We-ness,Embodied Simulation,and Psychoanalysis: Reply to Commentaries

Neuroscience is progressively revealing the intimate relationship between embodied simulation and the understanding of verbal communication, including its affective quality. The neuroscientific investigation of linguistic aspects of interpersonal relations and the functional mechanism of embodied simulation are discussed in relation to the understanding of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis.     

Reply to Commentaries

In this reply to Adrienne Harris and Cleonie White's discussions of my article “Language and Intersubjectivity: Multiplicity in a Bilingual Treatment,” I further explore the psychodynamics of bilingualism primarily in relation to implicit communication through spoken and unspoken language(s), affect, the body and unformulated experience. I also examine the intrapsychic and relational impact of multiple early attachments and consider the emergence of my own multicultural identity formed in the context of a primary cross-racial attachment in which I first learned to speak French.     

Reply to Commentaries

In our response, we address four themes arising from the commentaries. First, we discuss the distinction between cognition and metacognition and show how to draw it within our framework. Next, we explain how metacognition differs from social cognition. The underlying mechanisms of metacognitive development are then elucidated in terms of interaction patterns. Finally, we consider measures of metacognition and suitable methods for investigating it. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reply to Commentaries

In reply to my discussants, I take up their questions on the subjects of foolishness, the analyst's dreams, and the unnamed patient. My responses to them bring me back to my own father to ask questions that had not been asked yet about my mother's release; back to the return of my patient after years of absence, and the additional history I learned then; and back to Lacan's seminar and my Lacanian analytic training to question that approach to the treatment of madness.     

Reply to Commentaries

In my response to the commentaries, I take up Dr. Cushman's concerns about my use of the term “empathy,” grounding my use in the term's changing definitions over time. I take up Dr. Harris's concerns by elaborating on my views about the complexity of identifications and the fluidity of both subjective agency and power structures.     

Reply to Commentaries

The following response to discussions by Benjamin and by Fonagy and Target focuses on several issues raised, including linearity versus multiplicity in the assessment of developmental capacities, the complex interplay of shame and subjectivity in an intersubjective field, the notion of surrender in resolving therapeutic impasse, and some thoughts on the concept of the third, as they are exemplified in this case material.     

Reply to Commentaries

In this brief reply to commentaries from Professor Etzel Cardeña and Professor Anssi Peräkylä on my paper, I try to extend some of the themes they raise, and sketch areas for subsequent research. In particular, I focus on Peräkylä’s observation that poetic confluence may serve a range of socio-relational functions, and Cardeña’s remarks on the metaphorical dimensions of mind. My discussion is developed around a brief consideration of a case that, while retaining key features of poetic confluence, departs from the pattern described in my paper.     

Reply to Commentaries

The author examines the gendered Oedipal dynamics in Steven H. Cooper’s discussion and the notion of the “phallic collapse” in the context of recruiting a “third.” By comparison, the developmental thrust of Jody Messler Davies’s commentary is examined, specifically the idea of the various registers located in particular self-other configurations and the primacy of sensory experience in unlocking the impasse.     

Reply to Commentaries

Questions of historical context resonate with an Independent view of the importance of history. The historical backgrounds of North American and British psychoanalysis are relevant. Some American analysts may be seen as belonging to the Independent tradition, and the relation between Independent analysis in Britain and Relational analysis in America needs further consideration. I ask how far Relational analysis is taking on an institutional identity, and link this to Poland's discussion of “outsiderness.” Responding to Bass's and Berman's comments on my clinical examples I discuss why I sometimes do think analysts need to ascribe meaning to a patient's material. In other instances an analyst will invite the patient more into the process by which meaning evolves between them. To move freely between these positions is central to my view of clinical technique. I express doubts about analysts asking patients for their emotional reaction to an analyst's interventions. This risks being intrusive, and may tend to keep the exchange at the conscious level of a patient's mind. The analytic relationship is an interpersonal one between real people, but the analyst needs also to remain symbolically available as an object of unconscious fantasy and projection.     

Reply to Commentaries

Each discussant approached my paper on embedded levels of illusion from a different perspective, representing schools as diverse as those derived from Jung and Bion. It is interesting that, although my paper was not primarily about dreams or how to interpret them, but rather about the way in which multiple levels of illusion may open a potential space in treatment, each discussant centered his comments around a dream that I had reported in one of my cases. In this reply, I compare the discussants' approaches to the dream with mine. I also wonder whether the dream itself represents an embedded level of illusion within my paper. If so, it may function as a transitional space in which we may entertain different viewpoints around not only the nature of dream work, but also around questions including the nature of the mind and the therapeutic process.     

Reality Bytes: Reply to Commentaries

The author discusses Danielle Knafo’s paper, “Guys and Dolls,” from the developmental perspective of transitional space and the interplay of intersubjectively constructed spontaneous gestures, in the co-construction of a new narrative in the process of psychoanalytic treatment.     

Dialectics Forever: Reply to Commentaries

The dialectic between repetition and transformation, an inherent aspect of the therapeutic dialogue, is elaborated. Dialectic refers to an ever-present tension within a process, a pull by opposite tendencies in contradictory directions. Checks and balances between repetition and transformation are crucial. Too great a tilt toward transformation can bring the system into disorganization and instability. Too great a tilt toward repetition and the system can stagnate. The term “dialectic” is also used to refer to the tension between an emphasis on process and an emphasis on content or outcome. The massive challenges to traditional psychoanalytic treatment that stem from the empirical infant research, self psychology, general systems theory, and motivational systems are discussed. Their contributions are of particular relevance to the nonverbal dimension of the analyst-patient interaction.     

Relational Trouble: Reply to Commentaries

This reply to the commentaries by Corbett, Hansell, and Stern explores whether Lacan's concept of the real can—or should—be translated into more readily recognizable terms. It extends our previous discussion of impossibility by arguing that not all ideas and experiences can be brought within the realm of the known and familiar. We suggest that impossibilities of meaning should not be understood primarily in phenomenological terms, and we demur from the assessment that our concept of impossibility offers nothing for clinical work. Claiming that what resists meaning also impedes relationality, we encourage relational theorists to address the nonrelational processes that subtend relationality, including the relation between analyst and patient. We acknowledge that the theory of impossibility—or what we now call “negative mediation”—raises a fundamental challenge to relational theory, but we insist that disruptions of relationality need not be considered pathological. Taking into account the nonrelational may enhance rather than impoverish relational psychoanalysis.     

Ideology Springs Eternal: Reply to Commentaries

Empathy has come to occupy a central place in much discourse on psychoanalytic theory and practice. Since empathy is fundamental to how data are obtained and interpreted within psychoanalysis, it is essential to understand its relationship to the assumptions underlying any psychoanalytic epistemology. This paper examines some of the epistemological issues involved in Kohut's view of empathy as a mode of inquiry. The Kohutian view of empathy is contrasted with the understanding of empathy employed by Harry Stack Sullivan and the epistemology of American pragmatism. The epistemology inherent in empathy as a mode of inquiry is then clarified in relation to hermeneutics, phenomenology, structuralism, and deconstruction. The paper concludes with a case example to illustrate the clinical implications of the particular meaning of empathy as a mode of inquiry.     

Dreaming to Different Beats: Reply to Commentaries

Psychoanalysis is in the throes of transition and suffers in diverse quarters from a case of postmodern jitters. We are casting aside old paradigms and approach the new with trepidation. We fail to see that deconstruction is a practice rather than an end in itself. The bridge from the old to the new is yet to be completed. This response to reviews of Sexual Subjects: Lesbians, Gender and Psychoanalysis argues that psychoanalysis is not value free in theory or practice, nor can it be. Attempts to deconstruct psychoanalytic concepts of gender and sexuality aim, rather, at delineating values and demonstrating just how they are reflective of a particular siruation in place and time. The deconstruction of gender does not preclude the study of development—a development that is grounded in the analytic decoding and attribution of meaning to experience rather than morphology or critical stages. A hermeneutic-constructivist psychoanalysis is not necessarily at odds with a developmental approach to narrative. Moreover, a theory that acknowledges the performative aspects of gender can simultaneously account for “internal representations” that result from our specific historicities, our intersubjective, fantasized relationships. The deconstruction of gender binaries—the historical imposition of gendering on aspects of experience, desire, and identity that are culturally but not essentially related to constitutionally based sexual differences—does not necessitate the dismantling of a frame of self-systems, or the language that may be best suited for describing an individual's experience.     

I Have Loved: Reply to Commentaries

In replying I explore in more depth the journey of reclaiming the lost love and the mourning of a relationship that could not be publicly or privately grieved. Disavowed love, in its melancholic haunting, compels identity. In agreement with the model of multiplicity proposed by Harris and Hill I delve further into our hybridic racialized identities. I also come to an understanding of our differences, including our experience of whiteness and our processes of racialization. Finally, I engage with the complex issues of anger and forgiveness.     

The Vanishing Mother: Reply to Commentaries

In this response to discussions by Aron and Boyarin I draw attention to the instability of the figure of the mother within Freud's presentation of his life, as well as within psychoanalysis. I link this instability to the figure of a “spectral” mother and perhaps subversive aspects of femininity. Whereas Aron links castration anxiety with prevailing anti-Semitic ideas, I look to the Jewish ritual of the Brit Milah and the laws of Niddah, which further reveal attempts to control and contain femininity. Boyarin raises a concern between historicizing and psychoanalyzing Freud that I consider a misreading. I believe my hybrid method of moving between historical, cultural, religious, and psychoanalytic planes, as lived by Freud within his family, is not so different from Boyarin's own approach.