Notes
Chapter 1
1. I have not mentioned structuralism in this list, despite the fact that it was the structuralists who were more responsible than any other group of theorists for the view that experience is fundamentally linguistic. The reason I have not mentioned these writers (e.g., Levi-Strauss, Barthes) is that their underlying objectivism is inconsistent with the interpretivist, hermeneutic perspective I am adopting here. Structuralism was not based in social constructionism, as postmodernism is, but in the position that objectively existing universal elements underlie experience and are responsible for its shape everywhere, although that shape varies according to the kinds of adaptations required in particular environments.
For the relevant philosophy of science, see, for example, Kuhn (1970, 1977) and Feyerabend (1974), and in the social sciences, Taylor (1971). For reviews of hermeneutics and references to the primary texts, see Palmer (1969), Howard (1982), and Bernstein (1983). Sarup (1989) and Best and Kellner (1991) offer overviews of poststructuralist and postmodern thought that suit the same purposes. The relationship between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis is presented in chapter 11, and by Steele (1979), Strenger (1991), Sass (1988), and, with special clarity and conciseness, by Phillips (1991). Barratt (1993) offers an extensive survey of what postmodernism means for psychoanalysis. Pragmatism in contemporary philosophy is widely associated with Richard Rorty (1979, 1982, 1991a, b).
2. Notice that the change that has taken place here is not a change in the relation between the signifier (the sound of the word "art") and the signified (the image or idea of art). The reason we now consider earthworks to be art is not that assemblages of mud mean something different than they used to; the reason is that the signifier "art" has been redefined by changing the relation between "art" and "nonart." The union between signified and signifier, which composes what Saussure called the sign, and which he believed was relatively stable, has been dissolved in poststructuralism. Now, signifiers are defined only by their relation to other signifiers.
3. Sapir and Whorf did not consider the existence and significance of unworded languages, nor did they question the epistemological hegemony of science and objectivity. Thus, although the excerpt from Whorf that 1 use is charming, and useful as a demonstration of the constitutive properties of language, it is not actually written from a postmodern perspective.
Chapter 2
1. Freud (1915, pp. 177-179) did leave room in his theory for a nonrepresentational unconscious. The contents of this part of the unconscious, however, are "unconscious affects" or "unconscious emotions," never unconscious ideas. Ideas were for Freud the only targets repression could ever have, because instinct itself cannot be represented, only connected to ideas and affects—and, as we have just seen, affects cannot be repressed because they cannot be pinned down clearly enough to be expelled.
2. Freud makes this point in the following way. A certain kind of nonverbal representation, what Freud calls the thing-presentation, is unique to the unconscious. Thing-presentalions comprise the vocabulary of the primary process, which is Freud's term for the special kind of cognition that goes on only in the unconscious. The secondary process is the rational, verbal cognition characteristic of consciousness and the preconscious. When the secondary process connects to (cathects) a thing-presentation, verbal language is attached to the thing-presentation, transforming it into a word-presentation and bringing it into the preconscious. But the word-presentation is by no means a faithful copy of the thing-presentation; the language of the unconscious and verbal language are incommensurable; translation cannot be accomplished without a significant loss of meaning.
Once the representation gains access to the preconscious in this way, it can be brought into consciousness by a simple act of attention. The preconscious is simply that part of experience that could be conscious, but that has not fallen within the range of one's conscious attention. For the purposes of the argument I am making, the most important point is that, in Freud's view, what one becomes aware of in this way is a diluted form of the original unconscious representation.
Chapter 4
1. See Polkinghorne (1988) for a review of the controversies surrounding constructivism in history.
2. There are many collections describing the unbidden discoveries of artists, scientists, and mathematicians. Those I have come across are Bruner (1979), Burnshaw (1970), Ghiselin (1952), Hadamard (1945), Hampl (1989), Kris (1952), Poincaré (1952), Raft and Andresen (1986), Rosner and Abt (1974), Rothenberg (1979), and Shattuck (1984a). For more material on relevant dreams, see Garfield (1974) and Woods (1947).
3. I have taken this phrase from Jean Piaget (though the reference escapes me). Emulating Henri Bergson, whom he greatly admired, Piaget apparently was fond of making reference to the "creative disorder" of his office, implying a link between his tolerance for ambiguity and messiness and his capacity for creative endeavor.
4. Mozart's words are reported by Ghiselin (1952, p. 44); Tsvetaeva is quoted by Muchnic (1980, p. 7); Frankenthaler's words appear in a piece by Loos (1997, p. 19). The remainder of the quotations in this paragraph appear in Burnshaw (1970).
5. The quotation from Rilke appears in Burnshaw (1970). The others in this paragraph are from Ghiselin (1952).
Chapter 6
1. Being subject to the same principles as any other type of engagement includes being subject to conflict. I have not discussed conflict thus far, and I do not address it elsewhere in the book. That absence of consideration, however, does not mean I eschew it, but that I take its presence for granted. In the passage just quoted, Fingarette points out that spelling-out and not-spelling-out are events that reflect decisions between conflicting alternatives. A large proportion of these considerations are what psychoanalysts would consider unconscious conflict. Unconscious conflict in the terms I am using here is best understood as a clash of purposes over whether or not to spell-out a particular interpretation. Just as in traditional theory, the conflict need not be known to be effective in provoking indecision over whether to spell-out in any particular instance. If such a conflict does become known, of course, thai knowledge would represent an interpretation, not merely the revelation of preexisting content.
Chapter 7
1. Culture and person should not really be discussed separately, and probably one should try to avoid reference to things like the "influence" of culture on the individual, a wording suggesting that the person is already "there" for culture to have an influence "on." Persons, after all, are cultures. The understanding to which I am most sympathetic defines culture simply as human practice, which makes it hard to know when one is talking about culture and when about an individual—and that is as it should be. In that case, though, one has to decide what to do about the idea of self, to which I am also committed. This problem of self and agency in a postmodern world is key for all the intellectual disciplines, but for none more than psychoanalysis, which can only survive if it negotiates postmodernism while preserving some notion of what is personal and authentic. Throughout this book, I have tried to use the plural when discussing culture, since we never exist in "a" cultural context, but at the intersection of many.
2. Bartlett got the same kind of results I am about to describe when he substituted visual material for verbal material.
3. Important exponents of this view include Racker (1968), Levenson (1972, 1983, 1991), Hoffman (1983, 1991, 1992a, b, 1994, 1996), Mitchell (1988, 1993), Ehrenberg (1992), Hirsch (1993, 1996), Renik (1993), Greenberg (1995), Aron (1996).
4. For the purposes I address here, I could cite Berger and Luckmann's (1967) The Social Construction of Reality with nearly the same effect as citing Foucault. Berger and Luckmann take the position that everyday reality, which we take for granted and treat as objective, is actually a social construction. Processes that began as subjective (think of any discredited idea that once was taken for granted) come to be thought of as part of the natural world. These pieces of reality are described as "objectivations," a term that bears a close relation to Bartlett's "conventionalisation" and to Foucault's "normalization." I prefer Foucault's account, though. Whereas Berger and Luckmann preserve the removed and "objective" stance of the traditional social scientist, someone who is simply describing the way things are, political and moral questions are the driving force of Foucault's thought.
5. Schachtel, in fact, in his magnum opus, Metamorphosis (1959), presages much of this discussion of convention. The general tone of his work is similar to what I present here, and it is probably fair to say that a long and respectful acquaintance with Schachtel's work inspired this part of the chapter.
6. The dream also had to do with the transference, but that part of the session is not immediately relevant to the illustration.
Chapter 8
1. Despite his field theory, Sullivan took for granted the existence of an objective reality separate from the observer. Interaction in the interpersonal field, therefore, results in a version of reality that is either accurate or distorted. Sullivan, then, was no constructivist. On the other hand, he was committed to the idea that one's vision of reality is determined by the field in which one observes it, and he argued that our perceptions are more often personal and autistic (i.e., parataxic) than objective and consensually validated (syntaxic). See chapter 3.
2. Sullivan's thought, while it is not itself psychoanalysis, is nevertheless at the heart of the thinking of many of the psychoanalysts who have developed the interpersonal perspective (e.g., Lionells et al., 1995). Levenson (1992) has recently laid out this sequence of events in instructive fashion, showing the very particular ways in which Sullivan's thought is not psychoanalytic, and then detailing the developments, beginning in countertransference theory, that acknowledged the full import of Sullivan's conception of the interpersonal field (a task he himself never undertook) and built a psychoanalysis around that conception.
3. The references to this point would fill a substantial syllabus. In addition to Geertz, for accessible introductions to the most interesting of this psychological literature, see Harre (1984), Gergen (1985, 1991, 1992), Sampson (1989), Flax (1990), Cushman (1991, 1994, 1995), Kitzinger (1992), Kvale (1992), Shotter (1993), and Shotter and Gergen (1989). For those who wish to pursue them, these sources list the relevant philosophical references.
4. Philip Cushman (1994, 1995) argues that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are inevitably political and moral activities, with their own embeddedness in various cultural surrounds. Cushman sees Sullivan's thought as an alternative to Winnicott's and Kohut's, in both of whose writings Cushman believes the self appears as a real entity, a "thing." Such ahistorical and nonpolitical two-person psychologies, says Cushman (1991) although they add to our understanding of interaction, raise the dangers of "reifying, interiorizing, and historically decontextualizing the self, locating the self s origins in the 'natural' development of infancy, depoliticizing the self s illnesses, and commodifying its cures" (p. 838). In Sullivan's work, on the other hand, with its recognition of the interpersonal field and its dereification of the self, Cushman sees the opportunity to create a three-person psychology in which the third participant in the interpersonal field is the recognition that each person is an "intersection" of traditions. The third participant, that is, is culture. Such a conception is consistent with what I am trying to say, with the proviso that the effect of cultures is, of course, never separate from that of the two people involved. As Cushman says, it is not as if each of us is a self influenced by culture, as if culture were something that came along after the self already existed. Rather, each of us is an intersection of traditions.
5. See Greenberg (1991) for a carefully worked out theoretical description of exactly how the interaction of the interpersonal and the intrapsychic might occur.
6. See Sass (1988) for a convincing description of the humanism that lingers in psychoanalysis. Sass also shows why the best remedy for humanism is hermeneutics.
Chapter 9
1. I have discussed this issue elsewhere (Stern, 1985).
2. See also the responses to Spence (1993) by Bruner (1993) and Rorty (1993), and the analysis of Spence's (1982) first book by Sass and Woolfolk (1988), who point out the contradiction between Spence's objectivism and his stated purpose of introducing hermeneutics into clinical psychoanalysis.
3. On the other hand, if one counts the contributions of object-relations theory and self psychology as elaborations of the observation, one would have to say that the literature on the problem is vast. Object-relations theory and self psychology have alerted us that what we have called resistance can be an expression by the patient of a certain kind of therapeutic need, and have suggested that under some circumstances the analyst should respond to this need in the here and now. For instance, the analyst may "contain" the patient's projected internal objects; or, upon understanding what it is to be the patient's selfobject, the analyst may accept the patient's use of him in this way; and so on. But these conceptions, however clinically vital they may have become, are not really ways of dealing with resistance as much as they are redefinitions of some instances of resistance. And we are therefore back at square one when it comes to the interpretation of the unconscious.
4. This point and the evidence to support it is in the tradition of James Strachey's (1934) theory of therapeutic action. In his classic contribution, Strachey suggested that the patient changed by installing the analyst as "auxiliary super-ego," which then allowed the patient to experience more than he would have been capable of without the treatment. I am also in debt to Strachey's contemporary, Richard Sterba (1934), the author of the other significant theory of therapeutic action of the day. For him, the therapeutic collaboration was not merely an aspect of the therapeutic process, as it tended to become in the work of later writers who emphasized it (e.g., Greenson, 1965, and Zetzel, 1956), but was a goal in its own right, and the key to therapeutic change.
The problem with Strachey's perspective is that he believed the analyst, in order to serve as the best stand-in for the patient's superego, should be neither a good object nor a bad one. I do not believe that the patient's feeling of safety can be adequately supported by a neutral object relation with the analyst, even if such a thing were possible. What I am advocating in what follows is, in this respect, closer to the developmentally oriented analysts of the Edinburgh Congress (Gitelson, 1962; Nacht, 1962) and various early writers of the object-relations school (e.g., Winnicott, 1958,1965; Gun trip, 1969), who are unabashed in their advocacy of the analyst's attempt to be a good object. These writers, however, do not necessarily take the perspective, as I do here, that that attempt is best served by the analyst's consistent and compassionate curiosity.
5. Hoffman (1983) is responsible for the compelling argument about the place of transference interpretation in the patient's feeling of safety. Hoffman also makes the companion argument about the place of countertranference interpretation in the making of transference interpretations, which he derived from Racker (1968).
6. Conversation does not necessarily require two human beings. It can occur between a reader and a text, a listener and a piece of music, a viewer and a work of art. See chapter 11.
Chapter 10
1. I emphasize the analyst's use of her experience for diagnosticpurposes in this example, but it is equally important that the analyst see that the patient, by not saying anything directly, yet influencing the analyst to worry, is trying to create some specific kind of relatedness. The analyst needs to learn the specific way she was influenced, and she needs to consider how she might actually have discouraged the patient from being more direct. If such aspects of the interaction were discovered, then one might also want to question whether there were ways in which the patient had influenced the analyst to be less available than she might otherwise have been, thus making the patient feel less safe in being direct. And so on.
Chapter 11
1. Cushman (1995) makes Gadamer a mainstay of his examination of the self and psychotherapy in social context, and Sass (1988) discusses the relation of certain aspects of Heidegger and Gadamer to psychoanalysis. Orange (1995) gives Gadamer's thought an important role in her discussion of epistemology and self psychology. Strenger (1991) charts a path for psychoanalysis that runs between science and hermeneutics, and finds a place for both. A collection of articles edited by Messer, Sass, and Woolfolk (1988) addresses hermeneutics and psychological theory, including psychoanalysis. The introductory essay by Woolfolk, Sass, and Messer (1988) is a good, brief introduction to some of the basics of hermeneutics for psychologists who have had no previous exposure to the field. For presentations of the work of Gadamer, see Warnke (1987), whose book-length discussion, structured as a dialogue, is nontechnical. See also Bernstein's (1983) readable account of a way of understanding that falls between objectivism and relativism, in which Gadamer's work plays a leading role, and Weinsheimer's (1985) point-by-point exegesis of Truth and Method, Gadamer's major work. Other hermeneuticists who have been of particular interest to psychoanalysts are Habermas (1968), Taylor (1985a, 1985b), and Ricoeur (1970, 1981).
2. Translated and quoted by Linge (1976, p. xvii) from Gadamer's Truth and Method.
3. The first phrase is from Gadamer's Truth and Method:, the second is from Hans Lipp's Untersuchungen zu einer hermeneutische Logik (1938). Both are translated and quoted by Linge (1976, p. xxxii).
4. I am relying here primarily on one of Gadamer's two major replies to Habermas (Gadamer, 1967) and on accounts by Warnke (1987) and Woolfolk, Sass, and Messer (1988).
5. I should add, however, that Schafer (1983) does write (p. 234) that he has found Habermas's view so useful because it is more moderate than the view of Ricoeur (1977), by whom the unconscious is conceived to be more fully a natural phenomenon of cause and force than Habermas understands it to be.
Chapter 12
1. Adherents of the concept of parallel process in supervision would have it otherwise, claiming that the supervisor is often buried in an analogue of the therapeutic situation, which is unconsciously created between therapist and supervisor. This view, so popular a few years ago that almost every article on supervision referred to it, seems already to have faded in significance. It makes better sense to argue, as Bromberg (1982) and Grey and Fiscalini (1987) have, that when supervisor and therapist become embedded, it is in a mire of their own making—a separate relationship, independent of the therapy being supervised.
2. This is not say that Sullivan would have agreed with the emphasis here. In fact, he would have argued, and emphatically, that one helps one's patients precisely to the extent that one does perform a directed search for the truth. Sullivan had a deep conviction about the accuracy of positivism. Thus it may seem contradictory to cite him in support of the view being developed here. To this objection the best reply is that Sullivan's clinical attitude and his ideas retain liveliness and relevance even in a different epistemology. Sullivan's interest in the complexities of the clinical interaction, which he focused on because of his belief in the significance of the observable, happens to be the same emphasis one has to take from a hermeneutic view.
3. Van der Rohe is quoted by Bruner (1987), Nabokov by Hampl (1989).
4. Spence (1987) examines some of the same questions from a hermeneutic point of view. As a matter of fact, he entitles one of his chapters "The Myth of the Innocent Analyst," by which he means that anyone, analysts included, in order to understand, must work from a prior commitment to some grasp of the material to be interpreted. Ergo, a loss of innocence, at least in the blank-slate sense. But Spence does not then go on to redefine innocence in terms consistent with his hermeneutic point of view. He really does mean that the innocent analyst must now be considered a myth. As the following text indicates, I believe the description of the analyst as innocent remains meaningful.