Whence Creativity?

In this article, I explicate where my theoretical work on creativity has been and where it is going. I describe earlier three‐facet and investment theories, as well as a propulsion model. I then describe my new triangular theory of creativity.     

The Analyst's Uses of Theory and the Theory the Analyst Uses: Reply to Commentary

Where Slochower focuses her discussion on the analyst's multiform uses of theory, I focus my response on how the theory we each use informs a quite different way of understanding what is at issue for my patient in the apparent disengagement that marks her quest for help. More broadly, I consider how the theoretical perspective Slochower brings to her rendering of my clinical understanding and position makes for a reading that diverges significantly from my own view of what transpired in the treatment process I present.     

In the Pursuit of Absence: Reimagining Early Loss within the Psychotherapy Relationship

In this paper I examine absence—absence as an internal relationship, absence as an enactment, absences characteristic of psychotherapy, absence as a theory, and absence as something people do to each other, including patients, therapists, families, and societies. To illustrate these ideas, I discuss my work with Gemma. When absence enters our relationship in a very present way, the powerful emotions that absence eludes come alive for us. Forced to confront my own absences, I begin doing a better job of holding her in mind, which ultimately helps her to hold me in mind and make better use of me.     

Borges and the Art of Mourning

In my reply to Susi Federici-Nebbiosi, I emphasize and elaborate on the points of agreement between us, as well as the points where our thinking differs. My primary point of difference regards the suggestion that my accepting Yossi for short-term treatment was acquiescence to his request. This is only partially true. From his point of view, I offered him a treatment substantially longer than the one he wanted, thus I was agreeing and not agreeing to his request simultaneously.

The main idea that I put forth in my paper is that we always construct our setting together with our patients and that this is, in itself, a therapeutic factor. I share Federici-Nebbiosi's observation that the setting has undergone a great deal more change in practice than is reflected in the literature, and that there is unease discussing the issue of setting. I offer some thoughts on this and express the hope that the present exchange of ideas will lead to further discussion.     

Reply to Janine de Peyer’s “Traversing the Ineffable: Commentary on Sharon Farber’s ‘Becoming a Telepathic Tuning Fork’”

Janine de Peyer’s thoughtful and stimulating response to my paper evoked a good deal of thinking about playfulness and creativity in doing psychotherapy, what part intuition and empathy play in promoting telepathic communication, the distinction between thoughts and feelings unconsciously transmitted between people within close proximity and those transmitted across geographical distance, where there is no reliance on sensory clues involving sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. De Peyer’s summary of research on telepathy tells us that most of the research tries to rule out the variable of unconscious sensory exchange by physically separating the “sender” from the “receiver.”

In her discussion of my paper, Janine de Peyer raises some very interesting questions about how telepathy is to be defined. I recall reading years ago about someone who had gone to a medium and heard some startling information about herself and those in her circle. As I wondered how the medium could know so much about someone she had never before met, it occurred to me that there was a lot of knowledge about a person conveyed by the brain-to-brain sensory cues, and this was not telepathic but more a function of intuition and empathy. I think that was true about the relationship I had with my patient. but as with the medium there was a lot of other information I received about her that did not depend on sensory cues, and that information was, I believe, conveyed telepathically. So yes, I say, to de Peyer’s (this issue) question, “Is it not worth differentiating between in-session heightened intuitive receptiveness, and unexplainable transmissions of affect/thoughts/information that traverse time and geographical space?” (p. 736, italics in the original). In considering the time spent in my patient’s physical presence, much of my empathic attunement originated from the intuitive response that was induced in me by her physical presence. I think the increasing empathic attunement laid the foundation for subsequent telepathic communication.     

Creativity,Spontaneity, Impasse,and Leaps of Faith: Reply to Commentaries

In my reply to the commentaries, I address several points of convergence with and divergence from Drs. Danielle Knafo and Philip A. Ringstrom. I clarify my view that while shame can drive the creative process, the thrust of my paper is about ways in which shame can close down access to one's creative potential, as well as creating obstacles to vitality and intimacy in relationships. I expand on how it was indeed a visceral, embodied sense of my own shame which served as an “informant,” as Ringstrom suggests, of Julia's chronic experience of shame, opening a door to our exploration of the repetitive enactments between us. Grounding my understanding of therapeutic action and enactments in a relational perspective, I describe how I view enactments as inevitable and co-created, and reflecting on them collaboratively as a potentially useful opportunity in analytic work. I resonate with Ringstrom and Knafo's belief in the creativity inherent in the psychoanalytic process, and the importance of spontaneity and risk taking, particularly in negotiating impasses in treatment. Finally, I describe Julia's poetic reflections upon reading the paper.     

Embodied female experience through the lens of imagination

Abstract: In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying ‘male’ gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman – and thus imprisons her – which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman's lived experience. I will approach this by exploring how remembering this film has become a personally transformative experience as I look back on it through the lens of postmodern and feminist discourses that have emerged since it was made. In addition, I will explore how this process of imaginatively looking back on an artistic creation to generate new discourses in the present is similar to the transformative process of analysis. Lastly, I will present a clinical example, where my embodied countertransference response to a patient's subjection to the objectifying male gaze opens space for a new discourse about her body to emerge.     

Paintings as Solid Affective Scaffolds

We humans continuously reshape the environment to alter, enhance, and sustain our affective lives. This two‐way modification has been discussed in recent philosophy of mind as affective scaffolding, wherein scaffolding quite literally means that our affective states are enabled and supported by environmental resources such as material objects, other people, and physical spaces. In this article, I argue that under certain conditions, paintings function as noteworthy affective scaffolds to their creators. I begin with a theoretical overview of affective niche construction and affective scaffolding. Then, based on the criteria of robustness, concreteness, and dependability, I specify a more restricted, solid type of affective scaffolding and propound paintings as a cogent case of such. In support of my argument, I highlight two feelings typical to painterly creativity: the feeling of aesthetic resonance and the feeling of fusion. To conclude, I discuss the overall contributions and limitations of my account.     

The use of the analyst as an autistic shape

In this paper I describe through detailed clinical material the challenges posed by patients who employ entangled autistic defenses. I discuss the complicated nature of treating a patient who employed entangled autistic defenses and utilized my voice in an effort to preserve an undifferentiated state of dual unity. My patient's pursuit of dual unity took a very concrete form in her attempt to mitigate the terror of separateness. This concreteness was expressed via the patient's urgent request that I read letters she wrote to me between sessions. This type of autistic defense placed great strain on my ability to think analytically and I also became increasingly concrete in my response to the patient. Crucial to the analyst's regaining a space in which to think and a sense of separateness is the ability to contact the ground floor of her separate bodily experience. This is just the beginning step in the analyst separating herself from the powerful press to join the patient in a state of dual unity. Interpretation in action (Ogden, 1994) was an effective way to convey the importance of creating and tolerating internal space in myself and begin to create internal space in the patient. Previously such space had been closed down in order to manage primitive fears of annihilation. When a patient is absorbed in an entangling autistic retreat words do not reach the patient on a symbolic level but rather are experienced primarily as an assault on the need for dual unity with the analyst. The patient's need to be wrapped in a sensation based world of dual unity is preferable to a world of spoken words that carry the danger of delineating psychic separateness. In essence there is no self to speak words, only a whirl of an amorphous sensation self lacking definition. I believe with certain kinds of patients it may be necessary to first lose and then work to regain one's analytic mind, as I have powerfully described in the case of Linda. Linda's profound loss of connection to the ground floor of her experience could only begin to be addressed when I worked to extricate myself from ‘our magic carpet ride’ of dual unity, contacting the reality of my bodily experience, and begin to tolerate the terror I felt regarding my separateness from Linda. I also describe the confusing vacillation between entangled and encapsulated defenses in patients like Linda as previously identified by Cohen and Jay (1996). Ultimately, this kind of slow difficult analytic work began to help Linda develop a capacity to think and provided an alternative to the deadened world of her autistic protections.     

The Ethics of Immigration Revisited: Response to Brock,Fabre, Risse and Song

To a large extent, the differences between my four interlocutors and me have more to do with the way we choose to frame a question or approach a problem than with substantive disagreements. In her discussion of temporary workers and the brain drain, Gillian Brock implicitly assumes a different background framework of moral responsibility from the one I adopt in my book. Similarly, Cécile Fabre asks important questions about the intersection of immigration and criminal justice, but ones that I chose not to pursue in quite the same way or, in some cases, at all. Matthias Risse says that political theory should be ‘action‐guiding’, and I try to problematize that claim, at least to the extent that it limits the questions we can ask. Finally, I applaud the attention that Sarah Song brings to the link between political community and social membership but resist her suggestion that this shows that political community is more fundamental than social membership. I also suggest the need to clarify further the limits to democratic self‐determination.     

The Role of the Third Chakra in the Psychology of Terrorism

Abstract

In a recent dream I am with my German childhood girl friend. We are in a German town. There is an ominous feeling in the air. I have just learned that a young Jewish man who has lost his reason is running through town, seeking murderous revenge for the crimes of the Nazi Holocaust, committed almost forty years ago. Then I see lying on the sidewalk the black, charred body of a young man, a violin near his head. I know at once that this is the first victim of the young Jew's revenge, a horrible reminder of the crimes of the Nazi regime.

My girl friend buries her head on my shoulder and cries: “Will the past ever stay in the past?” I stroke her hair as I answer, “It is this poor young Jew's way of reminding us of our collective guilt.”     

Learning to Teach Islam as a Non‐Muslim in the Twin Cities

Abstract. In this essay I reflect on my experience thus far of teaching Islam as a non‐Muslim at Metropolitan State University and at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. I begin by narrating a conversation about conversion that I had with one of my Muslim students. Then I introduce the theme of multiplicity as a way of being, teaching, and learning. The third section illustrates the theme of multiplicity pedagogically with reference to institutional identity, choice of textbooks, topical organization of the course, the “mosque visit” assignment, and class composition and student roles in the classroom. I conclude in the fourth section with personal reflections on multiplicity in relation to credibility and identity, politics and transformation. The essay was inspired by my realization that I embody multiple religious identities, and that one of my purposes is to build community inside and outside the classroom in an effort not only to transcend the tendency of our culture to adopt an essentialist view of Islam as suspect and alien, but also to recover Islam as a universal religion and to consider its agenda for world transformation alongside those of other religions.     

GEORGES BATAILLE'S MYSTICAL CRUELTY

In this reply to Kent Brintnall's response to my essay on Georges Bataille and the ethics of ecstasy, I explore two primary questions: whether instrumentalization is inherently violent and non‐instrumentalization is inherently non‐violent, and whether there is a way to intervene in the world that avoids both “apathetic disengagement” and domination. I endorse the view that instrumentalization can be good as well as bad, and I suggest that it is possible to strive to intervene in the world without striving to master it. I make reference to Sarah Coakley as a Christian theologian who advances particular practices that aim for non‐dominating intervention in theworld.     

II—Disappointment

Miranda Fricker appeals to the idea of moral-epistemic disappointment in order to show how our practices of moral appraisal can be sensitive to cultural and historical contingency. In particular, she thinks that moral-epistemic disappointment allows us to avoid the extremes of crude moralism and a relativism of distance. In my response I want to investigate what disappointment is, and whether it can constitute a form of focused moral appraisal in the way that Fricker imagines. I will argue that Fricker is unable to appeal to disappointment as standardly understood, but that there is a more plausible way of understanding the notion that she can employ. There are, nevertheless, significant worries about the capacity of disappointment in this sense to function as a form of moral appraisal. I will argue, finally, that even if Fricker can address these worries, her position might end up closer to moralism than she would like.     

Man on Wire: Walking the Therapeutically Transformative Tightrope of the Analyst’s Cancer

Almost nothing was clear to me when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I knew that I intended to inform all of my patients about my illness. But how could the focus remain on their needs when my mortality was so at risk? Unexpectedly, I discovered that I coped with my fears most effectively in my office. It was the one place where I could maintain a grasp on a holistic sense of myself and hold conflicting intense emotions. Additionally striking was the corresponding capacity of my patients to remain in treatment while addressing the unpredictable dyadic changes generated by my sickness. In this paper, I address this point of intersubjective transformation—the interactive contributions that generated each treatment’s unique rhythm. I also discuss the temporality of illness and how my continuing reconfigurations of self-experience impacted my ability to maintain authenticity and analytic balance both during and after treatment.     

The essence of being stuck: It takes one to think you know one or work on the therapist's own family

Abstract

I would like to tell you about certain strategies I used to change my relationship with my family of origin, particularly my mother and dad. I did this in order to become more me, more differentiated from them. In doing so, paradoxically, I established a closer, more rewarding relationship with each of them and with my own children, especially my second child, Mark, and a more effective relationship with families in treatment.     

The dual impact of Freud's death and Freud's death instinct theory on the history of psychoanalysis

Since I have ranged over a rather large territory in this presentation I will summarize my main points. I claim that the very way Freud created psychoanalysis made it impossible for it to continue to grow and develop as a unified movement after his death. Unlike other sciences, psychoanalysis had no way of differentiating its basic findings from what is yet to be discovered. I then reintroduced my differentiation between heretics, modifiers, and extenders, claiming that after Freud’s death there was less opportunity for heretics and more space for modifiers. I assigned a crucial role to the fact that Anna Freud did not succeed in expelling the Kleinians. In the second part of the paper I presented the view of those who made use of Freud’s death instinct theory and those who opposed it. Many analysts preferred to ignore dealing with it rather than state their opposition. My presentation was biased in favor of those who chose to work with the death instinct as a clinical reality,highlighting Ferenczi’s construction. I made the claim, so far as I know never made before, that Freud’s death instinct theory had a traumatic impact on the psychoanalytic movement because it greatly limited the belief in the curative power of our therapeutic work. After his announcement of the dual-instinct theory Freud withdrew his interest in psychoanalysis as a method of cure. By doing so he inflicted a narcissistic wound on psychoanalysis. I believe that the creativity of psychoanalysis will improve if we face this difficult chapter in our history.     

Reply to Catriona Mackenzie

In her excellent critique of my book Self to Self (2006), Catriona Mackenzie highlights three gaps in my view of the self. First, my effort to distinguish among different applications of the concept ‘self’ is not matched by any attempt to explain the interactions among the selves so distinguished. Second, in analyzing practical reasoning as aimed at self-understanding, I speak sometimes of causal-psychological understanding (e.g. in the paper titled ‘The Centered Self’) and sometimes of narrative self-understanding (e.g. in ‘The Self as Narrator’), but I never explain how these two modes of self-understanding are related. Third, I never explain how my account of autonomous agency can be reconciled with my interpretation of Kant's (e.g., in ‘A Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics’). In this reply to Mackenzie, I agree with her about all three of these gaps, and I offer some (admittedly incomplete) ideas about how they might be filled.     

Theatres of the psyche

Fragments of the analytic voyage of a forty year old patient, haunted by the idea of her death since infancy when confronted with the anguish that accompanies the discovery of a potentially death dealing illness. In three years of intensive analytic work, her way of functioning psychically changed dramatically (her flight from imaginative life, total disaffectation of her emotional life, psychic deafness regarding her body and its messages ≡). These discoveries led to my analysand's resuming her psychoanalytic voyage in these words: 'Even if I am destined to die of this cancer, at least I shall have lived'.