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The phenomenological self, its environs, and its therapist
Introduction
In preceding volumes (Leffert, 2010, 2013, 2016) I have been delineating a familiar series of psychoanalytic worlds in very unfamiliar ways, offering in part a far-reaching critique of pre-1990 psychoanalytic thought and in part a holistic reformulation of the nature of human being. The inseparable worlds I am speaking of are the world of the self, the therapeutic situation, and the wider world in which they exist as disautonomous parts. I began with a post-Cartesian critique (e.g., Stolorow, 2011; Stolorow, Orange, & Atwood, 2002) of Mind-in-Isolation (the latter much favored in all forms of psychoanalytic theory building1), then moved on to replace this inseparable Mind with the holistic Selves of therapist and patient embedded in the therapeutic situation, and, finally, to the embedding of the therapeutic situation in the wider world, its Existence (May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958), if you will.
The problem with these now somewhat familiar critiques of Mind-in-Isolation is that they leapfrog from mind directly to world and ignore the relationship of mind and body, which is what Descartes was originally all about. The enormous weight of the neuroscience and neurohormonal research of the past fifty years demonstrates that any sort of discreteness of mind or brain and body is spurious. I have also been highly critical of the usual concept of self as some sort of intrapsychic âstructureâ that, on a pragmatic level, is impossible to distinguish from the concepts of self-representation or internal working model. Instead, I have used the term to signify the complex of mind, body, and embeddedness in the social world â a holistic bio-psycho-social self. Such a definition was in fact first posited by William James (1893/2007) more than a century ago.2 It leaves intact the concept of multiple and partial self images (or representations) which have recently been shown (Molnar-Szakacs & Arzy, 2009; Uddin, Iacoboni, Lange, & Keenan, 2007) to be closely associated with cortical midline structures of the brain.
Again in contrast to older psychoanalytic thought, I have posited (Leffert, 2016, chapters 2 and 3) that this holistic self is first and foremost a phenomenological self and the social and physical world in which it is embedded is a phenomenological world. (All too often, the term phenomenology is used, outside of its philosophical lineage or meaning, as a sort of synonym for appearance, implying both surface and the presence of something deeper; nothing could be farther from the truth.) It is to these arguments for a phenomenological psychoanalysis, drawing on the work of Heidegger (1975/1982, 1987/2001, 1927/2008), Boss (1963), and May (1958a, 1958b, 1964, 1966) among others, that we will first turn.
A [very] short course in phenomenology as it pertains to psychoanalysis
Historically, Phenomenology developed as a philosophical school centered on Being (that is, a field of ontological study) in the early to mid-20th century. It is a postmodern discipline, involving the same rules of knowledge, inherent limits on knowability, contextualism, and irreducible subjectivity inherent in all postmodern thought (Leffert, 2007a, 2007b). It is about the Selfâs Being and Being-in-the-World. Perhaps the three major contributors to the field were Husserl (1937/1970, 1913/1983, 1931/1999), Heidegger (1975/1982, 1927/2008), who was initially influenced by Brentano (1874/1995) (as was Freud), became a student and disciple of Husserlâs, but later contemptuously rejected him, and Sartre (1943/2003). Sartre used the term Existentialism that, on a practical level, is very hard to separate from Phenomenology. Human being was seen to involve conscious intentionality and apprehension of self and world. Heidegger used the word Dasein as a bridge of self and world, referring at once to human being (existence) and being there (or here) in the world. The emphasis on consciousness had, I think, mostly constituted a counterargument to the Freudian Unconscious (1915/1957) of the times: unknown, split off from world, organized only by primary process, and controlling the self without the latterâs knowing it was being controlled. As I have been arguing (Leffert, 2013, 2016), and will discuss below, the property of unconsciousness involves none of these things and unconscious aspects of the self are full phenomenological participants: very much parts of Dasein. A frequent error of those coming for the first time to the field is to confuse phenomenology with phenomenalism. Where phenomenology posits that things reveal themselves through their appearance, phenomenalists argue that things are their appearance, nothing more.
In the postwar years, Heidegger3 (1987/2001) became interested in educating clinicians about phenomenology as a foundation for their work. Out of this interest grew a collaboration with Medard Boss (1963), a Swiss psychiatrist working at the Burghölzi Psychiatric Hospital and the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic. Boss was practicing what he called Daseinanalysis, a term that doesnât signify for Anglophone therapists; I would use instead the term phenomenological analysis, and the process the analysis of the self and its being (not as concise as one might hope, but the meaning is clear). Their collaboration led to a series of seminars (Heidegger, 1987/2001) open to clinicians of all ilks that were held at Bossâs home.
By mid-century, a separate thread, called at the time existential psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, had developed in the United States under the auspices of Rollo May and others (May, 1958a, 1958b, 1964, 1966, 1969; May, et al., 1958). Trans-Atlantic cross-pollination occurred when Boss (1963) and Binswanger (1958) presented their work to audiences of existentially informed psychoanalysts and psychotherapists4 in the United States. This thread waxed during the 1960s with its new social agendas, then waned for unclear reasons, finally to be resurrected in a Heideggerian vein at the start of the new millennium through the work of Stolorow and colleagues (Orange, 2009; Stolorow, 2011; Stolorow, et al., 2002).
With all that said, what is phenomenologically based psychoanalysis and what are its organizing principles? In the interest of clarity concerning what it is and what it is not, Iâm going to present them as a series of numbered points that also constitute a radical critique of how psychoanalysis has been practiced. Again, this is only a summary argument; an in-depth discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter.5
1. There is no metatheory, no metapsychology; there are things that are, things that are secret or hidden, but they are subject to examination or exploration rather than some sort of depth analysis.
2. However counterintuitive it may appear, there is no such thing as psychological depth. What at first glance appears to be depth is actually historicity, manifested in two ways: the history of the selfâs changing narratives over time and the archaeology (Leffert, 2013, chapter 2) of the self. Both are subjects of conjoint clinical study by patient and analyst.
3. The venue of clinical psychoanalysis has been at once intrapsychic and Cartesian. That is to say, it has maintained an impossible separation of mind, body, and world, focusing exclusively on mind. Objects have been defined as intrapsychic representations as has the self; our business as psychoanalysts has been exclusively with them, not with what they are representations of. Similarly, transference is seen as a matter of archaic intrapsychic representation with the reality of the analyst concealed behind a putative neutrality and a blank screen. Fortunately, for most Contemporary6 analysts and therapists, such clinical theory is implicitly treated as a convention more honored in the breach. It was only the Interpersonal School beginning with Sullivan (1938/1971, 1953/1997) that had insisted on relationships as, well, interpersonal rather than intrapsychic, and Bird (1972) and Gill (1979, 1982) who passionately insisted that âtheâ transference must be engaged in the present, the experience near here and now, between analyst and patient as well as in the archaic, experience-distant past.7 Bromberg and Gill (Bromberg, 1991, 2011) similarly insisted that this was an interpersonal process and made the now fairly common observation that split off, frozen aspects of early relationships (and the self) must be brought into and made continuous with the present.
4. The venue has now shifted for some of us to the phenomenological present-self, its relations with real people-in-the-world (Heideggerâs term for this is the Mitwelt), and the external world as a whole (Umwelt) (Heidegger, 1975/1982)8 informed and contextualized by its historicity.9 That historicity includes both the narrative and non-narrative histories of the selfâs relations with other human beings10 and the wider world and the archaeology of the rules of knowledge governing how an individual perceives other human beings.11 Analysis is now concerned with these inseparable elements and their relations (a truly post-Cartesian ontology that constitutes the subject of analysis). As I posited, accessibility to consciousness per se does not have any special or particular place in these therapeutic endeavors.
5. Consciousness is only one small part of being. Unconscious being was eschewed by the first-generation phenomenologists (Heidegger, 1975/1982; Husserl, 1913/1983; Sartre, 1943/2003), who equated it with the Freudian Unconscious, split off by repression and irrelevant to phenomenological examination or inquiry. A half-century of neuroscience research has shown that unconscious parts of the self manifest a vibrant and complex plurality and are very much subject to examination and inquiry. In other words they exist and no phenomenological inquiry into the self would be complete without them. If there is no single dynamic Unconscious, split off from the self by repression (Willingham & Preuss, 1995), by what mechanism can some things residing outside of consciousness become consciously present? Heideggerâs answer is that much can be hidden or secret and brought into consciousness through discourse. To this I would add George Kleinâs (1966, 1976) observation that instead of a lifting of repression or some kind of hypercathexis, it is simply the self that chooses what it wants to be conscious of.
6. Psychoanalytic critiques of phenomenological psychoanalysis (e.g., Coltrera, 1962; Hanly, 1979; Renik, 1985), marketed as critiques of Existentialism, essentially argue that if what is simply is, then there is no such thing as meaning. In fact, the phenomenological argument is that meaning exists (and will be taken up in the following chapter) and is fundamental (although it must often be discovered): what doesnât exist is depth and metatheory; reality and meaning are always present and fully deployed.
7. The place of anxiety in the self is at particular issue here. Classical psychoanalytic theorists have described anxiety as following from the structural relations of ego psychology, reflecting libido theory and psychosexual development. In contemporary psychoanalysis (e.g., Holmes, 2010), both metapsychological assumptions are seen as seriously flawed. May (1958b) argued that anxiety is ontological in nature, a state of the selfâs being. Recent research (Panksepp, 1998; Panksepp & Biven, 2012) has established that, as a way of being, it is a process response existing across mammalian species and perhaps across all vertebrates to a threat to being there (threats to being need not be threats to life). Freudâs choice of the German Angst was phenomenologically fortuitous, containing elements of anguish and dread (German offers no distinction between anxiety and dread or anxiety and fear). The earliest instances of anxiety (their historicity) are linked to experiences in which the being of the self is overwhelmed by experience and sensation. Attachment Theory offers a phenomenological basis for anxiety rather than a theoretical one.
8. I have argued previously (Leffert, 2013, chapter 5) that Freud was as much a phenomenological author as a metapsychological one, with much of the metapsychology coming from the creaky pseudoscientific Strachey translation. Even The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1899/2006)12 was essentially a phenomenological work onto which Freud appended a now obsolete metapsychological epilogue.
9. So what does a phenomenologically based psychoanalysis look like? Classical (and many contemporary) psychoanalysts are trained to look behind the immediate phenomena of the psychoanalytic situation in search of some deeper (and unverifiable, I would add) theoretical meaning, whereas the former stay with the experiences of patient and analyst. The phenomenological goal is to discover their contextual meaning for the individual patient. This involves an exploration of a patientâs historical narrative and personal archaeology (Leffert, 2013).
10. A postmodern/phenomenological approach to the patient â treating her as an independent decision-making subject rather than an object of analysis â contradicts the power-relations framework that pervades many therapeutic relationships (Leffert, 2013, chapter 1) and much of standard psychoanalytic technique. In this vein, the demand that the patient free associate while the analyst interprets, bypasses the patient and her autonomy in the service of reaching presumed unconscious depths. Sadly, neither these depths nor effective procedures to reach them have ever been proven to exist. Contemporary psychoanalysts have largely replaced âfreeâ association with discourse concerned with the beingness of the patient (even if they donât use such terms to signify what it is they are doing). Classical psychoanalysts seek to get behind the phenomena of the patientâs being, while phenomenological analysts stay with their experiences of the patient and themselves. The phenomenological method relies on discourse and deconstruction with a limited use of interpretation not linked to a search for depth. Its goal is to discover meaning and narrative as it pertains to the patient and to themselves.
11. Our interest is in investigating and describing the patient (as he, if allowed, will be interested in us),13 not in using interpretations to destroy what we find in search of âdeeperâ meaning. Rollo May (1964) rema...
