In emphasizing materiality, the external world, Gentile notes the limits this reality places on imagination and omnipotence. The infant, in creating the transitional object, must also surrender to its limits, the constraints of the physical world out there to be found, and to its properties. We come into being through both our imagination/dreaming and through the limits of reality. Gentile muses that President Trump, aided and abetted by people who protect him from reality, has not tempered his omnipotence and fails to surrender to both reality and the rules of law [Lacan notes that without the Real there is a collapse of space, of the third, into two-ness. As such, when cultivating a fidelity to desire one still must be held accountable, responsible for one’s desires and actions. Bion, too, says there is a ‘truth instinct’-- what Civitarese* describes as the “drive toward integration and the construction of a psychic space”-- propelling us to a transcendent dimension while still relative or accountable to reality.]
Another interesting supposition of Gentile’s was to state that psychoanalysis spends too much time thinking about the analyst’s actions (interpretation, containment, etc) and too little time facilitating the actions and agency of the patient. In her practice, she tries -- with the intent to cultivate the patient’s voice and the patient’s agency-- to re-locate the primary action with the patient. Gentile intimates that in resistance, patients subvert the analyst’s agency and, if patients can do that, they are powerful enough to effect change. She went so far as to remind us of the patient’s part in ‘resistance.’ (This led, in the afternoon, to discussion amongst the attendees about when and how to approach this with the patient so as not to sound blaming and shaming.) Also discussed was the contradiction of the analyst’s authority as part of what is ‘curative’ [ala Freud] and the deconstruction of the analyst’s authority in order to achieve a level playing field in which the patient’s voice and authority could emerge.
Gentile also noted patients’ stubborn allegiance to identities such as ‘victim’ or ‘helper’ foreclosing potential for change [consistent with Bromberg’s staying the same while changing]. Gentile warns that too much reassurance and soothing from the analyst, too much provision of selfobject experience, deprives patients of the space for necessary conflict [confrontation with otherness?]. She reminds us that ‘maternal preoccupation’ [Winnicott, the perinatal period where the mother meets the needs of and adapts to the baby] is a time where the mother puts her own subjectivity on hold. Eventually the mother’s subjectivity, her mind, provides triangular space, the third, to the mother-infant dyad.
Space allows others into the conversation. Collapsing space through complementarity of doer-done to [Benjamin] forecloses possibility for conversation, curiosity, agency, initiative, and desire.
If space (transitional, triangular--the ‘third’--, …) is required for the emergence of self, for subjectivity and agency, then what about the feminine metaphor for agency? We have the phallic metaphor for potency and power, where is that which signifies creativity and generativity for the uterus? [How men 10,000 years ago must have marveled, and envied, that women could regularly bleed (and live!) and women could bring forth, from hidden, unnamed spaces -- out of their bodies -- another living being! Did men feel so dwarfed by these feats that they compensated with tall buildings and subjugation by brute force and myths like Athena arising from the head of Zeus? When asked what men fear from women, they answer: ridicule, being laughed at. Women, when asked what they fear from men, answer: being killed. One male comedian even quipped that men fear their blind dates may be ugly while women fear their blind dates may be serial killers.] Oh, the unequal playing field.
*Civitarese, G. (2013). The Grid and the Truth Drive. Ital. Psychoanal. Annu., 7:91-114.
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