One of the benefits of membership in the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society is participating in its monthly discussion group. This year the group is reading Philip Bromberg's Awakening the Dreamer. In the Introduction, Bromberg reprises Standing in the Spaces: "Self-states are what the mind comprises. Dissociation is what the mind does. The relationship between self-states and dissociation is what the mind is."
Bromberg sees dissociation as normative in the structure of the mind, but also as a process by which psychological survival is preserved in the face of overwhelming threat to self-continuity. When parents disallow aspects of a child's self, these aspects are dissociated by the child in order to maintain the needed tie to the parent. As the child grows into adulthood, his sense of self includes "'his parents' child'"-- that is, he continues to dissociate these aspects. Unlike repression that disavows content which causes conflict, dissociation disavows parts of the self. Bromberg claims that this disavowal of parts of the self impairs intersubjectivity such that the self is "largely unable to see himself through the eyes of an other."
Psychoanalysis, writes Bromberg, includes an act of recognition (different from understanding) of the patient's disavowed self-states, states accessible within the intersubjective field through enactment. Repeated experience with recognition [and the welcoming in] of these disavowed self-states increases their accessibility. Once accessible, these self-states are available to symbolization and self-reflection, and to conflict [the stuff addressed by traditional psychoanalysis].
In contrast, self-states that are not recognized by the analyst thwart the patient's desire for recognition and acknowledgement, and lead to shame. "..[B]ecause it is not forthcoming, [it] supports the reality of their needs being illegitimate." But "when the therapist is able to relate to each aspect...[t]his linking of self-states increases a person's sense of wholeness..." allowing one to live a fuller life.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Saturday, September 17, 2016
In Passing
The great American playwright Edward Albee died yesterday, September 16, 2016 at the age of 88. The theatre seems to me more than any other medium to reveal the human condition pointedly and in condensed fashion. Like so many great playwrights—Miller, Williams, Chekov, of course Shakespeare – before him, these artists show us a mirror of ourselves that we sometimes wish were left unrevealed (as when Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which won five Tony awards, was denied the Pulitzer by the advisory board despite being voted to receive it by the jurors.) Freud, however, would have been proud of Albee’s explications of sex, aggression, and death.
In his first play Zoo Story (1958), Albee wrote about loneliness and miscommunication. In Woolf, he exposed the illusion of the prefect American family. [What couples therapist has not seen a George and Martha in the consulting room?] The Goat, Who is Sylvia? pushed the limits of liberal tolerance when Martin falls in love with a goat (bestiality) while being somewhat judgmental of his homosexual son. Albee received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994).
Constitution
On September 17, 1787 (two hundred, twenty-nine years ago
today), the U.S. Constitution was adopted by the Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia, PA. One of its important compromises –between the Virginia Plan
and the New Jersey Plan— allowed states to be represented both by population
(The House of Representatives, favoring the larger states) and by same number
of votes per state (The Senate, leveling the playing field for smaller states.)
The Constitution was ratified by
conventions in eleven states and was adopted (went into effect) in 1789. It is the longest living Constitution in the
world.
The beauty of the U.S. Constitution is it is alive; It allows
for changes of itself through amendments— for example, the abolition of slavery
(13th), and prohibiting denial of women the right to vote (19th)—and
it is interpreted to fit the lives of people in the present
moment to allow for freedoms as yet unconceived by its writers and ratifiers. (Its
freedoms are often hard won such as in Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) establishing separate public schools for black and
white students to be unconstitutional; and Giddeons v FL (1961) allowing the accused to obtain a public
defender.) Yale Law Professor and Constitutional
scholar Akhil Amar said about the Constitution, “It is this epic, flawed, spectacular
conversation” and “it’s the job of our generation to make it more perfect still.”
Psychoanalysis, too, is a flawed
and spectacular conversation. It, too, is governed by a set of principles and
procedures, and like the U.S. Constitution, is a sacred forum for struggle and
negotiation where the state of the self is improved, made richer because of
increased accessibility to experience and emotion, and made freer as well by
being so enriched. It is through struggle and argument that our
country is made better. Sometimes I think the conversation of psychoanalysis,
like the voice of the vote, ought to be a basic right. But who will provide and
who will pay for such a service?
Monday, September 12, 2016
Acting Out and Passage à l'acte
On Sept 10, 2016 the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society
hosted Donna Bentolila at its monthly, all day seminar where she presented two
riveting cases. A native of Argentina and a Lacanian by self-report, Bentolila,
despite the privileging of left brain (the Symbolic) over right, and despite her
reluctance to locate herself squarely in the co-creation of the experience of
her patients, nonetheless, worked closely and beautifully in the lives of these
two patients and their analytic relationships with her. Due perhaps to the
severity of their illnesses and to complicated issues in both cases,
Bentolila found herself repeatedly having to bend the frame to fit both the
needs of these two very disturbed people and the limits of her capacity to endure
their demands. For confidentiality sake, I will give no details, but wish you
all had been there to become wholly engrossed in the presentation.
Lacan, like Freud, chose phallocentric terms to explain
human experience, and I was pleased to see Bentolila try to soften Lacan’s
ideas as metaphor. For example, the ‘name of the father’, Bentolila claimed, is
not necessarily the biological father, but the function that transcends him. Still, this function, in addition to “constraints
and proscriptions,” is to “break the fusion between mother and child." [But the idea of ‘fusion’ (or merger or symbiosis) has been
reassessed since the understanding by Stern (1985) -and Benjamin- of the normal
development of a sense of separateness from a very early age.]
Bentolila explained Lacan’s distinction
between acting out and passage à l'acte: Acting out is
done by a subject as an attempt to communicate something to the Other which
could not be heard, or said, in words. Because it remains as an attempt at
communication, it thus retains the Symbolic order. Passage
à l'acte (passage to [into] action), on the other hand,
exits from the Symbolic Order with behavior which is not meant to
communicate to the Other (the Other does not enter into consideration in the
act, sometimes because there has been a dissolution of connection to the Other)
for even the subject is un-situated from the scene in a desperate and irreversible
attempt to resolve some unbearable anxiety (this loss of self as subject sometimes
heralds psychosis), such as in the case Bentolila described.
What a wonderful reminder, as her clinical examples depicted, of how being listened to about one’s impulses makes it less likely those impulses will be acted upon. Acting out is a message to the analyst: an appeal or demand for
recognition from the analyst; an attempt to communicate what the analyst had
heretofore been unable to hear; an unspoken and/or unconscious invitation to
dialogue about a subject that could not find a place in their discourse,
perhaps because it remained dissociated (or outside the Symbolic order per
Lacanians). I suppose that were the analyst to disallow space for validation, or abdicate
responsibility for her own location in the fray, the patient might feel so
violated and destroyed as to abandon further attempts at communication and
enter instead into the real passage à l'acte.
Thursday, September 8, 2016
Comment about Homesickness and the Analytic Home
Brothers and Lewis write: “…the analyst finds ways to
communicate over and over again to a patient: ‘Yes, you can come home again. No
matter what happened between us during your last session, no matter how
different or similar we found one another, I will be here waiting for you when
it is time for us to meet again.’ "
Brothers,
D., Lewis, J., (2012) Homesickness,
Exile, and the Self-Psychological Language of Homecoming. International J.
Psychoanalytic Self Psychol. 7:180-195.
btwHB
Monday, September 5, 2016
What is Lost
The French are terribly enamored of Lacan with his
symbolic and imaginary and real, and the name of the father. Lacan leans a
little too heavily on Freud for my tastes and extends the patriarchal view of
things, deemphasizing contributions of our understanding of the importance of
the early maternal-infant relationship. Like the homunculus, a fully formed
tiny human, ‘seen’ through the microscope inside the human sperm (Hartsoeker
and Leeuwenhoek), thereby giving full credit to the male of the species for the
preformation of the next generation, so does Lacan disregard that it is the
maternal caregiver who first imparts language and law (discipline and guidance)
on the infant offspring, long before any oedipal taboos.
Donna Bentolila [who will be in Tampa on Sept 10, 2016]
invokes Lacan and Freud in her paper on revisiting the Death Drive (1996). Here
she notes the phenomenon that desire remains ultimately unfulfilled, thus the
repetition to forever chase after what we cannot have (the lost Other) as part
of the human condition. [Like Freud, I think of the death drive as partially
biological as in the necessity of death to make room for new life and in the
second law of thermodynamics where matter tends towards the lowest energy
state—making life and any biological system a kind of miracle in its randomness and its opposition
to entropy. And like Winnicott, I prefer to think of destruction as a
necessary dialectic allowing the Other to come into being, and a necessity in creativity.]
But it is Bentolila’s nod to difference which brings a
bittersweetness to mind. Juxtaposed with sameness— a sameness which obfuscates difference— she speaks of “Eros, the
union of two beings into One." She goes on to write: “For Bataille the ultimate
meaning of eroticism is a state of fusion between the partners which, insofar
as it involves no separation, acts to suppress all boundaries while sustaining
a perfect continuity.” Later she adds “a question of an impossible jouissance with an already lost object related to our impotence to retrieve
the thing (das ding) in the real.”
Ah, the lost object. To quote Robert
Frost again (Reluctance, 1913):
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To… bow and accept the end
Of a love, or a season?
Thursday, September 1, 2016
Homesickness and Cheever
Home is the place where, when you
have to go there,
They
have to take you in - Robert Frost
What do we do when we are confronted with the painful
realization that we can never go home again, if home indeed ever was? What do we do when
confronted with “this painful sense of unfulfilled and unfulfillable longing
for home”? Brothers and Lewis intimate that a compensatory ‘home’ can be
created by patient and analyst when they come to know one another in
predictable, reliable ways and by building together a shared unique language. “In
a healing analytic relationship…patient and analyst develop a shared
language—partly verbal, partly nonverbal—by means of which excruciating
experiences of sameness and difference become bearable.” [Here, sameness speaks
to the need for twinship (see post of August 28, 2016), belonging as one does
when ‘at home,’ and “the need to experience difference…to experience oneself as
unique, special…”] Treatment additionally offers the opportunity for mourning
what was lost, what one never had, and/or what one can never have.
Familiarity and belonging allow for the creation of
meaning. But the sense of certainty and of familiarity are shattered by trauma.
Trauma, in turn, can lead to exile “when
trauma brings with it a desperate need to experience the clarity of
difference.”
While Brothers and Lewis utilize the John Cheever quote ‘Fifty
percent of people in the world are homesick all the time’ , their points about
longing for what never was are also aptly illustrated in the Cheever short
story Reunion (1962) where the son,
meeting his father with heightened anticipation after years of estrangement,
comes to the painful realization over lunch that he will never have the
relationship with his father that he had always longed for; his longings for
connection will remain unfulfilled; his efforts futile. Many of the works of Cheever
speak to a kind of nostalgia or ‘homesickness’ for lost culture and community
experienced in the isolating and alienating suburbs. There is a deep pathos in
Cheever’s works. So, too, in ours.
Brothers,
D., Lewis, J., (2012) Homesickness,
Exile, and the Self-Psychological Language of Homecoming. International J.
Psychoanalytic Self Psychol. 7:180-195.
Cheever,
J., (1978) The Stories of John Cheever,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf; story originally appeared in The New Yorker
magazine, October 27, 1962.