The Collected Papers of Emmanuel Ghent

Heart Melts Forward

Victoria Demos, Adrienne Harris, Victoria Demos, Adrienne Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317404774
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book brings together an engaging study, using Emmanuel Ghent's collected papers, of theoretical and personal origins of the relational turn in psychoanalysis. Emmanuel Ghent was one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, and his ideas have been hugely influential. However, he published sparingly and his papers are scattered across a range of sources. In this book, his key writings are reproduced, along with analyses and critiques by major contemporary psychoanalytic figures such as Adam Phillips, Jessica Benjamin, Seth Warren, Adrienne Harris and Barry Magrid.

This book provides a thorough examination of the key tenets of Ghent's thinking and illustrates the continued importance of his theoretical and clinical work for the next generation of psychoanalysts.

Part I

Core papers and commentaries

Chapter 1

Emmanuel Ghent and the origins of relational psychoanalysis

Anthony Bass

“Credo: The Dialectics of One-Person and Two-Person Psychologies” (1989) was the first of three groundbreaking papers, along with “Masochism, Submission, Surrender: Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender” (1990) and “Paradox and Process” (1992), that Emmanuel Ghent published in the dawning days of relational psychoanalysis. Each of these papers served as a linchpin to an emerging relational perspective as it moved from a comparative psychoanalytic scholarly project explicating links and complementarities between diverse theoretical perspectives to an increasingly coherent, integrative theoretical and clinical position in its own right.

It would be impossible to overstate Dr. Ghent’s¹ role in initiating, ­inspiring and defining the relational perspective. He spearheaded a movement to create a space for its development at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in the 1980s. He was a key contributor as a theoretician of this new psychoanalytic perspective, as well as a beloved teacher, analyst, supervisor and mentor to several generations of analysts who would go on to make significant contributions to relational psychoanalysis in their own right. In addition, he was a prime mover, organizer and strategist. He led a group of faculty, graduates and candidates (among whom I was one) to form a “relational track” at the New York University Postdoctoral Program, an organized relational faculty and curriculum, that added a significant new and vitalizing dimension to the diverse mix of ideas at New York University, formerly having been represented solely by Freudian and Interpersonal orientations. Having succeeded in organizing a “Relational Track” at New York University, we could select a faculty and design a curriculum that reflected the kinds of integrative and synthetic interests in psychoanalytic theory and practice that would become the hallmark of the emerging relational tradition.

A volume bringing together Emmanuel Ghent’s collected papers is cause for celebration. It brings to the reader an engaging, creative, sophisticated course of study in the theoretical and personal origins of the relational turn in psychoanalysis. Reading these papers again now transports me as through a time machine, returning me in a flash to my own training years at the New York University Postdoctoral Program between 1983 and 1989. These were exciting times in psychoanalysis at New York University, with Emmanuel Ghent, Stephen Mitchell, Philip Bromberg and others introducing ideas that would change psychoanalysis forever. There I had the extremely good fortune to meet, study and have supervision with Mannie. I was in my first year of training when Dr. Ghent delivered an early version of the “Masochism, Surrender and Submission” paper. Listening to his inspiring reading of that paper, I believed that I had found my psychoanalytic home, much as Mannie described in “Credo” his own experience of knowing that he had come to the right place when he began his studies at the White Institute some 30 years earlier.

That same year (1983), inspired by his talk, I took Ghent’s course on the development of psychoanalytic theory,² in all of its diverse streams, a course that was so rigorous and comprehensive that I wasn’t able to complete all of the readings (required and recommended) until I had graduated from the program, and was myself teaching “Introduction to Relational Theory” at New York University. By then, a relational orientation with its own course of study was underway. It seemed to me that the whole curriculum of this new orientation constituted an effort to give sufficient time and attention to a full range of relational ideas (what he in this paper describes as a combination of one- and two-person perspectives). The entire curriculum covered material that Professor Ghent had attempted to teach in a single course!

The combination of rigorous, comprehensive, penetrating and creative engagement with a wide range of theories, contextualized by a personal, direct expression of his own values, sensibilities, experiences and beliefs, was what made Ghent an inspiring, transformational teacher.

That Ghent was a lover of theory is evident in “Credo.” The breadth and depth of his scholarship was astounding. But as he makes clear in this essay, theory for Mannie was a personal matter, not merely an intellectual pursuit. Rather, theory was an expression of the therapist’s subjectivity, sensibilities and values. Did he choose his preferred theory, he wondered, or did his theory choose him? His own theoretical commitments, while deeply and rigorously thought through, were never unmoored from his personal values, aesthetics and the experiences with his own patients and analysts that shaped his way of approaching psychoanalysis. Like the artist he was (he was a musician, a composer, a computer scientist, an inventor, as well as a psychoanalyst), his papers were, equally, works of art.

One- and Two-Person Psychologies in Relational Psychoanalysis

“Credo” manages to be at one and the same time a declaration of one man’s psychoanalytic belief system (“credo” is Latin for “I believe”), and a “state of the art” study of the importance of “one-person” and “two-person” orientations to psychology. Ghent uses the “Credo” paper to consider how these ways of parsing human experience inform psychoanalytic theory as well as the quotidian psychotherapeutic choices that shape our daily practice.

In so doing, he shines a light on how our personal beliefs are fundamental to the psychoanalytic theories that we hold. They provide an underpinning, a framework, though not always a conscious one, for the rigorous explication and scholarly investigation of central psychoanalytic frames of reference. The personal and the theoretical were two sides of the same coin. The rigor of systematic study and thought was important, but that rigor is informed by the subjective frame of reference of the thinker. The emphasis on the essential subjectivity guiding our work, in our theorizing and in our work with our patients, influenced me deeply as a student, and has continued to inform my way of thinking about psychoanalysis throughout my career. Mannie exemplified, in word and deed, how the value of rigorous, committed thought was enhanced and deepened when combined with the humility that comes of realizing that our beliefs are just that: beliefs. Mannie encouraged me to think deeply while never losing sight of my personal subjectivity and values. In describing his course at New York University, Mannie notes that,

For many years, I have tried to persuade psychoanalytic candidates embarking on a course of study to commit to writing as much as they could articulate about the theoretical beliefs they thought they held and practiced; and then at the conclusion of the course to repeat the exercise. This paper represents my own efforts at articulating the beliefs (and uncertainties that currently form the matrix of my own psychoanalytic thinking and practice.

(Ghent, 1989, p. 169)

I was one of the beneficiaries of taking on that exercise in my first class in psychoanalysis. That experience of self-reflection was so meaningful for me that I have carried the application of Mannie’s pedagogical approach into my own teaching. And I have initiated a feature in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, a journal of which I am an editor, in which we invite analysts of different persuasions to write their own “credos,” as a way of highlighting the personal beliefs and experiences behind the theories that they hold.

Dr. Ghent’s paper is an excellent reminder that analytic theories are the belief systems that analysts live and work by. Such beliefs inform how we hear, what we hear, how we assemble what we hear and how we conduct ourselves in light of what we hear in the analytic situation:

Our patients are there to help us if only we have ears to listen. If we remain attuned we will discover that all is not resistance; in fact, a fair share is counter-resistance, our own difficulties with having to re-evaluate our theories and expectations in the light of experience that we uneasily sense is not fitting with those theories and expectations.

(Ghent, 1989, p. 170)

With this caveat in place, Dr. Ghent goes on to explicate the two broad theoretical orientations: one-person and two-person psychologies in a scholarly consideration of the history of psychoanalysis from the vantage point of these two broad but essential frames of reference.

I plan to use this question of a one person as against a two person psychology as a scaffolding on which to paint the backdrop of the play called psychoanalysis.

(Ghent, 1989, p. 172)

He traces the history of psychoanalysis, beginning with two-person psychology and its pre-dawn origins in Freud’s seduction theory, and then moving to one-person psychology, which emphasizes instincts, drives and a cure based in the release of damned-up energy—catharsis and an emphasis on fantasies founded in the vicissitudes of drives. He considers Ferenczi’s stark divergence from Freud in the 1930s, his revisiting the reality basis of trauma, and the ways in which analysts on both sides of the Atlantic (Horney, Fromm, Sullivan, Thompson, Balint, Winnicott, Fairbairn, and many others in the object relations schools) followed Ferenczi’s lead. He shows how a two-person psychology began to take shape that credited experience over drives as a key source of the kinds of problems that people sought therapy to address.

The theoretical center of Ghent’s “Credo” is to be found in his personal consideration of where he stands in relation to both two-person and one-person dimensions of human experience and development. We find that Ghent, through his appreciatively receptive engagement of a wide range of perspectives, reveals how one-person and two-person perspectives are complementary. Both points of view are required to grasp the mysteries and complexities of human experience.

Dr. Ghent makes a crucial, fateful distinction in his engagement of psychoanalytic theories, a distinction that is crucial to understanding the project of relational psychoanalysis. He shows that relational approaches have in common the stress on the experiential and relational aspects of human development, psychopathology and therapeutic action. He reveals that relational approaches follow the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, while eschewing the classical metapsychology of drives and their vicissitudes. These are essentially psychological rather than biological theories, emphasizing issues of motivation and meaning-making in the developing human being.

Dr. Ghent clarifies that what we commonly think of as intrapsychic experience, the experience of an inner world, refers to the way our experience in the world has been internalized and held. The internal world and the interpersonal world are, at bottom, transformations of one another. The world of internal relations is derived from interpersonal experience even as interpersonal experience is itself shaped, affected and distorted by expectations that have been internalized as part of the self.

The artful theoretical pivot that Dr. Ghent makes in this essay unmoors the intrapsychic world from Freud’s theory of drives, with which it had for so long been associated.

Unfortunately the term intrapsychic has been so long associated with drive theory and with the implicit notion that the contents of the unconscious are largely innate in their origin that it seems like a ­contradiction in terms to speak of interpersonal relations as the very stuff of the intrapsychic.

(Ghent, 1989, p. 180)

The relational turn in psychoanalysis knitted together the tear that had developed between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. It enabled analysts to think of the intrapsychic in interpersonal terms, and the interpersonal as deeply informed by the intrapsychic. Ghent averred, “I see no difficulty then for an interpersonalist to be as interested in the patient’s inner world as in his externally observable interaction; they complement each other” (p. 181). In further critiquing the state of interpersonal psychoanalysis at that time, he noted that “it is unfortunate that interpersonalists cling to the inseparability of the intra-psychic, inner world, and drive theory, as if they were a hyphenated unit” (p. 181).

The Internal World and the Interpersonal World: Expanding Possibilities and Looking Toward the Future

In prying apart an appreciation for the internal world from the drive theory that restricted its possibilities and its uses in analysis, Dr. Ghent expanded the possibilities for dialogue and mutual appreciation for analysts emphasizing the internal world, and those emphasizing the interpersonal world. In so doing, he helped create a kind of integrative, middle space in which relational psychoanalysis came into being and has thrived.

Ghent’s remarkable sense of the history of psychoanalysis, as well as its contemporary transformations, is on full display in “Credo.” His grasp of the ebb and flow of theoretical emphases in our short history made for a heightened consciousness of the ways in which theory itself, and his own beliefs about it, were always in flux. And always subject to new learning. As he highlights at the end of his essay, quoting Eliot’s “Little Gidding” to make the point most poetically: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice” (p. 208). Of course, we have heard many new and powerful voices since Mannie said his last words in 2003. Yet, his modesty aside, I know that we still have a lot to learn from him. I believe that you will find his voice as powerful, resonant and inspiring as it ever was, as you read this wonderful, complex essay that set psychoanalysis on a course that we continue to chart.

Notes

1.I will refer to Emmanuel Ghent as Mannie when I am referring to him personally, as my mentor, teacher, supervisor, colleague and friend over the twenty years that I knew him until his death in 2003. That is what I calle...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Core papers and commentaries
• PART II Early writings
• PART III In Ghent’s words
• PART IV Reminiscences
• Afterword—On what we need: A celebration of the work of Emmanuel Ghent
• Index