Freud,Sullivan, Mitchell,Bion, and the Multiple Voices of International Psychoanalysis by Marco Conci,International Psychoanalytic Books,New York, 2019, 721 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Psychoanalytic Depth: A Contemporary Concept?

Although it sounds antiquated to refer to psychoanalysis as “depth psychology,” we continue to use the metaphor in relation to our clinical work. What does depth mean as we think about and engage in our work today? This is an introduction to three different arguments for a contemporary understanding of psychoanalytic depth followed by a discussion.     

A Phenomenology of Depth

In this paper, I re-vision the depth metaphor in a more contemporary epistemological frame. Rather than using depth as a “vertical” metaphor referring to the hidden, remote, or regressed, I use depth as a “horizonal” metaphor referring to the dimensionality of experience, to the ways in which all experience is structured in a figure–ground relationship. A foreground is always contextualized in relation to its background, and the series of relationships of form to field, self to world, subject to other constitute the ways in which meaning is formed, unformed, and transformed in a movement that characterizes how experience becomes what it is. The analyst’s role in deepening involves attending to the immediacy of the immersive perceptive moment, where embodied feeling-states might emerge from an unspecified ground, where the gap between what forms and its context becomes the crucible for new meaning. This entails receptivity to absence as much as presence, to the ways in which formation is always a play between what becomes and what it is not yet there.     

Dialectical Asymmetry: Commentary on an Article by Peter Shabad

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore the radical asymmetry set forth in the ethical turn, but suggest that Shabad develops a more refined notion of asymmetry grounded in the dialectics of giving and receiving. He develops what I call dialectical asymmetry where the reciprocity of human exchange offers an ethical demand for both analyst and patient. I suggest a productive comparison between Shabad’s perspective and the double asymmetry of the ethical seduction developed in the French tradition.     

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.     

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.