Harry stack sullivan: Opening the door for a transpersonal vision?

Abstract

As an apparently typical neo‐Freudian theorist, Harry Stack Sullivan may appear to have had little to offer to the development of transpersonal thought. Yet a closer examination of his work reveals several elements in his theorizing that (1) are surprising, given his intellectual heritage, and (2) allow for the extension of his theorizing in the direction of a transpersonal perspective. Sullivan's views on the nature and origin of anxiety, the inescapability of anxiety, empathy, and the need for sleep are examined with an eye toward parallels between his views and a transpersonal perspective. It is suggested that these elements of Sullivan's work provide a type of bridge between conventional and transpersonal perspectives on self and personality development.     

Reflections on Feminist Merleau‐Ponty Skepticism

Shannon Sullivan's critique of Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is based on the argument that, due to his concept of the “anonymous body,” his theory of intersubjectivity omits the particularities of bodies, such as gender. 1 argue that Merleau‐Ponty's “anonymous body” (le corps phénoménal) is not in fact “neutral” as Sullivan suggests, and moreover that he does not ignore differences but rather provides us with the idea of difference as a process of differentiation. Additionally, I argue that Sullivan's concept of “hypothetical construction,” which is introduced as an alternative to Merleau‐Ponty, turns out to be a conscious construction, not reflecting upon its very conditions. Thus, Sullivan's account fails by presupposing what in fact needs to be explained: the particularities.     

Preliminary thoughts on the neurobiology of innate unconscious structures and the psychodynamics of language acquisition

This paper builds upon Britton's recent writing on ‘models in the mind’, in which he gives an account of preverbal metaphoric structures based on object relations (Britton 2015). These correspond with Jung's theory of innate unconscious structures. These innate models are considered alongside current linguistic theory following Chomsky and post‐Chomskyan views about language acquisition. Neuroscience evidence linking language and abstract thinking with structures involved in tool use are presented. The implications of these findings, and our understanding of the relational context within which language, metaphor and abstract thought are acquired, will be discussed along with the failures of symbolization and verbal communication common amongst those with severe narcissistic disorders.     

ANALYTIC MIND USE AND INTERPSYCHIC COMMUNICATION: DRIVING FORCE IN ANALYTIC TECHNIQUE,PATHWAY TO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL LIFE

Developed from established psychoanalytic knowledge among different psychoanalytic cultures concerning unconscious interpsychic communication, analysts' use of their receptive mental experience—their analytic mind use, including the somatic, unconscious, and less accessible derivatives—represents a significant investigative road to patients' unconscious mental life, particularly with poorly symbolized mental states. The author expands upon this tradition, exploring what happens when patients unconsciously experience and identify with the analyst's psychic functioning. The technical implications of the analyst's “instrument” are described, including the analyst's ego regression, creation of inner space, taking mind as object, bearing uncertainty and intense affect, and self‐analysis. Brief case vignettes illustrate the structure and obstacles to this work.     

A Picture Book of Internal Events: The Colours of Rage and Love

The views on countertransference in psychoanalytic theory and practice have undergone a change within the last fifty years. From being considered an impediment to analysis, countertransference is today looked upon as an important potential for a tentative understanding of what is unconsciously communicated from the analysand to the analyst. This implies that the analyst is susceptible to the unconscious interaction in the transference and the countertransference, and that he/she becomes conscious as quickly as possible of what is taking place. This applies especially to erotic feelings which are often intensified in analyses with patients with a serious psychopathology, as well as in analyses with patients in regressive phases where projective identification is the dominant factor used as a defence and a communication. Opinions differ as regards the question of how to deal with such a situation, especially whether it is right to be candid about the analyst's countertransference feelings towards the analysand, something most would caution against. In an example from an analysis, the analyst describes how he was influenced by an unconscious erotic countertransference. After three years of therapy with a patient with a serious psychopathology, he developed ?motherly” feelings, which he interpreted as reflecting a child's longing for closeness and physical contact. The result was that a few times, he ?forgot” to indicate the end of the session, which was then prolonged, and also that he embraced her on several occasions before she left the session. One year later, he had intense sexual fantasies and dreams about the analysand, which he experienced as both enticing and alarming, and as an impediment to the analysis. He soon became aware of the element of projective identification in the interaction, and by interpreting the analysand's unconscious communication, he regained his ability to maintain an analytic attitude and clear boundaries.     

Searching for the enriching sense of otherness: The psychoanalytic psychotherapist as a meaning-bearing other

Abstract

This paper is a theoretical and clinical examination of the patient's search for the otherness of the therapist as a prerequisite for change and development in relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy. A basic assumption is that being in a relationship as well as being a personal self, is to be understood, as being with a “meaning-bearing other”; that is, someone who allows for the possibility of meaningful thoughts and feelings, either through an actual communicative presence or as a consciously, prereflective, or unconsciously imagined communication partner. The term “meaning-bearing other” is used to differentiate distinct, although often synchronic, modes of relatedness. The need for intersubjective “depth”—that is, to discover the otherness of the other, and for oneself to be recognized as an experiencing subject—is regarded as a main motivational force. Winnicott's, as well as Sullivan's developmental approaches, Mitchell and Aron's views on psychoanalytic interaction, and Heidegger and Gadamer's phenomenology and hermeneutics are used as theoretical points of reference for the present discourse. The theoretical points of view are examined and discussed through excerpts from twice-a-week psychotherapy with a six-year old girl.     

Blogging while gay and Christian: Andrew Sullivan and the production of the religious,secular, and sexual

This article examines blogger and political pundit Andrew Sullivan's performance of gay Christian identity through his weblog, The Dish. Through a reading of the repetitive and collaborative nature of The Dish as a medium of cultural production, I argue that Sullivan's gay Christian performance is made legible by how the religious and secular are articulated and negotiated through the site of the body in American culture. Sullivan's performance both reproduces and resists religious and secular normativities while at the same time produces a singular identity with distinct political and social advantages. Among other advantages, examining how the religious and secular are articulated through everyday discourse and embodied performance exposes some of the political investments in this articulation and provides a space to consider the stakes of scholars' own investments in ‘secular’ knowledge.     

Clinical Relevance of Social Character and Social Unconscious

The author discusses his recollection of Erich Fromm's views on psychoanalytic work with patients, including the author's treatment of a patient. The remembrance involves Fromm's clinical thinking on social character and the social unconscious, and its relevance to present-day clinical work. The author presents, in detail, his treatment of a 37-year old successful woman which addresses certain of today's clinical views on gender differences that resonate and differ with Fromm's thinking on the treatment of the marketing personality.     

New approaches to understanding unconscious processes: Implicit and explicit memory systems

Abstract

Freud viewed the unconscious as being roughly equivalent to dynamically repressed wishes, needs, and motivations. Findings from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience over the past 40 years have dramatically changed our views of unconscious processes and the human mind. It is now clear that Freud's dynamic unconscious is only a minor segment of information that is processed at subsymbolic, implicit, and automatic levels. Only a fraction of this information is further processed at explicit conscious levels. Moreover, the vast majority of the information that remains nonconscious is adaptive and has major consequences for development. We examine some clinical implications of these views.     

INTUITING THE TRUTH OF WHAT'S HAPPENING: ON BION'S “NOTES ON MEMORY AND DESIRE”

Bion's “Notes on Memory and Desire” (1967a) is an impossible paper that this article's author has struggled with for decades. He views the paper, only two and a half pages in length, as a landmark contribution. Despite its title—and its infamous dictates to resist the impulse to remember past sessions and desire for “results”—the paper is not, most importantly, about memory and desire. It proposes a new analytic methodology that supplants awareness from its central role in the analytic process and, in its place, instates the analyst's (largely unconscious) work of intuiting the (unconscious) psychic reality of the present moment by becoming at one with it. This article's clinical examples, provided from the author's own work, illustrate something of his ways of talking with his patients.     

Commentary on Paper by Lawrence J. Brown

Brown's historical overview of post-Kleinian psychoanalysis traces key steps in the evolving and diverse practice of working in the psychoanalytic situation while regarding it as a two-person field. The Barangers' “The Analytic Situation as a Dynamic Field” is central to his narrative. I develop my understanding of the originality of their contribution in theorizing a situational unconscious, and of their continuing relevance for thinking about analytic listening and intersubjective collaboration. Brown presents a countertransference dream of his own along with the dream of a patient as an example of the Barangers' concept of the “shared unconscious fantasy” of the analytic couple. A detailed alternative reading of Brown's clinical vignette reveals an absence of fit with the Barangers' views on collaboration in the analytic situation. Some uses of Bion's “dreaming” and “becoming” are implicitly questioned as they risk encouraging the idealization of special states over process.     

Emotional Communication and the Unconscious in the Analytic Setting

ABSTRACT

One type of unconscious communication is conceptualized as a form of emotional communication, the channel of communication that conveys information about a person’s emotional state through the nonsymbolic expression of feelings and is experienced as feeling in the receiver. Some of the analyst’s feelings are attuned responses to the patient’s unconscious communications; others are disjunctive and related only to the analyst’s unconscious. Attuned feelings can be identified by their congruence—similarities, consistencies, and analogies—with the patient’s verbal material, which reveals the meaning that the analyst’s feeling has within the patient’s subjectivity. Attuned feelings also have a meaning within the analyst’s subjectivity. Two cases are discussed, one in which the analyst experiences the patient’s unconscious communication within the symbolism of one of her own childhood memories. The other illustrates the risk of confusing disjunctive feelings emanating from the analyst’s own unconscious with unconscious communication from the patient.     

From Freud’s dream-work to Bion’s work of dreaming: The changing conception of dreaming in psychoanalytic theory

Bion moved psychoanalytic theory from Freud's theory of dream-work to a concept of dreaming in which dreaming is the central aspect of all emotional functioning. In this paper, I first review historical, theoretical, and clinical aspects of dreaming as seen by Freud and Bion. I then propose two interconnected ideas that I believe reflect Bion’s split from Freud regarding the understanding of dreaming. Bion believed that all dreams are psychological works in progress and at one point suggested that all dreams contain elements that are akin to visual hallucinations. I explore and elaborate Bion’s ideas that all dreams contain aspects of emotional experience that are too disturbing to be dreamt, and that, in analysis, the patient brings a dream with the hope of receiving the analyst’s help in completing the unconscious work that was entirely or partially too disturbing for the patient to dream on his own. Freud views dreams as mental phenomena with which to understand how the mind functions, but believes that dreams are solely the ‘guardians of sleep,’ and not, in themselves, vehicles for unconscious psychological work and growth until they are interpreted by the analyst. Bion extends Freud's ideas, but also departs from Freud and re-conceives of dreaming as synonymous with unconscious emotional thinking – a process that continues both while we are awake and while we are asleep. From another somewhat puzzling perspective, he views dreams solely as manifestations of what the dreamer is unable to think.     

From “disciplined subjectivity” to “taming wild thoughts”: Bion's elaboration of the analysing instrument

Abstract

Freud encouraged the analyst to use his unconscious “as an instrument of the analysis,” but did not elaborate on how this should be done. This recommendation opened the door to a consideration of unconscious communication between the analyst and patient as an intersubjective exchange. Both Wilfred Bion and Erik Erikson emphasised the importance of the analyst's intuition, and the author compares and contrasts these two approaches. Erikson advocated a more cautious attitude regarding the analyst's subjectivity, while Bion promoted a broader application of the analyst's various private reactions to the analysand. A brief vignette from the analysis of a five-year-old boy is offered to illustrate the importance of the analyst's reveries, the mutual process of containment and transformation between analyst and patient, and the co-creation of an analytic narrative.     

Oneiric activity and the analytical process A semiotic perspective on Willy Baranger's theory of dreams1

This author reconsiders, from a semiotic perspective, the theoretical and technical ideas developed by Willy and Madeleine Baranger, especially W. Baranger's views on the function of dreams, the status of oneiric symbols and the further clinical‐technical use of dreams in the context of the intersubjective dynamic fi eld, together with the basic unconscious fantasy that emerges in the analytic situation. She attempts to relate the Barangers' ideas to others arising from Peirce's analytic semiotics that would support a triadic conceptualization of dreams. The need to incorporate a pragmatic view of communication and of the processes of production of sense as contributions to dream metapsychology and interpretation in the case of non‐neurotic patients is particularly emphasized. On the basis of the hypothesis of a described series of triads underlying the production and retelling of dreams, the acknowledgment of these produced/told dreams as intentional signs allows the presence of a continuous process of semiosis to be proposed. The author introduces clinical material to illustrate the communicative value of dreams through the textual analysis of the report and accompanying associations of three dreams. Such analysis takes a linguistic pragmatics approach that examines those aspects of meaning not accounted for by a restricted semantic theory.     

Letter to the Editor: Re: The Origins of Psychodrame

Sparked by the 100th Anniversary of Kurt Lewin's birth, this paper re-examines a classic 1939 study by Lewin, Lippitt, and White, of three leadership styles and the resulting different social climates, that is, autocratic, democratic, and laissez faire. A gradual extension of Lewinian field theory to include unconscious motivations in individual and in group behavior has served to broaden the already significant influence of this research on the behavioral sciences. Two recent developments moved me to write this communication: (1) The 100th Anniversary in 1990 of Kurt Lewin's birth (Maccoby, 1992); and (b) a broadening of Lewinian field theory to encompass unconscious motivations (White, 1992).     

The problem of real trauma and the future of psychoanalysis

Abstract

Contemporary psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of “real” trauma, as it is well shown by recent sociological and theoretical developments (such as Kohut's Self psychology, object relation theory, renewed interest in Ferenczi's and Sullivan's contributions, etc.). To understand more clearly these developments, the author traces again the steps laid down by Freud in building the psychoanalytic edifice. The renewed interest in the environment, in real traumas, and in the vicissitudes of object relations could be a “paradigm change” in psychoanalysis: a return to Freud's original seduction theory. This development is seen as related to the difficulties of Freud's drive theory.     

Primary Process Communication

An unorthodox view of the function of primary process is presented with a view to enlarge, rather than diminish Freudian assumptions. One of the basic tenets of Freudian hypothesis was the supposed lack of influence of outside experience upon primary process functions. Yet we see demonstrated on a daily basis that primary process cognition is at work in any human interaction or experience. The mental structures of the self in interaction with the nonself is constantly monitored, added to, or subtracted from during contact with others. It is a prereflective mode that does not immediately rise into awareness. We give meaning to all interactions without necessarily reflecting upon them or even clarifying them to ourselves. Without allowing for such meaning to be integrated, we would lose or misinterpret large portions of our daily interactions. Flaws in communication occur every day and are demonstrable particularly in therapy when therapists are not attuned to their patients' emotional needs. It is demonstrated that nonverbal avoidance behavior of disturbed infants is the precursor for disturbed object relations of adults. Therefore, it makes no sense to interpret unconscious meanings—there are none. The difficulty lies in the inter-subjective realm and serves defensive modes. However, if patients present an inauthentic self, it is often difficult to decide if one is indeed in the presence of such a maimed self. The therapist's countertransference aids in detecting inaulhenticity. Ever-present, unconscious meaning analysis must be brought into consciousness by the therapist in order to further the therapeutic process.