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Imagination and Creative Speech

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Thoughts on Dissociation and Formulation

Usually we think of consciousness as the natural state of experience. We imagine that if we are unaware of something, we must have taken some action to be unaware. It is as if experience were a beach ball. It just naturally floats along the surface. If we want to keep it underwater, we have to push it down there and sit on it; and that takes work. We assume that active exclusion of content from awareness requires effort, as if it were any other kind of action—running, thinking, and so on.

Freud's theory certainly encourages us to continue thinking this way: repression and the other defenses force into unconsciousness experiences that would otherwise appear in consciousness as naturally as the beach ball pops up from underwater. It is hard and tricky to force that ball down; we often lose our balance. And once we manage to find our balance, it is just as hard to keep the ball down there. Freud makes these two activities—forcing material out of consciousness and keeping it out—the heart of his theoiy of experiencing. After an initial act of repression, defense is continuously necessary to beat back the drive derivatives that are ceaselessly cast "up" toward consciousness—the return of the repressed.

But what if we reverse the terms and look at the appearance of experience in awareness, not as the state of affairs that occurs "naturally," "by itself," or without intervention, but as the effortful event in itself? What if things are the other way around? What if the natural tendency is for experience to remain outside awareness? What if action and effort are required, not to keep experience out of consciousness, but to bring it in? What if conscious experiencing is not so much like stifling the uproarious beach ball as it is like lifting a rock from the bottom and hauling it to the surface?

From this point of view, consciousness is closely related to language. To haul up a rock from the bottom—to make a piece of experience conscious—is to construct that experience in words, to interpret it, wittingly or unwittingly. We know about ourselves to the extent that we can spell out in words what we are like, what our experience is like—very much as Sullivan (1940, 1953) wrote long ago, and as contemporary psychoanalysts influenced by Sullivan hold today, in particular Edgar Levenson (1972, 1983, 1991).

This is also precisely the perspective on consciousness (minus the beach ball) taken by philosopher Herbert Fingarette (1969). Fingarette reminds us that the language of consciousness in Western civilization is shot through with visual metaphors. "To see" is to understand, for example. When we want to draw someone's attention to our own thoughts, we say, "Look here." We "turn our attention to" a subject as we "turn our eyes toward" something. Vision, as a matter of fact, Fingarette contends (along with a long list of Western philosophers), is actually the model for our notion of consciousness; because of this connection, we think of experience "falling" on consciousness the way light falls on the eye. We have to make an effort not to see. And just as in everyday life we assume that seeing is the passive registration of light (though today's psychology of perception would certainly take issue here), even today we tend to assume that consciousness is the passive registration of the contents of the mind. We do not credit consciousness with constitutive or shaping properties, in other words, but see it only as the receptacle for what we will allow to fall into it. In this way we come to take for granted that we must make an effort not to be conscious. Instead, says Fingarette, we must conceive consciousness as active, not passive; it is something we "do." We are "doers," and consciousness is the exercise of a skill.

To "spell-out" is often, but not always, to produce detailed verbal representations of something that is becoming conscious. Though Fingarette refers to "allusive" and "cryptic" forms of spelling out that are not transparently verbal, spelling-out always bears a "close relation" to "perfectly straightforward examples of linguistic activity" (p. 40). In any case, spelling-out is always a matter of becoming explicitly conscious of something. Spelling-out is, in the terminology I have been using, interpretation in reflective consciousness.

It is a very short step—in fact, it is more like dropping the last piece into a mosaic that is already intelligible—to the conclusion that, in a frame of reference in which consciousness is active interpretation and not passive registration, the basic defensive process must be the prevention of interpretation in reflective awareness, not the exclusion from awareness of elements that are already fully formed. If reflective experience is created by interpretation, such experience is avoided by not interpreting, or by not-spelling-out. And not interpreting, or not-spelling-out, are essentially ways to define dissociation. Defensively motivated unformulated experience, then, or what I have referred to as "familiar chaos," is the way the dynamic unconscious looks in a constructivist, dissociation-based model. Familiar chaos is to dissociation what repressed content is to repression.

This is a definition of dissociation as an active defensive process. In many discussions, especially those centered on trauma, dissociation is portrayed as the result of "breakdown"; it is not a defensive measure itself, but is instead the result of the overwhelming of one's capacity for active defensive measures. It is the personality's last fallback position; there is nowhere else to go and absolutely nothing else to do, at least nothing consistent with continued sentience. Dissociation in this frame of reference represents an inability to reflect on experience, not an unconscious avoidance of doing so. It is about survival and necessity; there is no element of unconscious preference involved. I want to find in the use of dissociation, however, the same kind of active and preferential world making we take for granted in thinking about the traditional defenses, something on the order of what Philip Bromberg (1993, 1996b) describes as a kind of "normative," or perhaps better, expectable, dissociation (see also Mitchell, 1991, 1993; Hirsch, 1994; Davies, 1996b; Harris, 1996b; Flax, 1996). That is, whether the unitary self is an accomplishment or an illusion (and it has been repeatedly described as both), it is at the very least an effort. What is difficult or painful to put together we tend to leave apart.

What is Dissociated?

Dissociation is the avoidance of certain formulations of present experience. It is part of the activity by which we organize experience; it is part of our readiness to construct experience in particular, stable ways. Like the processes we call "mental contents" or "representations," dissociation is a channel or current along which certain meanings can flow and others cannot. To dissociate is simply to restrict the interpretations one makes of experience. Or perhaps better stated, because the interpretation is hard to separate from the experience itself, dissocation is a restriction on the experiences we allow ourselves to have. Even memory is an experience in the present, so that a dissociated memory is one we will allow to be constructed only in certain ways—and especially not in other ways.

New Meanings

As far as it goes, it is true to describe dissociation as the unconscious refusal to make verbal interpretations; but going that far is not enough. Although technically accurate, that kind of account, at least unembellished, would turn away from what I have been at pains to emphasize: the clinical import and subtlety of the constitutive properties of verbal language. We would again find ourselves in jeopardy of falling back into a psychology of mental essences and linguistic labels for them. There is nothing in a purely mechanical account of language, in other words, that helps us understand in what ways a verbal interpretation can be more than a label, nothing to tell us why spelling-out is more than spelling. A hermeneutic or interpretivist theory of dissociation should help us to understand, in a more phenomenologically compelling way, what it means to have a new reflective experience and what it means to prevent one.

To be capable of new experience is to be capable of not knowing what will come next. It is when one actually has some kind of sensuous contact with William James's (1890) "movements" or "feelings of tendency" in thought that expectation and the conventionality it breeds are weakest. At such times we have an interested sense of what might arise from these vague "movements"; we have an unworded and unwordable sense of what we might think next—unwordable because to word it would transform it into what it merely tends toward. But at the best times, we are more interested in allowing "movements" to become meaning than in forcing them in any particular direction. Reflective consciousness under these conditions "happens," which is to say that we feel comfortable letting language take its own shape, in the way that in fables, smoke streaming from the mouth of a bottle takes the ultimately recognizable, but utterly unpredictable, shape of a djinn. Rigid perceptions of the other and oneself are least likely at such moments.

Of course, we are certainly interested in being more than conduits. We hope that over time we and the patient, within the confines of our own little universe, and then in the larger world, come to use language more flexibly and precisely than before. We hope that we come to a greater acceptance that speech and thought are always incomplete and imperfect, and to an appreciation that saying and thinking one thing always means not saying or thinking another—that language constantly requires us to burn bridges to meanings not selected and articulated. And we hope that, however precisely we are able to express ourselves, we will be able to tolerate knowing that we never finish saying anything.

Language structures reflective consciousness. We have only the categories and processes of language within which to construe reflective meaning, which is the only meaning we can know directly. If a meaning cannot yet be spoken, it does not yet exist in a form in which we can grasp it; and if it is not among that virtually limitless crowd of phenomena that language has the capacity to represent, it can never become reflective meaning at all. It can be a different kind of meaning, and it is certainly meaningful, but it cannot enter reflective consciousness.

There are many moments between patient and analyst—of intimacy, say—which are complete in and of themselves, and which cannot be adequately spelled-out by verbal description. Words would often ruin such moments, and those moments play a very important part in creating the mutative effects of psychoanalysis. But we cannot strive for them. In this way, they share the quality that makes reflective consciousness authentic: they must just happen.

For the most part, what we and our patients are trying to do is to bring into words experience that has existed before that time in a different, inarticulate form. And often, the meanings we work with are less than fully expressed until they reach such a stage—until they can be said. We and our patients are not aiming at the unnameable bliss of mysticism, nor are we trying to create art. What we do bears the same relation to nonverbal experience that the work of the critic bears to a play or a piece of sculpture. Like the critic, we would not be drawn to our work unless we had a greater appreciation and love of the subject matter than most people do. Psychoanalysts love the forms experience can take as critics love art. And it is true that to become and remain good analysts, we must retain that direct and unmediated appreciation. But our relation to our subject of study—to experience—does not remain merely appreciative. We are driven to understand. Creating experience, by itself, does not satisfy what we want from our work; we must say things about what we create. We acknowledge how often the important parts of psychoanalytic treatment occur in the shadow of the interpretive task, spontaneously and apart from verbal representation; we hope, and even pray, that we and the patient will find our way to that kind of authentic experience. But we do not know how to make authenticity happen. So, while we are grateful for the unexpected and inexpressible benefits along the way, we focus our conscious attention on trying to say things.

Even when we limit our task in this way, however, we are immediately aware of invisible obstacles. How very difficult it is to say things that matter! In psychoanalysis, an activity in which the affectively charged nature of what we are trying to say means that we are often ambivalent about formulating experience in words, we use a generic term, resistance, to describe our difficulty. But resistance is not limited to the clinical situation. In both everyday life and clinical psychoanalysis we are constantly tempted to say things before they are ready to be said, to force the matter by the use of conventionalized or stereotyped language. Such use of language is, in Mallarmé's metaphor (quoted by Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 44), the worn coin placed silently in the hand. It is precise, agreed-upon, consensually validated; it is what it is, nothing more. There is nothing suggestive about it, nothing that points beyond itself. The conventional use of language, however central it is to the smooth operation of our day-to-day lives, does not give birth to meaning; it counts it, notes it, passes over it. This use of language reveals nothing new, but it does grease the tracks. Life is easiest when we use language in a way that reveals only what we already know. All of us are prone to this temptation.

Merleau-Ponty (1964b) distinguishes "empirical speech," the established usage of conventional expressions, from "creative speech," which "frees the meaning captive in the thing." "To speak," he says about authentic speech, "is not to put a word under each thought. . . . We sometimes have, on the contrary, the feeling that a thought has been spoken—not replaced by verbal counters but incorporated in words and made available in them" (p. 44). He goes on to discuss the creative use of language this way: "Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the meaning of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body" (p. 44). And earlier (1964a), he tells us that speech

This is hardly a vision of language as passive, docile, or merely categorical. It is instead apocalytic, intuitive, antic, possessed. Language is no servant; it is disobedient and revelatory. Language is a dervish. It belongs to us and it carries us away, all in the same instant. There can be discomfort in the realization that we really don't know what we will experience next. We do not even know what we are going to mean, what we will want (intend) to say. This uncertainty is the price we pay if we choose to wait for our thoughts to come to us of themselves. If we want to become able to reflect upon some portion of whatever exists apart from words, or if we want to reword what we have worded before, that previous experience must remain unformulated until it can be said in a way that does it justice. It must feel right to say it. We know to treasure what comes before speech, particularly when we can feel its stirring, because then we know we are inhabited by some sort of nascent meaning. A worthwhile interpretation is not one the analyst (or the patient) has arrived at by "figuring it out."

Experience that we know directly just appears. We have the experience of receiving it. We can try to reconstruct its history, and there is certainly something to be gained in this way, as Freud (in the case of his self-analysis), William James, and many others have shown us. But we cannot observe directly whatever implicit or nonverbal forms or structures of experience occur apart from our capacity for reflection. However close we may sometimes feel (or even be) to nascent meaning, we will never be able to see what it is. For it occurs outside the range of the categories at our disposal; and as soon as it comes into view, it is not what it was. Unconscious meaning outside the reach of words is like light or sound that occurs at frequencies and wavelengths outside the range of our senses; we have ample evidence that it exists, but we do not have the equipment to experience it directly.

The Pragmatics of Creative Speech

An essay by the literary critic Denis Donoghue (1981) offers a hint about the nature of creative language. Donoghue writes,

Then, later in the essay, Donoghue brings up a television play called Spend, Spend, Spend, the fictionalized true story of Vivian Nicholson, an English woman who won a huge amount of money in the football pools and proceeded to live up to the title of the play. The play deals with whether the money changed Vivian, and it answers its own question with a resounding negative. Why doesn't the money change the lives of the Nicholsons? Donoghue sugggests that Vivian is the product of her emotionally barren life, which has left her in a position in which, "If the structure of her feeling doesn't change when she comes into big money, the reason is that nothing that happens to her amounts to an experience. Vivian is locked in her feeling as in her language" (p. 17).

An example of how Vivian is "locked in her language" is the way the word "bugger" is "shouted again and again, as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb" (p. 17). "Most of the feelings in the play are violent, but the violence never finds an authentic form for itself; it's always vented in the same few ways. Every expression is belated, a cliché; Vivian's only speech is the speech of others" (p. 16).

And then, after a brief foray into literary criticism, Donoghue writes an intriguing couple of sentences. "But many events casually called experiences are merely happenings. The test of an experience is that it alters the structure of our feeling; if it doesn't, it has been merely a circumstance, it hasn't entered our lives in any radical sense" (pp. 17-18).

Here we have a perfect statement of what I want to say dissociation is—and by implication, what formulation is, too. As if to confirm it, Donoghue goes on to discuss an essay by Walter Benjamin about soldiers who came home from World War I with "nothing to report, no stories to tell." "The reason is that their months or years in the trenches never became real in the sense of altering their structures of feeling; or they overwhelmed whatever structures already obtained, rendering the soldiers numb" (p. 18). Good war fiction, Donoghue remarks, is usually written years after the war has ended. It takes that long for the experience to be made one's own,

The mere contingency of events, even if we are aware of the contingency, is not necessarily experience. Experience must be made from contingency, and that requires the articulation we can only accomplish by the creative use of language.

We are now in a better position to understand what it means to refer to language as creative or authentic. Language is being used creatively when we do not try to send it anywhere in particular, but allow it the freedom to follow the lead of our feeling, when, as Merleau-Ponty says, we allow language to be taken apart and put together again by our thought. "Language is much more like a sort of being than a means" (1964b, p. 43), he says elsewhere; "we do not have to consult some inner lexicon that gives us the pure thoughts covered up by the words or forms we are perceiving; we have only to lend ourselves to its [language's] life, to its movement of differentiation and articulation, and to its eloquent gestures" (p. 42). What a wonderful phrase: "we have only to lend ourselves to its life." That phrase is precisely what I want to say, for it contains within it the recognition of the power of expression we can have in language, but only if we give ourselves over to it and do not force meanings, allowing them to arise within it.

We use language creatively or authentically, in other words, when we treat unformulated experience as "creative disorder." By cultivating uncertainty and following the lead of our feeling, by following the point of emotional urgency on whatever path it charts through the time it takes to make a narrative, we create the best, truest stories, and they heal us by bringing what has hurt us into a meaningful relation with experience we already identify as our own. Our pain thereby becomes part of what we identify as ourselves—as our "self"—and ceases its disembodied, unstoried wanderings, what Loewald (1960) called its "ghost" existence.

It is not necessarily true, then, that a dissociated memory is unremembered. It may very well be possible to recapture the contingency of the relevant events, but the sequence is merely a fact; it has no place in our experience. To spell-out is not merely to bring an event into reflective consciousness, but to create for it what Donald Spence (1987) so aptly refers to as a "narrative home." And the opposite of dissociation is therefore not really the articulation of experience, at least not in the sense in which articulation means the creation of mere clarity, as in Sullivan's ideal of consensual validation. The opposite of dissocation is the particular kind of vivid and feelingful articulation we describe as imagination.

True Stories

I have said all these things: the best stories create experience; simple contingency is not experience; true stories heal. But what is a true story, if we are linking it with experience, and if we are not necessarily linking experience with what "actually" happened? Is an objective appreciation of events to play no role at all in our construction of narrative? And what, then, is dissociation, if not simply the refusal to acknowledge the contingency of "real" events? Do we skate here along the edge of an unchecked subjectivism or relativism in which the truth of stories is merely what we wish it to be, and the content of our dissociations is open to endless debate?

A certain degree of subjectivism is inevitable for anyone who seeks meaning in life and not the mere sequence and conglomeration of events—and when we get down to brass tacks, that includes pretty much everyone, even those who, like Vivian Nicholson, don't know how to do it. Why? Because when it comes to the measurement of reliability and validity, meaning is uncooperative. This is not to say that facts do not have their own truth. Of course they do; and that truth is often essential, as in the current controversy over adult memories of childhood sexual abuse (e.g., Davies and Frawley, 1994; Davies, 1996a; Harris, 1996a). But psychoanalysis has no magical, truth-serum way to establish the facts, and does not pretend to. Psychoanalysis deals with meanings.

So what is a true story? What is it that imagination creates and dissociation prevents?

The only good answers to these questions are allusive. Any concrete set of criteria would destroy what it sets out to describe, just the way an insistence on words can ruin certain moments in treatment. We can say that true stories represent something important, even essential, about what they describe. But that is so pale and generic a statement as to be useless. We can say that true stories are either full of feeling or, if they are not, like Raymond Carver's purposefully flattoned short stories, that they cause us deep feeling, or anguish over its absence. But once again, as right as this answer is, it, too, is too concrete to be very useful in any particular instance.

The best answers I have run across are from The Things They Carried (1990), one of Tim O'Brien's novels of the Vietnam War. Rather than try to paraphrase O'Brien's language, which is irreducible, I quote two passages at length. The book is fictionalized autobiography, although it is never entirely clear what is fiction and what is fact, and O'Brien places this ambiguity, which he believes is inescapable, at the book's heart. O'Brien is never generic: he always refers to "war stories" when the stories are about war. But there are other stories in his book as well. O'Brien's work is about all of us. And despite the ambiguity in his side-by-side presentations of story truth and "what actually happened," it is also true to say that these horrific and deeply moving stories of war are unimaginable without "what actually happened." The facts, it turns out, are essential, in war as they are in the rest of life. The meaning of "story" for O'Brien therefore reminds us that though reality is there, always, we have no choice but to grasp it through the very particular lenses offered by our time, place, traditions, and personhood. Nevertheless, each picture that convinces us, that furthers a dialogue between people who seek the truth, is true and objective. A good story, as Irwin Hoffman (1983) writes in a different context, "gives meaning or shape to something 'out there' that has among its objective properties a kind of amenability to being assimilated in just this way" (p. 409). In the following passage from O'Brien, he and several others, including a young man named Curt Lemon, are on patrol in a quiet forest in Vietnam in 1970, when Lemon steps on a mine.

Should we call this "psychic reality"? That trivializes it, and, just as bad, it is inaccurate. To call it psychic reality implies a contrast between private and public versions of what is true, as if we could see what was "really" true about O'Brien's version if we could just compare it to the "official," depersonalized one. But that separation is precisely what O'Brien denies.

Later in the book, a very brief chapter describes what it is to tell a story. Note that O'Brien makes the same distinction here between experience and happening that Donoghue does, calling it the difference between story-truth and happening-truth. I quote the chapter in full.

Dissociation and Imagination

This seems to leave us a long way from conceiving dissociation to be a matter of the defensive refusal to interpret unformulated experience. And yet—perhaps not so far. Dissociation is the unwillingness to allow one's imagination free play. It is the unwillingness to allow oneself freedom of thought. Yes, it is true, dissociation sometimes does involve nothing more than the defensive refusal to formulate or interpret. Sometimes, that is, dissociation is a simple matter of preventing a certain kind of experience or memory altogether. That is the meaning of dissociation with which we are most familiar. But it is not the most frequent kind of dissociative event. To conceive the most common sorts of dissociation, the kinds we see in psychoanalytic practice every day, we must add that dissociation is the refusal to allow prereflective experience to attain the full-bodied reflective meaning it might have if we left it alone and simply observed the results of our own capacity to create it. Dissociation is an intervention designed, in advance of the fact, to avoid the possibility that a full-bodied meaning will occur. Dissociated meaning is style without substance, the story that accounts for what it addresses but tells us nothing we don't already know, the conversation we can fill in without having to listen. Dissociation is the deletion of imagination.

Sometimes we refuse to imagine fully the unstructured possibilities and alternatives that are implicit to the stories we already tell about our lives, the possibilities that would be apparent if we were to allow ourselves to loosen the ties that bind the ways we live. To allow ourselves this kind of imagination might provoke in us the generic anxiety we feel about any kind of freedom (e.g., Fromm, 1941), but it would not necessarily be specifically noxious. Other times, we refuse to imagine memories and other aspects of our experience that we have encoded as action or practice. Now, these experiences, if we reflected on them with real feeling, would be likely to lead us into something ranging from the quite specific anxiety associated with selectively disavowed experience to outright terror. In either case, however, the alternatives—fully imagined, partially articulated, or dissociated—are the outcomes of the language we use.

What determines when we use creative language? When do we think with our full capacity for imagination? This question seems clinically crucial, because I am saying that our reflective experience is really only full-blooded when we do use language this way. Should we not know whatever we can about how to encourage it?

We should, of course. On the other hand, this is probably another one of those questions that should not be answered too precisely. A precise answer would trivialize the question and, more than likely, would seem clumsy or foolish, something like trying to paraphrase a poem.

Who can say how we come to say exactly what we mean? Our capacity to use language well is probably more accurately understood as our willingness to let language serve our deepest intentions—and those, of course, are always beyond any easy description. Merleau-Ponty (1964b) writes that

What we can do as clinicians is to be sensitive to the evidence of dissociation, which we note as absences, gaps, contradictions, stereotypes, repetitions, and dead spots in the material. In an atmosphere of safety, the patient then collaborates with us on the task of understanding if this is, indeed, a dissociative process, and if so, why it is necessary and what it obscures. During the process, with patience and luck, the patient may gain access to imagination. We cannot make language do our bidding, at least not in any but the most superficial sense; but to some degree, we can clear the field so that we do the least possible to prevent the eruptions of our own "wild logos" or "wild-flowering mind" (Merleau-Ponty, quoted by McCleary, 1964), our spontaneous and unpredictably engaged capacity to speak the truth.

A man in his early 30s, quite devoted to his analysis, used to refer to certain brief and precious periods in his treatment as "speaking from the heart." He never knew when speaking from the heart would start, and once it did begin, he never knew how long it would last. But it was both serious and exhilirating, because during these times, he knew that he meant every word he said. Every word, magically, was exactly what he wanted to say; his language and his intention were one. He and I never could identify what set off these episodes, which lasted somewhere between two and seven or eight minutes. They did not seem reliably related to the content under discussion, and there was no accompanying variation in the transference-countertransference that either he or I could identify. Speaking from the heart came and went on its own schedule, the way writers describe an "opening" into their material that suddenly allows them to type furiously for a little while, knowing that what they are writing will be good when they read it back, but having no idea why it is suddenly given to them.

Who is it that speaks from the heart? Whose language is creative language? Who is it that imagines? Is it consciousness itself? It must be. But it can't be, at least it can't be consciousness alone, because what we say at such times is beyond our power to predict. Is imagination, then, the sudden appearance of that unconscious organizing activity I have been discussing? Is it the unconscious that takes hold of speech and makes it true? In the most concrete sense, it can't be, because that unconscious activity is nonverbal. And yet—yes, too; it must be, at least in part, because we have no better way to refer to our deepest intentions than to defer to the mysterious authority of the unconscious. Conscious and unconscious: that brief catalogue seems to exhaust our parts. But once again: is it perhaps some other thing that possesses us and speaks at these moments? Are we taken by the Muse? But no: this way isn't adequate, either, because we know it is we ourselves who mean what we say, not someone else, and certainly not an anonymous presence. And yet, we must admit that it is indeed the Muse who speaks, or the spirit of culture itself, because we find that when we speak from the heart we are suddenly using the semiotic tools at our disposal in ways we could never have imagined.

The one who speaks from the heart must be all of these and none of them alone. It must be a voice that knits together all our parts, if only for a little while.

Imagination and Consensual Validation

I can now be more specific about a theme sounded in earlier chapters: the inadequacy of Sullivan's account of language. Now I can say that the problem with Sullivan's theory of consensual validation and the syntaxic mode of experience is that it does not recognize imagination and the creative use of language.

Sullivan himself was unquestionably imaginative, and his writing, which is never dull, shows it (though whether it is bane or balm is a matter of taste). But when he moved from the practice of language to its conception, he sheared off every tiling that is quirky, poetic, and difficult about linguistic expressions, all in the interest of his opera tionism. Yes, of course, language must be understood by others; and so, yes, of course, consensual validation is desirable. But Sullivan missed something essential about consensual validation: he didn't see that it could easily degenerate into empirical speech, the worn coin placed silently in the hand. He didn't see that language was most important when it was revelatory, and that, at those moments, it was less important for it to be understandable to others than for it to be generative to one's own sense of experience. Imagination brings thoughts alive. It is important, later on perhaps, that one be able to say them to someone else, of course, but that comes with the territory; that is a consequence that follows naturally from the fact that the kernel of the self is Mead's (1934) "generalized other"; other people always understand us when we clearly understand ourselves. What is more important, especially for psychoanalysis, is that one be able to say one's thoughts to oneself, even if they are messy, incomplete, and a bit confused. The capacity to say one's thoughts to oneself (and, in the case of free association, to the other) is what spells the defeat of dissociation. And if one's thoughts are densely poetic, or even just plain opaque, and if that poetry or opacity makes one's interlocutor's work difficult, and even makes the interlocutor wonder about whether the speaker's language is autistic—well, then, so be it. Eventually a meaning for the speaker's utterance will come clear in the mind of the listener, or the listener will think of questions to ask that will help along the process. Communication is always the eventual point, just as Sullivan said. But there is no reason that it should always be easy. To communicate about a matter of substance is liable to be difficult. Maybe it even should be difficult, because, after all, the thought hasn't been spoken before. Difficulty should not too easily be attributed to parataxis. In "A Prayer for Old Age," William Butler Yeats wrote,

And Sullivan's most frequently quoted aphorism (though I do not know where it comes from) is, to his everlasting credit, and despite what I have just said, "God save me from a treatment that goes well!"

Dissociation and the Interpersonal Field

It is a clinical commonplace today that the patient and the analyst cocreate their experience of the analytic situation, but it is less often pointed out that patient and analyst cocreate the environment in which it becomes possible to think certain thoughts and not others, to have certain feelings, perceptions, experiences. It is the ongoing nature of the relatedness in the analytic situation that determines when experience must remain unformulated and dissociated and when a new perception can be articulated. Reflective meaning, in other words, is an interpersonal event.

This is a view Sullivan pioneered. "Selective inattention," says he (1956), in reference to people's omission of crucial parts of both their histories and current events in their lives, "is so suave that we are not warned that we have not heard the important thing in the story—that it has just been dropped out" (p. 52). He goes on to say that the important thing simply has been overlooked, "so that we just do not notice the gap where it belongs" (pp. 52-53).

Dissociation always goes on without the the awareness of either the patient or the analyst. That is its nature. Analyst and patient build a relationship together that seems natural and seamless, and the longer it goes on, the more natural it seems. Its naturalness is not as simple as it feels, though, because as Sullivan (1940) puts it, "there is nothing else as powerfully motivated as that which is happening" (p. 190). In other words, what seems natural, and therefore unworthy of remark, has come about for reasons that lie at the heart of the reason why the patient came for treatment in the first place. The very naturalness of the relationship obscures some of what is most important to know; often it takes some kind of problem, or even upheaval, to bring the obscured to light. Time and time again, when I have learned something unexpected about a patient, or about the relationship that is taking place between us, it has seemed to me that my capacity to understand was potentiated by a shift in the nature of the interpersonal field. I have not necessarily intended such shifts in any conscious way and cannot take credit for them. Yet they are often responsible for my capacity to transcend a dissociation and articulate a new understanding.

If, as psychoanalysts, we were able to satisfy directly our motives to grasp what we do not know, it could only be because we were successful in a direct exercise of will. And we know how much good that does. Anything like "a will, in contradistinction to the vector addition of integrating tendencies" (Sullivan, 1940, p. 191) is bound to be illusory. We take for granted our inability to force self-understanding. But we can depend no more reliably on our capacity to grasp what is transpiring between ourselves and the other person in a relationship, because we do not have the power to decide these things for ourselves. "Situations call out motivations" (p. 191), says Sullivan, reversing the usual polarity. Here we have the core of the thinking that Sullivan himself never found a way to articulate, but that he would eventually inspire in others (e.g., Levenson, 1972, 1983, 1991). Sullivan did not understand that the analyst was embedded in the analytic relationship right along with the patient, but what he did say about the matter allowed succeeding generations to extend his ideas to embrace that insight (see Levenson, 1992).

A Clinical Illustration

At the time of the clinical incident I recount, I had been seeing Bob for several years, three times a week. I would have liked to see him even more often, and he felt the same, but as it was, even though I charged him a reduced fee, his treatment was a great sacrifice of both time and finances for him. He was deeply involved in the analysis, though, and with me, so despite the sacrifice, he never had any question about continuing—until the episode I narrate.

Bob's feeling about me was usually warm and appreciative; he said more than once, with real feeling, that I was the father he had not had. I was a father who appreciated how hard he tried to be good and how much he sacrificed for others, including me; Bob badly wanted me to demonstrate a continuing understanding of how staying in treatment strained his time, money, and emotional resources to the limit. In fact, it did not feel difficult most of the time for me to provide that understanding. I felt paternal toward Bob, and it was gratifying to feel helpful. Bob's appreciation merely added to all that. It seemed likely enough to me that our relationship was an enactment of something important in his past, but I was content to wait to find out the signficance of what it was we were doing. I did not find the assumption that we were involved in an enactment objectionable, and the thought did not make the very real emotional contact between us mean any less to me, because I believe enactment is continuous, even when we cannot see any particular problematic involvement with the patient. We know that most enactments are invisible; to that I will add that they are invisible because they constitute nonlinguistically structured organizing activity that is dissociated, or Schafer's (1983) "disclaimed action." All we can do is continue the work with the hope and intention of perceiving what we and the patient are up to, and of eventually interpreting and understanding it.

I knew that Bob's father most often had been silent, withdrawn, and depressed, a state frequently punctuated by episodes of rage. It turned out, though, that the warmth between the patient and me was not entirely absent from the patient's actual experience of his father, who was the more emotionally available parent. The boy had managed to be with his father at certain times, usually just before the father would fall asleep, when an uncharacteristic calm and content on the father's part allowed the two of them to spend a few close, silent minutes together. The boy would tell his father some of the things that were on his mind, and at these times, unlike others, the father could tolerate listening. It hurt when, invariably, the boy realized as he talked that his father had fallen asleep; but these times were precious nevertheless, and understandably so.

Despite these times with his father, though, the duration of warm feeling between Bob and me was new for Bob, and the continuity was probably always fragile. I realized that it would be easy for me to fail him in some way. It was probably even inevitable. And I did. Every now and then Bob felt I had betrayed him in some fashion, or did not appreciate him, and he responded with disappointment and rage.

One day Bob arrived for a session and, as he lay down, told me blithely (as it seemed to me then) that he would not be paying me on time when I billed him next; he would be several weeks late. I have an agreement with patients that they pay me the session after they receive the bill, and I had sent him that month's bill two weeks before. It was also my impression that Bob had not yet paid the previous month's bill.

But this situation was not simple, because I had several times stretched my payment policy considerably with Bob; I knew he was, if anything, more interested in paying me than I was in being paid. He dreamed of being able to "hold up his end," by which he meant being able to pay a full fee. Over and over again, sometimes angrily, he expressed the concern that I probably resented having reduced his fee, and that if I did, then I should just say so and he would leave. He refused to be a burden.

Of course, no matter how sincere Bob was in wanting to hold up his end (and I did have the impression that he was sincere), the reduced fee was also dear to him, because it meant I was doing something for him. And I was doing it for a reason he liked: I wanted him to be able to come more than the once a week he could have afforded at my regular fee. That is, the fee was evidence that I cared about him. I was to find out that, unbeknownst to me, I wanted his appreciation for my generosity, just as he wanted mine for his sacrifices.

Anyhow, laying aside all the complexity about the fee for the time being, the upshot was this: if Bob was late paying, I knew it was always because he simply did not have the money.

Yet in this instance I found that his announcement irritated me. It seemed to me, as I thought back on it, that he had not asked me if he could defer last month's payment, and here he was announcing his intention to defer this month's payment. This was not a request at all. I would probably not have thought twice about his tone if he had paid the previous month's bill; but this entitled assumption that I would be delighted to put up with any payment schedule he chose seemed outrageous. I was annoyed.

In a tone that expressed my annoyance, I asked Bob what he thought it was about to just assume my compliance with his wishes. Why had he not asked me if it was all right to defer payment?

Bob was immediately enraged and went on the attack, telling me I should know he would pay me, that he always paid me, that I had no right to question his integrity. This attempt to turn the tables on me, for that is what it seemed, did not have the effect, let us say, of dampening my annoyance. I returned to my original point and tried to tell Bob that I was not concerned in the slightest with his integrity, but with his apparent assumption that he did not need to ask me about deferring payment. He responded by saying that he guessed I had a point; but within a few seconds he had said something subtle that denied that very point. He then repeated his accusation. I responded by repeating my own point, and he once again agreed, then subtly took it back. I felt that he was trying to have his cake and eat it, too—that he wanted to appear to agree, thereby complying with what he thought I wanted, while simultaneously but indirectly suggesting that what he really thought was that he should be able to do as he pleased. My attempt to draw his attention to this process, needless to say, only fanned the flames.

Bob was soon in the midst of an eruption of volcanic proportions. He spent much of the remainder of the session shouting at me, and we ended having made almost no headway. Before he left, we both made efforts to reconnect by trying to express concern for one another, but neither of us had an effective grasp of what had happened.

We chewed over this incident unproductively for the next two sessions. Bob remained very angry, and I was unable to find anything more effective to do than to tell him there must be something more to the situation than met the eye, because (I said) all he seemed interested in doing was punishing me. That remark was true, but none of the ways I thought to say it helped. Once in a while Bob agreed with me, because even he could see that there was simply nothing I could say that he did not deride; but within a moment or two he was once again telling me that I, as the analyst, should simply never have become irritated with him. It had been either wrong or a demonstration of incapacity. I told him that, at this point, we should try to understand what we had been enacting. We could try to understand what he was looking for in my response. Was he missing something from me? What accounted for the extent and power of f his reactio?

Bob would momentarily be mollified by the tone of what I said, but my invitation fell on deaf ears, and within a few minutes he would start up again in the same way. Things were going nowhere. He remained angry, and I was frustrated and very distressed and guilty. It seemed possible that this treatment that had been so important to Bob, and to me, had been irreparably damaged. I felt I should have handled things differently, though I wasn't quite sure how.

In the meantime, it was time for me to do my billing again. As is my custom, I sent Bob a bill that listed both the current charges and the balance he was carrying from the month before. Over the weekend, before he came for his next appointment, Bob left a message on my answering machine expressing shock at the size of the bill. As far as he was concerned, he had paid the previous month's bill. On the day he paid it, he had not thought to write the check before the session, he said, and in order not to inconvenience me, he had written it in the waiting room after the session, put it in an envelope, and slipped it under the door of my office. He had done this before, usually telling me his plans as he left the office at the end of a session, and I had accepted the practice without comment, so he simply assumed the bill had been paid. Now he was afraid that maybe he hadn't paid it, and he said he was panicked about where he could possibly get the money to satisfy his responsibility.

The next time we met, I told Bob it was terribly unfortunate that this issue should come up at a time like this, but that I had no record of the payment. I told him that because of the financial burden this imposed on him, I hoped the mistake had been mine, but because I had never made this kind of error before, I could not simply assume it was my doing. I told him I was sorry to put him to the trouble (and you can imagine, under the circumstances, that I was), but that I would have to ask him to locate the cancelled check. Even if he had left it in my office, I told him, I needed to make sure that I was the one who endorsed it.

The next session, Bob came in waving the cancelled check, which did indeed have my signature on the back of it. I had apparently not recorded in my account book half-a-dozen checks I had grouped together and deposited in the bank. I was unhappy with myself and I told him so.

The expected attack did not come. Bob's fire had subsided somewhat. Instead of continuing to express his rage, which I actually might have preferred, he reported, simply and calmly, that he would be terminating at the end of the month. He spent a good deal of time shaking his head over my lack of responsibility, and he went back to the earlier episode again, making the same points but less furiously. Of course, I asked him what my most recent error meant to him about me, or about my feelings about him, but he just rather sadly repeated the charges he had already made.

I was not entirely surprised by this turn of events; I had worried about something on just this order, especially after my accounting error. Privately, I thought that the fact I had neglected to record his check was probably not a meaningful reaction to him in particular, because his check had turned out to be one of several in that batch. But I still believed, and told Bob, that we needed to understand what exactly had happened between us, and that it would not be in his interest, if he did terminate, to do so prior to recovering the positive feelings we had had between us for so long. I told him that it seemed to me, no matter how angry he was at me now, and no matter how badly he felt I had behaved, that we had spent several positive years working together, and that if he left, I wanted to make sure he took those experiences with him, too. I reminded him of some of the most important things that had taken place over the years. I was very sad at the prospect of his departure, and I expressed it.

In response, Bob said bitterly, "You made me dig up the check. It was such a pain. I had to spend an hour and a half looking through boxes in the garage. You couldn't just believe me."

I don't know exactly why this remark accomplished something that none of Bob's accusations had. It's not as if the remark awoke some dormant empathy for him, because there was nothing vulnerable in it; quite the opposite. What he said certainly did not express, in any direct way, a fear on his part that I did not trust him any more; he did not even suggest such a thing, at least not in so many words. But somehow, in response to his reference to my not believing him, that is the thought that came into my head. Suddenly I realized that the fact that he had already paid the bill for the month before meant that the entire disturbing interaction had been built on false grounds. I saw that I had reacted to him with irritation to begin with, because I had believed he was being blasé about a debt to me that in fact did not exist. Had I realized he did not owe me for the extra month, I now knew, I would not have been irritated when he told me, with that apparent lack of concern, that he would be late paying the next month's bill.

I remember feeling intensely relieved, because I finally thought there might be a way to get a foot in the door. I did not know what the answer to the question I wanted to ask would be, but I knew I had a good question, and it seemed like the first one I had come up with in weeks. Asking a patient to join in an open-ended inquiry (e.g., "What might it be about, do you think, that your reaction to what I did is so intense?") is not helpful when the patient is stymied, because the patient, even if he can manage a degree of collaboration at a bad moment, really has no idea where to start. Yet, up to now I had been reduced to taking just this posture with Bob, because I could not see how to ask a more meaningful question about the problems we were having.

I had been suffering from a lack of imagination, a disturbance in my capacity to think and speak creatively about this problem. I have no doubt that I would have remained frozen on that same unproductive path, too, if Bob had not said what he did, allowing me, for whatever reason, to breach the dissociation. Perhaps my imagination could not reawaken until I felt the kind of concern I could only muster once the demise of the treatment was imminent. Or perhaps Bob's remark, which had consciously struck me as bitter, was mournful as well, and I had responded to that aspect of it without knowing it.

At any rate, at this point I could ask Bob—and I did so tentatively—if it was possible that he thought I didn't trust him. Almost immediately, his eyes filled with tears, and he said, still angrily but with a certain surprise, that yes, it certainly did seem that I had lost trust in him over the last few weeks, though that thought had not directly occurred to him before this. The atmosphere in the room softened rapidly, in an almost tactile way. Armed with this new point of view, we quickly went over the events of the previous weeks. It had seemed to him that I had chided him for not paying his bills more quickly. I had tried to explain to him that the irritation I had felt on that first occasion had not been about that issue, but he had never really believed me. Bob had felt betrayed, because he felt that I, knowing how important it was to him that he hold up his end, and be a good son, should never have doubted that he would pay me as soon as he could. And then, when the error took place in my accounting, I had not believed his insistent claim that he had paid his bill, which of course simply compounded the problem and the hurt.

I explained that my request that he bring in the cancelled check had not been a matter of belief in him or lack of it, but of figuring out which of us had made an honest error. This time my explanation made sense to him.

In that same session, I reminded Bob how badly he had always wanted his father to appreciate his efforts, and how badly he had wanted the same thing from me in the past. I told him that during the previous weeks, seeing matters as he had, he must have felt I did not appreciate him at all.

Bob agreed. We had clearly reestablished contact. He said he had apparently not seen the events of the previous weeks very clearly; however, he pointed out, neither had I. Why was that? Had I really understood nothing at all? Why had it taken so long?

I told him I did not have a complete answer to that question (though a more or less complete answer was to arise soon enough, as will be clear), and that I would be interested in whatever thoughts he had about it. (Be warned, reader: stay with the weird analogy I am about to report—it was useful in the context of its invention.) I could tell him, I said, that the way I had experienced the situation was as if he had shown me a hardboiled egg in the palm of his hand, representing his implacable rage at me, and had expected me to see that it was not actually a hardboiled egg at all, but an artichoke—that is, that his rage was not rage at all, but hurt feelings. I could tell him nothing more, I said, than that it had looked like a hardboiled egg until it suddenly looked like an artichoke. Bob laughed. In their ludicrousness, these metaphors convinced him that during the past weeks it really was true: I had had no inkling of the conclusion we had just reached.

No doubt you have already seen the last point I want to make. It turns out that it was not only Bob who wanted to be appreciated. Apparently I wanted to be appreciated, too—in my case, for my willingness to give Bob a financial break. That is one good understanding of why I would have been irritated with Bob for taking my flexibility for granted (that is, if my records had been accurate). We each apparently wanted the other to appreciate him, and we were each prone to feeling that the other did not.

From this formulation, which I suggested to Bob and he accepted, it was a short step to the interpretation that Bob was not the only member of his family who felt unappreciated. We were able to see, for the first time, that Bob's sad and distant father must have wanted Bob's appreciation, just as Bob wanted his father's.

Even now, the story is not entirely told. There is a coda; or maybe it is a beginning. Why did I dissociate this particular enactment? Why did I not articulate it sooner, as Bob asked? Better yet, why did I not just avoid it altogether? Did I not bring some motive to the interaction that would help to answer these questions?

I did. Like Bob, I am a son who wanted to be appreciated by his father more than he was. To one degree or another, most of us are sons and daughters with unrequited yearnings for parental love. It did not occur to me, however, that Bob and I had this piece of feeling and history in common until I had already formulated the interaction I have described. In retrospect, it appears that Bob and I had been passing the roles of appreciative father and appreciative son back and forth for years; that is one way to formulate the content of that affectively positive, long-running enactment I had been content to wait to understand. Enactments are routinely gripping; but no enactment grips either the patient or the analyst unless it somehow taps into a compelling part of both their histories. Analysts do not use only their well-analyzed experience to understand patients; as Racker (1968) described so eloquently, we also continue our analyses with our patients. I do not believe the analyst always understands himself first, as a condition of understanding the patient, as Racker believed; but whatever the order of the events, the substance of the point is the same.

A fully interpersonal conception of treatment is a field theory. The psychoanalytic relationship, like any relationship, takes place in a field that is defined and ceaselessly redefined by its participants. It is not only the intrapsychic dynamics patient and analyst bring to their relationship that determine their experience with one another. The field is a unique creation, not a simple additive combination of individual dynamics; it is ultimately the field that determines which experiences the people who are in the process of cocreating that field can have in one another's presence. It is the field that determines what will be dissociated and what will be articulated, when imagination will be possible and when the participants will be locked into stereotypic descriptions of their mutual experience. Each time one participant changes the nature of his or her involvement in the field, the possibilities for the other person's experience change as well. When Bob became enraged with me and could only repeat the same accusations, I could not see further than the stolid and stereotyped observation that his reaction seemed more intense than made sense. It is meaningless, really, to claim that I should have been able to see beyond his rage. The field is the only relevant context. In the field Bob and I had constructed, I could not do it.

Meaning, then, is an interpersonal event. The meanings that can be explicitly realized, articulated, or reflected on at any particular moment depend upon which interpersonal field(s) one is participating in at that moment, and upon the shape of that field at that time. Because it suited the purpose of an illustration, which must be simplified, I have written as if imagination is all or none, but most of the time, of course, that is not true. Any relationship is made of multiple fields, with their corresponding multiple selves, so that at any one moment, it is possible to use language creatively about some things and not about others; and the distribution of those areas of light and darkness changes a moment later.

It is also worth noting, in the context of the illustration, that empathy is not a stance one can necessarily choose to take toward the patient's experience, however desirable it may be (Stern, 1988, 1994). Especially when the analyst is under intense emotional pressure, what I have elsewhere called "the grip of the field" (see chapters 10 and 12), all he can do is to stay as open as possible to whatever new meanings float within range, waiting until something makes it possible to tell a more imaginative and convincing story of the events transpiring in the field—sometimes, in fact, waiting just to be able to see the events. Often the enabling episode, as in this illustration, is initiated by the patient. No matter which participant it is who eventually manages to exert the influence that destabilizes the previous perception, however, neither patient nor analyst usually knows, before the fact, how to do it. Sometimes destabilizing episodes are large, as the one I have recounted here; more often they are small. And to the extent that a treatment is moving well and imaginatively, such episodes must be nearly continuous, though seldom actually formulated. We are grateful for abilities we apparently have, but cannot understand. We are grateful when we can speak from the heart. We know not to sneeze at serendipity—if that is what it is.