Decentering Relational Theory

A Comparative Critique

Lewis Aron, Sue Grand, Joyce A. Slochower, Lewis Aron, Sue Grand, Joyce A. Slochower

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351625524
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Decentering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique invites relational theorists to contemplate the influence, overlaps, and relationship between relational theory and other perspectives. Self-critique was the focus of De-Idealizing Relational Theory. Decentering Relational Theory pushes critique in a different direction by explicitly engaging the questions of theoretical and clinical overlap – and lack thereof – with writers from other psychoanalytic orientations. In part, this comparison involves critique, but in part, it does not. It addresses issues of influence, both bidirectional and unidimensional. Our authors took up this challenge in different ways.

Like our authors in De-Idealizing, writers who contributed to Decentering were asked to move beyond their own perspective without stereotyping alternate perspectives. Instead, they seek to expand our understanding of the convergences and divergences between different relational perspectives and those of other theories.

Whether to locate relational thought in a broader theoretical envelope, make links to other theories, address critiques leveled at us, or push relational thinking forward, our contributors thought outside the box. The kinds of comparisons they were asked to make were challenging. We are grateful to them for having taken up this challenge. Decentering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists across the theoretical spectrum.

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Chapter 1

Trauma as radical inquiry

Sue Grand

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Beginnings

I began studying trauma in the 1980s, prior to the birth of relational psychoanalysis. When I entered my training, there were no trauma studies in mainstream psychoanalysis. This was an unfortunate legacy of our forebears. Freud wrote about sexual trauma, the war neuroses, the stimulus barrier, and the repetition compulsions. But in the arena of sexual abuse, Freud would take a problematic path: he repudiated the seduction theory in preference for Oedipal fantasy. Classical psychoanalysis followed him into the realm of Oedipal fantasy and sexual abuse was foreclosed. Throughout the twentieth century, there were psychoanalysts studying trauma through the lens of the Vietnam war (Lifton, 1996; Shatan, 1982) and the Holocaust (Bergmann, 1983; Krystal, 1988; Laub, 1992; Laub & Auerhahn, 1989, 1993). But their work almost seemed to confirm mainstream inattention: if war and genocide defined trauma, then surely trauma was a condition of absolute extremis; it was outside the purview of our daily practice. This only served to distract us. In the U.S. in 1981, psychoanalysis was riddled with these severed links, splits and contradictions, so that trauma was eclipsed by collective amnesia. These amnestic gaps had gathered around Ferenczi, whose work had been disqualified as madness. Thus, in 1992, Judith Herman would begin her classic text with this observation:

The study of psychological trauma has a curious history – one of episodic amnesia. Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion . . . Although the field has in fact an abundant and rich tradition, it has been periodically forgotten and must be periodically reclaimed.

(Trauma and Recovery, p. 7)

Psychoanalytic training and trauma studies: in that era, these were two different tracks, non-communicating.

Now, in contemporary relational psychoanalysis, it may be hard to recall the magnitude of that gap. After psychoanalysis re-awakened to the reality of childhood sexual abuse (Alpert, 1994; Davies & Frawley, 1994; Grand, 1995, 1997a, 1997b), ‘trauma’ and ‘dissociation’ began to infuse our lexicon. We wanted to redress our patients’ fragmentation and their secret wounds. To reach into those wounds, to know and speak with the ‘un-thought known’ (Bollas, 1995): this required us to reach beyond ourselves. In search for a resonant practice, relational psychoanalysis found Holocaust studies. We accompanied survivors of genocide into their theory of trauma, PTSD, and survival (Krystal, 1988; Laub, 1992 etc.). I recall reading about Laub’s ‘empty circle’ (1998), his articulation of knowing and not-knowing in massive psychic trauma (1993). In the desert of our ignorance, someone knew. Laub saw into the heart of darkness, translating dead souls back into human discourse. His concepts of absence and the ‘empty circle’ resonated, for me, with Guntrip’s description of the schizoid problem (1969), facilitating my thesis about the reproduction of evil (Grand, 2000). I was not alone in awakening to the power of this literature. Drawing on Laub, (1993); Laub and Auherhahn (1993); and Caruth (1995), relational trauma praxis would gradually find its home (see Reis, 2009).

This look would be combined with Green’s (1986) work on the ‘dead mother’, and with Fonagy, Gergely, Junst and Target’s (2002) work on affect regulation and mentalization. We found a new language for intractable wounds. We became grounded in the paradox of speech and silence; in testimony, narrative, and witnessing (Gerson, 2009; Grand, 2000, Reis, 2009). We had already critiqued the unitary self, and clinical enactment was re-conceived (Davies, 1994). Enactment was the unspeaking performance of the unseen (see Bass, 2003; D. Stern 1997); it was a call for witnessing. All of this became entwined with attachment theory (see Howell, 2005). And Salberg (2016) could begin tracing history and transgenerational transmission through “the influences of disrupted attachment across multiple generations” (p. 79). As we have made all of these shifts in relational psychoanalysis, our disciplinary boundaries have become more fluid, expansive, and permeable. History, politics, culture, literature, ethics, philosophy, infancy research, neuro-science; the intersectionality of race, gender and class: to apprehend traumatic subjectivity we have needed to breach our insularity, open our borders, and question received knowledge.

All of this began, for me, in the 1980s. It is now 2016. In the intervening decades, trauma study has been a force of radical inquiry. We have gradually retrieved much that had been marginalized and forgotten in our canon (see Aron & Harris, 1993; Aron & Starr, 2013). We returned to Freud’s early work on hysteria, to Ferenczi’s experiments with mutual analysis, to the social critique that we see in Fromm. We interrogated classical theory, and drew on the interiority of Object Relations theory, and from the mutual social dynamisms originating in inter-personal theory. We cast doubt on analytic authority, invisibility, sterility, and silence. We embraced feminist critiques, re-writing mother as subject, and re-conceiving the mother-infant dyad (Beebe & Lachman, 2014; Benjamin, 1988; Slochower, 1996). We have theorized trans-generational trans mission (see Gerson, 2009, Grand, 2000, 2009, 2012, 2016; Gump, 2016; Guralnik, 2014; Salberg, 2016) and trauma’s reproduction (see Grand, 2000). In asking what ‘cures’, we de-centered ourselves from ego, reason, and interpretation. In all of this, we drew on Freudian theory, self-psychology, object relations, and inter-personal psychoanalysis.

Today, trauma is the focal point for relational psychoanalysis. Dissociation, fragmentation, enactment, affect dys-regulation, multiple self-states, somatic communication, disordered attachments, the gaps in mentalization: these terms are now our familiars. They are referents to the collective violence imposed on us by the ‘out there’ and to the intimate conundrums of psychic life. The term ‘trauma’ has truly become a large tent¹ – from genocide and the ‘dead third’ (Gerson, 2009) to the chronic relational mis-attunements of infancy and early childhood (see Bromberg, 2011; Schore, 2011) – all of it refers to the collapse of mentalization. All of it calls for relational immersion, affect regulation, and relational repair. Once marginalized, trauma study has facilitated larger cultural critique,² reawakened us to history and ethics (Goodman, 2012; Goodman and Layton, 2014; Orange, 2011), and reignited our passions for social justice. This convergence happens not a moment too soon. As citizen-therapists, we face dark times: climate change, global violence, rising hatred, fear and inequality, the authoritarian eclipse of democracy.

Listening for the next turn

In psychoanalysis, trauma has tested us; it has been a force for de-stabilization and radical inquiry. Encounters with trauma can seem to destroy our ability to think, vacating whatever we thought that we knew. But in psychoanalysis, this effect has been paradoxical. If trauma study has seemed to destroy links and vacate our minds, it has also been human creativity gestating in human bewilderment. At our best, relational psychoanalysis has come a long way because we have been listening to that bewilderment. We must recall, however, that traumatic knowing is a destination that can never arrive. Trauma is excess, it is the unexpected; it exceeds human experience. Psychoanalytic knowledge will always be partial, unstable, provisional. But this instability is a great teacher: it inspires us to continue our radical inquiry.

And so, in the rest of this chapter, I want to ask: how is trauma testing us, and undoing us, now, in 2018? Where are our limitations and omissions? How might these problematics point us towards our next turn? What do non-analytic trauma therapies know that we do not? In the course of these reflections, trauma will shake the foundations of our discipline. Although my reflections will apply, in many ways, to the underpinnings of all psychoanalytic orientations, I will be following the stated mission of this volume, and focusing on relational literature and thought. As I meditate on these questions I want to be clear: I do not exempt my own work from these problematics. Indeed, this de-stabilizing inquiry emerges directly the limits of my own work. Thinking about destructiveness in culture and psyche (Grand, 2000), I have stood on the solid ground of psychoanalytic theory. But in thinking about what I have called ‘small heroes’ (Grand, 2009) I felt descriptively fluent but theoretically inarticulate. Since the publication of the latter book, I have slowly been understanding my predicament. In writing about ‘small heroes’ I was leaning on theoretical fragments; I was confounded by analytic gaps and impossibilities and I felt I kept falling through space. In recent years, I have been trying to formulate what was missing (Grand, 2013). At this writing, I have realized this. In relational psychoanalysis (and perhaps in all of psychoanalysis) there is an absent discourse. In the arena of trauma, we not formulated an expansive field theory, informed by a multiplicity of minds, through which we can theorize mutually influencing forms of mentalization, resiliency, and enduring love.

I hope in the course of this essay my meaning will come clear. Even at this writing I am already having difficulty with articulation. I want to say, very simply to my reader, that we don’t have a relational field theory of resilience. And that relational psychoanalysts have been rather silent on the topic of resilience in general, with the exception of Richman (2018, vol I in this series). But even as I write the word ‘resilience’, the term somehow feels banal, and quite inadequate to my search. But the term will have to suffice for now, and what I place under its umbrella will hopefully become clear. Certainly, as clinicians, our primary concern is, and should be, healing our patients’ wounds, and we have followed Holocaust studies in our address to these wounds. Relational witnessing literature has emphasized witnessing and testimony; narrative absence; and states of deadness and emptiness, associated with an absent ‘thou’ (see Gerson, 2009, for example). Powerful, haunting, and often true to traumatic experience, this literature does not address the forms of resourcefulness, strength, and love that are also remarkably present in trauma survival and in the trans-generational heritage of that survival. I have no doubt that our clinicians attend to these capacities, but with the exception of Richman (2014; this volume) our literature does not. How can we witness survival and promote healing if resourcefulness and the living human heart fall through a gap in our theory?

Even during genocide, love is not entirely vanquished by cruelty and the ethos of care is not fully eviscerated (see Bodenstab, 2004; Ornstein, 1985, 1994; 2004). This is evident, for example, in Laub’s autobiographical essay about his survival with his mother (2016). Despite terror and brutality, trauma narratives often contain traces of the living ‘thou’. And though many trauma survivors do seem scarred by the ‘dead mother’, they are not hostage to that dead mother. After hundreds of years of severed attachments from their own mothers, African American slaves would risk their lives to find their children (see Williams, 2012):

My father was sold away from us when I was small . . . He missed us and us longed for him . . . He would often slip back to us cottage at night . . . us would gather round him . . . when his master missed him he would beat him all the way home. Us could track him the next day by the blood stains.

(Hannah Chapman qtd. in Williams, 2004, pp. 32–33)

In the shared, struggle of life in near-death, there is a persistence of care. That care is mutually sustained and replenished, even when our minds crack up, even in the midst of starvation in a German concentration camp:

And somehow I found the barrack where she was waiting for me. (Putting her arm around Rosalie) And when I came in, I said, ‘Look mother, I have a bowl of soup.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want any. You eat it.’ I said, ‘I had already a bowl’. She says, ‘No. I want you to survive. You are young. I had my life already’. And I said, ‘Please, no, you have to survive. Father will be waiting, my brother will be waiting. We both have to survive.’ So we decided to share it. My mother took a spoon, but the spoon was empty. She hardly took anything. And when I took a spoon, it was also empty, because I didn’t want to take much that she would have. So we realized that we’re not getting anywhere, and we decided to feed each other. So she was feeding me, and I was feeding her. And that bowl of soup most likely saved us, because in a day or two we were liberated.

(as cited in Grand, 2015. From Bodenstab, 2004, p. 735, testimony of Jolly Z HVT-34)

These memories cannot fail to move us to tears. So why doesn’t this compel us in relational psychoanalysis? Without this focus, we will have little to inspire us in the meeting with destruction, in the world, and inside the office. Trauma narratives are fraught with the unspeakable, but, often, they are also infused with the remarkable acts of small heroes (see Grand, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014). Resourcefulness, miraculous acts of human kindness, enduring love and the endurance of the I-Thou; the capacity to say NO to bestiality when it would be so much easier to say Yes, the re-creation of life after everything is lost: resilience exists and it takes many forms. During and after trauma, these forms are not that rare. We see them in our patients, every hour of the day. If we cannot be awed and sustained by human goodness, resourcefulness, endurance and strength in adversity, we will burn out quickly in our encounters with human darkness. As clinicians, I th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author biographies
• Introduction
• 1. Trauma as radical inquiry
• 2. Otherness within psychoanalysis: on recognizing the critics of relational psychoanalysis
• 3. Reflections and directions: an interview of Jessica Benjamin by Sue Grand
• 4. Toward a more fully integrative and contextual relational paradigm
• 5. The pathologizing tilt: undertones of the death instinct in relational trauma theory
• 6. The injurious impact of failed witnessing: reflections on Richman’s “pathologizing tilt”
• 7. Don’t throw out the baby! External and internal, attachment, and sexuality
• 8. Multiplicity and integrity: does an anti-developmental tilt still exist in relational psychoanalysis?
• 9. Reflections on relational psychoanalysis: a work in progress
• 10. Beyond tolerance in psychoanalytic communities: Reflexive skepticism and critical pluralism
• Index