be determined. The actual context of mental experiences is not captured within it, however, only the context of meaning. This is what creates a unity that can then be hermeneutically explicated. For Binswanger, the process of psychoanalytical interpretation becomes a special case of Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics of the humanities. Binswanger then proceeds to work from an even stronger assumption of a “between” than Buber did. He speaks of a constitutive primacy of duality, which he conceptualizes as “We-hood” [Wirheit] and understands as an ontological unity, contra Heidegger, who thought of the “being-with” (Mit-Sein) of the Other only in terms of “being-there-with” (Mit-Dasein). For Binswanger the self is constituted in terms of the “we”.

This conception of encounter was widespread in psychoanalysis in Germany in the 1950s. According to this conception, the analyst must come into communicative contact with the patient’s world in order to understand his worldview [Weltentwurf] and mode of existence. This can only come about in a genuine encounter, one that goes beyond the dynamics of transference and countertransference. In this way, the relationship between analyst and patient constitutes a new and previously unknown communicative experience, and both transference and encounter are necessary if psychotherapy is to be successful (Schottlaender, 1952). All of these approaches emphasize the fundamental significance of intersubjectivity in the human and therapeutic relationship. Yet, despite their empirically anthropological perspective, they also hollow out the actual “You” and the actuality of the relationship. Methodologically, the immediacy of the relationship, which as a present intersubjective experience of encounter cannot be captured by the concept of transference, is inadequately conceptualized in terms of its intersubjective significance. The encounter becomes a metaphysical and transcendental fact, and ultimately seems to assume a nearly religious basis. Hence, adherents of ego psychology conceived as an objective natural science had little trouble in criticizing this concept as “too unfathomably deep, resisting any thorough exploration” (Scheunert, 1959). Their criticism had some merit, but it also resulted in some fruitful elements of this school of thought being discarded, elements that certainly could have been further developed in psychoanalysis. These elements made their reappearance later, however, both in the debate about the scientific standing of psychoanalysis and in the development of intersubjective concepts of treatment.

In the mid-1960s, new scientific methodological approaches came to the fore, fuelled primarily by Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer (1960) explicated intersubjective communication phenomenologically as hermeneutic experience. In his work, the intersubjective relationship between the I and the Other unfolds according to the inherent structure of question and answer. The encounter with the Other as a You begins with something addressing us. To directly subject oneself to this experience means, literally, to allow oneself to come into question. Every action and every expression of the patient represents an answer to a question, and the analyst must be aware of what that question is if he or she is to understand the patient’s words and behaviour. As Loch (1965) observed, countertransference thereby becomes the focus of the analyst’s attention, since his task is to ensure that the question, to which the patient’s behaviour and emotions are the answer, can first fully unfold within himself, the analyst.

Argelander (1968, 1970) developed a model of psychoanalytical hermeneutics that he described as “scenic understanding”. In the scene, within which the interaction of analyst and patient unfolds, no single infantile experience is ever manifested, but, rather, what is expressed is an infantile configuration, one that has been constructed from multiple scenes. This is a present creation, arising out of the “scenic function of the ego”, yet it is also always intersubjectively tied to bot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE INTERSUBJECTIVE PARADIGM IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LATE MODERNITY
• PART II: TRAUMA, MEMORY, AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• PART III: PSYCHOANALYSIS OF IDEOLOGICAL DESTRUCTIVITY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX