Psychoanalysis, Group Analysis, and Beyond

Towards a New Paradigm of the Human Being

Juan Tubert-Oklander, Reyna Hernández-Tubert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619489
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis, Group Analysis, and Beyond presents an important new paradigm in psychoanalysis and group analysis, presenting the individual and the group as elements of a wider whole and taking socio-political and cultural contexts into account.

Juan Tubert-Oklander and Reyna Hernández-Tubert explore the contributions of group analysis to this new perspective, which suggests a holistic conception of the respective status and nature of what the common-sense view of the world conceives as the individual and the community. Part I presents thoughts on the 'gelding' of psychoanalysis, focuses on the limitations of classical psychoanalysis, and elaborates on key topics including epistemology, inclusion and exclusion, culture, and the real. Part II considers the reincorporation of what had formerly been excluded, through the theory and practice of group analysis. Finally, Part III bridges the gap, presenting several approaches to the building of the new paradigm that is so sorely needed.

Psychoanalysis, Group Analysis, and Beyond will be of great interest to group analysts, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists in practice and in training, as well as other professionals specializing in group work.

Part I

The gelding of psychoanalysis

Chapter 1

Freud’s contradictions and the hybrid nature of psychoanalysis (2008–2020)

Juan Tubert-Oklander

DOI: 10.4324/9780429055287-3

When we began our work together, both of us had been feeling for quite some time that there was a major contradiction between the practice and the theory of psychoanalysis. This contradiction stemmed from an original duality in the thinking and practice of the creator of our discipline, a split that ran deep into his personality, thinking, feeling, values, and actions. It was obvious to us that the practice of analysis – both psychoanalysis and group-analysis – was based on an intimate, intense, and highly personal relation, and that the analytic dialogue was a shared attempt to make sense of the patients’ life experiences and of the shared experiences generated by the analytic encounter. Consequently, it was obvious to us that analysis was an interpretative practice – ‘an art of interpretation which takes on the task of, as it were, extracting the pure metal of the repressed thoughts from the ore of the unintentional ideas’, as Freud (1904a, p. 252) rightly put it – but the theory he developed to account for his therapeutic experiences, observations, and discoveries intended to be strictly causal, in the model of the natural sciences, and we felt that there was no way in which these two aspects of psychoanalysis could ever fit together.

We tackled this problem in many ways over the years, looking for elements for thinking it through in literature, philosophy, linguistics, and semantics, but we still lacked a more precise language in which to formulate our ideas on the matter. Fortunately, in 2005, we met the Mexican philosopher Mauricio Beuchot, who was the author of a novel philosophical proposal of what he called ‘Analogical Hermeneutics’ (Beuchot, 1997). This was the beginning of a long-time dialogue and collaboration among us, which eventually led to Juan and Mauricio co-writing a book in Spanish called Hybrid Science: Psychoanalysis and Analogical Hermeneutics (Tubert-Oklander & Beuchot Puente, 2008).¹ The present chapter is a revised and updated version of Chapter II of that book (Tubert-Oklander, 2008a).

Which Freud are we talking about?

In the first chapter of our book together, called ‘The presence of hermeneutics in Freud’s epistemological discourse’, Mauricio Beuchot Puente (2008) expounded, with utmost clarity, his conviction that Freud’s psychoanalytical method was, from the very beginning, both hermeneutical and relational. It was hermeneutical, because his research strategy was based on the interpretation of the hidden meanings that lay beyond the patients’ manifest expressions, and it was relational, because the whole procedure was necessarily based on the emotional and dialogic bond that ensued between therapist and patient.

However, Beuchot does not fail to point out the existence of major contradictions in Freud, who intended that psychoanalysis should abide by the epistemological criteria of Nineteenth Century natural science, just as his creation was setting the bases for the need for a new epistemology, which would emerge during the Twentieth Century and put an end to the Cartesian dissociation between mind, body, and heart, as well as between subject and object (Tubert-Oklander, 2000).

This is indeed a delicate matter. The psychoanalytic movement emerged and evolved as an ideological movement, comparable to a religious or political organisation, rather than a scientific one. Hence, its founder became something of a cult figure, an icon, or even an idol, of psychoanalysis (Tubert-Oklander, 2009–2014), and his Complete Works are frequently read and studied, not as the indispensable historical context for a better understanding of contemporary psychoanalysis or as a fount of possible ideas to be critically analysed, but as the unquestionable source of psychoanalytic truth. Consequently, many original psychoanalytic authors have felt obliged to reinterpret Freud, to make him say what they are actually thinking, rather than acknowledging – both internally and publicly – the divergence, or even incompatibility, of the new ideas they are putting forward with his.²

It is quite obvious that the previous statement, about the contradiction between Freud’s scientific ideals and the very nature of the discipline he created, is bound to generate an intense criticism from two quite different quarters. On the one hand, those who share his particular epistemological stance, which conceives psychoanalysis as a natural science, will affirm, on the basis of a selection of Freudian quotes, that this was the founder’s explicit project, so that any attempt to assert that it has, or should have, a different epistemological status is utterly untenable.

On the other, those who conceive psychoanalysis as something totally different from and incompatible with positivistic science will show us, from a different but similarly sized selection of quotes, a hermeneutic Freud, who practiced what Wilhelm Dilthey (1883) called a Geistewissenschaft, a Human Science or Science of the Spirit that has an access to knowledge that differs from that of the Naturwissenschaften, the Natural Sciences. Of course, Freud would not have accepted such proposition, but they conceive this humanistic or romantic side of his work and thought as the ‘true Freud’, who has been distorted by his orthodox following. In this ‘either-or’ situation, nobody seems to like a position like mine, which tries to acknowledge the existence of such a deep contradiction and find a way to transcend it.

The basic flaw in such arguments is that they both insist on taking an author’s thought as if it were, or had to be, unitary and consistent. Freud, just as all of us, had all sorts of unacknowledged inconsistencies and conflicts. In particular, there is an essential incompatibility between the characteristics of the novel field of enquiry he had opened and the new discipline he was creating, on the one hand, and the scientific ideal to which he wished to abide, on the other.

The problem is that epistemology always comes one or several steps behind science. True scientists are daring enquirers who pose all sorts of questions and problems, moved by deep worries, derived from living experience, that unsettle their spirit. These they strive to answer, using the means at their disposal, and, when these fail, they manage to devise new ways of tackling them. The epistemologist beholds, astonished, these accomplishments and tries to account for them, by inventing theoretical models that might shed light on what the scientist has actually done. If one of these models turns out to be particularly convincing, he might be tempted to formulate it normatively, as ‘that what scientists are supposed to do’. And such formulations may become the Law for a certain community of researchers.

Most scientists try to abide by the more prestigious epistemological models in their community at the time, and they do get results that way, but always within the limits of the existing paradigm.³ At least, until the inconsistencies and proliferation of unexplained findings in their shared work bring about a crisis in their discipline and force some of them to devise new ways to deal with it. Those few thinkers who then dare to formulate some radically new questions, thus creating a new paradigm, are obliged to go beyond the limits of what is already known and develop a novel approach that they themselves do not fully understand. This unleashes a deep crisis, in themselves and in their community, which is what Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) calls a ‘scientific revolution’. The new and the old paradigm coexist for some time, thus generating much strife and bitterness among colleagues, which in the end subsides with the death of those who had been reared in the old set of assumptions.

That is the moment when these original thinkers feel lonely and lost in a darkness they only manage to illuminate partially, by means of the light they themselves generate, when they may turn, hopefully, to the models received from their teachers, without being fully aware that their own work is demolishing them into obsolescence. Such was the case of Freud.

If we accept this conception of the function of epistemology as an enquiry into the methods, findings, and theories developed by actual scientists, instead of seeing it as a normative discipline, it is obvious that Freud could not fully understand the revolutionary consequences of his discovery – the unconscious – and his creation – psychoanalysis – for overcoming the model of thought in which he had been reared and to which he aspired as an ideal. As I once wrote (Tubert-Oklander, 2000), Freud was a psychoanalyst of the Twentieth Century, who operated with Nineteenth Century epistemology; it is our turn to do Twenty-first Century psychoanalysis, leaning on the Twentieth Century epistemology.

Epistemology-in-use and affirmed epistemology

The epistemologist Abraham Kaplan (1964) distinguishes between what he calls ‘logic-in-use’ and ‘reconstructed logic’, and this he explains in the following terms:

[S]cientists and philosophers use a logic – they have a cognitive style which is more or less logical – and some of them also formulate it explicitly. I call the former the logic-in-use, and the latter the reconstructed logic. We can no more take them to be identical or even assume an exact correspondence between them, than we can in the case of the decline of Rome and Gibbon’s account of it, a patient’s fever and his physician’s explanation of it.

(p. 8)

This is the fundamental principle: the map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski (1941) said in his famous aphorism. The symbol is not the thing symbolised, the portrait is not the person depicted, the representation is not the thing represented, and Freud’s logical reconstruction of his practice differs significantly from what he actually did. Moreover, I think it fails to do justice to the utter revolutionary character of his creation.

But, just as we can distinguish between the way in which a person actually thinks and the way in which he believes he thinks, we can also do it between the epistemology that underlies how a scientist actually works and how he theorises about his results, and the ideal epistemological model he aspires to attain, either on account of its prestige within his community or the subjective value it has for him. It is also quite frequent, for a researcher who is not quite sure about what he is doing – as a result of its novelty or because it conflicts with what he has learnt in his training – to strive to affirm that his work is strictly based on the generally accepted principles, in an attempt to feel legitimised, in the eyes of both his colleagues and his own. I shall therefore call the unstated principles that underlie his revolutionary work his epistemology-in-use and that other pre-existent model he feels should rule his enquiry his affirmed epistemology.

Freud’s epistemology-in-use is, precisely, the one described by Beuchot. It is unquestionable that, in his clinical practice, he strictly adheres to the principle of looking for hidden meanings, rather than causes. Consequently, his approach to phenomena such as dreams, parapraxes, or neurotic symptoms is clearly interpretative, not explicative.

As Charles Rycroft (1966) pointed out,

In some aspects of his work Freud saw this himself clearly. His most famous work he entitled The Interpretation of Dreams [1900a] not The Cause of Dreams and his chapter on symptoms in his Introductory Lectures [1916–1917] is called The Sense of Symptoms.

(p. 13)

There, Freud says,

Thus neurotic symptoms have a sense, like parapraxes and dreams, and, like them, have a connection with the life of those who produce them [pp. 257–258][… And then he adds] I have shown you, then, on the basis of two chosen examples, that neurotic symptoms have a sense, like parapraxes and dreams, and that they have an intimate connection with the patient’s experiences.

(p. 269)

However, since his field of enquiry includes not only neurotic symptoms, parapraxes, and dreams, but also all other behaviour, purposive or spontaneous, and the subject’s relations with others, including the analyst, we may well affirm that for Freud, every human expression is always meaningful. Besides, his discovery of the unconscious dimension of human existence leads him to formulate the hypothesis that, although all expression or behaviour may or may not have a conscious meaning for its agent, it never fails to have a meaning (or set of meanings) that is unknown to him and can only be accessed by means of inferences – that is, an interpretative work. In other words, all human manifestations are subject to interpretation since they express meanings that are not immediately accessible.

This hermeneutic perspective is particularly clear in Freud’s (1904a) third-person presentation of his method in ‘Freud’s psycho-analytic procedure’, in which he writes,

Freud has developed on this basis an art of interpretation which takes on the task of, as it were, extracting the pure metal of the repressed thoughts from the ore of the unintentional ideas …. The details of this technique of interpretation or translation have not yet been published by Freud. According to indications he has given, they comprise a number of rules, reached empirically, of how the unconscious material may be reconstructed from the associations, directions on how to know what it means when the patient’s ideas cease to flow, and experiences of the most important typical resistances that arise in the course of such treatments.

(p. 252, my italics)

This quotation shows that not only he is aware that he is doing a hermeneutic job, but also what kind of theory of interpretation he holds. The assumption that interpretation consists in ‘extracting the pure metal of the repressed thoughts from the ore of the unintentional ideas’ implies that the hidden meaning that is to be unveiled is pre-existent to the interpretative act and that all that is needed is to extract it from its deceptive manifest appearance, by means of an adequate technique. In such a positivistic univocal theory, interpretation should be strictly objective, by excluding or minimising the participation of the interpreter’s subjectivity.⁴

Nonetheless, what we know of Freud’s concrete practice, through both his numerous clinical examples and the testimony of his former patients, suggests a quite different way of working. It is clear that, although he never mentions Dilthey in his writings and he surely would not have shared his conception of the Sciences of the Spirit, Freud systematically used that operation called Verstehen (Dilthey, 1883), that is, empathic comprehension through identification, ‘putting oneself in the other person’s shoes’, at least as a source of a possible understanding, if not of validation. He even went as far as using his own fantasies, remembrances, or associations as sources for interpretation⁵ – a most unusual position for a staunch believer in objectivity!

This is in sharp contrast with Freud’s affirmed epistemology, which was the positivistic conception of the natural scienc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I The gelding of psychoanalysis
• Part II A fresh look
• Part III Bridging the gap
• Appendices
• References
• Index