Tag: freedom

the therapeutic encounter is a mess, so to speak, of sheer humanity…

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In his last works, Ferenczi seeks unconventional ways of expression in order to break through the wall of words that had become all too familiar and automatic, with the assumption that “if we only stick to a strictly defined setting, we will automatically further the positive outcome of the therapy”. That is to say that we would be rewarded for the merits of our discipline, by strictly adhering to the rules, tying the analysand to a procrustean bed and stretching or cutting him to fit the bed size. As a matter of fact, the therapeutic encounter is a mess, so to speak, of sheer humanity, where no reliable laws apply, as Ferenczi experienced it for the worst and the best in the cases described in the Clinical Diary, without the paternalism implicit in purism. He is aware of our epistemic fallibility and he does not forget our propensity to err, “the map should never be confused with the territory”, as he writes (Ferenczi, 1932, p. 75). The personality of the analyst, as we have seen in Balint’s humorous sketches, cannot be ignored; the little trifles, the spices, are often more important than strictly following the instructions of the recipe. Ferenczi anticipated this difference, as is mirrored in his texts. For a long time, Ferenczi feared that, if he did not follow Freud’s lines and “recipes”, this would make him a poor analyst. In the early 1930s, however, he underwent a positive change towards more independence. He developed and increasingly trusted his own way of thinking, as is reflected in the Clinical Diary.

Judith Szekacs-Weisz; Tom Keve (2012-01-06). Ferenczi and His World: Rekindling the Spirit of the Budapest School (The History of Psychoanalysis Series) (Kindle Locations 1685-1696). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition. 

the totality of debris

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Q: Are you suggesting that the analytic experience can be a dehumanising once?

Bion: I think that there is a great danger of it. I come across a lot of what is thought to be scientific psychoanalysis, but it doesn’t remind me of anything except boredom.

The situation in the consulting room, the relationship between these two people, could be like the ashes of a fire. Is there any spark which could be blown into a flame? In this little bit I have described, we would have to examine, observe, devote care to mental debris – bits of what we have been taught, bits of what we have learnt, bit of what the patient has been taught. In analysis one is seeing the totality of debris. What has happened to the face of a man of forty-two? Why does he look twenty-five or sixty-two? Why does he say he is forty-two? It is all part of the debris. Do those pieces come together? Would you be able to put them together so that they make sense?

Q. (an inaudible reference, to ‘psychotic experience’)

Bion: The idea that it is a psychotic experience is very cerebral. In analysis we are concerned with something which might ultimately be expressible in cerebral terms, but that is not how it appears to us as practising analysts. That is one reason why we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that patients do not come to us with little labels tied to them saying, ‘manic’, or ‘depressive’, or ‘manic-depressive’, or ‘schizophrenic’. If they do come with such labels we should regard them as more pieces of debris. I do not mean by calling it debris that it is not worthy of attention; I mean that it is something which has to be observed and scrutinized with very considerable care, otherwise you might throw away the necessary, vital spark. One cannot afford to cast aside imaginative conjectures on the grounds that they are not scientific – you might as well throw away the seed of a plant on the grounds that it is not an oak or a lily but just a piece of rubbish. This applies to all that goes on in your consulting room.

But I suggest that it would be worthwhile considering it not as your consulting room, but as your atelier. What sort of artist are you? Are you a potter? A painter? A musician? A writer? In my experience a great many analysts don’t really know what sort of artists they are.

Q. What if they are not artists?

Bion: Then they are in the wrong job. I don’t know what job is any good because even if they are not psychoanalysts they need to be artists in life itself. A mathematician can see that an algebraic formula is a beautiful one; a musician can hear a manuscript which is simply black marks on paper. Even using the language I know best, I cannot tell you what an ‘artist’ is; I prefer you to go beyond that word and see what I am trying to convey to you by this very inadequate word. It is certainly not somebody who is able to deceive your eyes, to make you think that there is a tree there when there isn’t one, but somebody who has made you able to see there really is a tree there and its roots even if they are underground.

I suggest that behind this forty-two-year-old man is hidden a person, and that person has roots, an unconscious which, Like the roots of a tree, is hidden from sight. There are not only branches which are ramified and have veins, but under the surface it has roots. So when this person comes into your room, what do you see? I am not asking simply what do you see with your eyes, but also what does your intuition enable you to see?

Wilfred Bion, Seminar in Paris; July 10th 1978

the primary of perception and attention

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Eigen (2005), whose thinking represents well the Romantic sensibility in psychoanalysis, sees the analyst as more of an agent who evokes new experience than an instrument for understanding what is. Similarly, Lacan has suggested that the purpose of interpretations is to “make waves” (Eisenstein , 2007). Openness to traveling the emerging pathway, what Casement (1985) calls “learning from the patient,” is a sine qua non of an analytic process that seeks to expand the patient’s ways of being (Summers, 2005a ; 2012). It follows that the analyst must adopt a technical stance of not knowing. The tempting desire for omniscience among those who sit in the analytic chair runs the underappreciated danger of suffocating the openness required for self formation (Eigen, 1993a). Interference with the analytic space can be subtle, but the consequences may impair the patient’s freedom to explore the unknown. It can be seductive for both parties to enact the roles of knower and known, but the more the analyst is able to sustain the openness of the analytic space, the greater is the opportunity for the analysand to uncover new possibilities.

Although Bion’s admonition to greet every analytic hour without desire or memory is fanciful on its face, one can appreciate the spirit of Bion’s interpretation of the analytic stance as openness to the unknown. Eigen (1993a) interprets Bion’s dictum as an injunction to “opt for the primary of perception and attention over memory and knowledge” (p. 125) and cautions that attempting to control where the truth goes risks imposing on the emerging truth of the patient’s experience. And here we come to a fundamental shift in the analytic stance. We have now reconceptualized the analytic task from knowing the patient to engaging her being, an analytic attitude suggestive of Heidegger’s (1968/ 1954) concept of openness to Being. When the analyst adopts this way of attending to the patient, he has shifted his top priority from discovering new knowledge to receiving the being of the other. This interpretation of the analytic task does not obviate the role of understanding; it sees the value of insight in its ability to make contact with and expand the patient’s experience. In this sense, contemporary analysis accords with the Romantic value system articulated by Fichte’s (1848) statement that Being is prior to knowledge. Knowledge, or self awareness, subserves the creation of new ways of being and relating.

Summers, Frank (2013-05-20). The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process (p. 53). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

living human speech

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The analyst’s speech must be the creation of a person who is alive in that moment. Living human speech is as difficult to come by in the analyst’s spoken use of language as it is in written prose or verse.

Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (Kindle Locations 156-158). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

on the art of psychoanalysis

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Among the most astute comments concerning what it means for an analysis to be alive has come (as one might expect), not from an analyst, but from a novelist and essayist, speaking in 1884 about the art of fiction:

The good health of an art which undertakes to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. [Henry James 1884, p. 49]

James’ statement about the novel (and implicitly about the relationship of writer and reader) has important relevance to the art of psychoanalysis and to the understanding of the relationship of analyst and analysand. The idea that above all an analysis must be interesting is for me both self-evident and a revolutionary conception (cf. Phillips 1996). To be interesting, the analysis must be free to “exercise ,” to shape itself and be given shape in any way that the participants are able to invent. The freedom to “exercise” is the freedom to experiment : “Art lives upon discussion , upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt , upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” (H. James 1884, pp. 4445). When the analysis is alive, it unselfconsciously manages for periods of time to be an experiment that has left the well charted waters of prescribed form; it is a discussion fueled by curiosity and by variety of attempt; it is an endeavor that depends upon genuine exchange of views and comparison of standpoints.

Ogden, Thomas (1999-12-31). Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (pp. 7-8). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.