Structures of Subjectivity

Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism

George E. Atwood, Robert D. Stolorow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317673125
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, is a revised and expanded second edition of a work first published in 1984, which was the first systematic presentation of the intersubjective viewpoint – what George Atwood and Robert Stolorow called psychoanalytic phenomenology – in psychoanalysis. This edition contains new chapters tracing the further development of their thinking over the ensuing decades and explores the personal origins of their most essential ideas.

In this new edition, Atwood and Stolorow cover the philosophical and theoretical assumptions of psychoanalysis and present a broad approach that they have designated phenomenological contextualism. This approach addresses personal subjective worlds in all their richness and idiosyncrasy and focuses on their relational contexts of origin and therapeutic transformation.

Structures of Subjectivity covers the principles guiding the practice of psychoanalytic therapy from the authors' viewpoints and includes numerous detailed clinical case studies. The book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, practitioners of psychotherapy, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and social workers. It will also be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in psychoanalytic theory and practice, and its philosophical premises.

Part 1

Chapter 1

Philosophical Context and Basic Concepts

This book brings together a series of efforts to rethink the conceptual and methodological foundations of psychoanalytic theory. These efforts have been guided by three general considerations. First, we have felt that any new framework should be capable of preserving the contributions made by the classical analytic theorists and of translating these contributions into a common conceptual language. Second, it is our view that the theory of psychoanalysis should be formulated on an experience-near level of discourse, closely anchored in the phenomena of clinical observation. The third guiding consideration is found in our belief that an adequate theory of personality must be designed to illuminate the structure, significance, origins, and therapeutic transformations of personal subjective worlds in all their richness and diversity. The intellectual heritage upon which we have drawn in fashioning our “psychoanalytic phenomenology” is a very broad one, embracing the hermeneutic tradition in the philosophy of history, aspects of the phenomenological movement, basic concepts of modern structuralism, and certain trends in contemporary Freudian thought which have in common the notion that psychoanalysis should be reframed as pure psychology. In the sections that follow, we discuss these various influences and give a sketch of our view of the nature of psychoanalytic investigation and knowledge.

The Hermeneutic Tradition

Psychoanalytic phenomenology is a depth psychology of human subjectivity devoted to the illumination of meanings in personal experience and conduct. It may thus be grouped with what the German philosopher–historian Wilhelm Dilthey (1926) called the Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences. According to Dilthey, the human sciences are to be distinguished from the sciences of nature because of a fundamental difference in attitude toward their respective objects of investigation: The natural sciences investigate objects from the outside whereas the human sciences rely on a perspective from the inside. The supreme category of the human sciences is that of meaning, which is something that exists within human subjectivity rather than on the plane of material nature. The central emphasis in the natural sciences, as Dilthey viewed them, was upon causal explanation; the task of inquiry in the human sciences, by contrast, he saw as interpretation and understanding. Understanding (Verstehen) denotes the act by which one passes from the sign to the thing signified, from the expression to the meaning being expressed. This focus on interpretation and understanding was part of an overall conception of the methodology of human sciences as essentially hermeneutic in character. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation originally developed by scholars of religion seeking to understand and explicate the meaning of Scriptural writings. After it was expanded by Schleiermacher to apply to any literary text, Dilthey further elaborated hermeneutics into a tool for interpreting human history in general.

Dilthey argued that understanding of historical events is achieved through a process of “re-experiencing” (Makkreel, 1975, p. 252). This means that the historian must reconstruct the world of meaning belonging to an event and then comprehend that world from the viewpoint of its own intrinsic structure. This process closely resembles the interpretive analysis of texts and follows a pattern known as the “hermeneutic circle.” In textual interpretation, the meaning of a particular passage is established primarily by considerations relating the passage to the structure of the text as a whole; parts of the work are thus assessed in relation to an understanding of the totality while knowledge of the whole is constituted by study of the parts. Dilthey characterized historical inquiry as involving a similarly circular movement between a focus on particular events and a view of the total meaning–context in which those events participate.

One of the consequences of adopting a hermeneutic approach in the human studies is the recognition that the knowing subject is one with the object of knowledge: both are human individuals. This identity of subject and object is responsible for a distinctive feature of the methodology of these disciplines: the investigator can, indeed must, draw upon his or her own experience and self-knowledge to guide interpretations of the lives of those being studied. Dilthey made this link between subject and object explicit in his definition of the mode of insight established in the human sciences as “the rediscovery of the I in the Thou” (1926, p. 191). This bond of kinship uniting the investigator and subject matter is also responsible for a particular difficulty in the human sciences: the investigator is an experiencing individual, situated personally and historically, and his or her quest for knowledge is accordingly subject to the influence of all those historical, personal, and circumstantial factors that come into play in every human action. These factors inevitably relativize the investigator’s understanding and threaten to subvert the aim of arriving at conclusions possessing general validity. Dilthey’s solution to the apparent antithesis between the historical-situational relativity of human understanding and the striving for universal knowledge was to propose a “critique of historical reason.” This he envisioned as an analysis devoted to rendering conscious and explicit the finite existential perspectives associated with all inquiry in the human sciences.

Dilthey’s insights and proposals have given rise to a broad hermeneutic tradition radiating outward from the philosophy of history to influence thinking in all the disciplines concerned with understanding human existence (Palmer, 1969; Gadamer, 1975). This tradition has a special significance for psychoanalysis, which in spite of being an interpretive science in its methods and goals, has since its inception been encumbered by a felt obligation to ground itself on natural science concepts. The notion that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic or historical discipline rather than a natural science has been persuasively argued by Lacan (1953), Sherwood (1969), Ricouer (1970), and more recently Steele (1979) and Leavy (1980). This idea is also implicit in the radical proposals for psychoanalytic theory made by Guntrip (1967), Klein (1976), Schafer (1976), and Kohut (1977), all of whom reject the mechanistic language of Freudian metapsychology in favor of experience-near concepts addressed to the realms of personal meaning and personal action. This book as well represents a further effort to develop the implications of the hermeneutic viewpoint for psychoanalysis.

One group of issues to which hermeneutic considerations are particularly germane concerns our conception of the nature of psychoanalytic investigation. In the next section we discuss these issues with specific emphasis on the individual case study, the problem of validation of interpretations, and the intersubjective field in which psychoanalytic understanding is generated.

The Psychoanalytic Case Study

The individual case study has been and seems assured of remaining the central method by which psychoanalytic knowledge is advanced. How is an understanding of a person’s life established in a case study? All psychoanalytic understanding is interpretive understanding, in the sense that it always entails a grasp of the meaning of something that has been expressed. This meaning belongs to an individual’s personal subjective world and becomes accessible to understanding in the medium of the analyst’s empathy. Empathy arises as a possibility in the case study because of the common bond of humanity shared by the observer and the observed. The inquiry concerns an experiencing person, who stands in turn within the experiential field of the analyst, and empathy is implicit in the attempt to understand a person’s communications and actions from the standpoint of his or her own subjective frame of reference (Kohut, 1959).

The development of psychoanalytic understanding may be conceptualized as an intersubjective process¹ involving a dialogue between two personal universes. The goal of this dialogue is the illumination of the inner pattern of a life, that distinctive structure of meanings that connects the different parts of an individual’s world into an intelligible whole. The actual conduct of a psychoanalytic case study comprises a series of empathic inferences into the structure of an individual’s subjective life, alternating and interacting with the analyst’s acts of reflection upon the involvement of his or her own personal reality in the ongoing investigation. Every such study begins in a modest way, with a single instance of a person’s behavior. One or more interpretive hypotheses are posed regarding the experiential and life-historical context within which that behavior has meaning. The analyst then studies further instances of the individual’s communications and actions and poses further hypotheses about the subjective and genetic contexts to which they belong. In this way a field of provisionally identified meanings comes into existence, and these meanings are compared and cross-linked, with the validity of any particular insight concerning the person being assessed by its degree of coherence with the analysis as a whole. The interplay between individual hypotheses and the analysis as a totality follows a “hermeneutic circle,” in which the parts give rise to the whole and the whole provides a context for evaluation of the parts. The structures of meaning disclosed by this mode of investigation become manifest in invariant thematic configurations that are repeated in different sectors of the person’s experiences. The elucidation of such invariants forms the counterpart in the interpretive science of psychoanalysis to the doctrine of replication of observations in the sciences of nature.

Since psychoanalytic case studies are interpretive procedures throughout, the validity of their results is evaluated in light of distinctively hermeneutic criteria. These criteria include the logical coherence of the argument, the comprehensiveness of the explanation, the consistency of the interpretations with accepted psychological knowledge, and the aesthetic beauty of the analysis in disclosing previously hidden patterns of order in the material being investigated.

The varied patterns of meaning that emerge in psychoanalytic research are brought to light within a specific psychological field located at the point of intersection of two subjectivities. Because the dimensions and boundaries of this field are intersubjective in nature, the interpretive conclusions of every case study must, in a very profound sense, be understood as relative to the intersubjective context of their origin. The intersubjective field of a case study is generated by the interplay between transference and countertransference; it is the environment or “analytic space” (Viderman, 1974) in which the various hypotheses of the study crystallize, and it defines the horizons of meaning within which the truth–value of the final interpretations is determined. An appreciation of this dependence of psychoanalytic insight on a particular intersubjective interaction helps us to understand why the results of a case study may vary as a function of the person conducting it. Such variation, an anathema to the natural sciences, occurs because of the diverse perspectives of different investigators on material displaying an inherent plurality of meanings. The analyst is aware of the nature of interpretation as “the rediscovery of the I in the Thou” (Dilthey) and therefore knows that each of his or her ideas is grounded in and limited by the finite perspectives of his or her own personal world. This capacity for critical self-reflection opens the analyst’s thinking to alternative conceptions and establishes the possibility of integrating the interpretations that are made with ideas developed from differently situated points of view.

A psychoanalytic explanation is generally communicated to others in the form of a narrative case history, written to display the various details of a person’s life as expressions of unifying themes or patterns. It is required of this narrative account that it be internally self-consistent and capable of being followed in its own terms, a feature that derives from the status of psychoanalysis as an essentially historical discipline, committed to the narrative mode of truth (Sherwood, 1969; Ricouer, 1974; Gallie, 1974; Spence, 1982). But psychoanalytic histories must go beyond fulfilling the requirements of the narrative and accomplish something further; they must bridge the gulf between the concrete particularity of an individual life and the experience of being human in universal terms. The task of writing a psychoanalytic narrative is one of transposing the analyst’s understanding into a presentation illuminating the life under study for the intellectual community at large. This means unveiling the experiences of that life in a form to which others can relate their own personal worlds in empathic dialogue. The intersubjective field of the analysis serves a mediating function in this regard, providing the initial basis of comparison for describing the pattern of the individual’s life as the realization of shared human possibilities.

Philosophical Phenomenology

The point of departure for psychoanalytic phenomenology is the concept of an experiencing subject. This means that at the deepest level of our theoretical constructions we are operating within a sphere of subjectivity, abjuring assumptions that reduce experience to a material substrate. The material world, from our standpoint, is regarded as a domain of experience, and the concepts of natural science are understood as modes of organizing that domain of experience. This is in contrast to a theoretical position that would assign ontological priority to physical matter and interpret human consciousness as a secondary expression of material events. The development of knowledge in the sciences of nature involves the organizing and interconnecting of human observations, which are experiences; but materialism is a doctrine based on reifying the concepts of natural science and then seeing consciousness as an epiphenomenon of those reifications.

The notion that a genuine science of human experience requires its own unique concepts and methods and cannot rely on emulating the sciences of nature forms a central tenet of the phenomenological movement. We are in agreement with this tenet, and especially with the phenomenological critique of doctrines of consciousness that descend from Lockean empiricism. Such doctrines rest upon a view of man as the passive receptor of discrete, atomic impressions from the outer world, an idea that body and mind are separate yet causally connected entities, and an interpretation of the nature of consciousness as a quasi-spatial container. These assumptions and metaphors involve a projection into experience of the qualities of material objects of experience, and reflect a failure to confront the attributes of subjectivity in their own distinctive terms.

Although psychoanalytic phenomenology joins with the phenomenological movement in affirming the need for an autonomous science of experience, there is an important difference between the psychoanalytic approach and the phenomenological systems elaborated within philosophy. Psychoanalytic phenomenology is guided by observations conducted in the dialogue of the psychoanalytic situation, observations always made as part of an inquiry into the experiential world of a particular person. The phenomenological investigations of philosophers, by contrast, have traditionally relied on a method of solitary reflection and have inevitably defocused the individualization of a world in the quest for knowledge of subjectivity in universal terms.

As a way of defining the relationship between psychoanalytic and philosophical phenomenology in more specific terms, we shall now turn to a discussion of the systematic formulations of three important figures in the phenomenological movement: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The systems developed by these philosophers represent proposals for the understanding of human experience. By critically evaluating these proposals, we hope to bring the assumptions underlying our own thinking more clearly into view.

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl conceived phenomenology as the fundamental descriptive science of human experience. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical studies of Descartes and Kant, Husserl sought to devise a method by which he could reach indubitably certain knowledge of the primordial nature of consciousness as such. The research program he proposed for this purpose, so-called “transcendental phenomenology,” was designed to elucidate the invariant structures of subjectivity that constitute the ultimate conditions of the possibility of all conscious experience. Because of its concern with the preconditions of all conceivable experience, transcendental phenomenology was regarded by Husserl as a discipline more fundamental than the traditional empirical sciences.

The Husserlian system was understood by its founder as the fulfillment of an historical teleology aiming toward the clarification of the foundational source of all formations of knowledge. This source he saw in the “I-myself,” the knowing subject or “ego,” which stands related to a world of which it is conscious. Whereas traditional sciences take the existence of the world for granted as a “pregiven” reality, transcendental phenomenology suspends or “brackets” assumptions regarding the nature of objective reality and studies instead the world’s manifestation to consciousness as pure phenomenon. The procedure by which this suspension of belief occurs is known as the phenomenological reduction or “epochē.” The reduction is a mental operation by which the phenomenologist frees himself from presuppositions and moves into a perspective from which what had previously been taken as real presents itself purely as a field of appearances. The status of the world as an object of consciousness has thus been reduced by the withholding of assumptions regarding its validity, nature, history, etc., and the investigator refocuses on the manner of the world’s givenness within his own awareness. Husserl thought of the epochē as something utterly without precedent in the history of science and philosophy.

We perform the epochē … as a transformation of … the natural attitude of human existence which, in its total historicity, in life and science, was never before interrupted (1936, p. 151).²

The carrying out of the phenomenological reduction is said to result in the disclosure of the pure essence that invests the world with all its meaning and validity: the transcendental ego. This is not the empirical or concrete ego of everyday life; on the contrary, the transcendental ego is understood as an entity that constitutes the meaning of existence and is ultimately responsible for defining the empirical ego and its relations to the world. Through the operation of bracketing the world and thereby reducing its status to that of a mere “correlate” of consciousness, the power of the transcendental ego in determining the features of empirical experience is brought into view.

the world is the totality of what is taken for granted as verifiable; it is there through an aiming and is the ground for ever new aimings at what is … In the epochē, however, we go back to the subjectivity which ultimately aims, which … has the world through previous aims and their fulfillment; and we go back to the ways in which this subjectivity … “has brought about,” and continues to shape the world through its co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Reference
• Author Index
• Subject Index