Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious

An Integration of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian Perspectives

Lawrence J. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415607001
• eBook ISBN: 9781136661426
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious looks at how the minds of the therapist and the patient interact with each other in a profound and unconscious way: a concept first described by Freud.

This book expands Freud's ideas further and examines how these have been greatly elaborated by contributions from the Kleinian School as well as from the work of Bion. It explores how, together, patient and therapist co-create a narrative through these unconscious intersubjective processes. Topics of discussion include:

• the unconscious dimensions of intersubjective processes
• an historical overview of Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian contributions
• an integrated theory of the nature of unconscious intersubjective processes
• the central importance of dreaming in intersubjective processes
• the clinical implications of this intersubjective model

The author offers in-depth clinical examples and case vignettes to illustrate the application of these principles when working with trauma, countertransference dreams and supervision. As such, this book will be invaluable to all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in the topic of intersubjectivity as well as those who want to learn more about the interactional dimensions of Freud, Klein and Bion.

1

Introduction

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

(Freud, 1905a, p. 109)

This book represents an attempt to explore the nature of intersubjective processes from a particular theoretical framework – an integration of primarily Freudian, Kleinian, and Bionian perspectives – that typically has not been associated with the terms “intersubjectivity” or “intersubjective.” However, I will argue that embedded in these traditions are theoretical and clinical stances that describe and offer the reader a deep understanding of the nature of intersubjective processes, which in their essence are unconscious in nature. These processes are extraordinarily complex and, operating under the “radar” of conscious awareness, rapidly engage the psyches of analyst and patient in the creation of a jointly constructed narrative that either removes the cloak of repression from forgotten memories or ascribes meaning to experience for which no language previously existed.

I will begin with a brief, though highly condensed, vignette that quickly came to mind when I sat before my computer and started to gather my thoughts for the project before me. I immediately thought about a poignant session from the analysis of a young boy I treated a few years ago. In addition to the powerful emotions evoked in the analytic hour, I also felt a sense of many disparate thoughts, writings, and personal experiences about intersubjectivity suddenly falling into place as though a kaleidoscope’s fragments had unexpectedly taken the form of a stained-glass design. It became clear that, as Beebe, Knoblauch, Rustin, and Sorter (2004) have said, there are many forms of intersubjectivity, and yet it seemed that all these were present in the encounter with Sam.

Sam, 4½ years old, was in analysis for aggressive behavior at home and school. His mother was regularly overwhelmed by his behavior and struggled to set appropriate limits, often feeling like a single parent because her husband was frequently very depressed. Sam’s father was a fragile man who had been hospitalized for depression on numerous occasions, and the family tended to walk on eggshells around him. Despite what appeared to be an inability to control his anger, Sam showed a remarkable capacity to rein himself in while with his father. He was often provocative with me, and his play consisted of repetitive variations on aggressive themes.

Sam began the session in a typical manner, dumping all the dinosaurs and action figures onto the analytic couch, which was the arena for battle. Gradually we each gathered an army and then arranged the figures according to fighting skill. As usual, Sam’s fighters easily trounced mine, and I was left feeling predictably demoralized. I repeated some of the interpretations of this play that addressed how my men had all the “losing feelings” that felt really bad and made them angry, and that his men were lucky to be so strong and have all the exciting “winning feelings.” Sam shrugged his shoulders and said, unimpressed, “yeah, I guess.”

At one point I decided to withdraw my men to the desk a few feet away, saying that they needed a break. As I moved my pieces to the desk I noticed that there was an incoming telephone call, and the caller ID indicated that it was from the hospital in New York where my mother was then a patient. I immediately became quite worried, since she was very ill with congestive heart failure. I am not sure what my expression looked like, nor do I know how long I was actively distracted. Nevertheless, I quickly came out of my distraction and said, probably with a somewhat forced exuberance, “Ok, let’s get back to the battle!” However, Sam said that he wanted to play something different, and he introduced a theme that had never previously appeared. He said that he was going to be a “mummy,” and I heard “mommy.” “Mommy?” I asked, and he corrected me, “No, mummy – you know those creepy guys with the bandages wrapped all over them” and pretended to have unraveled, ragged gauze dropping off him. I dismissed my mishearing him as an artifact of worry about my “mommy” and let the play unfold.

Sam said that the mummy had to be buried, lifted up the couch mattress, and began to inter himself between the mattress and the wooden slats it rested on. I was a bit disoriented, in the midst of what felt like an uncanny experience (Freud, 1919). I said something about how dead mummies are buried in a grave just like he was showing me and that’s very scary and sad. Sam quickly replied that this mummy “wasn’t really dead; it was an alive mummy that used to be dead.” I was relieved at hearing this, though I was not aware in the moment why it affected me this way. I said, “when a mummy that used to be dead becomes alive again the people who love that mummy aren’t so scared and sad anymore.” Now in an excited state, he went over to the desk drawer where the supplies are kept, took out a roll of scotch tape, and asked that I wrap him in it so he could be like a real mummy.

This very brief, but complex, vignette is a multilayered intersubjective precipitate of the interaction between Sam and me that occurred on conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels. Though this book will explore such intersubjective exchanges on all planes of consciousness, it is my belief that intersubjectivity is based upon, and is largely comprised of, processes that are a constant unconscious companion to what is occurring on a conscious level. The session begins with a repetitive game of competition and defeat that left me feeling consciously demoralized, which I interpreted with the comment about the “losing feelings” being in me. However, on this particular day, for reasons of which I was unaware at that moment, I withdrew from the play to my desk. Why on this particular day was I unable to tolerate the demoralized and “losing feelings?” In retrospect, my receptivity to these emotions was most likely curtailed by worries about my mother that were lurking preconsciously and left me closed to “losing” feelings. My telephone emits an almost imperceptible clicking sound when a call is coming in, and, although I was not aware of hearing that, it must have registered an alarm that brought me to my desk rather than stay with Sam. Thus, on this particular afternoon, there was a unique alignment of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious events that defined a singular moment in a fleeting emotional field that Sam and I shared.

I suspect that in my withdrawal I became for Sam his withdrawn and depressed father, a perception of me that was galvanized by the likelihood that he sensed my troubled response to the call from my mother’s hospital. Thus, for Sam, the analytic situation had devolved into a familiar conundrum: what to do with a depressed father/ analyst? Although I tried to get us back to the play, it was clear that Sam and I had crossed an emotional Rubicon from which we could not return. Here we can see that Sam was very attuned to my mood and appeared to unconsciously interpret my momentary unavailability in the light of experience with his father. Given his propensity to be carefully attuned to his father’s emotional states, it is not surprising that he sensed my distress at the telephone message. He picked up this distress signal and worked on it unconsciously to transform it into a play theme that was meant to comfort his sad father/analyst as well as himself.

I should add that this book is not a volume on technique, and I am aware that there are alternative points of view regarding the technical handling of this interaction with Sam. My purpose with this vignette is to convey the nearly instantaneous ways in which Sam and I are cueing each other that in the moment remain preconscious at best. It was this kind of exchange that, subsequent to unraveling what was being expressed in the session, permitted me later to interpret to Sam how worried he was about his father and how the feelings felt too big for him when his mother got overwhelmed (as well as how these affects were manifest in the transference). These kinds of rapid-fire encounters were frequent in the earlier parts of his analysis and were necessary preliminary steps before I could offer an interpretation aimed at helping Sam become consciously aware of his powerful emotions.

Sam’s introduction of the mummy character¹ signaled the start of a process of mutual regulation of affects, which was accomplished through the shared narrative that we unconsciously spun together. The fascinating question is, how did Sam’s unconscious, through its collaboration with my mine, choose the mummy out of a myriad of potential characters? The mummy figure seems to be a condensation of my worry about my mommy and his worry, in the moment, about his distressed analyst/father. If he had been solely focused on my emotional state, then he might have conjured a story about bringing back to life a dying mother. I thought he was doing just that when I heard mommy, but then he made it clear that he referred to a mummy, which is a masculine figure. I believe that Sam’s description of the ragged mummy must have conveyed his unconscious perception of me as his somewhat emotionally disheveled father/analyst. But what about the maternal implications of the mummy character, and did Sam sense, through some ill-defined channel of unconscious communication, my dread of losing my mother?

It is uncanny that Sam’s attunement was so refined as to pick up the “signals” of being anxious about one’s mother. Is there a designated unconscious “wavelength” along which concerns about one’s mother are transmitted? Or, to use another metaphor, are there specific pheromones that are emitted by one’s mind when that psyche is disquieted by possible maternal loss? Are such messages encoded in the panoply of wild thoughts (Bion, 1997) that include rhythmic and other apparently extraneous experiences, which actually may be carriers of vital meaning? It is also likely that Sam’s well-honed attunement was a necessary adaptation (Hartmann, 1958) developed to keep aware of his mother’s overwhelmed states in order to help regulate his and her emotional world. In this regard, Sam was probably well acquainted with the “signals” associated with worry about one’s mother, and his unconscious quickly identified such signals emanating from me.

Thus, the mummy was a highly condensed character that was born out of the analytic intercourse of the transmitting and receptive unconscious work we were doing together. Owing to the unique adaptations that Sam had to make to his father’s depression and his mother’s tendency to be overcome with emotion, he brought to the analytic encounter a finely sharpened sensitivity to my emotional states. Regardless of the means by which he sensed my anxiety about maternal loss, he transformed this affect into something less scary for me: a masculine mummy rather than a feminine mommy. Simultaneously, the mummy appeared to represent Sam’s perception of my tattered emotional state that was linked with his experience of his father.

At this point in the hour, I was feeling somewhat disoriented and grew concerned that the sadness in the room was too much to bear for Sam (probably my projection) when he said he was going to bury the mummy. However, my interpretation that “dead mummies are buried in a grave just like he was showing me and that’s very scary and sad” was clearly off, because he responded with “this mummy wasn’t really dead; it was an alive mummy that used to be dead.” I felt relieved at hearing this, or, put another way, Sam’s response to the interpretation transformed my pain into something more hopeful.

Additionally, on another level, he had restored his transferential father’s mood while simultaneously diminishing his mother/analyst’s overwhelmed state. However, all this “magical” alchemy of transmuting his analyst/father/mother, and rescuing himself from a fate of being without any parental figures to regulate his emotional world, appeared to have triggered an excited manic state. Thus, he took out the scotch tape and asked me to wrap him up – that is, it was now my turn, having been restored by Sam to my analytic competence, to contain him. His mummy play was partly aimed at restoring his analyst’s emotional equilibrium, but it was also expressive of his being a small boy burdened by very big feelings without the parental support he required to contain and transform his emotions.

So, what do we learn about the nature of intersubjectivity from this brief, but richly complex, vignette? In simplest terms, it refers to how the minds of the analyst and patient interact with, and affect, each other. In addition, the encounter with Sam showed that intersubjectivity refers to an exchange between the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious systems of each participant in the analytic dyad. There is a continuous streaming communication between these three levels of awareness in the analyst and those in the patient. For example, while Sam and I were engaged in conscious conversation (“my men need a break,” as I moved to the desk) there was a simultaneous unconscious dialogue (analyst: “I am not in the mood for any more ‘losing feelings’”; patient: “That’s ok, I’ll talk about mummy, not ,”).

In addition, a shared emotional field is created through a unique blending of conscious, preconscious and unconscious experiences in the analyst and patient. Sam began the session in a typical manner by defeating my soldiers and projecting “losing feelings” into me that, on that particular day, I was unable to tolerate. I was unable to bear them because of fears about my mother’s health percolating preconsciously and likely magnified by subliminally hearing the telephone click. Sensing my dysphoria, I was equated in Sam’s unconscious with his depressed father, thereby repeating a familiar loss for him. Thus, a shared emotional field arose defined by anxiety about parental loss.

Intersubjectivity also consists of a process of mutual affective attunement and regulation that is a means of unconsciously working on the shared emotional field through the co-creation of a narrative. Sam’s unconscious quickly went to work to modify the shared experience of anxiety about parental loss by bringing the mummy character on the conscious stage. This seemed to be an effort to regulate his analyst’s troubled mood by offering me a mummy who “wasn’t really dead; it was an alive mummy that used to be dead,” a statement that I found reassuring. The masculine nature of the mummy also seemed to represent a maneuver to comfort himself at the temporary loss of his disheveled (depressed) analyst/father. In my statement that “when a mummy that used to be dead becomes alive again the people who love that mummy aren’t so scared and sad anymore,” I was consciously elaborating our collective story further with an interpretation meant to soothe Sam, but I was unconscious of also consoling myself.

Furthermore, intersubjectivity is a process of unconscious communication, receptivity, and meaning making within each member of the dyad to bring idiosyncratic signification to the shared emotional field that interacts with an analogous function in the partner. I have been emphasizing that intersubjective exchanges occur on a mostly unconscious level and that Sam and I were engaged in collaborative unconscious work to create meaning out of our collective emotional field. This transaction begins first with our individual constructions of the field – mine primarily of maternal loss and his of paternal absence – that are conveyed verbally and nonverbally to each other. Having received these messages, a process begins of mutual attunement and regulation that is accomplished through the rapid back-and-forth threading of a conjoint story made up from emotional themes contributed by each member of the analytic dyad. In my view, this is accomplished through the cooperative efforts of an aspect of our unconscious egos working in tandem.

This unconscious communication between analysand and analyst travels along many pathways including linguistic, pictographic, “extraneous” experiences (random thoughts, unbidden tunes), bodily sensations, and other yet to be understood channels that, from a mystical point of view, may be called telepathic. In the intersubjective domain, words uttered deliberately may carry disparate meanings for each member of the dyad – that is, Sam’s use of mummy that registered with me as “mommy.” The significance of what Sam intended did not reach me until he described the ragged mummy, a graphic pictogram that transmitted his unconscious view of me as his emotionally disarrayed analyst. It remains a mystery how he was attuned to signals emanating from me of apprehension about my mother and also how, and by which channels, such signals were broadcast. One is tempted to attribute such phenomena to telepathy, which Freud (1922) attempted to discuss without confirming or denying its existence. He asserted that if it did exist, the “laws of unconscious mental life may then be taken for granted as applying to telepathy” (p. 220) and that there is an “incontestable fact that sleep creates favorable conditions for telepathy” (p. 220). I leave aside the riddle of whether telepathy is a fact and emphasize that what is enigmatic in the intersubjective encounter has mainly to do with the qualities of the unconscious in general, and specifically the characteristics of dreaming.

The co-created narrative, ideally weighted more heavily in the direction of the patient’s difficulties, not only owes its lineage to the psychic issues of each partner activated at the moment, but also contains, in part, a highly distilled historical record of each individual’s family history. In the session with Sam, my receptivity to “losing feelings” was diminished by my distress that put him into a familiar situation of being with a depressed father whose emotional state required revitalizing. In addition, and on another level (Grotstein, 2009a, 2009b), I had likely become his emotionally overcome transferential mother. If there were a camera that recorded emotional emanations, and not those of light, we would have a snapshot of a moment in our analytic history together colored by the deep hues of melancholy, loss, and aloneness, with bursts of excited flashes of dreams of magical reparation. Thus, aspects of Sam’s and my history concatenated at this point of interaction (Brown, 2004). However, both of us came into this world in the context of unique family histories stretching generations into the past; histories that formed around factual kernels, like a dream around a day residue, passed from parent to child through projective and introjective identifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The analyzing instrument: unconscious communication and classical psychoanalysis
• 3. Klein, Bion, and intersubjectivity: becoming, transforming, and dreaming
• 4. The ego psychology of Wilfred Bion: implications for an intersubjective view of psychic structure
• 5. Intersubjectivity and unconscious process: an integrated model
• 6. Intersubjectivity and the internalized Oedipal couple
• 7. Julie’s museum: the evolution of thinking, dreaming, and historicization in the treatment of traumatized patients
• 8. The triadic intersubjective matrix in supervision
• 9. On dreaming one’s patient: reflections on an aspect of countertransference dreams
• 10. Final reflections: dreaming the future
• References
• Index