Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis

Neville Symington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429911231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What Neville Symington is attempting to do in this book is to trace the pathway along which he has travelled to become a person. This has run side by side with trying to become an analyst. The author has made landmark discoveries when reading philosophy, sociology, history, and literature. Learning to paint, learning to fly a plane, and also the study of art and of aviation theory have opened up new vistas. This account is only a sketch. The completed picture will never materialize. It is therefore autobiographical but only in a partial sense. It is always emphasized that one's own personal experience of being psychoanalysed is by far the most significant part of a psychoanalyst's education.

PART I

JOHN KLAUBER:
PSYCHOANALYST OF THE PERSON

CHAPTER ONE

John Klauber, Independent clinician

“Though force may coerce the body, it also has the effect of embittering the mind. He who uses it, though in the defence of the right, may, in the hour of victory, shut his heart to pity, and in doing so render himself or his children liable to the terrible penalties which the gods sooner or later inflict on the arrogant”

(Bryant, 1969, p. 68)

John Klauber died on 11 August 1981, while on holiday with his wife in France. I believe that he made a very distinct contribution to psychoanalysis, and yet I believe that it is underestimated and in danger of disappearing unnoticed. He may be partly responsible for this because he was a modest man and did not see himself as breaking new ground in the way that Balint and Winnicott did. Yet his contribution was in that area of psychoanalysis that, to every clinician, is the most important: in the clinical practice. He was, however, a deeply thoughtful man, so his technical innovations were backed with a theoretical structure (see pp. 19-22, ‘Thoughts thirty years after’, for a statement about this).

I was analysed by John Klauber. I came to him very definitely ill and in a state of inner and outer disarray, and I emerged from analysis some seven and a half years later a changed person. Although I contributed to this result, I know that his mediation of the analytic process was crucial. Over the years I have, in idle moments, tried to pinpoint those elements which seemed to be decisive in bringing about a successful therapeutic outcome. I want to start by looking at his clinical practice, before moving on to its theoretical underpinning and showing how the two are closely interwoven.

It may seem superfluous to enumerate the orthodox or traditional aspects of Klauber’s clinical practice, and yet, in recent years, I have come to believe that sometimes the matters most talked about are by no means those that are practised in reality. So, from the beginning of the analysis until its end, he interpreted the transference. He very rarely spoke about what I was doing to him but instead looked for the deep underlying assumptions that I had about him, and in the early part of the analysis he put into words how I felt about him. I think technically it was extremely important that by tone or words he did not repudiate my assumptions about him. Quite simply he interpreted the transference phantasies. He did not imply that this was an incorrect way of viewing him. For a long time I thought that this was what every analyst did; that this was what was meant by interpreting the transference, yet I came to realize that it is not what is meant by many analysts. I have heard many presentations where the analyst points out what the patient is doing to the analyst, the way the patient is treating the analyst, or if, to use shorthand, a Klauber interpretation is made, the analyst soon points out to the patient the error of his ways and how he is misperceiving the situation. I will give a very simple example of what I mean. In a clinical presentation I listened to a colleague who reported how his patient said that he (the analyst) was a rigid Freudian. He repudiated this uncalled-for accusation and pointed out how bending and flexible he was. The Klauber version of that would be to notice that the patient felt this way about him and make an interpretation that would free the patient to say that he was a rigid Freudian. He would not suggest to the patient that he was misperceiving the situation.

Klauber believed, I think, that if the analyst bore these misperceptions for a reasonable period then the impulses of which they were the derivatives slowly became modified. In this way I think one could conceptualize Klauber’s method by saying that he acted the role of container for the patient’s projections in the early phase of the analysis, rather in the way that Bion said the good mother would do for her baby. After a reasonable time he would favour disillusioning the patient, rather in the way that Winnicott said the mother needs to disillusion her baby. Just in case I am misunderstood when I use the phrase “reasonable period”, then I should perhaps say that in my case, especially with deeper phantasies, he would interpret them regularly but only start disillusioning after some five or six years. I believe that this capacity of his to contain a transference over several years was deeply therapeutic. I believe that this was the case for me; I would not want to argue that it would be for everyone. In my time as an analyst, supervising, being supervised, hearing papers, and listening to clinical presentations, I have neither heard of an analyst containing the transference as Klauber did with me, nor have I heard a presentation where an analyst interpreted the transference so consistently in this way as Klauber did.

In the interpretation of the transference he gave special attention to the negative transference. Again, he did not point out my negative attitudes to him, but consistently interpreted negative images as being directed at him. What is frequently described as interpreting the negative transference is a veiled condemnation of the patient’s hostile or aggressive impulses towards the analyst. There is a big difference between the analyst who says, after a patient has spoken deprecatingly of someone called John Smith, “You are in a veiled way mocking me” and the analyst who says, “I think the feelings you are expressing towards John Smith really refer to me.” The first statement can so easily be felt by the patient to mean, “You should not be mocking me” or “It is unfair of you to be mocking me”, whereas in the second case the patient can feel that these hostile impulses can be received by the analyst. My overall feeling about Klauber was that I was received by him totally. I think it is probably significant in this connection that I do not remember him ever making a “There is part of you” interpretation. There was a definite sense of the whole of me being received by the whole of him. I never had the sense of being pushed away. I only once remember him being momentarily defensive. Interpreting the negative transference means, in the Klauber sense, that the analyst accepts the misperception of the patient. This is different from it being pointed out in such a way that it is clear that the analyst is not receiving it. This is the main point that I would want to stress about Klauber’s orthodoxy. (I should also mention here that Klauber always kept to a fifty-minute session time and I do not think he ever ran over time. He occasionally changed a session time and only rarely cancelled one. There was always a sense of reliability in him.)

I will now turn to those aspects of Klauber’s personal style of analysis that, although unconventional, were important to a therapeutic outcome. After what I have said about the enormous emphasis that he put on transference interpretations and the containment of transference phantasies, it may seem contradictory when I say that he stressed the non-transference elements in the analytic setup. He believed that the patient was able to scrutinize with considerable accuracy real personality factors in the analyst. In his paper “The psychoanalyst as person”, he says,

When the patient visits the psychoanalyst for a consultation, it is not only the psychoanalyst who makes an assessment of the patient—the patient also attempts to make an assessment of the analyst. Though the transference, which begins to be formed before the consultation, has an important share in the patient’s subsequent reaction, the capacity of the patient’s ego to evaluate it is not paralysed, as later analysis tends to reveal. Just as a psychoanalyst starts his report on a patient by describing what he looks like, how he moves and how he is dressed, so equally a fund of information about the psychoanalyst reaches the patient—about his capacity to respond, about his tastes and personal attitudes, as displayed, for instance, by the pictures on his walls. Some psychoanalysts seem to regard this as unfortunate and attempt to limit its effectiveness by establishing a so-called “neutral” setting. I believe that the second attitude fails to give adequate credit to human intelligence and the human unconscious. A woman, undoubtedly suffering from paranoid tendencies, gave as her grounds for refusing treatment with a particular psychoanalyst that she could never be analysed by someone who decorated his consulting room with such bad art. The patient herself had a considerable sensitivity for the visual arts, which had been demonstrated by discerning purchases. One psychoanalyst reported this decision as the arch evidence for the unreasonableness of the patient. A second thought that the perceptiveness which marked her character, perhaps in some respects sharpened by her paranoid tendencies, had made her quickly understand that a psychoanalyst with such taste in pictures would only with great difficulty acquire sufficient affinity with her own personality to understand it. [Klauber, 1968, pp. 129-130]

In this connection he thought that it was sometimes right for an analyst to acknowledge the accuracy of a patient’s perception. I said once to him that I had the idea that he had been to a public school, but somehow could not place him as someone who had been to a boarding school. He answered good-humouredly that I did not think he looked ascetic enough to have been through the rigours of a boarding school, and then he said that he had been to St Paul’s, which is a public school, but one of the few that is a day school and not a boarding school. Because he believed that there was a non-transference element to the psychoanalytic relationship he did not think that every communication had to be met with an interpretation. In his paper “Elements of the psychoanalytic relationship and their therapeutic implications”, he says, “Do we sometimes pay too high a price for the sophistication of our techniques, for instance, if we reply only with an interpretation?” (Klauber, 1981, p. 59).

He quite frequently responded to a communication of mine with an answer other than an interpretation, and these fell into three classes. In the first class it did not immediately look like an interpretation but in fact was one. The second was an emotionally affirming response when I made some developmental step, and the last was a straightforward discussion about something. I will give an example of the first class and then refer to an example of my own before tackling the next two.

During a phase of the analysis I was working part-time at Grendon Prison, out beyond Aylesbury, and I used to spend one or two nights a week at the hostel there. So, for instance, I would have analysis on a Wednesday morning after seeing my training cases and then drive out to Grendon, stay there the night, and then return on the Thursday in time to see my two training cases and have analysis. On one occasion Klauber was giving a paper at the Society on the Wednesday evening, of which I had made no mention, and he drew my attention to my silence about it. I justified my silence by saying that I stayed the night away on Wednesday nights and it was anyway a long drive in to hear a paper. He simply said, ‘“Some analysands would drive further than that to hear their analyst give a paper”, and laughed good-humouredly. It was, of course, an interpretation, though I think it only sank in sometime later. I think the ritualized style of interpretation was something he avoided as much as he could. In this I feel in complete sympathy. Again I have the feeling that it is so obvious a point and yet, listening to presentations, I am struck by the formal style of interpretations and I think this signifies a lack of emotional contact. I would just like to mention an example that occurred in the summer with a patient who was finishing his analysis at the end of July. He had opted not to continue with me until a later date when I was finishing with all my patients in preparation for emigration. A factor in his finishing before I went was that he felt that it would be a difficult time for me, saying goodbye to all my patients, and he had moments of panic when he thought he would have to support me and cheer up the sad and depressed analyst. Towards the end of the session I said, “But in fact I don’t need your support.” From previous experience I thought this would have an effect, which it did. When he returned the next day he said that he realized that all along he must have been thinking deep down that I did need him to cheer me up in my depression. He went on to say that all this had been set in train when I had said the previous day that I did not need him. My statement was an interpretation. I am also sure that if I had said to him, “You feel that I need your support”, it would not have penetrated. With that patient there were two reasons for that. If I had put it in the stylized form he would have felt that I was indulging in “analytic talk”. He would have felt that I was more concerned to be obedient to an authority than to be concerned about him. I think, too, that the phantasy that I needed his support for my depression was so deeply rooted that had I said, “You feel that I need your support”, I think he would only have heard the confirming words, “I need your support”, and only by countering the phantasy with a definite “No” did it become available to reach consciousness. In my own case, Klauber’s laugh clearly communicates the sense that here he was rubbing shoulders with nasty old human nature but feeling reasonably at home with that, and that he shared the same blemished humanity. Klauber had great integrity, but also enjoyed finding corruption in high places, and this was very congenial for me, having been brought up as a Catholic.

The second kind of communication was that of emotional affirmation. If I had come out of a passageway to a new emotional sense of things he would invariably be affirming and I believe that this was therapeutic. It was the equivalent of the mother smiling encouragingly at her baby as the child is beginning to succeed in a new endeavour. It would always take the form of him adding his own affirming comments, quite often relating to social attitudes. I realize that affirmations of this kind can make one dependent upon the positive smile, but I do not think this happened. I have been able to hold a view or a principle in the face of opposition. I think perhaps “affirmation” is the wrong word—”agreement” would be more accurate. I want now to turn to the third type of response, which was him speaking to me directly, and I want to spend some time on this as I think it was the most controversial aspect of his technique.

Klauber often spoke about aspects of life, whether it be discussion of a book, a painting, a news item, or a religious or social attitude. He knew that he did this. When I challenged him about it he said he knew he spoke about general matters a good deal more than most good analysts. I think this matter is worth some discussion and thinking about. This talking about many topics of psychological and social interest was clearly consonant with his nature, but he also believed that it had an important role in the psychoanalytic process. One aspect of it is quite clear: that he believed that the transference was so powerful a process that it was not disrupted by the sorts of exchanges I am describing. I can only remember one occasion when I felt a discursive comment to be insensitive.

Until now I have spoken as if these discursive forays were totally disconnected with the interpretative work that was going on, and if I have given this impression then it is a mistaken one. They were usually, though not always, connected with interpretative interchange. I have always derived a lot of self-understanding from reading, and my own emotional development has been aided considerably through reading. When I was in analysis quite a lot of material from me came in the form of a dialogue with the author of whichever book I was reading at the time. On one occasion I was reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and something had crystallized for me. It may have been a narcissistic satisfaction in discovering Maugham’s statement that all weak men lay exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind. Whatever it was, I remember Klauber saying that he thought Of Human Bondage was Maugham’s greatest book. I think I went on to say quite a lot about The Moon and Sixpence, and if I remember it rightly I think he thought Of Human Bondage was head and shoulders above the rest of Maugham’s books. Although I thought it was a great book I also thought The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, The Summing-Up, and some of his short stories of equivalent worth. I believe that these conversations had the effect of linking psychoanalysis and the interpretations that he made into the web of life, so that life and psychoanalysis interpenetrated. After a Klauber analysis I could only with the greatest difficulty put psychoanalysis into one mental compartment and the rest of life into another. These conversations, which were a kind of dual free-association-interplay, embedded psychoanalytic insight into the pattern of my own relationships and value system. I think that Klauber also trusted the psychoanalytic process deeply and that these conversations were generated by it.

In the last few years of his life, Klauber said quite often at Scientific meetings that when making interpretations the analyst needed to keep in mind the day when the patient left the consulting room for the last time. I regret that I never asked him how this factor influenced specifically the structure of his interpretative work, but my surmise is as follows. He believed that the aim of psychoanalysis was to foster the development of the patient’s own individuality, creativity, and attitude to life. He was also aware that the psychoanalytic procedure was one through which the patient was greatly influenced and that it was impossible for the patient not to incorporate some of the analyst’s own attitudes. In particular, he thought this was the case where the patient was an analytic candidate, because in these cases the analysand is following the career of his mentor and taking up the same role in relation to his or her patients as the training analyst has in relation to him or her. Therefore, he saw as a danger a patient’s identification of psychoanalysis with the particular form in which he or she had experienced it. He believed that, although it could not exist without the agency of the analyst, the process of psychoanalysis was to be differentiated from the particular tonal qualities that it receives inevitably from each individual analyst. Therefore, as much as possible, the patient needs to be helped to differentiate between the process of analysis that is being purveyed through the agency of many analysts of differing attitudes and the particular colouring that it is receiving from this particular analyst. I believe it was for this reason that he favoured some grasp by the patient of the analyst as a person with his own prejudices and attitudes. My own experience has been that this revealing of himself had some beneficial effects for me. I think it has helped me to separate analysis from my own analyst to some degree. It may not seem so from what I have said so far, but in fact I felt, and still feel, in considerable disagreement with him over certain attitudes of his both in terms of psychoanalytic technique (e.g., his non-use of the “part of you” interpretation) and more general attitudes. Another very important fruit of these conversations was that I was able to see some areas that he was unlikely to be able to analyse well. I can think of one area that was not analysed at all, really, and I sensed from what I knew of his character that he was not likely to be very successful in attempting it. This is true of all analysts, but I think that these conversations of his meant that it was not hidden and therefore was more truthful. And for Klauber it was the truth that healed. In the introduction to his book Difficulties in the Analytic Encounter he says, “I believe that truth is the great corrective by which, with the analyst’s help, patients heal themselves” (Klauber, 1968, p. xiv).

I suppose that every analyst has areas that he or she thinks particularly need to be analysed. Klauber was particularly determined to analyse successfully paranoia and paran...