Foreign Climes

I recently had the privilege of guest teaching a clinical case course, this time to fourth year students, at a psychoanalytic training program separate from my home at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies (a relational institute with an emphasis on trauma and attachment). Surprisingly, while these students had heard of attachment -- one had even translated the BCPSG’s Change in Psychotherapy into a foreign language, they seemed to have very little interest in it. The presenter went so far as to say any talk about attachment was mere theory (metapsychology) and did not have a place in psychoanalysis where “making the unconscious conscious” was the aim of treatment. Deepening treatment meant diving into the unconscious.  (Had this other institute not yet embraced the paradigm shifts in psychoanalysis from left brain narrative/interpretation/insight to co-created right brain implicit/procedural/often nonverbal communication?) 

I was reminded of the BCPSG’s ideas that 1. experiences do not always need to be verbalized for changes in implicit relational knowing to take place, and 2. that relationship may be foundational, while conflict (the contents of the Freudian dynamic unconscious) comes secondarily out of experience in relationships (as evident in attachment patterns observed at 12 months of age in the Strange Situation). In particular, I recalled Stern’s idea that a verbal/conscious search for meaning may sometimes actually impede the deepening of experience. Had the centrality of relationship in treatment eluded the curriculum of this strange (to me) institute? I will note that, when having taught clinical case seminars to its first and second year classes, the students seemed more interested, even excited by, ideas less well known to them.

The presenter in this fourth year seminar, on the other hand, eschewed attachment research and was certain that it was the patient’s responsibility, and hers alone, (in a blaming sort of way) to choose her own life, regardless of the patient’s early experiences and regardless of the present moment and the therapeutic relationship. The analyst was to make interpretations in order to bring unconscious motivations to consciousness. The class, upon hearing the case, could observe that the patient had been deprived of both a nurturing mother and of being allowed the opportunity for identificatory love with her father, yet the class saw no place for the therapist to provide a new attachment relationship where unfinished developmental business could safely be revisited. The therapist was decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of being either for the patient. The class mostly interpreted the rocky relationship between therapist and patient as the patient’s bent toward “competitiveness” (e.g. when the patient wanted to read a book the therapist mentioned) and thought it odd that I might, in addition, see the patient’s wish to identify with, be like the therapist. (And, of course, the rocky relationship between me and the class is a parallel process which humbles me.)