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INTRODUCTION
S. Montana Katz
As the editor, I have multiple expectations for what can be accomplished with this book. For the reader unfamiliar with the use of either metaphoric processes or fields in psychoanalysis, I hope that this book will offer an explanation and demonstration of the use and value of these concepts. For all readers, I have striven to arrange the contents of this book such that a potential future direction for psychoanalysis is articulated and progressively explored, taking into account features essential to psychoanalysts of all persuasions. I have attempted to build a convincing case for readers to become immersed in the resulting framework, clinically and theoretically. In this way an attempt is made to bring psychoanalysis into the postmodern future by fashioning an umbrella field for psychoanalysis.
A common language is constructed in this framework through which all psychoanalytic perspectives can find faithful expression. It is hoped that conference and dialogue among the different analytic perspectives about psychoanalytic theory and practice will be possible without ineradicable loss or confusion of meaning. It is further anticipated that, ultimately, the result could be an expanded potential for the integration of concepts, principles, and techniques across analytic positions. Construction of the shared core concepts that underlie analytic perspectives constitutes a significant clinical and educational tool and may thus have an impact on psychoanalytic training.
There are other potential and far-reaching consequences to a common base for the psychoanalytic perspectives. Under this umbrella, analysts may reach across the interdisciplinary divide on firm ground. Psychoanalysis may become more accessible to disciplines in the humanities. Its irreducibility to other sciences is also clarified. The model exhibits what is unique to psychoanalysis and how it cannot be subjected to a reduction to a physiological or any other kind of inquiry. A possible outcome is enhanced and genuinely interdisciplinary cooperation, discussion, and research. This may afford a way to describe the discipline of psychoanalysis across perspectives for quantitative research. It is, moreover, an umbrella through which psychoanalysis may have expanded exposure in higher education and other kinds of professional institutions.
This book will thus address the current situation, in which not only are there multiple branches of psychoanalysisâeach refecting a different theoretical and clinical perspectiveâbut also there is also a dearth of understanding among the branches. This situation is due to several historical and other factors, which have been written about elsewhere and in some of the chapters here. Such a project is of contemporary relevance and perhaps urgency. In the current climate, psychoanalysis has endured diminished status and recognition, as well as reduced educational outlets.
Combining these factors with the lack of communication amongst the multiple branches of psychoanalytic theory and practice, it is unclear whether there is currently a discernable integrated field of psychoanalysis. This situation is unacceptable if psychoanalysis as a body of theory and as a clinical set of techniques for addressing issues in mental health is to thrive. Over the past decades, there have been repeated calls to find a common ground and to open genuine discourse and understanding among the various analytic perspectives.
Most of the work for this book grew out of two issues of Psychoanalytic Inquiry for which I was the editor (31[2] and 33[3]). Many of the chapters in this book were written for one or the other of those issues. The first issue brought the psychoanalytic use of metaphoric processes up to date, with a particular eye toward forging a common ground amongst different schools of thought in psychoanalysis. The chapters in this book from that issue are 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Together, these papers form a compelling discussion of how common ground might be achieved.
Taking an overview of the work on metaphor, I felt that something was lacking in the structure such that the emerging umbrella framework was not entirely cohesive or complete. The missing piece was supplied by the formulation of a generalized notion of the psychoanalytic field. This concept arose from a process of abstracting from specific kinds of fields used in different psychoanalytic perspectives. This was part of the subject of the second issue. The chapters in this book that appeared in the second issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry are 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.
In the issue on fields, the discussion taken as a whole demonstrates the essential nature of this emerging family of field concepts and of the idea of a generalized psychoanalytic field in particular. Tat issue brought the discussion onto the cusp of a potential future direction for an integrated discipline of psychoanalysis. There a double language barrier was broached. First was the barrier of natural languages, in that much of the vast, important, and highly stimulating work on fields in psychoanalysis was just beginning to be translated into English. Second was the barrier of the difculty of translating the specifc languages of the diferent psychoanalytic perspectives; this situation was partially addressed in some of the papers in the first issue.
Field theory has emerged as an international psychoanalytic concept that may help bring not only a coherent underlying structure for disparate psychoanalytic perspectives, but also a way of fostering interactive exploration of the various uses of psychoanalytic concepts and techniques. Field concepts are not new to psychoanalysis. Since at least 1960, Madeleine and Willy Baranger have elucidated their formulations of analytic fields and have shown how they work with them clinically. The relational fields of the north American school of relational theory, intersubjective matrices, self object matrices of self psychology, and recent developments in Italian psychoanalysis resulting in a modified form of the field work of the Barangers are all examples where field concepts have been employed in theoretical frameworks and clinical technique.
Other perspectives can be understood as using some form of field concept at the base of their theoretical structure, as well as underlying their clinical approach. In this way, the contents and process of what occurs in sessions conducted by an analyst of each perspective can be described in what will be explored in general field theory terms. In fact, each clinical way of working can be described as employing a specific kind of field. Thus, a general field structure that encompasses individual field configurations supplies an essential component for the psychoanalytic framework with which to move the new paradigm forward.
This book thus furthers the exploration of a merging of work on metaphoric processes and that on fields. The use of a framework with metaphoric processes and fields combined exhibits the uniqueness of psychoanalysis and shows how and with what concepts it explores and explains human experience. An umbrella for psychoanalysis may not dissolve disagreements amongst psychoanalytic schools of thought, but it may permit the schools to be more clearly rendered and more explicitly understood. Formulating an umbrella for the discipline does not have the objective of eradicating differences among perspectives, but rather to be able to understand, explore, and learn from each of them. Both similarities and differences amongst the different psychoanalytic perspectives may be clarified with such a model, which also shows how psychoanalytic perspectives are related and how they are more like each other by far than like any other discipline or clinical technique.
With this umbrella, the barriers to mutual understanding may be dismantled and a path permanently opened to the possibility of meaningful international, intercultural, and poly-perspectival psychoanalytic exchange. Thus, this book contains an attempt to shine a light on a possible future direction for psychoanalysis by building a framework that can be used to structure clinical work and the theoretical constructs of psychoanalysis. This framework builds on the complex and rich history of psychoanalysis and takes fundamental psychoanalytic principles and concepts as a foundation. The framework allows an exploration of what it means to thoroughly probe core psychoanalytic insights.
In particular, this book can be viewed as an exploration of building from the fundamental premise of the existence of unconscious processes and the discovery of the complex affective meaning of human experience. Every analytic perspective accepts the existence and infuence of some form of unconscious processes. Following from this, each perspective can agree to the use of a psychoanalytic conception of unconscious metaphoric process. From this, a general concept of unconscious fantasy emerges.
Pursuing the premise of multiple affective meanings embedded in every experience leads to the development of what is here called a general psychoanalytic field structure of human experience. Some analytic schools of thought explicitly employ field concepts. Others can be understood as having an operative, implicit field concept, each specific to and uniquely formed by the particular analytic perspective. What evolves from the multiple field concepts in use in psychoanalysis is the employment of metaphoric processes and a generalized understanding of psychoanalytic fields utilized as a way of comprehending and speaking about psychoanalytic processes, theory, and human experience, such that a psychoanalyst from any school of thought can engage with and speak a common language. With these building blocks, psychoanalytic work on metaphoric processes is united organically with the use of field theory.
The chapters in this book approach the subject from diverse vantage points. Taken together, they form an intricate web of psychoanalytic thought that moves the scope and frontier of psychoanalysis beyond the format of dispute and toward the open, inclusive discussion of core concepts and technique, in an era in which psychoanalysis is coming to terms with the conclusions and implications of postmodernism.
In Chapter 2, I discuss the first principles necessary to build a base for psychoanalysis in which all schools of thought can participate. In this brief chapter, I discuss the consequences of adopting the fundamental psychoanalytic premise of the existence of unconscious processes. Included in this chapter is a discussion of the implications of dualism and holism for psychoanalysis. Interpretation and fantasy processes emerge as essential to human experience. The multiple affective meanings of human experience are also explored.
In Chapter 3, I discuss the evolution and use of the concept of metaphoric processes in psychoanalysis. I describe a model of metaphoric processes by breaking them down into component parts and subsidiary concepts. The ingredients of metaphoric processes are then used to express fundamental psychoanalytic concepts. Psychoanalytic perspectives are characterized according to this model in order to display similarities and differences among the different perspectives within a single common base and resulting common language.
In Chapter 4, Robertallerstein revisits a pertinent aspect of psychoanalytic history in his discussion of the attempts to eliminate the use of metaphor in psychoanalytic theory with the purpose of rendering psychoanalysis more on a par with other sciences. Citing the work of lakof and Johnson, Wurmser, and others, Wallerstein discusses the ubiquity as well as the inevitability of metaphor in general, in all scientific theory andin psychoanalysis in particular. He cautions against the current trend to spread the concept of metaphor so widely as to render it devoid of content. Wallerstein calls for some way of drawing a distinction between the metaphoric and the literal, locating the latter in the data of clinical experience. Different theoretical perspectives are then viewed as employing different scientific metaphors, which serve as heuristic devices to guide clinical work. Common ground is located in the clinical concepts of transference, countertransference, defense, conflict, and compromise.
In Chapter 5, léon Wurmser provides a philosophical and psychoanalytic discussion of metaphor. He locates metaphor in the tension between the realms it brings together. In this way, metaphor is discussed as uniquely suited to portray inner conflict in the widest sense. Building on his previous work, Wurmser finds common ground for psychoanalytic perspectives in the study of cultural historical metaphors for conflict, complementarity, and harmony. Both ancient Greek and Chinese traditions are discussed in this connection.
Arnold Modell, in Chapter 6, describes the evolution of his thought on the use of metaphoric processes in psychoanalysis. He locates the motivation for the genesis of different psychoanalytic perspectives alongside the rise in popularity of ego psychology. Modell identifies with Freud's early emphasis on the unconscious processing of memory and feeling, through which meaning making takes place. Modell elaborates and argues for his proposition that metaphor is the currency of the mind. In so doing, he refers to a potential common ground in psychoanalytic concepts rather than in psychoanalytic technique. Metaphoric processes, then, are the subject matter of both psychoanalytic theory and clinical work.
In Chapter 7, Robert White focuses on the concept of the nondynamic unconscious, and in particular on three psychoanalytic perspectives in relation to this concept. The three theories are found in the work of Wilfred Bion, Cesar and sara Botella, and donnel stern. White discusses these theories in detail and emphasizes the metaphors contained in them. The three perspectives are then compared on this basis.
Antal Borbely, in Chapter 8, envisions the possibility of forging understanding among diferent theoretical psychoanalytic perspectives and between psychoanalysis and cognitive science. He discerns closer alignment in practice among various schools of thought in their use of metaphoric process and temporality. Borbely characterizes the fundamental psychoanalytic concepts of transference, defense, and interpretation in terms of a conception of temporal metaphors. Tat is, the common ground amongst psychoanalytic perspectives is here identifed in core aspects of psychoanalytic process. These are modeled in terms of temporality, metaphor, and metonymy.
In Chapter 9, Robert Bornstein and Nikaya Becker-Matero discuss the role of metaphor in psychoanalytic process, psychoanalytic research, and interdisciplinary discussion. They show how psychoanalysis has and can make use of metaphors from other disciplines, and how psychoanalytic metaphors have been translated and transformed in the language of other disciplines. Included is a discussion of the use of metaphor in both the design of psychodynamic research and in understanding the results.
In Chapter 10, I describe extant field concepts in contemporary psychoanalysis. I then provide a structure for what I call general psychoanalytic fields. This structure is designed to express the principles and concepts of different psychoanalytic perspectives and aford a neutral language in which to be able to compare and discuss the concepts of each perspective.
In Chapter 11, antoine Corel describes the conceptual, social, and psychoanalytic antecedents to the development of the field concept by Madeleine and Willy Baranger. He describes the intellectual atmosphere in Argentina preceding their work and explains the development of psychoanalytic concepts in that time and place that led to the concept of the analytic field.
In Chapter 12, Giuseppe Civitarese and Antonino Ferro discuss the central role of metaphoric processes in analytic field theory, as both a clinical tool and a core component of a model of human experience. They explore the genesis and meanings of the field metaphor in Bion's work and in field theory in general. Civitarese and Ferro discuss the paradigm shift that occurred in psychoanalysis as a result of Bion's work and the development of field theory. The authors then offer rich clinical examples of work with metaphoric processes in a field theory context, expanding their discussion with retrospective refections.
Ana-MarĂa Rizzuto, in Chapter 13, explores the analytic process from the perspective of the Barangers' work, with attention to the use, function, and evolution of the meaning of words and other forms of expression. She then reviews neuroscientifc, psychoanalytic, and other literature concerning communication, including verbal communication. Rizzuto argues that communication is fundamentally embodied. She further draws out the psychoanalytic implications of the embodied nature of word meaning, with emphasis on understanding the nature of the intersubjective. Rizzuto locates word meaning in experiential and afective interpersonal meaning.
In Chapter 14, Juan Tubert-oklander adds to the working concepts of this bookâmetaphor and fieldâtwo other concepts to be taken ...
