Love as a Problem of Knowledge in Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Plato's Symposium

At the end of the essay “Silhouettes” in Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes, “only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.” I interpret this as an allusion to Alcibiades' speech in Plato's Symposium. Kierkegaard invites the reader to compare Socrates with Don Giovanni, and Alcibiades with the seducer's women. Socrates' philosophical method, in this light, is a deceptive seduction: just as Don Giovanni's seduction leads his conquests to unhappy love—what Kierkegaard terms “reflective sorrow”—so the elenctic method leads Socrates' interlocutors to aporia, not to knowledge. I offer a critique of Socrates' ironic stance as a philosopher, which stance is reflected in the theory of love he presents in the Symposium, and suggest that philosophy should be modeled on the romantic love of persons—a love that can be reciprocated—not the love of an impersonal Form, a one-sided love.     

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.     

Review Essay: Constructivism with a Human Face

Irwin Hoffman's book Ritual and Spontaneity includes, but goes well beyond, his series of seminal papers—written over the past several decades—developing a psychoanalytic, constructivist perspective. A new, existential framework depicts what Hoffman calls the “psychobiological bedrock” at the core of the human process of constructing meaning—the lifelong effort to create a livable, subjective world in face of our ever present sense of loss, suffering, and, ultimately, mortality.

This review describes Hoffman's encompassing, existential perspective and discusses how, within this framework, he uses his dialectical sensibility to frame our understanding of both parenting and analysis as “semisacred” activities. The “dialectic of ritual and spontaneity”—the vital clash between disciplined adherence to the analytic frame and personally expressive deviations from it—represents the creative tension between the “magical” dimension of analytic authority and the healing influence of a genuinely expressive human relationship. Hoffman's perspective on the self-interested, “dark side” of the analytic relationship is compared with Winnicott's views on the vital, therapeutic role of “hate” and the paradoxical process by which the patient comes to “use” the analyst.

Unlike most postmodernist “constructivists,” Hoffman openly reveals his underlying belief in certain “transcultural, transhistorical universals”—his “psychobiological bedrock.” In acknowledging these “essentials” (assumptions about human nature) that in some form are integral, yet often hidden, elements of any system of thought, Hoffman saves his own dialectical constructivism from falling into dichotomous (constructivist vs. essentialist) thinking.     

New frontiers in psychoanalysis – in our international community

The paper discusses what the author calls “The seduction by the father”. It would occur when, in the Oedipus complex, the father reverses his role: instead of being the one who castrates, he seduces. Seduction here is understood in the sense that he does not act as the one who imposes limits to the child. Consequently the child can not project his hostile impulses onto the father.

Based on clinical data, the Author says that, in the male child, the seduction by the father hampers the transformation of the two Oedipal attitudes towards the father into identifications. The consequences of this fact upon the construction of the “nostalgia of the father's protection” are discussed, so as the transformation of this father into the symbolic father.     

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.     

The Lure of Pan(en)theism

Abstract

This response to Karmen MacKendrick’s work follows the thematic trail of desire through Divine Enticement (2012), seeking to clarify the relationship in MacKendrick’s work between God and creation. While MacKendrick expresses an initial desire for an “immanent divine,” especially in relation to the work of St. Augustine, she later feels more drawn to “a world that in its beauty calls out the name of its creator” than to a world “in which the creator is simply present.” This brief engagement explores MacKendrick’s logic of seduction in relation to the panentheist and pantheist theologies of Cusa and Bruno, ultimately suggesting that “immanence” only collapses the distance of desire if creation is understood to be finite and self-identical.     

Technique as a Case-Specific Problem: Reply to Commentaries

Seligman's appreciative response to the discussions of his paper is most concerned with the issues raised in Leon Kleimberg's critique of his “modifications of technique.” The dialogue between Kleimberg's and his point of view, with the latter echoed as it in Case and Dent's and Frosch's, reflects a number of key convergences and divergences between the American relational perspective and the British Independents'. Both approaches rely on a fundamentally dyadic perspective that stresses how the analyst's work is fundamentally shaped in response to the patient's internal objects. At the same time, although he is sympathetic to Kleimberg's concerns, he questions the idea of technique as a fixed set of uncontaminated practices. Instead, he endorses the North American relational idea that whatever the analyst does in the name of “technique” cannot be extricated from the transference-countertransference in which it is implicated. From this point of view, technical decisions are most likely to be experienced by the patient, and very often by the analyst, as inevitably reflecting one aspect of another of the patient's internal object world from within the phanstasmatically organized matrix of each analytic relationship. In addition, he is concerned that analysts' rigidly adhering to “technical” positions will reduce their likelihood of being effective with the widest range of patients, an increasing number of whom may not accept the traditional analytic practices. The mentalization concept, although not guiding his decisions in the case, is useful in describing many such situations.     

Standard Dominance Versus Creation of Interludes of Equalization of Power in the Psychoanalytic Situation: Discussion of Case Presentation by Joseph Newirth

Joseph Newirth tells us that it is his aim in the analytic work to facilitate a “symmetrical dialogue [that] involves an equalization of power, [and] a radical view of mutuality and of self-disclosure in the analytic relationship.” My thesis here is that the process falls short of that objective. Instead, it is characterized by an enactment in which the analyst is always dominant. Several examples of “power plays” are presented in which the analyst, in a manner partially institutionalized as standard psychoanalytic practice, repeatedly gains the upper hand in the analytic relationship. One important aspect of this enactment entails a systematic bias in favor of interpretations that attribute neurotic, primitive, or regressive motives to the patient at the expense of hearing and taking seriously the patient's more mature perceptions and judgments, including those focused on the analyst himself.     

A brief introduction to the work of Jean Laplanche

The author proposes an introduction to the work of Jean Laplanche, a well‐known figure of psychoanalysis who recently passed away. He foregrounds what he views as the three main axes of Laplanche's work: firstly, a critical reading method applied to Freud's texts; secondly, a model of psychic functioning based on translation; and, thirdly, a theory of general seduction. Far from being an abstract superstructure, the theory of general seduction is firmly rooted in the analytic situation, as the provocation of transference by the analyst best illustrates. The analytic situation indeed consists in a revival and a reopening of the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ which, according to Laplanche, is the lot of every human baby born in a world where he or she is necessarily exposed to the enigmatic and ‘compromised’ messages of the adult other. Thanks to the process of analytic de‐translation, the analysand is therefore granted an opportunity to carry out new translations of the other's enigma – translations or symbolizations that might be more inclusive and less rigid than the pre‐existing ones. Incidentally, such a model brings together the purely psychoanalytic and the psychotherapeutic aspects of the treatment.     

A Few More Thoughts on the Frame: Forms,Functions, and Meanings

This response to discussants David Scharff, Juan Tubert-Oklander, Boaz Shalgi, and Reyna Hernández-Tubert takes up some further considerations bearing on the variety of forms, functions, and meanings of an analytic frame. The metaphor of a “fractal,” drawn from chaos theory, is discussed, in terms of its relevance to the relationship between therapeutic process and the structure of the analytic frame, and between content and process. Multiple functions of the frame, both practical and symbolic, are considered. “Structuring” and “holding” dimensions of the frame are discussed, with particular reference to Winnicott's groundbreaking paper, “Hate in the Countertransference,” as well as his analysis of Margaret Little.     

Incognito or not? the patient's subjective experience of the analyst's private life

This paper examines the meaning for the patient of the analyst's personal life and personality which are ostensibly banished from the consulting room. The therapist has a not‐always‐so‐secret “secret life”; that the patient is supposed to “not know”; about. Yet, more or less unconscious perceptions, impressions, and fantasies about extratherapeutic aspects of the analyst are omnipresent and significantly color the psychoanalytic enterprise.

Moreover the analyst as a person generally plays a critical and underacknowledged role in the patient's experience of the endeavor. Constructing multiple overlapping images of the analyst and of the analytic relationship, the patient discovers himself or herself in the matrix of these relationships with various images of the analytic other. The analysand is motivated to make sense of the analyst as wholly as possible, the better to place into context the analyst's interventions. The patient's resulting view of the analyst's subjective experience acts as a lens that filters and subtly alters the meaning of the analyst's communications.

I illustrate these points by relating my work with a patient whose dreams uncannily picked up on a (consciously) unknown aspect of my private life—my having a handicapped son. The treatment thereafter centered on the patient's identification with my child (as someone “disabled") and on the meaning of her having dreamt something so personal about her therapist.     

The Question of a Jungian Community

The author describes her relationship with the reality of Parkinson's disease—how she twists and turns and pivots and falls with this rapacious intrusion, and how a new, hitherto unknown space opens between Parkinson's and herself. This new space claims its own dynamic, objective reality. In attempts to consciously access the reality of this third space, the author faces paradox, “plays” with metaphor, and tries to recognize the right “reality.” She considers Freud's reality and pleasure principles, Winnicott's iconoclastic declaration of “health being the ability to play with psychosis,” and Jung's transcendent function. She also calls on Hermes with his wings to fly through otherwise impenetrable borders. As an incantation, an evocation or a pathway, she implores Hermes to breathe in flight. In the midst of this inner work, the dragonfly literally appears, emanating transformation.     

On knowing one's patient inside out: The aesthetics of unconscious communication∗1

“Knowing one's patient inside out” is a metaphor that is intended to capture the paradoxical quality of the intersubjective field that we call the analytic relationship. The interface among trauma, dissociation, and regression is discussed in the context of unconscious communication as a transferential enactment of unsymbolized experience.The view is offered that for certain patients in particular, past experience is not so much unconscious as “frozen in time” and that a key element of the psychoanalytic relationship is bridging dissociated aspects of self through the creation of a dyadic experiential field that is both “inside” and “outside.” The writings of Michael Balint, D. W. Winnicott, and several other British object relational theorists are explored in the context of a contemporary interpersonal psychoanalytic perspective.     

Ferenczi's “Confusion of Tongues” Theory and the Analysis of the Incest Trauma

Abstract

The tender-mother transference of Ferenczi's humanistic analytic orientation was as important an advance in pioneering times as was Kohut's selfobject transference in contemporary psychoanalysis. Ferenczi's clinical theory and method began a focus on pre-oedipal experiences, which eventually became an alternate to the oedipal theory. Freud was critical of Ferenczi's formulation, leading a successful attempt to suppress his work and remove it from mainstream psychoanalysis because he believed it was “regressive.” In actuality, Ferenczi's “Confusion of Tongues” theory and “Relaxation Therapy” were prophetic and pioneering attempts to understand and treat the incest trauma (ironically the clinical data upon which Freud founded psychoanalysis 100 years ago). In the case of Miss T., Ferenczi's ideas are applied to the contemporary analysis of the incest trauma.     

The Analyst's Bad-Enough Participation

The term “bad-enough” participation refers, in a general sense, to the inevitable ways that all analysts cause their patients to suffer and, more specificaelly, within each analysis, to the ways in which the analyst's participation confirms some version of the patient's worst fears. These manifestations of “badness,” as long as they are honestly considered and creatively used, are expectable, and even therapeutically essential, aspects of analytic relatedness. Frequently, however, an analyst's bad-enough participation, despite its ubiquity and transformational potential, is attenuated or selectively overlooked. As a result, the therapeutic possibilities of analytic work may be compromised. In this paper the analyst's bad-enough participation is considered conceptually, and an argument is advanced for its therapeutic salience. Two cases are discussed, the first involving a treatment impasse, and the second, the beginning phase of a long-term treatment.     

On shame,countertransference, and analytic style

Some analysands experience a restricted space in the analytic situation with special counter-transferential consequences. The author discusses how shame is involved in these situations, and projected on to the analyst. This leads to an important choice of direction for the analyst regarding counter-transference acting out or conditions for a real analytic situation. Shame plays a special rôle in these choices of direction. The author illustrates the problem with a clinical vignette and shows how integration of shame is accomplished clinically, and continues with a discussion of the connections between the analyst's analytic style, his own communicative style as a defense against shame and the analytic styles of different analytic “schools”. A discussion of Liberman's concept, of “asymmetrical dialogue” and its connection with countertransference acting out and analytic styles, forms a conclusion to the paper.     

The dream between “here‐and‐now” and “there‐and‐then”

The analysand recounts his/her dream now, and here, in the setting. Though a dream may be recounted repeatedly, the human situation in which the recounting takes place is unrepeatable. Each moment of the analytic relationship is unique, and the recounting is essentially relational. Even if the dreamer were to read from a written text, his/her voice and non‐verbal aspects would render the communication unique. Not only the recounting but also the content recounted may present relational aspects, manifest or latent, but of a relational nature different from that of the session “here‐ and‐now”. The dream dreamt belongs to the “there‐and‐then”, and its analysis, like every analysis, implies an objectification. The analyst reacts to the recounted dream, trying to objectify it in its “there‐and‐then” and also inviting the dreamer to a common task. Working on the manifest content, free associations and interpretations of symbols, they voyage through the time and space of the analysand's life. The recounted dream involves the “here‐and‐now” of the session and asks to be meaningful as a cue in the analytic dialogue (what is the meaning of recounting this dream at this moment). At the same time it refers back to the dream dreamt, to a “there‐and‐then” which, if it is not to remain “an unopened letter”, must be received as an enigmatic challenge and a window on the unconscious, open and ready to close. Thinking of an opening of the dreamer's unconscious the analyst may find himself/herself faced with an opening of his/her own unconscious.     

Analytical Psychology and Science: Adversaries or Allies?

This article examines C. G. Jung's relationship to science as a paradigm and the relationship between the Jungian community and science. The impact of Jungian “isolation” in terms of academic dialogue, cross-theoretical influence, and absence from the public sphere is also discussed. The author examines how findings from science can enhance our functioning as analytic clinicians and improve our ability to communicate the wealth found in analytical psychology to a variety of audiences outside Jungian circles. Finally, research on analytic interaction and analytic theories of the mind/psyche is explored as well as general research that has implications for analytical psychology and psychoanalytic theory.     

Affective Honesty and Compassion Come in Many Forms: Discussion of “Love (and Hate) With the Proper Stranger: Affective Honesty and Enactment,” By Holly Levenkron,L.I.C.S.W.

Holly Levenkron's work with her patient, Ali, beautifully illustrates one way that a creative analyst makes superb use of her own experience to communicate and negotiate with great affective honesty. Holly's analytic style emphasizes the effective use of a particular kind of self-disclosure and a way of thinking about intersubjectivity and enactment associated with the contemporary Relational movement. Yet, it may be Holly's personal willingness to allow the analytic relationship to profoundly destabilize and influence her that most engages Ali in their work.

An imaginary analytic scenario is described with an analyst, Dr. X, who like Holly is destabilized by Ali but whose thinking about intersubjectivity and enactment emphasizes an empathic immersion in Ali's experience of the analytic relationship. In contrast to Holly, Dr. X focuses primarily on grasping and interpreting the adaptive strivings that animate Ali's differently organized subjective world.

The underlying capacity to acknowledge and use the analyst's own version of the patient's issues may also characterize analyses such as that of the hypothetical Dr. X—in style that are more explicitly “interpretive” (less confrontative) than Holly's work. These two contrasting approaches highlight the wide range of ways to think about intersubjectivity, enactment, and affective honesty in the analytic process.     

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.