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PART I
Translating, understanding and language confusion
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Anna Ursula Dreher
Babylonian language confusion?
In our analytic context, often characterised as ‘Babylonian’, there are definitely many problems, but there are also potentials worth realising before looking for solutions ‘beyond Babel’. The title “Inside Babel” should elucidate which pole of the field of tension between ‘Inside and beyond Babel’ this chapter is located on. The Bible story of the Tower of Babel, with the consequence of language confusion among human beings, is understood, in religious interpretation, as a punishment of God for human presumptuousness. The plan, to rise up to God physically, to enter heavenly spheres through the high tower, alludes to an old motive – the aspiration to be God-like – which we find again in manifold ways in the sciences today. However, scientists are, above all, seeking insight and knowledge, that is, to decode God’s creation plan of the world through science. Some physicists want to have already discovered ‘God particles’ and some neuroscientists claim to be able to watch the psyche working by using a scanner. Others are looking for universal natural laws, which can give a causal explanation of all our behaviour and actions. As we know, the God of the Old Testament was ‘not amused’ by the Tower of Babel and, as a consequence of his punitive action, the negative impact of the difficulty in communicating ensued: chaos, violence, flight and dispersal all over the world – phenomena that are ubiquitous still today.
In psychoanalysis, we are currently living in and with this language diversity, thus we are living ‘Inside Babel’ in times long after the tower was built. This language diversity does not result only from the many languages that are due to the worldwide distribution of psychoanalysis, but also to the many analytic ‘dialects’, which are in the background of this chapter. This diversity is, of course, not due to God’s punishment, but to the scientific, historic and socio-cultural developments inside and outside psychoanalysis. And it was not our aspiration to rise up to God; our aspiration was and is much smaller, yet not immodest: we want to understand how the human psyche functions, why it is disturbed and how it can be healed. The language diversity in psychoanalysis is experienced by many as language confusion because one can easily lose the overview. However, one has to distinguish: confusion can, of course, arise when matters become too complex, too contradictory and too unwieldy, but also when there is unwillingness to tolerate, acknowledge and cope with the diversity of other language games. Which aspect is working in the individual case is sometimes difficult to say.
In the Bible story, it is said that there were many conflicts in the time after the tower was wrecked because of the disturbance to communication. But they certainly do not have to be as extreme as those narrated in some Hebrew variants of the Babel mythology, where workers on the tower speaking with other tongues were slain because they no longer understood work orders (Ranke-Graves et al., 1963). The use of language is by far not always as harmless as it might appear. “Flags are optical keywords. National anthems are musical keywords. But the deadly weapon of man is language”, Arthur Koestler wrote (Koestler, 1975: 98, translated for this edition). Only think of the sad notoriety that the German word ‘Untermensch’ has gained; or of the usage of language as a weapon in the yellow press; or only of the highly sensitive nature of an aspect in the enduring argument between the Western world and Russia as to whether the taking of the Crimea may be called ‘annexation’ or not. The list of the usages of language as a weapon could be arbitrarily continued. Koestler writes further: “Each language acts as a connecting force within the group, and as a repelling force between different groups” (p. 104, translated for this edition) and he sums up pessimistically that, in the course of the history of our species, aggressive, disintegrating forces have always triumphed over those that seek to connect us (p. 104). Regrettably, this is the case. And it is indeed difficult to be optimistic in a world in which the destructive forces are as dominant and ubiquitous as we are currently experiencing. Nevertheless, at least in psychoanalysis, I would want to give the forces of connection a chance and, through that, to the possibility of understanding on the basis of the positive potentials of diversity, not least because we have a common ground worldwide: studying the ‘human psyche’ through our specific access to psychic phenomena – above all but not only – in the analytic situation.
The special relevance of language is deduced from the well-known fact that we use language in manifold ways: we speak with and about our patients, we discuss our clinical cases, we write our papers, we formulate and modify our ideas, models, theories and Weltbilder (worldview). Thus, we communicate with the most different addressees: with ourselves, our patients, our colleagues, the insurance companies, the worldwide associations of analysts, the scientific communities of our competing human sciences, and, not least, with a broad public interested in psychoanalysis. That there can be various barriers to communication is obvious and simple solutions are certainly not in sight. Therefore, I shall attempt to make only a snapshot here, a kind of inventory of some aspects of our psychoanalytic discourse in Babylonian times. In this, I see our analytic Babel as an analogy to the mythological site Babel, within the walls of which a lot of things can happen, constructive as well as destructive. I would like to stroll a bit through this, our town, walk through old and new neighbourhoods and across the squares, and collect impressions, and simply look at what interesting, pleasant, but also unpleasant things one can encounter there.
Reasons for the many voices in psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis, empirically, conceptually and theoretically, is working with one of the most difficult research subjects in existence: the human psyche. Difficult for many reasons: not least because, in the end, we have only our own psychic apparatus to know how the psyche works. Up to this day, there is no consensual definition of what precisely the human psyche is at all or how it is constructed and how it functions. In the sciences, there is not even consensus about its existence at all, despite it being the name giver of psychoanalysis, as well of psychology, psychosomatics or psychiatry. Even though the whole world often and readily speaks of ‘psychic’, many people obviously find it difficult to acknowledge an entity, ‘psyche’, as a scientific subject. ‘Mind’ has it much easier and even the good old ‘soul’ is having a comeback. In psychoanalysis, there is certainly a number of schools and traditions of thought, which, based on their specific models and ideas of the psyche, have developed their own dialects. By ‘analytic dialects’, I mean those tradition-specific language games which are, historically, one of the most relevant sources of our Babylonian diversity and which are apparent mainly, but not only, in the diversity of concept meanings. These dialects distinguish themselves from one another by having developed a number of their own specific concepts and by having given school-specific meaning variants to classic concepts. I think, for example, of the Kleinian concept of ‘projective identification’ which meanwhile has found recognition in various schools of analytic thought. Or of the ‘transference as total situation’, an understanding of transference which has remained regional up to now. Most of us, reading or hearing for the first time a text from a different school than our own, will have experienced great surprise upon encountering a concept hitherto unfamiliar to us. For instance, I was flabbergasted when I once heard in a lecture of the ‘thinking breast’ (Bion).
Behind the many voices in Babel is not only the multitude of specific analytic ideas or models of the psyche; this well-known source of language diversity refers mainly to our internal clinical and theoretical discourses. But, along with these inner analytic discourses, it increasingly also refers to the interdisciplinary discourses, definitely and especially then, when – in the canon of these sciences – psychoanalysis wants to be taken seriously, recognised and, above all, wants to be heard. The broad field of psychic disturbances, as this domain is called in both ICD and DSM, is being differently researched and worked with therapeutically. In addition, we are called more and more to present scientific evidence of the efficacy of our clinical interventions. Whether everyone likes it or not, psychoanalysis actually cannot afford not to participate in the field of scientific discourse. However, the different scientific worldviews are evident in this terrain, and they are a further source of diversity, but mainly just another source of confusion. In the same way, how psychoanalysis is scientifically positioned, whether it is a science at all, is seen differently. And even if it is supposed to be a science, there is dissent: what kind of science it is, natural science or human science, cultural or social science, or even a species of its own. And from this stem the controversies about which research methods and aims are the right ones, and which data are relevant at all. This becomes especially obvious with the understanding of what ‘clinical research’ is, which, since the beginning, has been one of our most important research disciplines. The bow ranges from the traditional understanding of the Freudian ‘conjunction research’ – the analyst is also the researcher and his research takes place mainly in the analytic situation using analytic methods – to diverse research understandings orientated towards other scientific worldviews, coming from empiricism through hermeneutics up to the neurosciences, which research with scanners, no longer from behind the couch.
Diversity of theories and world views, which is evident in the diversity of discourses as well as in the spoken dialects, is actually quite normal in living sciences and there is no reason why this should be different in psychoanalysis. Different scientific socialisations, different clinical experiences, different reception of analytic and scientific trends, new ideas and findings influence our dialects, which are, moreover, interwoven with the societies and cultures in which they are spoken. And by society, I am not only referring to the regular geopolitical units, but above all to our diverse regional analytic associations. Historically, psychoanalysis was and still is under pressure to continually calibrate and adjust its ideas about the psyche, as well as the ideas about how psychoanalysis can help people. Also, our understanding of the development, diagnostics and therapy of psychic illness was always in competition with, initially, that of medicine, and today also of genetics, of behavioural science and the neurosciences. This has always been the case and will always be that way, certainly for as long as we want to participate in interdisciplinary discourses and keep striving for better solutions – not least of all in the interest of our patients and clients (Dreher, 2014a). We do not treat our patients analytically because we are analysts, but we are analysts because we are convinced that psychoanalysis can help the patients, and that it is definitely not worse than other procedures.
Constructive and destructive aspects in analytic Babel
If you like, you can refer to this ordinary run of things in psychoanalysis, as in all other sciences as ‘Babel’ – ‘Babel’ understood in the sense of a never-ending competing multi-voicedness; there will never be an ‘end of history’ in this respect. Competition, however, can have many faces: from bitter rivalry, even hostility, to the constructive search for communication and greatest possible agreement. Babel can be both a fighting arena for dominance and a place for fertile controversy.
If one is optimistic, one can experience the diversity of voices as a resource and the attraction of difference as enrichment. As is familiar to us from the regulation mechanisms of closeness and distance, being constantly confronted with the voices of others not only shapes one’s own position with a strengthened identity, but also bestows an increasing readiness to open oneself up to a critical and stimulating dialogue. If one is pessimistic, one can regard the diversity as a barrier at which often unfair battles are fought, which also can often end in emotional injuries due to the devaluations and insults that are exchanged. In this field of tension between sameness and otherness, we encounter different kinds of danger: the impasse of anxiety, defence and exclusion; the danger of fusion and, thus, loss of identity. This dialectic between constructive and destructive moments in all scientific discourses, as well as in our analytic Babel, does not surprise us. At any rate, many of us have been living in this town long enough and want to continue to stay there. It would not be bad if we all got along well, with all our various forms of thought and life, our various beliefs and mentalities. In the German-speaking area alone, all members of so many analytic societies, who have gone through various scientific and analytic socialisations and are working within countless institutions and many fields of practice, belong to the ‘psychoanalysts in Babel’. This complexity would increase considerably if we were to take the worldwide distribution of psychoanalysis into account, too. No one has an overview of the entire analytic Babel as a whole – we all have limited perspectives on it, as well as, by the way, on our subject, the psyche, even though there are, from time to time, those that act as if they knew ‘everything’.
What unites us analysts – apart from our historic descent from Freud’s psychoanalysis, never mind how straight or winding these genealogical lines may have been – is that we are all workers on and with the psyche. What can divide us are differences in theory and practice, in mentality and culture, in world views and language games. Most of us speak that analytic dialect in which they were analytically socialised or in which they now feel at home by belief. As tends to be the way with dialects, they signal where you are from and offer a sense of home, a social and emotional ‘Heimat’. In the development of our dialects a complicated genealogical tree presents itself. At its branches, one often finds important analysts with their ideas. I cannot trace this branching historically, but can only consider a few aspects of the ‘here and now’. The dialects that have had the most powerful effects historically derive from our authorities of the founder generations. Therefore, we find in Babel the old Freudian centre of town, surrounded by a number of old-town quarters where Jungians, Adlerians, Kleinians, Lacanians, Bionians, Winnicottians, etc., live. Next to some of these old centres there are new neighbourhoods, where a ‘post-’ sign is over the entrance: for example, post-Kleinians. The prefixes ‘post’ or ‘contemporary’ signal that things continue slightly differently than has been historically passed on, but without a radical break from the original theories. The old city of Babel is mostly occupied by the diverse ‘-ians’. Around this old centre of Babel there are areas that are not named by persons any more, but after the dominant perspective on the psyche, whether their inhabitants be object relations or drive theorists, self- or ego psychologists, attachment theorists or intersubjectivists. And there are, of course, not only these relatively homogeneous quarters, there are innumerable single detached houses where pluralists, eclectics, or solitaires live. In the past decades, in the suburbs of Babel, new construction sites can be found; mainly researchers have moved in there, who are dealing with psychoanalytic subjects (e.g., baby watchers, attachment theoreticians, psychotherapy researchers, trauma and brain researchers). Do they still belong to ‘our’ Babel at all? Are they analysts? Some long-time residents say no, others see them as enrichment. Up to now, they may have a limited influence on the clinical discourses in psychoanalysis with their ideas and results; however, they dominate the scientific discourses, because their understanding of science and research, of theory and the empirical is closer to the scientific mainstream than the classic psychoanalytic research understanding. Altogether, our Babel is a rather colourful city; its map reminds one more of the organic growth of Rome than of Manhattan’s grid designed on the drawing board.
These labels, the analytic quarters in Babel, help us to structur...
