Charles Brenner: a practitioner's theorist

To avoid certain errors in practice, Charles Brenner offered an holistic substitute for the Freudian structural model of the mind. He used the term compromise formation ambiguously to refer to both actions and states, so as to render unnecessary what he considered artificial, judgmental attitudes embodied in images of psychic structures. He believed that a theory of conflicting structures transforms the phenomenological drama of the patient's actual life-world into an artificial drama of contending intrapsychic parties that may reflect the analyst's values. According to Brenner, the meaning of life, with its desires, fears, and regrets, is structured forever in the first articulation of the family drama, and that is all the structure a practitioner should have in mind. In principle, the ambiguity of the term compromise formation allows for observed continuities in human life, and might have inspired an ambitious theoretician to exploit that option for an account of character, but that aspect of theory moves in a direction opposite to Brenner's practical mission. For the same practical reason Brenner refused to acknowledge gradations of mental operation, such as differences in maturity, or style or level of thinking, so the theory cannot say how change can take place, analytic or otherwise. These lacunae in theory were unblinkingly (if implicitly) accepted in pursuit of Brenner's goal, which was not to polish up theory but to cleanse the analyst's mind of concepts that subtly interfere with the essential nondirectiveness of treatment. His theoretical minimalism and exclusive concern with practical consequences can be recognized as a peculiarly North American attitude to psychoanalysis.     

Rejoinder to Wall

Edmund Wall's criticism of the author's earlier analysis of Hare's consequentialism and Kantian ethics claims that the author overlooked Hare's commitment to preference satisfaction as an “ultimate good.” This rejoinder points out that Hare never uses the phrase in question, nor any equivalent phrase or concept, in presenting his own arguments and refers only to the standard of “universalizability” as ultimate, in contexts that support the author's original argument. Hence Wall has only given us yet another example of how Hare's views can be misunderstood by philosophers who fail to attend to the details of Hare's approach.     

Rejoinder to Harold Blum2

The author's main disagreement with Harold Blum is over Blum's contention that symptomatic improvement is directly linked to the recovery of memories. The idea that memories are laid down in childhood and preserved until the time of their later recovery flies in the face of what we now understand as the creation of memories by the neurobiological systems underpinning this aspect of mental function. No evidence directly links symptomatic improvement to reconstruction and thus to outcome; care should be taken to avoid confusing co‐occurrence with causality. While reconstruction of how things actually were in childhood can significantly contribute to therapeutic action, it is the process rather than the outcome of this reconstruction that is therapeutic, due to the opportunity thus afforded to rework current experiences in the context of other perspectives. The author clarifies his definition of transference to show some areas of agreement between his position and Blum's. He disusses contemporary neuroscientific views on memory and identifies a number of psychoanalytic writers who have used these productively.