Emotional Communication

Countertransference analysis and the use of feeling in psychoanalytic technique

Paul Geltner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415525169
• eBook ISBN: 9781136172687
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What role does animal like and infantile communication play in life and in psychoanalysis? How are painful childhood experiences recreated with people who are nothing like the original family? What are the roles of loving and horrible feelings in psychoanalytic cure?

In Emotional Communication, Paul Geltner places the pre-linguistic type of communication that is shared with infants and animals at the core of the psychoanalytic relationship. He shows how emotional communication intertwines with language, permeating every moment of human interaction, and becoming a primary way that people involuntarily recreate painful childhood relationships in current life.

Emotional Communication integrates observations from a number of psychoanalytic schools in a cohesive but non-eclectic model. Geltner expands psychoanalytic technique beyond the traditional focus on interpretation and the contemporary focus on authenticity to include the use feelings that precisely address the client's repetitive patterns of misery. The author breaks down analytic interventions into their cognitive and emotional components, describing how each engages a different part of the client's mind and serves a different function. He explains the role of emotional communication in psychoanalytic technique both in classical interpretations and in non-interpretive interventions that use the analyst's feelings to amplify the therapeutic power of the psychoanalytic relationship.

Offering a clear alternative to both Classical and contemporary Relational and Intersubjective approaches to understanding and treating clients in psychoanalysis, Paul Geltner presents a theory of communication and maturation that will interest psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and those concerned with the subtleties of human relatedness.

1

INTRODUCTION

Language and feelings: the two channels of human communication

Analysis is the talking cure, but the words only tell only half of the story. They communicate the particulars of the patient’s existence. They recount the events, detail the circumstances, and name the feelings that make up the patient’s life story. As the patient talks, she also stimulates feelings in the analyst that are beyond the scope of the patient’s words. Sometimes the words and the feelings tell the same story; sometimes they tell different stories, and other times they contradict each other altogether. Neither can be understood without the other. The analyst must listen to the patient’s words and experience the feelings to fully comprehend the full story of the patient’s life.

What happens when two people talk? They use spoken language, which often looks and feels as if it were a unitary process, but is, in fact, a densely interwoven amalgam of two distinct components: language and feelings. The language expresses information about the speaker’s thoughts symbolically and transmits these thoughts to the listener. The feelings express information about the speaker’s emotional state through non-symbolic dimensions of speech such as tone and the rhythm of the words. The language is a form of cognitive communication. The feelings are a form of emotional communication.

Until the 1980s, most psychoanalytic theory focused on the role of cognitive communication in the psychoanalytic relationship. However, there was a minority tradition within psychoanalysis that recognized the importance of emotional communication and held that both channels of communication play a role in psychoanalysis.

It has only been within the last two decades that most contemporary schools of analysis have shown an increasing interest in emotional communication – both as a channel of understanding and as a vehicle of cure.

This book is about emotional communication in psychoanalysis as it is manifested in two important areas of the psychoanalytic relationship: countertransference and psychoanalytic technique.

Before we can delve into the role of emotional communication in psychoanalysis, we must look more closely at the role emotional communication plays in everyday life.

Cognitive and emotional communication

Cognitive communication is the channel of communication that makes use of the purely symbolic elements of language: a set of symbols (words) and rules for using them (grammar) that generate consensually agreed upon meanings. Many types of information – including facts, observations, commands, opinions, requests, and questions – can be expressed through cognitive communication. The speaker (or sender) expresses this information in bits, encoded in the symbols, and the listener (receiver) understands these symbols and experiences this understanding as thought. Cognitive communication is effective to the extent that both people share the same understanding of the meaning of the words and the grammar.

Emotional communication, on the other hand, is the channel of human communication in which one type of information – information about the sender’s feeling (or emotional state) – is conveyed to the receiver through the non-symbolic dimensions of spoken language such as tone, prosody, rhythm, and silence, as well as through facial expressions, posture, and non-symbolic gestures. When a person feels happy and conveys this state through emotional communication, the happiness is expressed through the brightness or lightness of tone and/or through her smile and the expression in her eyes. Conversely, when a person is angry, the anger is expressed through the harshness of her tone and/or through the narrowing of her eyebrows and tightness of her mouth and face. Emotional communication not only conveys information about the sender’s emotional state but also about her intentions, desires, or impulses. The sender’s expression of feeling stimulates feelings in the receiver. Whereas cognitive communication is experienced as thought, emotional communication is experienced as feeling.

Unlike cognitive communication, which is the distinctly human channel of communication, emotional communication is used by other mammals. It is also the first form of communication in human development, pre-dating the acquisition of language. After language has been acquired, emotional communication remains entwined with cognitive communication in spoken language. (This topic will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 2.)

Emotional communication is primarily goal-oriented or manipulative (Mithen 2006). Its function is to have a specific impact on the receiver. This can be seen clearly in the first emotional communication that all healthy human beings express at birth: the anaclitic cry – the cry that signals distress in the context of physical and emotional dependency (MacLean 1990). The newborn’s cry not only signals the need for nurturance and attention, but its goal is also to elicit a specific cluster of feelings in the mother: sympathetic empathy with the newborn, which enables her to understand what she needs, and nurturing love that leads her to want to soothe her distress and satisfy her needs. Her feelings are a logical and predictable response to the infant’s cry, and they lead her to give the infant the specific cluster of the feelings she needs to experience in an interpersonal context in that moment – the feeling that her needs are known and will be satisfied and the feeling that she is loved – all of which are as crucial to her as the physical care the mother provides.

This interaction, in which the baby’s emotional communication stimulates the cluster of nurturing feelings in the mother that, in turn, motivate her to meet the infant’s dependency needs, is an example of the process of emotional induction. Emotional induction is the outcome of a successful emotional communication. It occurs when the sender’s emotional communication induces a feeling in the receiver that is logically and predictably related to the sender’s goals and intentions. It is analogous to a successful cognitive communication, which occurs when the receiver understands the sender’s language.

As we shall see in later chapters, emotional communication does not always result in emotional induction. For a range of reasons, the feeling that the receiver experiences may be a distortion of the sender’s emotional communication, or it may be completely incorrect. These are examples of emotional interactions in which no emotional induction has taken place, despite the fact that the sender has expressed an emotional communication.

This sometimes happens even with newborns and their mothers. Some babies are less able to successfully induce the necessary feelings in the mother, and some mothers never experience the necessary feelings after having heard the baby’s cry. But in this earliest, yet still fully operational example, emotional communication usually results in induction. The core of the infant’s message gets through and has the right effect on the mother’s feelings. Sometimes it takes a few weeks to get the communication working properly, but the vast majority of new mothers – even those who didn’t feel maternal during pregnancy and feared that they wouldn’t want their babies – hear their newborn’s cries and are moved to nurture and soothe, a set of feelings that usually evolves into maternal love.

As we shall see throughout this book, what transpires between the baby and the mother is only one type of emotional communication and induction – the anaclitic type. Three other types will be described: narcissistic, object, and projective identification. However, the significance of emotional communication at the start of life illustrates that emotional communication is the one of the most basic of human experiences.

Emotional communication and psychoanalysis

Cognitive communication is largely responsible for the precision of human communication and the development of human culture. However emotional communication is the very stuff of human relatedness. Psychological maturation is largely dependent on the child getting the necessary emotional communications – the maturational feelings – from the parents at the critical points in development.

The idea that early relationships form the templates for later relationships is fundamental to the psychoanalytic perspective, and emotional communication is one of the most important means by which a person’s emotional past is both repeated and recreated in the present. Emotional communication enables the successes from the earliest days to be carried over into the future. It also recreates the failures. And it is usually these failures that lead a patient to seek analysis.

Emotional communication is integral to the psychoanalytic process, as it is to all human relationships. Emotional communication functions in analysis in the same way that it does in everyday life: The patterns of emotional communication that were established in the patient’s childhood shape the patient’s patterns of emotional communication with the analyst, affecting the way the analyst experiences the patient and the way the patient experiences the analyst. The difference is that these patterns occur spontaneously and (usually) unobserved in everyday life, whereas the psychoanalytic relationship is structured in a way that allows the patient’s repetitive patterns of emotional communication to be activated, observed, and most importantly changed through the impact of the analyst’s interventions.

The concept of emotional communication is closely related to a number of more limited concepts in psychoanalysis: thought transference (Freud 1925), empathy (Greenson 1960; Kohut 1971), trial identification (Fliess 1942), projective identification (in Bion’s [1959] sense, not Klein’s [1946]), the beta-screen (Bion 1962, 1963), reverie (Bion 1962, 1963; Ogden 1997b) coenestheic functioning (Spitz 1945), the infantile nonverbal affect system (Krystal 1988), role-responsiveness (Sandler 1976), nonverbal transmission of affects (Schore 1994), affective attunement (Stern 1985), intermodal matching of affect states (Kumin 1996), self-disclosure (Aron 1996), and emotional engagement (Maroda 1991), implicit relational knowing (Boston Change Process Study Group 2008). However, each of these concepts is discussed in the context of a particular stage of development, form of pathology, type of defense, relational mode, type of feeling, or technique.

In contrast, emotional communication is a more general concept that encompasses all these phenomena. The concept of emotional communication describes the expression and the reception of all forms of emotion, in humans and animals, throughout the lifespan, in everyday life and within the analytic relationship.

Understanding the role of emotional communication in psychoanalysis is critical to understanding the patient and curing her. Through an understanding of emotional induction from the patient, the analyst has access to dimensions of the patient’s experience and problems that the patient is unable to communicate directly in language. Through the use of emotional communication to the patient, the analyst gives the patient the feelings that she needs in order to resolve the problems that brought her into the analysis. In life, these needed emotional communications are called maturational feelings; in analysis, they can be called the curative feelings.

Brief history of the role of emotional communication in psychoanalytic technique

The role of emotional communication has been a point of difference between two traditions within the history of psychoanalytic technique: the classical tradition made use of a limited range of emotional communication but stressed the overriding importance of cognitive communication in the form of interpretation. The minority tradition, on the other hand, made use of a wider range of emotional communication in technique, viewing it as equally important – and sometimes more important – than the cognitive communication.

The classical tradition was established by Freud, who delineated two components in psychoanalytic technique. The primary component was interpretation. Through interpretation, the analyst communicated the latent meaning of the patient’s symptoms, dreams, fantasies, memories, and feelings to the patient (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973). Interpretation was designed to make the unconscious conscious, enlarge and strengthen the ego in relationship to the id and the superego, and thus allow the patient to regain “its mastery over lost provinces of his mental life” (Freud 1940: 173).

Interpretation, for Freud (1919: 168), was the distinctive element in psychoanalytic technique – the “pure gold of analysis.” But as powerful as interpretation was, what “turns the scale” in the patient’s struggle against the neurosis “is not his intellectual insight – which is neither strong enough nor free enough for such achievement – but simply and solely his relation to the doctor” (Freud 1917: 445). Thus, the second component of psychoanalytic technique was the psychoanalytic relationship. Freud (1913: 139) suggested that if “one exhibits a serious interest in him [the patient], carefully clears away the resistances that crop up at the beginning, and [listens with] … sympathetic understanding,” positive, non-erotic transference will develop. He argued that this type of transference enabled the patient to make use of the interpretations and eventually adopt the analyst’s “conviction of the inexpediency of the repressive processes established in childhood” (1919: 159). With this transference in place, the analyst could encourage and soothe the patient¹ in his efforts to overcome his resistances helping him persevere with the analytic process (Freud 1940: 178). The analyst could also, to a limited extent, make use of this transference to provide a degree of “after education” to the patient, correcting some of the parents’ mistakes with the patient (Freud 1940: 175).

The first component – the work of interpretation – in which the analyst conveys precise information in language to the rational part of the patient’s mind – the patient’s ego – is conveyed through cognitive communication. The second component – the serious interest, sympathetic understanding, encouragement, and soothing – is conveyed through emotional communication. The work of emotional communication is secondary to and supportive of the work of interpretation, but it is essential to the analytic process. When the noneroticized positive transference cannot develop, as in Freud’s (1940) narcissistic neurosis, analysis is impossible.

Privately, Freud discussed a wider use of emotional communication. He wrote to his friend Ludwig Binswanger.

What is given to the patient should indeed never be a spontaneous affect, but always consciously allotted, and then more or less of it as the need may arise. Occasionally a great deal, but never from one’s own unconscious. This I should regard as the formula. In other words, one must always recognize one’s countertransference and rise above it, only then is one free oneself. To give someone too little because one loves him too much is being unjust to the patient and a technical error.

(Binswanger 1957: 50)

However, there is no hint of this idea in his published writings, which established the parameters of the classical psychoanalytic theory of technique. This can be seen in the work of Strachey (1934), who elaborated a more refined account of the role of emotional communication in the psychoanalytic process. He argued that the patient introjects the analyst as an auxiliary superego; this introjection modifies the patient’s superego, which allows the patient to make use of the analyst’s interpretations. What the patient introjects is not any particular interpretation but rather the manner in which the analyst relates to her. Strachey does not describe what the analyst actually does to facilitate this process, but Glover (1955: 370), referring to Strachey, says that the analyst maintains a “humane” attitude to the patient’s instincts. He even suggests that, “in the deeper pathological states, a prerequisite of the efficiency of interpretation is the attitude, the true unconscious attitude of the analyst to his patients” (Glover 1955: 372).

This attitude is again conveyed through emotional communication. Nevertheless, the type and the range of deliberate, conscious emotional communication advocated by Strachey (1934) is extremely limited, even more limited than Freud’s prescription. The mutative interpretation involves the transference, and its effectiveness is catalyzed when the patient’s sense of reality differentiates between her transference fantasies and the analyst’s actual behavior. In order for this to work, the analyst’s behavior must not resemble the patient’s fantasies – whether positive or negative – in any way. Despite differences in emphasis,² Strachey’s (1934) description of the therapeutic process was consistent with Sterba’s (1934: 324) idea that interpretation offered the patient’s ego a “new point of view of intellectual contemplation”: cure was affected through cognitive communication.

Later theorists within the Freudian mainstream (such as Greenson 1967) further explored the importance of the “real” emotional relationship between the analyst and the patient. However, these discussions continued to emphasize only one type of emotional communication; feelings that facilitate a “working alliance” between the analyst’s analyzing ego and the patient’s reasonable, observing and analyzing ego (Greenson 1967: 193). The most mature aspects of the analyst’s personality are in contact with the most mature aspects of the patient’s personality. No attempt was made to make direct emotional contact with the forces within the patient’s mind that drove the repetitions. There was no con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The evolutionary and developmental origins of objective countertransference
• 3 The concept of objective countertransference and its role in a two-person psychology
• 4 Emotional communication and its relationship to the basic concepts of psychoanalysis
• 5 Differentiating objective and subjective counter-transference
• 6 Narcissistic countertransference
• 7 Object countertransference
• 8 Countertransference in projective identification states
• 9 Anaclitic countertransference
• 10 Emotional communication in psychoanalytic technique
• 11 Narcissistic emotional communications
• 12 Techniques of object emotional communications
• 13 Techniques of emotional communication with projective identification
• 14 Anaclitic emotional communications
• 15 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index