Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s-2010s

Evolving Interest in the Analyst’s Subjectivity

Donnel B. Stern, Irwin Hirsch, Donnel B. Stern, Irwin Hirsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351265386
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s-2010s is the second collection of selected classic articles of the modern era by psychoanalysts identified with the interpersonal perspective. The first, The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s presented articles by second and third generation interpersonalists. This book contains those written by the third and fourth generation of interpersonal psychoanalysts.

The articles selected by the Editors for this second book extend the theme of transference and countertransference that was the throughline of the first book, lending even greater significance in clinical practice to the analyst's subjectivity and its relation to the patient's mind. One chapter after another in this book reveal ways that the analyst's experience can lead to a greater appreciation of the patient's unconscious experience. It is because of papers such as these that interpersonal psychoanalysis has been described as the origin, at least in North America, of the contemporary clinical interest in psychoanalytic subjectivity. As in the first, the articles in this second book include classic contributions from Bromberg, Greenberg, Hirsch, Mitchell, Levenson, Stern, and Wolstein; these writers are joined here by Blechner, Bonovitz, Buechler, Fiscalini, Held-Weiss, Kuriloff, and White.

North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. Along with its companion work, this book provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context.

Prologue to Chapter 1

In praise of actuality (1985)

Roberta Held-Weiss

Editors’ prologue

Roberta Held-Weiss died at the age of 51 in the same year this paper was published. She had just begun her writing life. This paper was her second and last.

It so happens that the paper also occupies a place in the life of one of the editors of this volume. In 1984 I (DS) was the Program Chairperson of the William Alanson White Society, responsible for the monthly Scientific Meetings, and also for planning the lectures to be given as part of the annual weekend retreat of the Society. Held-Weiss’s paper was one of the four memorable papers members of the Society submitted that year in response to the invitation to address the subject of “Psychoanalysis and Truth.” All four were published as a panel (with the same title) in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (see issue 21 [1985], pp. 201–265). As a result of this history, I happen to know that Held-Weiss’s paper was presented on April 8, 1984, in Walker Valley, New York. I remember well the very positive reception the panel received; but most particularly I remember that Held-Weiss’s paper was immediately recognized as the significant contribution it was.

Held-Weiss addresses complex matters here that are more often addressed philosophically and/or academically than—as Held-Weiss does—poetically and pragmatically. For that reason, most discussions of these issues in the psychoanalytic literature are much more difficult to read than this paper is. Held-Weiss can take this tack because she is unafraid to make the claim that psychoanalysis need not cast itself in the mold of any other discipline. In one fell swoop Held-Weiss removes psychoanalysis from the realm of what she calls “the mechanistic model of science” of the nineteenth century. But neither, she says, should we judge ourselves by criteria contributed by linguistics, postmodern philosophy, interpretive hermeneutics, or any other discipline external to our own. Rather, psychoanalysis should “[attend] to the structures of process and pattern inherent in its own inquiry.” And that means thinking about psychoanalytic truth as something that emerges from the analytic situation and experience itself. The kind of truth that is specifically psychoanalytic is not inherent in the patient’s history, however that history may be interpreted. Nor is it captured by any one theory (but Held-Weiss encourages us to continue to struggle with theory). Nor is it somehow present in the transference and countertransference, so that the correct understanding sets it free. Held-Weiss asks (and answers herself), “If the practice of psychoanalysis is not located solely in digging out past trauma, if it is not in establishing historical or narrative truth, if it is not in specifying categories of reality and distortion, what then is it? It is what the patient and analyst construct together in the close and consistent attention paid to the act of emerging experience. It is the process of discovering itself.” Elsewhere she writes that psychoanalytic practice “comes out of the analytic experience itself, which moves us rather than informs us. And it is in the act of being moved that we may become intelligent and imaginative about ourselves.”

Held-Weiss’s tightly woven writing demonstrates its subject matter in the act of expressing it: in reading it, that is, one has a dialogic experience with the writer. The article invites quotation at every turn, resists summary, and encourages reading aloud to colleagues, or to yourself. In her evocation of the centrality of “a direct analysis of the analyst’s inevitable involvement and participation,” “In praise of actuality” remains as full and deep a statement of the heart of the interpersonal perspective as it was when it appeared over thirty years ago.

In praise of actuality (1985)¹

Roberta Held-Weiss, PhD

One evening recently, a prominent speaker, a man who has written many books and who comes from a venerable tradition, presented a clinical discussion before a distinguished audience of analysts. In it he outlined in great and touching detail the data: the early infantile deprivations and subsequent losses sustained by a man who throughout his long and very productive life suffered great anguish of spirit and unsatisfying object relations. He offered clinical formulations which had not only coherence and power but which also, he thought, accounted for the patient’s regressive yearning and search for the absent mother typical of pathological mourning. Early and repeated deprivation, it was said, determined his adult character, and the effort at reparation led, at the deepest level, to the subject’s creativity. In corroboration images were deciphered and similar findings among a significant number of patients with early parent loss were offered to substantiate the theoretical claims and confirm diagnostic predictions. An appreciative discussion closed the meeting. At the end of the presentation, many people in the audience applauded; a significant number of psychoanalysts, however, felt their own thought and experience had not been represented. I was one of them. I thought to myself, “This is not the state of the art in psychoanalysis. Prescriptive encoding and causal historical explanation do not account for the vitality of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. The heart of the psychoanalytic endeavor is not in this kind of closed form and exclusiveness of construction.” Though we long for order, predetermined truth speaks to an order which the experience of psychoanalysis itself belies.

It will be my thesis that the truth we look for in psychoanalysis is not to be found while searching for historical events or causes, nor in recreating, restoring, or repairing the past. Neither would I locate it in a hermeneutic exegesis, a coherent and logical narrative. Instead I would search for it in our patients’ struggle to give shape and meaning to their experience, in their efforts, however fragmented, unordered, incoherent, desultory, erratic or formless these efforts may be. Psychoanalytic truth, I will maintain, emerges in the analysis of the immediate analytic experience, in the observation and analysis of the participation. That is, it is in a reflection on its own process, in a self-consciousness of the emerging experience between the analyst and patient, continually being redefined, that psychoanalytic truth is found. This is not to preclude the study of lives, or, for that matter, the patient’s experience of the past, as it gets actualized, articulated in, and filtered through the present.

We in the modern world have had to accommodate to, or assimilate, a world caught up in an unprecedented process of change … a world of agitation and turbulence, terrors of the street and of the spirit, where the destruction of social structures and moral institutions offers the possibility of both the growth and disorder of self. Ours is a sensibility which has come to believe in the unity of disunity, in a tension of perpetual frailty and strength, of destruction and renewal, of lassitude and strain, of contradiction and ambiguity. Alternating with the energy and excitement that both the belief in the infinite possibilities of the human spirit and our will to transform ourselves and the world brings is also the terror of disorientation and disintegration … a fear that the fabric of life is shredding and dissolving. Since we can no longer think of unchangeable permanences, every possibility seems fraught with its opposite; we have been forced to come to terms with the awareness of unresolved contradiction, a dialectic of discordant qualities. It has been necessary for modern man to do for himself what God has ceased to do—to put things together: to invent and restore balance and harmony. A sense of truth, in this context, is often seen as one of the means of amelioration of personal and existential isolation, something designed to alleviate the unease, or disease, which attends the jarring experience of discordance.

Views of where to center this search have varied through history. One age has sought for it in God, or nature, another in society and now another in the self.² With the decomposition of what is considered real in the last 100 years, this particular philosophical preoccupation has focused on the relativity, fluidity and multiplicity of both truth and personality. That one’s consciousness is a necessary but insufficient representation of reality, that individuality is a desirable goal but only achievable in terms of its opposite commonality, that one experiences oneself through an alternating sequence of composition and disintegration, gain and loss is constantly thrust on us. Coherence, whether in our sense of ourselves or of the external world, is repeatedly shaped and reshaped, found and lost again; it remains forever a movement and never an achieved status. And because it is in the experience of oneself with others that the shaping of our coherence occurs, it is inevitable that when we fail to connect, or if we pair imperfectly, we should complete, or repair, in imagination each failed connection or imperfect pairing to ease this sense of disruption. In a world in which absolutes have dissolved into a relativistic vision, reality, then, has been relegated to a position as subjective as the individual consciousness perceiving it.

Categories of interpretation then, in and out of psychoanalysis, shift and are up for grabs. Ascertaining the “true” nature of reality is considered a senseless activity. Even in so-called hard sciences we hear rumblings of dissent about the absolutism of scientific truth. There are some who view the progression of scientific theories as one intellectually satisfying construction following another. They tend to consider scientific representations closer to inventions of the imagination, meant to pacify the intellectual’s need for security, than to depictions of a firmly established objective reality waiting to be discovered. Most popular currently is Kuhn’s notion that it is the power of a new vocabulary rather than any intrinsic truth which a new paradigm offers. Or in the words of a contemporary pragmatist: “Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”

Parallel developments have occurred in literature, painting and sculpture. It is what Mary McCarthy has referred to as the resolute junking of perspective and objectivity in representation in search of a greater realism and fidelity of experience. The idea that time and space no longer had fixed determinants had had its influence. With the growing disinterest in the practice of historical realism, the decomposition of the narrative, and the abandonment of linear, serial writing, the shift in interest was to that of multiple consciousnesses and multiple fields of vision. Reality, in 20th-century novels, is represented from multiple points of view simultaneously. In painting we can also observe an unabashedly self-reflective awareness of itself, a rejection of a standard of beauty based on an art which conceals art. Stylistic innovations such as these were conceived to be truer and more realistic than old-style narration, representation and imitation. By the same token in contemporary psychoanalysis, consciousness of its own process is the central concern.

Psychoanalysis, too, has changed in its modes of understanding and interpreting human experience over the last hundred years. Its realm proved to be infinitely varied and the concepts by which it was originally grasped proved insufficient to encompass it. And so the evolution of psychoanalytic concepts has gone from the interpretation of unconscious and infantile wishes to the significance of defensive functions in the life of an adaptive person. The metaphor shifted from the language of biology to the language of relationships between persons or parts of persons; from the preoccupation with frustration and trauma to a focus on the relationship between inner and outer reality. From the deep, the romantic, the atomistic and partial to the outer, functional, adaptive, rational and organismic whole. From a preoccupation with the reconstruction of the past to an inclusion of the present and future in the form of the contemporaneous transference and the wishes, hopes and goals of the future. From questions of historical genesis and ultimate cause to questions of structure, function and systematic patterns of experience. Our view of the past now is always coordinated by the context of the present. Finally, questions of the depth of a psychoanalytic experience have been disentangled from, and no longer confused with, considerations of only historical or developmental priority. Depth no longer refers exclusively to drive derivatives of the residues of infantile conflicts; it may also refer to complexity of relatedness. That is, biological drive is no longer viewed as our essence—more basic, primary, deep, and real and interpersonal-cultural as superficial, superimposed epiphenomena.

These moves from one set of explanatory concepts to another only provide new forms of observation, not a more valid theory. Each has come in response to a need for elaboration, refinement and shifts in emphases in our observations. The changes do not represent a linear process of development that approaches closer and closer to some external unchanging truth. That is, these shifting concepts, or modes of observation, do not provide us with knowledge which is independent of our forms of inquiry. We might then conclude that the only psychoanalytic truth we can know is that of the nature of the inquiry itself, that we have no transcendental viewpoint outside of our own activity in, and experience of, the analysis itself.

It may be claimed that only in 19th-century psychoanalysis, which aspired to the mechanistic model of science established by physics, and which originated in a hypnotic, medical conception of the clinical relationship, is psychoanalytic truth dependent on referents external to the analytic event itself for validation. When it is relieved of its function of determining and establishing genetically causal sequences of events, of the necessity of adjusting behavior and correcting distortions, and of ascertaining reality, psychoanalysis is free to create new meaning and new rules of order, i.e., to engage in change. It can then also come closer to the truth of its reality, which previously these other considerations obscured. At the moment it is in the assertion of its autonomous existence—the need to know the basic aspects of its practice that its vitality exists. That is, it may be argued that psychoanalysis comes closer to the truth of its own particular reality when it does not pretend to be what it is not, but rather discloses itself to be what it is in particular, a creation of itself, neither physics, nor medicine, nor education, nor reparative parenting. In that way it is like all else in our era: impelled toward self-definition, toward what is distinctive, and indispensable to it.³

If the practice of psychoanalysis is not located solely in digging out past trauma, if it is not in establishing historical or narrative truth, if it is not in specifying categories of reality and distortion, what then is it? It is what the patient and analyst construct together in the close and consistent attention paid to the act of emerging experience. It is the process of discovering itself. The question remains as to what it is about this that turns contingency into experience. What is it in the psychoanalytic process that enables individuals to learn from the behaviors in which they engage, from the fantasies by which they are compelled, and the events that befall them, thus allowing them to take full account of the very experiences they have lived through and activating the process of self-transformation? Well, we might consider that it is analytic activity itself, the fact that analytic activity exists alongside a consciousness of its own nature, that one can both attend to its process and also maintain its integrity, which presents the challenge to the rigidity of pathology and represents what is unique to psychoanalysis. That is, it is our very endeavors to make sense of experience which irrevocably alters and expands our psychological nature. If viewed in this way the definition and articulation of self is inextricably and inevitably bound up with the consciousness of the psychoanalytic process itself.

That psychoanalysis requires forms of description and methodology quite different from those of the physical sciences, and that mind to be distinct from body need not be a substance, a special thing—a libido—has long been evident.⁴ That there is a need to shift from a drive paradigm, whether it is that of libido or of security-seeking paradigms, to a psychology of active, choosing, willing subjects, thus reiterating the centrality to the psychoanalytic vision the thesis that life is made rather than born, has now also become increasingly clear across metapsychological lines (i.e., Gill, 1976), (Levenson, 1984), (Schafer, 1976), (Wolstein, 1967).

Two of the more recent critics of the physical science and biological models of psychoanalysis, Schafer (1976) and Spence (1982), aware that psychoanalysis offers no singular, correct interpretation, discontent with the inadequacy of both the predictive methodology of science and the postdictive methods of history for validating the truth of psychoanalytic statements, and also cognizant of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments from Donnel B. Stern
• Acknowledgments from Irwin Hirsch
• Introduction: Distinguishing features of the Interpersonal perspective in psychoanalysis
• Prologue to Chapter 1 In praise of actuality (1985)
• In praise of actuality (1985)
• Prologue to Chapter 2 Theoretical models and the analyst’s neutrality (1986)
• Theoretical models and the analyst’s neutrality (1986)
• Prologue to Chapter 3 Contemporary perspectives on self: Toward an integration (1991)
• Contemporary perspectives on self: Toward an integration (1991)
• Prologue to Chapter 4 Shoot the messenger—Interpersonal aspects of the analyst’s interpretations (1993)
• Shoot the messenger—Interpersonal aspects of the analyst’s interpretations (1993)
• Prologue to Chapter 5 Observing-participation, mutual enactment, and the new classical models (1996)
• Observing-participation, mutual enactment, and the new classical models (1996)
• Prologue to Chapter 6 Searching for a passionate neutrality (1999)
• Searching for a passionate neutrality (1999)
• Prologue to Chapter 7 Surviving hating and being hated: Some personal thoughts about racism from a psychoanalytic perspective (2002)
• Surviving hating and being hated: Some personal thoughts about racism from a psychoanalytic perspective (2002)
• Prologue to Chapter 8 The gay Harry Stack Sullivan: Interactions between his life, clinical work, and theory (2005)
• The gay Harry Stack Sullivan: Interactions between his life, clinical work, and theory (2005)
• Prologue to Chapter 9 Coparticipant inquiry: Analysis as personal encounter (2006)
• Coparticipant inquiry: Analysis as personal encounter (2006)
• Prologue to Chapter 10 Looking back, looking forward: A reexamination of Benjamin Wolstein’s interlock and the emergence of intersubjectivity (2009)
• Looking back, looking forward: A reexamination of Benjamin Wolstein’s interlock and the emergence of intersubjectivity (2009)
• Prologue to Chapter 11 The Holocaust and psychoanalytic theory and praxis (2010)
• The Holocaust and psychoanalytic theory and praxis (2010)
• Prologue to Chapter 12 Stumbling along and hanging in: If this be technique, make the most of it! (2012)
• Stumbling along and hanging in: If this be technique, make the most of it! (2012)
• Prologue to Chapter 13 Witnessing across time: Accessing the present from the past and the past from the present (2012)
• Witnessing across time: Accessing the present from the past and the past from the present (2012)