Memory, Myth, and Seduction

Unconscious Fantasy and the Interpretive Process

Jean-Georges Schimek, Deborah L. Browning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780367606237
• eBook ISBN: 9781135191887
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Memory, Myth, and Seduction reveals the development and evolution of Jean-Georges Schimek's thinking on unconscious fantasy and the interpretive process derived from a close reading of Freud as well as contemporary psychoanalysis. Contributing richly to North American psychoanalytic thought, Schimek challenges local views from the perspective of continental discourse. A practicing psychoanalyst, teacher, and consummate Freud scholar, Schimek sought to clarify Freud's concepts and theories and to disentangle complexities borne of inconsistencies in Freud's assumptions and expositions.

This book is divided thematically into three sections. The first concerns fantasy and interpretation as they play out in the analytic situation, and the manner in which analyst and patient coconstruct meaning and reconstruct and recover memory. The second consists of two seminal papers which provide the sequence of steps in the five revisions in Freud's seduction theory. Schimek's careful scholarship lays out the data of Freud's writing, which allows one to draw one's own conclusions about the implications of the changes in the theory that he made. In the third, more theoretical section, he provides a foundation for understanding many of today's discussions about unconscious fantasy, dreaming, remembering, consciousness, affect, self-reflection, mentalization, and implicit relational knowing. He clarifies and illustrates Freud's original formulations (and their inherent problems) through a careful reading of sections of The Interpretation of Dreams, and a study of Freud's famous Signorelli parapraxis.

Skillfully arranged and carefully edited by Deborah Browning and including a foreword by Alan Bass, this collection of Schimek's published and unpublished papers will be of interest to practicing psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists, and students of the history of ideas and philosophy who have a particular interest in fantasy, interpretation, and Freud.

Part 1

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On the analytic relationship

Deborah L. Browning

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One can discern two interrelated themes running through Schimek’s chapters on the analytic relationship. The first is an assumption of asymmetry in the analytic situation and the implications this has for issues related to the enactment of interpersonal power. The second and closely related theme concerns the extent to which the analyst brings her own frame of reference into her listening to the patient. With these two issues in mind, Schimek steps back from the clinical situation and discusses somewhat broadly the topics of transference, countertransference, psychic reality, intersubjectivity, enactment, and therapeutic action. The protagonists in this story of the analytic relationship are Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Schafer, Loewald, Gill, Hoffman, Renik, Ogden, and the Sandlers, whose ideas he uses to clarify the conceptual and theoretical points he wants to make.

Schimek also moves forward to share his stance with respect to his own work as a clinical psychoanalyst and how he thinks it fits within the field as it exists today. I will limit my notes, here, to highlighting Schimek’s concern with the asymmetry and power differential in the analytic situation and the way in which the analyst’s conscious categories of interpretation and unconscious psychic reality risk taking center stage. Following these comments, I will provide a brief synopsis of each chapter.

POWER AND THE PATIENT’S POINT OF VIEW

Simplifying the history of psychoanalysis rather greatly, one may note that when Freud found that suggestion was insufficient for his purposes, he began to exert pressure. That failing, a struggle broke out between analyst and patient. It was as if the analyst now had a mandate to overpower the patient’s mind—and, by extension, her self. (It is called “breaking through resistance.”) Today, as medical practice outside the institute has been increasingly required to collaborate with a patient in all aspects of her care, the psychoanalyst is left with the thorny task of figuring out how to be of help and use, without taking over, without misusing the power that the pained and paying patient will likely be inclined to offer.

At the close of his “Dynamics of the Transference” (1912), Freud remarked that “this struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won” (p. 108). Freud was an ineffectual hypnotist, and his forays into the pressure technique failed to yield his hopedfor discoveries of the patient’s “hidden and forgotten erotic impulses.” It now appeared to him that transference would be a new “royal road.”

But what, exactly, is transference? If we think along with one of Freud’s criteria of transference as that which is “inappropriate,” then one may raise the questions: “inappropriate in what respect?”, “inappropriate according to whom?” Schimek suggests rather provocatively that perhaps there is no such thing as transference, only transference interpretations. He points out that different analysts will identify different aspects of the patient’s behavior and affect as transference, contingent upon their own frame of reference, beliefs about the purpose of treatment, and personal defensive needs, so that the nature of this victory that Freud would have us win risks becoming the victory of the therapist’s point of view over that of the patient.

Schimek assumes that the analytic situation is unavoidably asymmetrical and involves an imbalance of power, but this need not and must not mean that the analyst becomes the final authority on what is true. Even the new perspective that the analyst may hope to provide is not meant to supplant or supersede the patient’s, but rather only to enlarge and supplement it. And while he agrees with much that Gill and Hoffman bring to our attention about the influence of the analyst on the patient’s experience, Schimek believes that, because the analyst must restrain the revelation of his own private associations in order to protect the patient from undue influence, a “negotiated consensus” about what is actually happening in the interpersonal situation, is most likely an unreachable goal. Schimek suggests that recognition of the asymmetry places particular responsibility on the analyst for self-control, self-discipline, and tolerance of frustration. The rule of abstinence applies as much, if not more, to the analyst as to the analysand. This restraint is all in the service of the analyst’s efforts to be an attentive, alert, open-minded listener. It is the patient’s point of view that should take precedence, and it is the analyst’s task to safeguard this view.

Of what are patient and analyst together in search? Schimek takes a traditional point of view that the goal of analysis should be greater selfawareness and self-knowledge and that the role of the patient’s reconstruction of her history is crucial. This construction and reconstruction of the patient’s life story, while pursued together, must make some kind of intrinsic sense to the patient. The patient must be allowed to assume first and final authorship in filling out a story where, initially, there may have been only inarticulate and fragmentary elements.

In taking this position, Schimek indicates his view that a person’s past is not buried exactly as it once happened, providing clear, veridical memories. The past will have left its imprint, to be sure, but not necessarily in a way that can be remembered in a singular, distinct, and accurate way. And it is this assumption of a real and influential, but largely unrememberable, early past that makes it all the more important that the patient should be the “first author” of her story. This role of first author both respects and supports the patient’s sense of identity and self-image, and her way of relating to the world. The understandable urge of many therapists to move in, take over, and fill in the gaps, imposing their own assumptions demands what Schimek refers to as the rule of abstinence for the analyst.

While Schimek perhaps privileges the importance of historical construction and reconstruction in the analytic process, he does not dismiss the significance or the reality of the analytic relationship, even if mostly mediated though the interpretive activity of the analyst. His thinking at times is reminiscent of Loewald, and he sees the analytic situation as a staging area where prior relationships are lived out under the stewardship of the analyst as “stage director.” What may account for therapeutic change is not so much a new view of the past, but more likely the internalization of the patient’s experience of the relationship with the analyst. And, here again, we see the ascendance of the patient’s point of view, in that what matters and is potentially internalized is the patient’s explicit, as well as unexpressed, opinion of what in that relationship constituted “transference” and what for him or her has been real.

PSYCHIC REALITY AND THE MIND OF THE ANALYST

Discussions of the analytic relationship in clinical psychoanalysis involve issues related to reality and fantasy, self and other, past and present, psychical and external reality. We assume increasingly that these ideas and phenomena cannot be dichotomized, nor should they be polarized; rather each “this and that” is a blend, an “interpenetrating mix-up” (Balint, 1960, p. 39), that can only be worked with, handled, transformed, detoxified, but most likely never fully disentangled. The “truth” of a situation can never be fully known. The concept of psychic reality is particularly useful for its emphasis on something ineffable about the patient—and also the analyst—that, while ultimately unknowable, still requires our full attention. It captures both “inflicted fact and purposeful editing” (Friedman, 1995, p. 27). It is that which gives shape to the neurosis, to fantasy, dreams, slips of the tongue, to the analyst’s desire to know, and to the patient’s resistance to knowing. In its timelessness, it plays tricks on us, inspires our multiple self states, makes us feel restless during those moments when time seems to stand still.

Definitions of psychic reality abound, and while the concept is made use of in a great many psychoanalytic articles, there remains no consensus as to its meaning—only choices of definitions. In his recent discussion of the topic, Zepf (2006) takes the position that the idea of psychic reality should not be “watered down” from Freud’s original conception. Freud introduces the term psychical reality in the closing pages of the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), writing:

The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs. (p. 613)

But this comment is sufficiently ambiguous, and there are few enough other elaborations by Freud that there is still leeway for interpretation of its meaning.

Schimek defines psychic reality first by that which he views it is not. It does not refer to a patient’s conscious, subjective experiences. At most, these experiences would reflect, be derivatives of, be shaped by something underlying. Schimek reads Freud’s comments on psychic reality to suggest “that unconscious wishes have an autonomous structure, organization, and persistence with an enactive power and causal efficacy of their own” (see Chapter 3). He is thus describing psychic reality essentially as unconscious fantasy, a topic he elaborates extensively in Chapters 9 and 10 on unconscious mental representation and fantasy. As such, Schimek defines a person’s psychic reality as consisting of a set of basic, unconscious fantasies that operate in the manner of Kantian categories to organize, structure, and give meaning to experience.

In the chapters on the analytic relationship, Schimek emphasizes the way in which the analyst’s own psychic reality as well as her assumptions of certain basic, organizing fantasies in all individuals’ psyches can influence both listening to and speaking with the patient. Schimek argues that, to the extent that psychic reality involves a “limited set of primary fantasies” that organize and give meaning to one’s experience, the analyst’s choice of interpretive category, whether it is that of the “holding mother,” “the oedipal father,” or “the mirroring parent,” reflects an aspect of her own psychic reality taking shape in her theory of mind, which can be imposed upon the patient’s material.

Schimek compares the analyst at work, making meaning while listening, with Freud, the “archeologist of the mind,” and suggests that, in both cases, this reflects a basic search by the individual for causes and explanations. And it is these theories and the material that gives content to them that constitute an individually created psychic reality. Put another way, our psychic reality is constituted because of our need for causes and explanations, which operates, then, as much in the analyst as in the patient. While not linking it specifically to psychic reality, Blass (2006) elaborated extensively on this desire for knowledge in her paper on Freud’s (1910) “Leonardo” monograph. One will see the topic of psychical reality taken up more fully by Schimek in his considerations of Freud’s seduction theory (Chapters 7 and 8).

Not only will the analyst bring her own personal history, implicit theory of development, psychopathology, goals of treatment, and “voices” of prior supervisors (Smith, 2001) into the psychoanalytic situation, but each theory of psychopathology, development, and therapeutic change also has built into it assumptions about the presumed psychic reality of the patient. It is this issue about psychic reality at its broadest level that Schimek brings into his thinking throughout the chapters on the analytic relationship. These differing psychoanalytic models of a prototypical past tag along with the analyst in her listening, regardless of whether the material is about the patient’s past, current life, or expressed in the here and now of the analytic situation.

Despite the imbalance in the analytic relationship and the vulnerability of many patients toward interpersonal submission, how might we try to limit the imposition of our own frame of reference on the patient? How do we limit the rigidity of our assumptions about what we see or what we expect to see in any next moment? In her extensive writing on analytic listening, Schwaber captures Schimek’s advocacy of the patient’s point of view when she refers to the “inherent legitimacy” of the patient’s experience. She writes:

We lose sight of the fact that our vantage point, even our view of ourselves, is simply that—ours; the patient may have another, the inherent legitimacy of which is still to be found. We tend, thereby, not to ask, not to take our patients at their word. (2006, p. 17)

Schwaber’s writing on analytic listening helps attune the analyst to the possibility that, by carefully following the manifest, the conscious in the patient’s thinking and feeling, more unconscious areas will be opened up, and the analyst will be less inclined to impose “assumptions” about the unconscious on the other person.

Pine’s (2006) recent plea for a measure of diversity and tolerance thereof offers a different kind of anodyne for the pain of the dissonance between the patient’s experience and the analyst’s frame of mind. To the extent that we open ourselves to a “multiplicity of ideas about mind” (p. 464) and accept and recognize their intrinsic validity in certain contexts with certain patients, we open ourselves as well to the differing needs of different patients and also, importantly, to the shifting needs of any individual patient at any given moment. In doing so, we offer ourselves, and thus our patient as well, more opportunity to find and employ, if only initially and preconsciously, the least discordant conception until the individuality and originality of the patient and her experience is more fully understood.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

In Chapter 1, “Psychoanalysis and Transference: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Schimek reminds the reader that clinical psychoanalysis was never Freud’s primary motive or goal and that his writing on technique comprises a fairly small proportion of his total work. He points to the way in which psychoanalysis has become increasingly concerned with treatment issues in the last 40 years and has been applied in ever greater variation to an ever broader range of patients in ever lengthening analyses.

In Chapter 2, “The Construction of the Transference: The Relativity of the ‘Here and Now’ and the ‘There and Then,’” after providing a succinct summary of Freud’s criteria of transference as inappropriateness, resistance, and repetition, Schimek proceeds to challenge many aspects of the concept and the phenomena that are labeled as such. He points to the extent to which transference is defined by the analyst in terms of her view of pathology, development, and goals for the treatment. Those aspects of the transference that will serve to facilitate the treatment may well be ignored, allowed to flourish in a sotto voce manner, or relabeled as the “real relationship.” He considers the writing and theories of Melanie Klein and Gill and Hoffman in order to show that, in two such different approaches to treatment, both work within implicit models, leading to selective constructions influenced by the analyst’s frame of reference.

In Chapter 3, “Intersubjectivity and the Analytic Relationship,” Schimek discusses Renik’s oversimplified caricature of the objective, neutral, anonymous analyst. He points to the pitfalls of the postmodern emphasis on relativity and the idea that an analytic relationship could ever truly be a “collaboration between peers”—unless, perhaps he comments wryly, the individuals took turns paying each other. In his discussion of Ogden, Schimek notes the many ways the idea of projective identification is used, and he questions the assumption that unconscious influence seems to be assumed to be unidirectional, from patient to analyst, and that the analyst could truly function as a “clean container” without the mediating effect of his own psychic reality.

In Chapter 4, “On the Resolution of the Positive Transference: Suggestion, Identification, and Action,” Schimek returns to the topic of transference per se, focusing here on the role and fate of the positive transference and the idea that, more than just identifying with the analyst or his interpretations, internalization of the entire relationship with the analyst may be a crucial part of therapeutic action. He also elaborates on the importance of interweaving the patient’s experiences from the three different perspectives—of her experience of her past, her experience of her ongoing life, and her experience of the analytic situation—in providing a part of the therapeutic action.

In Chapter 5, “Transference and Psychic Reality: Ideas About the Timeless Past in Psychoanalysis,” Schimek explores the concept of psychic reality, extends this discussion to a consideration of the impact of the analyst’s psychic reality on the analytic process, and concludes with an emphasis on the centrality of the concept of psychic reality in psychoanalysis.

In Chapter 6, “Further Thoughts on the Contemporary Analytic Relationship,” Schimek summarizes what he sees as six interacting trends found within discussions of the contemporary analytic relationship. He considers issues related to countertransference and enactment, and he proposes his own view of the principles and goals of the analytic relationship.

Chapter 1

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Psychoanalysis and transference

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow^*

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It is well known that Freud never saw himself primarily as a therapist and healer; neither did he view psychoanalysis as first and foremost a technique of therapy, nor even a theory of psychopathology. In the most general way, he defined psychoanalysis as primarily a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any way other than from the special analytic situation. Only secondarily was it defined as a method for the treatment of neurotic disorders based on that investigation. Thirdly, psychoanalysis was a collection of psychological information, gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline.

In 1926 Freud stated that “the future will probably attribute far greater importance to psychoanalysis as the science of the unconscious than as a therapeutic procedure” (1926b, p. 265). We may now see that this was more a wish than an accurate prediction. For Freud, psychoanalysis was “the science of the unconscious mind” (1923a, p. 252), a depth psychology. His major interest in psychopathology was that it should make a unique contribution to the understanding of normal mental functioning. He repeatedly stressed the continuum and basic similarity between neurotic and normal phenomena. From the beginning of his writing, he used data not only from the clinical situation, but also from dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, folklore, and myths. His two major works, The Interpretations of Dreams (1900) and Three Essays on Sexuality (1905b), deal with the psychopathology of everyday life and are not meant to apply primarily to neurosis.

It is also well known that Freud’s writings on treatme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Editor’s introduction
• PART 1 On the Analytic Relationship
• PART 2. On the Seduction Theory
• PART 3. On Unconscious Fantasy
• References
• Index