Of Innocence and Experience: Commentary on Paper by Stuart A. Pizer

In providing the background to a pivotal session, Stuart Pizer reveals his clinical work as an unsupervised neophyte, prior to his own analysis and analytic training. These early therapeutic efforts were flawed, leaving Pizer at times “grimacing with mortification 26 years after the fact.” But they were also extraordinarily helpful to the patient. Schaffer discusses the challenge of supervising similarly talented beginners: how does one teach psychoanalysis without desiccating a treatment? How does one teach a relational approach, with no “basic model” and few rules, to a beginning analyst infused with an unformulated, yet often passionate, sense of what is “curative”? Pizer recognizes that were he to meet the same patient today, he would not conduct the same treatment. Now trained and analyzed, not to mention more cautious and “worldweary,” Pizer would not do what he did then. But what if he were the supervisor then? Schaffer concludes her discussion by asking Pizer how he, now a seasoned analyst, would supervise his early therapist self.     

Affective Relatedness in Stance and Process: Commentary on Papers by Stuart A. Pizer and Barbara Pizer

Although these papers by Stuart and Barbara Pizer might initially seem unrelated, I find in them a deep complementarity, presenting an interlocking approach to analytic stance or attitude and analytic process. Both papers are responses to the totalizing nature of knowing that can reduce our ineffable subjectivity to chattel, to be used as spare parts in the service of avoiding the existential agonies of our own vulnerability in the face of death. I see generous involvement as a contemporary formulation of neutrality and as a necessary foundational stance for an analytic process captured eloquently by the notion of moving feeling forward, a process of de-totalizing, of opening a generous experience of the other as an irreducible mystery.     

Love Will Do the Thing That's Right: Commentary on Paper by Stuart A. Pizer,Ph.D., A.B.P.P.

In this paper, hope is explored as a motivating force in analysis. To see the patient's and the analyst's hopes in terms of changes they expect the treatment to accomplish emphasizes the cognitive aspect of hope. While touching on these cognitive expectations, this paper focuses on the emotional, rather than the cognitive, function of hope in treatment. It addresses the question of how hope can inspire analytic participants to have the strength and stamina that analysis requires.     

Narrative Writing and Soulful Metaphors Commentary on Paper by Barbara Pizer

The author posits that Pizer's use of both narrative and lyrical style is not typical in psychoanalysis, whose scholarly tradition tends to favor a denser, more academic style of writing. The ways in which psychoanalysts read these two forms of writing are mirrors of one another. Both kinds of reading are forms of discipline; both forms of writing are necessary in psychoanalysis. The author also writes that Pizer's “nonanalytic third” does not have to be a “good” thing like a poem; it can be almost anything important to the analyst. The nonanalytic third is a soulful metaphor that can be used to create alternatives to rigid experience. Because rigidity in psychoanalytic relatedness is usually the result of problematic unconscious involvements between analyst and patient, the nonanalytic third can be significant in the negotiation of enactments.     

Commentary on Paper by Philip A. Ringstrom

When we feel overwhelmed by an inescapable threat, we “identify with the aggressor” (Ferenczi, 1933). Hoping to survive, we sense and “become” precisely what the attacker expects of us—in our behavior, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. Identification with the aggressor is closely coordinated with other responses to trauma, including dissociation. Over the long run, it can become habitual and can lead to masochism, chronic hypervigilance, and other personality distortions.

But habitual identification with the aggressor also frequently occurs in people who have not suffered severe trauma, which raises the possibility that certain events not generally considered to constitute trauma are often experienced as traumatic. Following Ferenczi, I suggest that emotional abandonment or isolation, and being subject to a greater power, are such events. In addition, identification with the aggressor is a tactic typical of people in a weak position; as such, it plays an important role in social interaction in general.     

Search Yourself: Commentary on Paper by Kenneth A. Frank

This commentary has as its point of departure essential questions about selfhood, self-knowledge, and therapeutic action. Frank's contemporary redefinition of “mutual analysis” and its impact on the clinical surround are examined, with a special emphasis placed on the willingness of the analyst to change and grow. The vital role and theme of the analyst's emotional honesty are explored with an eye toward the clinical impact of contextualism, psychoanalytic complexity, and the personal attitudes that inevitably permeate the analytic relationship and its trajectory. This commentary, in concert with Frank's paper, encourages clinicians to embrace a more collaborative, mutually analytic posture in their clinical endeavors.     

A Neuropsychoanalytic Viewpoint: Commentary on Paper by Steven H. Knoblauch

In October 2004 it was my pleasure to present at a cutting-edge conference entitled The Interplay of Implicit and Explicit Processes in Psychoanalysis. In addition to offering an address (“The Essential Role of the Right Brain in the Implicit Self: Development, Psychopathogenesis, and Psychotherapy”), I also provided a commentary to Steven Knoblauch's excellent paper, “Body Rhythms and the Unconscious: Toward an Expanding of Clinical Attention.” In the following, I briefly summarize these presentations, with the purpose of showing how current advances in developmental and neuropsychoanalysis are being incorporated into the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. This work is part of an ongoing effort to expand regulation theory, an overarching theoretical model of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the implicit self.     

The Psychoanalytic Other: Commentary on Paper by Helen K. Gediman

Dr. Gediman locates the intersection of modern Freudian and relational theory in the arena of what she calls the “disclosures of everyday analysis” (p. 242). She suggests that because Freudian analysts, like their relational colleagues, work intersubjectively, relational theory does not itself embody a paradigm shift away from the Freudian model. I disagree. Relational theories assume that the analyst's work is inevitably informed by the relational context in a way that precludes clinical certainty. Gediman, however, believes that the analyst is capable of separating her countertransference response from her subjectivity and thus can interpret from a position of clinical certainty. Each set of theoretical assumptions is associated with a somewhat different analytic stance and analytic ideal. Freudian analysts aim for a position of “methodological neutrality” that relies on considerable certainty in the countertransference while giving the analyst plenty of room within which to use her subjectivity. The relational ideal concerns the analyst's capacity to enter into an asymmetrical treatment relationship and to tolerate the uncertainty generated therein.     

High-Risk,High-Gain Choices: Commentary on Paper by Philip A. Ringstrom

In this commentary building on Philip Ringstrom's paper, I address how improvisation, an unpremeditated spontaneous activity emerging within an interactive context, can be analytic even when not shaped consciously by the analyst's reflective capacity and therapeutic judgment. A microanalysis of the nonverbal dimensions of the analytic exchanges that Ringstrom offers is used to illustrate how affective experience can be attended and coconstructed on a subsymbolic process register carried on kinesthetic, somatic, and acoustic dimensions that may or may not be transduced to symbolic expression for mutative analytic impact to have occurred. The metaphor of jazz is added to the metaphor of improvisational theater to help elaborate this view.     

A Warrior's Stance: Commentary on Paper by Terry Marks-Tarlow

This commentary highlights specific aspects of a psychoanalytic complexity perspective in considering and discussing Terry Marks-Tarlow's article, “Merging and Emerging: A Nonlinear Portrait of Intersubjectivity During Psychotherapy.” The advantages of a complexity theory sensibility reside in the areas of (a) providing a robust theoretical framework for understanding the sources and phenomenology of complex emotional life and (b) understanding the clinical implications of thinking through a complexity theory lens. The latter involves examining the attitudes that emanate from such a revolutionary perspective and their impact on the therapeutic relationship and on therapeutic action and change. Special emphasis is placed on the distinction between two vital dimensions of psychoanalytic discourse: the phenomenological and the explanatory. This distinction is used as a lens through which the author considers the essential themes of understanding the complexity of the multiple sources of personal lived experience and their concomitant meanings, personal situtatedness (or “thrownness”), emotional responsibility, and personal freedom.     

The Radical Cure: Commentary on Paper by Eyal Rozmarin

This commentary on Eyal Rozmarin's paper “To Be Is to Betray” considers the place of history in the psychoanalytic encounter. Examining texts by Adorno and Ferenczi, the author cautions against “radical cures” that conflate political values with analytic ones.     

Commentary on Paper by Ellen F. Fries

In Perchance to Sleep: Minding the Unworded Body in Psychoanalysis, Ellen F. Fries masterfully articulates the complexities of right-brain to right-brain, body-to-body interactions between herself and her patient. Her work highlights the dominance of the nonverbal implicit self over the verbal, explicit self and provides an excellent example of clinical work in which she thoughtfully attends to the unspoken, bodily based communication that takes place within the therapeutic dyad. In this discussion, I offer perspectives from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy on the impact of early attachment on the procedural organization of action sequences that reflect and sustain the implicit self, and embody unconscious relational expectations. The following topics are addressed: (a) Physical actions that provide avenues of exploration into the implicit self, especially actions such as reaching out, making eye contact, or maintaining an upright posture that are abandoned or distorted when they are ineffective in eliciting the desired response from attachment figures; (b) Body-oriented interventions that target the involuntary physical spasms that Fries' patient experiences, which are associated with unresolved physiological arousal originally stimulated in the face of trauma; and (c) The nonverbal manifestation and negotiation of enactments that emerge from the body-to-body dialogue between the implicit selves of patient and therapist.     

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.     

Field Theory: Commentary on Paper by Donnel B. Stern

Stern offers a compelling introduction to a comparative theory of the field in his examination of its origins in the work of Harry Stack Sullivan and of Madeleine and Willy Baranger. Although he notes that Sullivan and the Barangers developed their field concepts separately, I suggest that there is a common context, and I detail this in regard to the early history of the concept, particularly in regard to Merleau-Ponty. Stern describes well the points of common use of the field concept and highlights differences that are the defining line between relational thinking and other orientations. In his view, the Barangers do not adequately take into account the analyst's inevitable participation and do not in the end step out of framing the unconscious as an internal process. I question this reading and ask how we might benefit from an “epistemological pluralism” that would invite working from diverse perspectives.     

Between Subjects: Commentary on Paper by Robert P. Drozek

This commentary on Drozek's paper outlines its key points under 10 headings, looking at various aspects of the intrapsychic and intersubjective elements involved in understanding motivation. There is discussion of issues of autonomy and dignity based upon Kant's philosophy that underpin the paper's assumptions about unconditional valuing of the other as a universal element of intersubjective motivation. In the commentary attention is paid to the role of desire in motivation, as well as some of the psychoanalytical literature on motivation, including papers by Sandler, Loewald, and Winnicott, some aspects of which connect up with the paper's theses. At various points, some of the clinical relevance of the paper's proposals are brought to light, in particular how the patient may be in a position to use the analyst's interventions as a source of intersubjective motivation.     

The Strangeness of Passing: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

Christopher Bonovitz gives us a rich landscape of the theoretical, historical, and relational aspects of his work with his mixed-race patient. In my response I explore what seems missing: a stronger sense of the patient as a person, more of her own history in her family, more of the clinical back and forth with her therapist, a sense of what is being played out in the transference, and particularly what “passing” is for her. I show how his choices about how to think about her story and how to tell it are oversaturated with awareness of identity and race at the expense of the basic human relationship. In the face of such racial anxiety, there is a pull to rely too strongly on countertransference as a way to gain privileged access to knowledge about the other. I attribute many of these problems to the inescapable power of race in our culture. Furthermore, I address the themes of hatred, silence, secrecy and transgression as they relate to the history of transgenerational trauma for this patient and invite our broadening our awareness about how they play out in the therapeutic process. We are faced with the difficult, yet the essential task of holding and living out the patient's anger and outrage at the racial hatred that has been endured.     

The Coparticipant Field: Commentary on a Paper by Juan Tubert-Oklander

Psychoanalytic field theory is integral to relational praxis. In his study of the analytic field and its interpersonal complexities and relational intricacies, Tubert-Oklander emphasizes its clinical promise. Tubert-Oklander's field orientation, however, is a conservative and limited one. This commentary proposes a new, more radical coparticipant theory of analytic praxis.

As a unique form of clinical participation, coparticipant inquiry is marked by an emphasis on patients' and analysts' relational mutuality, coequal analytic authority, and dyadic uniqueness. Coparticipant inquiry represents both a one-person and two-person psychology—an integral of classical individualism and the social emphasis of the interpersonal/relational viewpoint. Coparticipant analysis calls for a new, multidimensional concept of the self that reconciles the seeming paradox that we are simultaneously communal and individual beings—from birth embedded in a series of social field, yet always uniquely individual. This psychoanalytic dialectic between personal, nonrelational selfic “I” processes and an interpersonal “me” pattern brings into relational play such concepts as will, self-determination, and agency. Coparticipation promotesatechnically freer, more self-expressive, and spontaneous inquiryandemphasizesthecurativeimmediacyofnewrelationalexperience.

I have believed for a long time that human

nature is a reciprocity of what is inside the skin

and what is outside; that it is definitely not

“rolled up inside us” but our way of being one

with our fellows and our world. I call this field

theory.

—Gardner Murphy