Psychoanalysis in Transition

A Personal View

Merton M. Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135061449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychopathology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 2000. This volume outlines the changes in Gill's formulation of psychoanalytic theory in response to new ideas and dialogues. This evolvement includes more focus on the clinical process, with psychoanalytic theory being part of a toolkit for the analyst, and exploring the 'nature of psychological therapy informed by psychoanalytic concepts.

1

Constructivism and Hermeneutics

Before proceeding to the psychoanalytic situation as such, I want to provide the context within which I will discuss it. That context is in terms of constructivism and hermeneutics. For some time I struggled with the question of whether constructivism and hermeneutics were on the same level of abstraction or whether one was superordinate to the other. It now seems preferable to me to consider constructivism superordinate to hermeneutics, and I will try to explain why.

Constructivism

Since I am not sophisticated in epistemology or philosophy, I believe it is important to state that I am using concepts like constructivism, hermeneutics, and objectivism, which have generated great bodies of controversial literature, only in a global, connotative, more or less commonsensical way.

Constructivism is the proposition that all human perception and thinking is a construction rather than a direct reflection of external reality as such. That is to say, any percept or idea is in part a function of the perceiver or thinker. Otherwise stated, any perception or idea is from the particular perspective of the perceiver or thinker. Constructivism can also be called perspectivism or relativism. Another familiar way of conveying the constructivist premise is to say that there are no facts as such. In a vivid metaphor, facts are soaked in theory.

Science—obviously based on perception and thought—is constructivist. While this may appear more obviously true for the human sciences, it is true for the natural sciences too. The natural sciences are developed by human beings. As such, they are determined in part by the nature of the perceiving or thinking human beings. They are constructed from the human perspective. They are relative to that perspective.

I understand radical constructivism to mean questioning the certainty that there is any external reality at all or that one can know anything about external reality. I do not mean that kind of constructivism. I mean that what we understand of reality is not reality as such but the construction we make of reality. A construction is subject to the constraints of reality even if we cannot say what the reality really is. It seems like a conundrum to say that we must take account of the constraints of reality when we cannot say what reality is. Constructivism in psychoanalysis is sometimes misunderstood to mean that the analyst cannot feel sure of anything. That is not so. It is, rather, that the analyst should not function with the idea, for example, that he is dealing with unquestionable facts as to what human nature universally is. In his everyday work, the analyst is a pragmatic constructivist (Berger, 1985; Schafer, 1992). He may work with confidence, but he never abandons the perspective that he may be mistaken. Of course, the more inferential a conclusion he has reached, the more ready he is to entertain other views. This is especially true if he is dealing with another person’s subjective state. Nor can one say that another person is the final arbiter of his own subjective state. That may be true for his conscious state, but psychoanalysis has discovered unconscious mentation.

Hermeneutics

There is a large body of philosophical studies about the nature of human knowledge generally and, within the philosophy of science, about the meaning of hermeneutics more particularly. I know that literature only second and even third hand. I know that some of that literature claims that there can be no such thing as a hermeneutic science, but that view seems to be based on the assumption that there can be a nonconstructivist science, that is, a science in which one can reach a positive, unequivocal, and certain knowledge of external reality. The model for such alleged knowledge has long been the natural sciences, but my understanding is that the natural sciences are constructivist too, even if less obviously so than matters psychological.

What then is hermeneutics? It means interpretation. How then does it differ from constructivism, since constructivism also implies interpretation, there being no such thing as a perception that is not already an interpretation? The answer is that, at least as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, hermeneutics means an interpretation of human meanings. I have difficulty defining a human meaning but, as a supreme court justice said about pornography, he could not define it but he could tell it when he saw it. I can tell it when I see it. I can offer only a global statement of what I mean by a human meaning. I mean one that includes an affective personal meaning or, more generally, psychic reality in contrast to material reality. Human meaning is really the same concept Kohut (1959) used when he wrote his famous paper on introspection and empathy. He argued that if empathy—that is, a potential capacity to feel what another human being feels—is not part of an observation, that observation is not a psychoanalytic one. 1 meant the same thing when I wrote that “metapsychology is not psychology” (Gill, 1976). Freudian metapsychology is not hermeneutic. Despite Freud’s insistence that his metapsychology was an intrinsic aspect of psychoanalysis, he in effect defined a “psychical act” as hermeneutic. He wrote:

Anything that is observable in mental life may occasionally be described as a mental phenomenon. The question will then be whether the particular mental phenomenon has arisen immediately from somatic, organic and material influences—in which case its investigation will not be part of psychology—or whether it is derived in the first instance from other mental processes, somewhere behind which the series of organic influences begin. It is this latter situation that we have in view when we describe a phenomenon as a mental process, and for that reason it is more expedient to clothe our assertion in the form: “the phenomenon has a sense.” By “sense” we understand “meaning,” “intention,” “purpose” and “position in a continuous psychical context” [Freud, 1916, pp. 60–61].

Although Freud seldom used the word empathy [Einfülung], he did write this: “A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life” (Freud, 1921, p. 110n, italics added).¹

When I say that hermeneutics involves interpretation, I recognize that the word interpretation is very broadly used. In the realm of material reality, I can “interpret” the meaning of a chemical experiment, but such an interpretation is not hermeneutic. I can interpret the Song of Songs, for all its sensuous imagery, to refer to man’s relations to God. The latter interpretation is hermeneutic, even though it need not be the meaning that the Song of Songs has for everyone. By a hermeneutic meaning, I mean, for example, that a patient’s bitter tirade may signify his denial that he is falling in love.

The idea of hermeneutics originally described the interpretation of religious texts. It spread to include other texts, such as those of literature, so that literary criticism is now called a hermeneutic discipline. Even a human being can be considered a text (Gergen, 1985). A crucial difference between a literary text and the human being as a text in the psychotherapeutic situation is that the human text answers back. The psychotherapeutic interpretation is met by a response; a poem does not reply to an interpretation of its meaning. It is a fixed text. I think it is a mistake to argue that the text is not fixed because it has different meanings to different readers. A new reader can come along to read the original text, except, of course, as he has been influenced by others’ prior readings.

Can There be a Constructivist and a Hermeneutic Science?

For some time, there has been a furor in psychoanalysis as to whether psychoanalysis is a natural science or a hermeneutic discipline. The very phrase hermeneutic science has been considered by many to be an oxymoron, a self-contradiction; and constructivism is by many regarded as incapable of being scientific, since it allows for the validity of differing views of the same phenomenon.

What does it mean to say that the same phenomenon is being described? It means that there are facts in the material realm as well as events on which we can unequivocally agree. If I raise my eyebrows, we can all agree that this phenomenon took place. If a patient tells us his parents were divorced, that is a fact on which we can agree. It is not hermeneutics. One might say that the fact of the divorce is akin to material, rather than psychic, reality. But what the divorce meant to the patient is hermeneutic. We can never know it unequivocally. Freud unequivocally regarded psychoanalysis as a natural science. “What else can it be?” he asked. Those who argue that psychoanalysis is constructivist and hermeneutic are considered to be denying that psychoanalysis can be a science, because it is taken as axiomatic that there cannot be a hermeneutic or constructivist science. Indeed, the charge frequently leveled against those who consider psychoanalysis to be constructivist and hermeneutic is that this is an evasion of the responsibility of psychoanalysis to subject its theories to testing by the methods of science.

I must first point out that, while hermeneutic studies in the humanities may not be science, psychoanalysis as hermeneutics can be. As I just suggested, a poem does not reply to an interpretation, but a patient does, at least implicitly, but sometimes explicitly as well. We need not take his reply at face value, and we have a basis for continuing exploration of the validity of a meaning.

A major reason that constructivism and hermeneutics are ruled out as science is the failure to recognize that all science is constructivist, even though this is less obvious in the natural than in the humanist sciences.

An antonym to relativism is positivism. The latter assumes facts that are in no way relative to the observer. There is only one true answer. The observer can be, as it were, factored out. I will later discuss the view of the analyst as a blank screen as exemplifying the fallacy that the analyst can be factored out, that is, that his observations and interpretations are free of any contribution from his own personhood.

How can there be such a thing as science if there is no one true answer? Is science not the progressive elimination of the contribution of the observer until finally the naked, brute fact is reached? No, the contribution of the observer can never be reduced to zero. Even the statements that I raised my eyebrows and that there has been a divorce are statements in a particular context. That context can be progressively clarified by working toward its greater comprehensiveness and coherence, but the fact remains meaningful only in a context. A fact can be meaningful in a material context, but it does not become a psychoanalytic “fact” unless it is being described in a context of psychic reality. Interpretations of psychic reality can, of course, differ widely. It is a reduction to an absurdity to argue, as it often is argued, that in a constructivist-hermeneutic perspective “anything goes,” or, in a current idiom for the psychotherapeutic situation, that one narrative is as good as any other or that narratives differ only in their aesthetic appeal. That kind of thinking is what I have referred to as radical constructivism.

At one time, it was believed that from the point of view of epistemology, the theory of human knowledge, a major distinction must be drawn between the natural and the human sciences, or as Dilthey (1924) put it in the German terms often used even in discussion in other languages, between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, literally between the natural sciences and the spiritual sciences.

A major form that the argument over whether psychoanalysis is a natural or a hermeneutic science has taken is the metapsychology versus clinical, or, as I prefer, the metapsychology versus psychology (Gill, 1976) debate. I believe the issue can be formulated in the context of the preceding remark. Every discipline has a metadiscipline, that is, a context that determines the meaning of its terms. Freud’s metadiscipline for psychoanalysis is his metapsychology. Freudian metapsychology is in a natural science framework; its natural scientific terms are force, energy, substance, and space. Freud’s clinical theory, his psychology, is in a hermeneutic metapsychology; it deals with human meanings. Freud’s metapsychology and his psychology are confusingly intertwined. A prime instance of their intertwining is Freudian drive theory, which is formulated in both natural-science and hermeneutic-science terms. Psychosexuality in Freudian theory is both energic and relational, libido and love, metapsychology and psychology. George Klein’s (1976) brilliant essay on Freud’s two theories of sexuality distinguishes between viewing drive theory in natural science terms or hermeneutically. Libidinous activity must be distinguished from love. Rape is also a humanly (or from another point of view, inhumanly) meaningful activity.

It is important to emphasize a point that was effectively made by Griinbaum (1984): although Freud himself did not make the distinction, his claim that psychoanalysis is a natural science is based not only on his metapsychology but on his clinical theory as well. It cannot be assumed, therefore, that Freud’s belief that psychoanalysis is a natural science rests on the metapsychology alone.

As something of an aside, I insert here a remark about primary and secondary process. These concepts are constructs that certainly capture something about the nature of thought. Rejecting energic metapsychology as I do, I have been unable to accept Freud’s explanation of the primary processes of displacement and condensation as resulting from the need to discharge as much psychic energy as rapidly as possible.

The most plausible alternate construction of these processes I have been able to find is Irene Fast’s (1992) discussion relating them to Piaget’s sensorimotor period in which meaning derives from actions, so that any constituent of the action can express the meaning of the action. In the action of sucking, for example, finger and nipple can substitute for each other; that is, meaning can be displaced from one to the other. In a condensation, the elements that are condensed can be shown to be parts of constellations that have equivalent meanings. The formulation reminds me of David Rapaport’s (1951) distinction between the drive and the reality organizations of memory.

It is often said that scientific method is the same throughout the sciences. Only the subject matter differs. On the other hand, it is sometimes said— of course by those who consider that there can be a hermeneutic science— that the scientific method of a hermeneutic science is, or will be, different from the scientific method of the natural sciences. Just what these differences may be is a largely unexplored topic. As I said, the hermeneutic position is widely regarded as an evasion of the responsibility of psychoanalysis to test its theses for their validity; it thereby bears out the critic’s claim that there cannot be such a thing as a hermeneutic “science.” There are many interesting twists and turns taken by those who deal with the issues of hermeneutics in psychoanalysis. Donald Spence (1993) emphasizes the crucial need to take subjectivity (hermeneutics) into account, but he seems to do so with the idea that if one does so one will finally be able to reach brute facts. He has therefore been called a “closet positivist” by Jerome Bruner (1993), who regards the search for agreement among analysts as a mistaken enterprise. Richard Rorty (1993) takes an even more extreme position, which he calls pragmatism: “the issue about the ‘scientific status’ of a discipline moves away from questions about whether there are covering laws … and about whether these laws … can receive empirical confirmation … toward questions about whether the people who work within the discipline tend to reach consensus . . (p. 23).

I shrink from the task of trying to define what the scientific method is and how it may be different in the natural and in the hermeneutic sciences. Nevertheless, in the most general terms, the scientific method is the postulation of a hypothesis, the collection of data relating to that hypothesis, and the testing of that hypothesis in terms of the data according to a prescribed set of rules. Of course the rub is in how to define “data.” Validation in a hermeneutic context is sometimes described as involving a “hermeneutic circle” in which the whole determines the meaning of the parts and the parts determine the meaning of the whole. The process of validation is a continuing reciprocal movement from part to whole and whole to part. Is this really any different from validation in the natural sciences? I think not, even if the circle is so much more obvious in the human sciences than in the natural sciences.

A common argument is that the natural sciences deal with causes while the human sciences deal only with reasons. But it can be cogently argued that a reason is a cause. Is making a distinction between cause and reason saying anything more than that the natural sciences deal with material reality while the hermeneutic sciences deal with psychic reality? I think not.

It is often said that hermeneutic validation rests only on comprehensiveness and consistency, while the natural sciences deal with facts. I distinguish between facts in a context of material reality and in a context of psychic reality. But, again, I argue that all science, whether natural or hermeneutic, engages in validation only in the sense that the relationships between part and whole and whole and part are made more consistent and comprehensive. Again, this says no more than that all observation and thought is meaningful only in a context or, once again, that all observation and thought is constructivist. In both the natural sciences and the hermeneutic sciences validation is subject to the constraints of reality, even though, as I said, the reality cannot be known directly. To be valid, a proposition must not contradict reality insofar as reality can be known, that is, insofar as there are observations on which we can unequivocally agree. This issue is, of course, being discussed in our literature as an opposition between a correspondence and a coherence theory of truth. Victoria Hamilton (1993), among others, has pointed out the unnecessarily sharp dichotomizing of the two as far as psychoanalytic practice is concerned. Those who insist on a correspondence theory of truth imply that they are preserving the status of psychoanalysis as a science and therefore as researchable. But where, then, is the research?

It is worth pointing out that there is a distinction between the general epistemological concept of constructivism and the specific constructivist recognition that every investigator finds his “facts” in terms of his theory, that is, in terms of the context within which he works.

Some prominent philosophers believe that psychoanalysis is a hybrid, in the words of Ricoeur (1981), a mixed “energic-semantic discourse.” Habermas (1971) distinguishes between ordinary hermeneutics and psychoanalysis as a “depth hermeneutics,” because psychoanalysis postulates unconscious as well as conscious psychic activity. The fact that hermeneutics is sometimes referred to as “subjectivity” has led some to the mistaken idea that hermeneutics is necessarily confined to that which is conscious. It is frequently unrecognized that there can also be a hermeneutics of non-verbal behavior.

My own view is that the concept of a mixed energic-semantic discourse is an attempt to deal with the fact that a human being is both a physical organism and a psychological person (Rubinstein, 1976). I believe that psychoanalysis can and should be a purely psychological discipline. That does not mean that I discount the role of the body in human functioning but that, at least as far as psychoanalysis is conce...