British Psychoanalysis

New Perspectives in the Independent Tradition

Gregorio Kohon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351262866
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

British Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives in the Independent Tradition is a new and extended edition of The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition, which explored the successes and failures of the early environment; transference and counter-transference in the psychoanalytic encounter; regression in the situation of treatment; and female sexuality. Published in the mid-1980s, it had an important influence on the development of psychoanalysis both in Great Britain and abroad, was translated into several languages and became a central textbook in academic and professional courses.

This new, updated book includes not only many of the original papers, but also new chapters written for this volume by Hannah Browne, Josh Cohen, Steven Groarke, Gregorio Kohon, Rosine Perelberg and Megan Virtue. Addressing and reflecting on the four main themes of the first collection, the new papers discuss such subjects as:

· a new focus on earliest infancy

· new directions in Independent clinical thinking

· the question of therapeutic regression

. the centrality of sexual difference in Freud.

They also highlight the connections between and the mutual influence of British and French psychoanalysis, now a critical subject in contemporary psychoanalytic debates.

British Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives in the Independent Tradition will be important not only to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and the full spectrum of professionals involved in mental health. It will be of great value in psychotherapy and counselling training and an important resource for teaching and academic activities.

PART I

AN INDEPENDENT TRADITION

Nobody can tell how you are to live your life, or what you are to think, or what language you are to speak. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that the individual analyst should forge for himself the language which he knows, which he knows how to use, and the value of which he knows.

Wilfred R. Bion, ‘Evidence’ (1976)

1

THIRTY YEARS LATER

Looking back into the future

Gregorio Kohon

It is hard to believe that thirty years have passed since the publication of the first edition of The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition. When, in 1983, four years after qualifying as a psychoanalyst, I first suggested the book to a senior member of the Publications Committee of the British Psychoanalytical Society, I was met with a wry smile as he said, ‘Quite a task, to put together a book about a group that refuses to be a group.’ This was true: there was a group of psychoanalysts who, at some point in the history of the British Psychoanalytical Society, had refused to belong either to Anna Freud’s B group or to the Kleinians, wishing to remain in the ‘middle’.

My colleague’s response to my suggestion only made me more deter mined to carry on with the project – although there were unforeseen difficulties. For example, I was not given permission, for what seemed arbitrary and rather capricious ‘administrative’ reasons, to include papers by Paula Heimann, Pearl King and Marion Milner – three women analysts who had contributed significantly to British psychoanalysis. Otherwise, the support from the majority of my Independent colleagues was unconditional.

It was for both organizational and political reasons that the ‘Middle Group’ later became the ‘Group of Independent Psychoanalysts’. However, the name of ‘Middle Group’, originally so described by Edward Glover during the Controversial Discussions (Riccardo Steiner, in King and Steiner, 1991, p. 681), persisted for a while.

At one point, Glover referred to it in terms of the ‘English Freudians’ (King and Steiner, 1991, p. 136), and Barbara Low called it ‘the “Middle” Party’ (King and Steiner, 1991, p. 83). While Michael Parsons thought that the final name was agreed upon around the 1950s (Parsons, 2014a, p. 184), John Keene suggested that this occurred in the 1960s (Keene, 2012, p. 4). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there was also a rather hostile description of the group as a ‘muddled’ group. During my training (1975–1979), I heard a number of senior Inde pendent analysts commenting on this, but for them it was a compliment, an achievement, rather than a failure, denoting the Independents’ refusal to be associated with dogmatic attitudes or unjustified certainties.

I believe that the 1986 edition of the book made Independent tradition a widely accepted description. Afterwards, other books dealing with this particular tradition followed the same principle of avoiding reference to a ‘group’. In 1991, Eric Rayner published The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis. In 2012, Paul Williams, John Keene and Sira Dermen edited a collection of papers that they entitled Independent Psychoanalysis Today. The emphasis of the titles was not on the ‘group’ but on the individuality of its members.

More recently, Michael Parsons has written,

[The concept of] the Independent traditon does not coincide with the Independent Group. There is a large overlap, in that the majority of analysts who have exemplified and developed the tradition have been part of the Group. However, there are members of the Independent Group that do not stand within the Inde pendent tradition. Conversely, the Independent tradition is not limited to the Group, or even to the British Society.

(Parsons, 2014a, p. 187)

This distinction, between an organizational and political group, on the one hand, and a tradition, on the other, is very important. As can be seen from Parsons’ quotation above, the very concept of a ‘tradition’ is a complicated one: within one given tradition there might be many different strands, perhaps coexisting in disagreement, all parts of a paradoxical and complex whole. This does not apply just to one particular professional, political, religious, or any other type of group of individuals. In psychoanalysis, naming one tradition helps to recognize and distinguish it from any others; in fact, the distinction only makes sense if considered in contrast with and compared to other traditions. Although, in social terms, naming a group represents a way of identifying people, the differentiation rarely takes place on exclusively fair and accurate assumptions; frequently, it may also be based on unconscious prejudice, false perceptions, and/or tactics of relatively conscious active discrimination. Naming and describing a group can also fairly easily turn into the creation of misleading stereotypes – not an uncommon event in the psychoanalytic world.

The present book does not aim to give a historical view of the institutional changes in the British Psychoanalytical Society, nor to give an account of the British Independents’ clinical and theoretical contributions of the last thirty years. For this, I would refer the reader to the collection of papers brought together and edited by Williams, Keene and Dermen (2012), already mentioned above. Given the existence of a relatively new Association of Independent Analysts within the British Psychoanalytical Society and the annual meetings organized by them under the heading of The Cambridge Convention, there may be in the near future the opportunity for a new volume of collected papers written by younger contemporary Independent analysts.

This is a new book and should not be considered a re-presentation, nor is it an updated edition of the original 1986 publication. From the beginning of this project, my wish and intention were to make a personal selection of the 1986 original papers, following somewhat idiosyncratic criteria: a subjective appreciation of their theoretical and clinical value for my present way of thinking psychoanalytically. In making such choices, I was aware of excluding very important papers, not unlike the editing process at the time of the 1986 edition. Then, I did not include papers by Marjorie Brierley, Edward Glover, John Bowlby, John Rickman, Ronald Fairbairn, Ella Freeman Sharpe, Sylvia M. Payne, and, of course, many others. Looking back, I especially regret the exclusion, besides Paula Heimann, Pearl King and Marion Milner, of Marjorie Brierley’s work on affects (1937), Sylvia Payne’s comments on technique (1943), and Ella Sharpe’s contributions (1958). This is somewhat restored, if not fully rectified, by Steven Groarke’s references to their work in his chapter in this volume (pp. 133–147 herein).

Once the present choice of papers was made, my ideas about the book changed: I wanted to invite analysts from a younger generation to present their own thoughts about the papers selected. Instead of elaborating on the importance of these papers for me, I became rather curious and more interested in discovering the possible impact, if any, that these writings from the past may have had on a small group of younger colleagues, who had trained and qualified at different times during the last thirty years.

When the 1986 edition was published, two unexpected comments were made to me by colleagues from the Independent Group: first, that it had taken a foreigner to come up with this idea, and, second, that my writing was not really representative of their group. The text of my Introduction and my Dora paper were both ‘too French’ – most definitely, some of them argued, not ‘Independent’. I came to realize that there were good reasons for this comment, to which I will return.

The Society has always been very welcoming to overseas students and analysts. In fact, the group of students in training during my years as a candidate included, apart from Welsh, Scottish and English students, Greek, Chinese, Australian, Peruvian, South African, Chilean, New Zealander, Argentinian, North American, Mexican, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Irish and French candidates – and a 21-year-old Brazilian trainee who was pregnant at the start of her training. In terms of the present average age of candidates, times have certainly changed.

I have always considered the British Psychoanalytical Society my psychoanalytic home, and, come rain or shine, it has always remained so. After returning from Australia in 1995, I was made a training analyst two years later; this was the only constitutional moment when a member was required to declare his/her allegiance to a group in the Society. I then became a member of the Independent Group of Training Analysts. However, in 2003, I resigned from it, which meant I no longer belonged to any group that was part of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. Not belonging to a group is not the same as being ‘non-aligned’ (thus, neutral, impartial, uninvolved, unattached, uncommitted, sitting on the fence, etc.).

As stated in my Prefatory Remarks (pp. 21–24 herein), ‘independent’ can be understood as ‘not depending upon the authority of another, not in a position of subordination or subjection; not subject to external control or rule; self-governing, autonomous, free’ (Oxford English Dictionary). I believe that this remains a valid and reasonable description. Nevertheless, any indiv idual, group or nation wishing to be independent has, tacitly or not, to acknowledge and take on board the need for others. In this sense, members of the Independent tradition have never felt deterred from recognizing their indebtedness to authors from different theoretical traditions. Look at the bibliographies included in the writings by Independent authors during the last six decades.

In the 1986 edition, I referred to ‘tradition’ as implying, ‘… a certain continuity in time, a body of experience, principle and/or laws, a complex of customs and beliefs that are rooted in the past and that link a certain group of people (e.g., professionals, artists) across generations’ (p. 21 herein).

Thirty years later, Steven Groarke, in his ‘Making Sense Together: New Directions in Independent Clinical Thinking’ (p. 133 herein), asserts the need to pay respect to the authority of the past, to become ‘trustful guardians’ of a well-regarded legacy. Paradoxically, this goes together with the crucial need to renew that legacy in the present: to develop, change and enhance what has been passed on from that past. This entails, in Groarke’s description, becoming the inevitable ‘oedipal usurpers’. Paying due respect to the past is not just a blind act of faith nor a meaningless and repetitive duplication of sterile and withered ideas; on the contrary, tradition can only be kept alive if exposed to ‘the retrospective influence of new ideas’.

One might want to argue that only the weak and insecure fear artistic, literary or scientific traditions: we greatly benefit by responding to the challenge of making sense and further use of valued past experiences. To respect tradition, to accept being part of it, is not equiv alent to being a political ‘traditionalist’, a right-winger, a reactionary, a conservative who resists change.

In a well-known essay, T.S. Eliot writes,

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to ‘the tradition’ or to ‘a tradition’; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is ‘traditional’ or even ‘too traditional.’ Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. … You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears …

(Eliot, 1921, p. 1)

Poets may be praised or admired for those features of their work considered individual and original, that is, not traditional, the term implying a certain disapproval. In contrast, Eliot claims,

… if we approach a poet without this prejudice, we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.

(Eliot, 1921, p. 2)

In considering the value and significance of tradition, Eliot argues that it is not a matter of mere sycophantic imitation, a passive repetition of what has already been achieved, a resistance to change. A legacy needs to be taken possession of, through hard work and challenging critical labour. This demands what Eliot calls a ‘historical sense’, involving a particular perception, ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence …’. For Eliot, tradition is not fixed and static: it is constantly changing, growing and becoming different from what it was. Tradition is affected nachträglich – although, most likely, Eliot did not know this concept: the past guides the present but this present also modifies the past; when a new and original poem is written, Eliot argues, it can actually change the concept and the view of the literary tradition to which the poem belongs.

In the case of the Independents, they are not united by sharing particular beliefs and analytic doctrines. I described them (p. 23 herein) as being comparable to ‘… a school of painters, by virtue of a shared set of problems and sensibilities’ (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983, italics added). There is nothing essential about the Independent tradition: people can and do widely disagree about certain issues. In his ‘Psychic Life: A New Focus on Earliest Infancy’ (pp. 75–87 herein), Josh Cohen describes, in a particularly insightful way, the subtle and yet important disagreements among Independent authors concerning the privilege of external reality over unconscious phantasy.

The attention centred on the influence of the early environment in the development of the individual was a specific result of the theory of object relations: it was argued that an individual was formed, from the very beginning, following the vicissitudes of the relationships with objects. This implied the mediation of some kind of self, or ego, present from very early on in life. Different authors developed similar notions resulting from the interest in the relationship between mother and baby. They attempted to describe particular characteristics found in the treatment of disturbed patients: premature ego development (James, 1960); cumulative trauma (Khan, p. 104 herein); basic unity (Little, 1960); true and false self (Winnicott, 1960b); basic fault (M. Balint, 1968). They all tried to account for ‘something missing’ in the patient’s life: it was seen not as a conflict to be resolved, or a trauma to be uncovered; it was a ‘fault’, something wrong in the mind, a kind of deficiency that must be put right (M. Balint, 1968).

Cohen brings to light the presence of nachträglich temporality in the three papers in this section – a temporality in which the earliest events in life are not given linear causal priority, something theoretically assumed by most Independent writers until very recently. This is just one instance of many theoretical and clinical differences of opinion within this one particular tradition; I could also mention a lack of consensus about the importance of the drives, or the frequency of the interpretations, or the emphasis given to reconstruction as opposed to the relevance of constructions in the here-and-now, or the clinical understanding and theoretical place of the oedipal conflict, or what is meant by ‘intersubjectivity’. The variations and discrepancies between the members of the same Independent tradition may be as important as those between the different groups. In fact, this may well be an internal feature of other groups too.

There is nothing dogmatic about the ideas of Independent analysts, no specific truth that is passed on from one generation to the next. This may be seen, for example, in questions of clinical technique: referring to specific problems with patients in psychoanalysis, Michael Parsons writes, ‘… no technical prescriptions are possible’; the how to proceed will rest on ‘… an availability that depends on the inner silence of the analyst’s listening’ (2012, p. 84). This inner silence, I would add, is determined by the individual analyst’s personal style. And there seem to be as many personal styles as psychoanalysts.

Whatever may have been Independent for one generation will not necessarily be so for the next. A legacy is there, but it is always open to being transformed into something ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Biographical notes
• Acknowledgements
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• PART V
• PART VI
• References
• Index