ParentWise by Loren Buckner

Tampa psychotherapy colleague Loren Buckner, MSW, is author of ParentWise: The Emotional Challenges of Family Life and How to Deal With Them. ParentWise is a most unusual parenting book in that it does not tell people how to parent but instead explores what it feels like to be a parent. Writing on May 31, 2011 for the Orlando Sentinel as a guest columnist, Buckner shares some thoughts from ParentWise in the article entitled “Lessons from the Anthony trial: Inner reflection can help conflicted parents:

“…There's a risk, though, to pointing our fingers at other so-called "bad" parents. Focusing on their problems can lead to minimizing our own. Most of us admit to a certain amount of everyday anger. But we avoid confronting the deeper feelings, the ones that keep us up at night.

The Anthony case, and others that periodically dominate the news, center on parents who have lost their way. After every tragedy, we wonder: How could something like this possibly happen? This response is problematic, too, because as long as the question remains unfathomable, we can avoid thinking about it seriously.
The truth is we hear about families and children in crisis practically every day. We read about parents who hurt their children and about kids who are violent. To help them deal with their emotions, doctors prescribe antidepressants to kids and parents who are overwhelmed by how they feel and at a loss as to what do about it. Over-eating, under-eating and addictions of varying kinds have become common but unhealthy ways to cope.

This tragic case presents an opportunity to bring to light a painful truth that is hard to admit even in the privacy of our own thoughts, never mind say out loud. Normal, everyday kinds of parents sometimes hate their children.

Hatred feels awful. It fills parents with such unspeakable guilt and shame that hiding this excruciating feeling seems like the only respectable thing to do.

The word "hate," usually believed to be a horrid, immoral emotion, is difficult to use without cringing. Admitting that there are times when we do, in fact, hate being parents or hate our children may seem appalling. However, there's a type of hate that's different from the evil kind.

Like other strong feelings, hate is as much a part of life as any other emotion. Not only is hate a normal feeling, hate and love aren't mutually exclusive. We feel happy and sad, relieved and disappointed, and we feel love and hate, too. Most people have mixed feelings about all sorts of things. Parenthood is no exception. Containing the hate and anger we feel toward the people we love the most — our own children — is one of the most gut-wrenching parts of parenting, making it vital to understand.

Feelings, even disagreeable ones, do not determine our character. How we react and how we interact with others, especially when we're upset, is what's telling. We know in our hearts when something is wrong inside. We need to listen to these feelings instead of drowning them out. Pretending that everything is fine when we're confused and unhappy can lead to serious consequences.

People tend to think they wouldn't feel bad inside if they had stayed married, had a more traditional family, or had more money. Parents believe that somewhere out there are moms and dads who don't suffer with bouts of anger, guilt or self-doubt.

In reality, we all have to learn to manage painful feelings. Individual circumstances vary, but disturbing emotions are an integral part of a family's journey. Feelings, even negative ones, are not character flaws or signs of weakness; they are signs of life.

As parents, we have a responsibility to look into our own personal stories. We need to understand and learn how to cope with the complicated and conflicting feelings we have. Our kids deserve this degree of dedication.

And even if we haven't been committed to a self-reflective parenting style, we can certainly honor Caylee Anthony's memory by developing one now.”

I am grateful to Loren Buckner for sharing her much needed ideas in such an accessible manner for all to read and to the Orlando Sentinel for publishing her work.

An Introduction to "Prisoners of Childhood" by Alice Miller (1981)

Prisoners of Childhood, published by Basic Books,(republished under it's German name Drama of the Gifted Child in 1997) is ironically a basic, but essential book that focuses on the the loss of the self (and its origins) and on the traumatic consequences of this loss. Prisoners of Childhood is divided into three short chapters rich in psychoanalytic insights (especially in the first two chapters).

First, a little bit about the two editions of the book. The original edition centered around the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism. In the ensuing years, Miller had a complete falling out with the psychoanalytic community and even turned away from the concept of psychoanalysis itself, which is a bit confounding given what a gifted psychoanalyst she was. Thus in the 2nd edition she stripped the work of any and all psychoanalytic "jargon". I believe something was lost in the process, so I have chosen to review the original.

Like my review (March 17, 2011) of Gaslighting... (Dorpat), I will quote this book extensively for it is rich in deep insights spoken so eloquently they hardly need explanation.

In the foreword Miller focuses on the ways many children are taught to behave at a very early age. With this focus on behavior, the child, who cannot risk losing his parents' love, complies, behaving before he can possibly understand what the behavior means. Miller than goes on to show how this leads to the development of a "false self" in gifted children (by "gifted" Miller is referring to those children that are very good at modifying their behavior to secure the parents' love, i.e. surviving).

On the lack of "respect for others" found in the narcissist, Miller has this to say:

If a mother respects both herself and her child from the first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others. (viii)

How lost this is on so many parents! I see it all around me, the commandment "Thou shall Honor thy mother and thy father" is drilled into a child's head on the one hand, but that honor is never practiced in the parent-child relationship. Children learn through observation and experience, what better way to teach a child respect than to respect yourself as well as the child? This commandment ought to be "Honor thyself and thy child". The original is a poisonous commandment that has misguided countless parents and poisoned society.

Miller continues:

... a mother who [was not respected as a child] will crave this respect from her child as a substitute; and she will try to get it by training him to give it to her. The tragic fate of such training and such "respect" is described in this book, (viii)

Miller makes some poignant observations about this early focus on behavior:

[it is inconceivable to love others] ...if one cannot love oneself as one really is. And how could a person do that if, from the very beginning, he has had no chance to experience his true feelings and to learn to know himself? For the majority of sensitive people, the true self remains deeply and thoroughly hidden. (viii-ix)

Miller's point is that the 'gifted' child, the child who most successfully conforms to her parents' wishes of behaving a certain way (and thus being something the child is not) most thoroughly loses any notion of love and respect for who she really is.

Miller poignantly concludes:

Such people are enamored of an idealized, conforming, false self. They will shun their hidden and lost true self, unless depression makes them aware of its loss or psychoses confronts them harshly with that true self... (ix)

On page ix we get the origin of the books title, where Miller speaks of the "true self's 'solitary confinement' within the prison of the false self." (ix) For Miller then, the ultimate goal of therapy is to help the patient experience his true feelings which will allow him to face repressed instinctual conflicts, which he will experience intensely. (x)

I could justifiably end this review with the opening sentence, one which could not be more insightful or informative to the therapist and patient:

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and the unique history of our childhood. (3)

but continuing,

for many people the truth is so essential that they must pay dearly for its loss with grave illness. (4)

I have born deeply personal witness to the veracity of this statement! "The truth hurts, but lies kill" I often say.
Miller goes on to say

Sometimes I ask myself whether it will ever be possible for us to grasp the extent of the loneliness and desertion to which we were exposed as children and hence intrapsychically are exposed as adults." (5)

by Tim LaDuca

(To be continued...)

Review of "Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation, and other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis" by Theo Dorpat (1996).

As a layperson I found Gaslighting... by Theo L. Dorpat a true gift. Through it I learned that the psychoanalytic process could be a useful and trustworthy tool in the treatment of mental illness. Before I read Gaslighting..., I harbored a great distrust for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general. Gaslighting... taught me it is not these great institutions that matter, but the individual persons who populate them and their kindness*.

It is hard to get across the impact this book has had without quoting it extensively, which I shall do. It has a very high signal-to-noise ratio. By that I mean it is jam packed with facts and truths, and I would recommend it for that alone.

Gaslighting... is a book about "covert methods of interpersonal control" both inside and outside of the therapeutic framework. It's not just about covert abuse in psychoanalysis but the role of covert abuse in the genesis of mental illness. This dual framework is what makes the book so amazing. Hopefully the first three sentences will peak the readers interest:

It has been said that fish don't know they swim in water until they are out of the water. Similarly, most people do not know about the subtle and covert types of interpersonal control, domination, and abuse they are exposed to all of their lives in their families, at their schools, or in their workplace. Not until they have experienced relationships that are more caring, respectful, and nonmanipulative are they able to recognize how much they have been covertly manipulated, controlled, and abused by others. (1)

Aptly covered is the concept of "projective identification", Dorpat's definition:

In projective identification, the subject first unconsciously projects unwanted aspects of themselves onto another person and pressures the object to contain, as it were, the subject's disavowed affects and contents. (6)

This is a primary form of gaslighting, which I assert, is unfortunately used quite commonly on children unwittingly by their parents becoming the source of many, in Dorpat's words, "pathogenic beliefs" often seen by clinicians.

Dorpat covers many covert methods of interpersonal control in the therapeutic situation including the aforementioned projective identification, a form of gaslighting which "...is an attempt to impair or destroy an individual's confidence in his or her psychic abilities". (7) Also covered are questioning, "defense interpretation", confrontations, interrupting or overlapping communication, and abrupt change of topic all which can lead to a "fragmenting [of] the patient's experience" (11).

I want to emphasize that although this book emphasizes the therapeutic framework, it also recognizes the covert methods that are endemic in society.

Dorpat wastes no time with a brief, simple but scathing critique of behavioral therapy and it's use of rewards and punishment, noting that "Humans have used rewards and punishment as effective means of training and attaining social control over others... for millions of years" (22), concluding that behavioral therapy is merely a means of getting patients to "act normal"(23). [In the interest of revealing my own bias, I would add that CBT is even more insidious with the "C" merely a proxy for brainwashing.]

Dorpat includes numerous, rich case studies to explore the dynamics of psychoanalysis. By studying where psychoanalysis goes wrong he manages to show its immense worth by saving the baby from the bathwater. He discusses a patient's reaction to attacks on the patient's judgements and perceptions noting the patient's "self-esteem fell as his confidence in his reality-testing and mental functions was markedly lowered." (36)

Dorpat skillfully portrays the use of questioning (quite simply, asking questions) as a method of control. In a vignette he reaches a beautiful conclusion of what a patient tries to communicate about the author's use of questioning: "Don't worry about not immediately knowing something about me. Your questions are pushing me away!" (54) Dorpat takes a very hard line on questioning, stating that it is only useful "in situations where the therapist is uncertain about the meaning of something said by the patient...". (71)

Gaslighting... shows some ways psychoanalysis can be counter-productive and the meat of this book illustrates in great detail, through vignettes, the disastrous results of covert interpersonal control in therapy. I fast-forward to the beautiful conclusions of this book. Extensively paraphrasing Wiess et al. (1986) Dorpat agrees:

Psychopathology stems from unconscious pathogenic beliefs of dangers if the patient were to pursue certain important goals. Unconscious pathogenic beliefs are irrational and they involve feelings of guilt, shame and anxiety. These are mainly formed in childhood out of traumatic relationships with parents and others... Patients are powerfully motivated to disconfirm these beliefs because they are maladaptive and grim, and they produce much mental pain. (238)

This is pure gold. Other conclusions are: to avoid the use of stereotyped psychoanalytic approaches (226); to recognize the importance of the nature of the analyst's interaction with the patient (231); and the importance of evaluating patient's responses to interventions by the analyst (247).

Much of my admiration for this book is due to the fact that it is very extensively sourced (a quality with which it shares in common the Pulitzer Prize winning "Denial of Death", Becker (1972)), drawing on works from A-Z including Hienz Kohut, Robert Langs, Joe Weiss, DW Winnicott, Eric Fromm, Bob Stolorow, and more than 100 others.


Gaslighting... is a great starting point for anyone interested in covert abuse, mental illness, psychoanalysis, and how power is unconsciously communicated in American society. I'll end with the books cogent epigraph:

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian ocieties, much less so in the system of "brainwashing under freedom" to which we are subjected and which we all too often serve as willing or unwitting instruments. Noam Chomsky, 1987


* Dorpat's kindness and caring is unconsciously woven though every page of the book.


Tim LaDuca
Wednesday, March 16, 2011

'Being Toward Death'

The Self Psychology Study Group of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc. had its usual 'waging of dialogue' when it discussed, yesterday, the final chapters in Robert Stolorow's book "Trauma and Human Existence." Stolorow emphasized two points: that emotional life is context embedded; and that emotional trauma is constitutive of human existence. In the discussion, Peter Rudnytsky highlighted "the tension between a 'relational' view of trauma, which emphasizes the context-dependency that makes some experiences traumatic but not others, and an 'ontological' view, which posits that there is something inherently traumatic in human existence and our 'being-toward' death." Peter noted that "Stolorow says something close to this in his last chapter," and also noted that he wished [Stolorow] had brought it out in the previous chapter, where Peter thought that Stolorow's "presentation of Heidegger accepted too uncritically the premise that death is an essentially non-relational phenomenon."


Because of the finitude of human existence and the finitude of emotional connections with others, I thought Stolorow intimates that we should 'be with' each other in grief: he writes: we are "deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common[italics, his] finitude," that is, we have a "kinship-in-finitude,' or what Vogel called "brothers and sisters in the same dark"[ness].

I think many of us know this to be so. After 9/11, we, for a moment, thought we might be just a little kinder to one another, for life is precarious as well as precious. We were shaken from our everyday denial of (a turning away from?) death. And in moments of crisis, trauma, or loss, it is the lucky who find a "relational home" with family and friends. Stolorow writes, "Loss can be an emotional trauma for which it is especially difficult to find a relational home." William Upshaw pointed out yesterday how the psychotherapeutic relationship allows a relational home -- for sorrow and grief and loss, and for authenticity.

Stolorow's phrase "authentic being toward death" led me to consider that authenticity is a dialogue, a dialectic if you will, and that one cannot be authentic 'toward death' without also being so toward life, holding in tension this unpredictable but certain looming reality of death alongside the reaching for, the deeply living of, life. Stolorow quotes Critchley: "death and finitude are fundamentally relational." For me, when I contemplate my own death, I think of how it will affect those loved ones left behind, and I assure them now that my life is, has been, full, and so they need not worry on my account. As for those I have loved and lost, while part of me is diminished, that loss is held in tension with the gratitude of what that love brought to my life.

Lycia Alexander-Guerra

Recommended book: Identical Strangers

Identical Strangers by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein.

I was intrigued and fascinated by this book written by identical twins who had been separately adopted at birth for a "twin study": Their website is http://www.identicalstrangersbook.com/about.html It presents a balanced perspective on nature-nurture contributions on behavior.

Recommended by John Lambert, LCSW

Book Review: Literature and the Brain

In Literature and the Brain (©2009 The PsyArt Foundation, Gainesville, FL) Norman N. Holland combines his love of ideas, questions, and answers with his love for literature. Like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or The Tipping Point, Holland’s is the perfect vacation or bedtime reading for the learned person interested in human behaviors, in this case, in thinking about literature. This is not a book that analyzes particular pieces of literature, as many of his other books do, but one that asks questions such as “Why do we feel real emotions at things we know are fictional” and what allows us to suspend disbelief, as well as explores “how the brain both enables and limits us in creating and responding to literature.”

To answer and explore some of these, Holland elucidates workings of the brain and looks at our relation to reality in general. Apparently, when our brain is cognizant that it cannot (or needs not) act or change the outcome of a situation, for example, on a work of art as when viewing a movie in a theater, then the motor cortex 'relaxes' allowing the limbic system its freer emotional expression.
He describes four changes in the brain when we are transported by reading a book or watching a play: our perception changes in relation to the body, to the environment, in reality testing, and in our emotions.

Holland provides biological and evolutionary reasons why we can lose awareness of our bodies and the world, and why we can cease to judge reality, allowing us to react emotionally toward fictional characters as if they were real. He explores why literary works engender such strong emotions by explaining the functioning of the brain, its cortical and subcortical workings. Holland says that the sole purpose of the brain is to move the body as in the four F’s learned by all medical students: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and sexual reproduction [the latter ‘F’ an example of the joy of surprise, as in a joke or well-turned phrase. ]


In explaining how the retina and the occipital brain perceive electrical physiological processes as something “out there,” he begins:

“Sensing objects as ‘out-there’ in a not-me world is useful, even essential, for survival. I have to know that somewhere beyond my skin is a mountain lion, a banana split, or Marilyn Monroe, depending on which basic need I am trying to satisfy at the moment.”


In Literature and the Brain Holland makes complex ideas accessible to the lay person. It is a rich book of neurological and psychoanalytic ideas about emotion and motivation, combined with thoughts from philosophers and poets, and peppered with humor. His avuncular writing style leads the reader into comfortable conversation with the author. Sometimes there are lovely metaphors: “A poem lies inert, like Sleeping Beauty, until we love it into life.” [Loving both poems and fairy tales, and with its allusion to sexual awakening, this one delighted me, despite the unconscious misogyny intimating that women find life from men.] Sometimes there is frank science: "...the brain stores information: not in the cells, but in the patterns of linkage between cells." But, throughout, there is the desire to read and understand more.

For the psychoanalyst, there are both ideas to fortify traditional views (about free association; the structural theory of id, ego, and superego; repression; and sublimation) and contemporary ones (cultural construction of our worlds; subjectivity; and negotiation of agreement about understanding) as well as those to support both (implicit learning and varying memory systems; how our brains are interconnected, porous to another’s person’s feelings). And when Holland writes about our enjoyment of tragedies (such as Hamlet) “…we fit them into our schemas for understanding the world. By making sense of them, we tame them.,” we think not only of Piaget, or Stolorow, or even Maurice Sendak, but we also resonate with what goes on, in part, in treatment with our patients. Later, privileging the left brain and insight, Holland notes how “Symbolization makes meaning possible,” however idiosyncratic and personal that meaning may be. But he also notes the importance of implicit connection, what Benjamin may write about as the joy of two subjects sharing a moment of like-mindedness, when he quotes the student Ellen “…this book [referring to the cartoons of Kliban] proves that someone else sees what I see.”


SEEKING behaviors and CONSUMMATORY behaviors, essential to the survival of the species, shed light on why we make meaning from and sense of literary works. Authors create a problem and we hunger for its resolution. We seek to learn the meaning of things. We seek to be reassured. Seeking satisfactions and getting them both bring us pleasure. I took pleasure in reading Literature and the Brain. In it we “discover this mysterious, magical treasure,[the] Mind.”

review by Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D.

RELATIONSHIP AND LONELINESS

Perusing the preliminary program for the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 2010 Winter meeting Jan 13-17th at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, NYC, I noticed that Discussion Group 95 is entitled “Toward an Understanding of Loneliness and Aloneness.” The presenter Lisa A. Piazza will share about a patient who uses a busy work schedule to avoid intimate connections. The Discussion Group plans to emphasize the experience of the patient’s loneliness and how therapists might best deal with loneliness in the patient. Perhaps this Discussion Group caught my eye because recently I had read a review of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century by two psychiatrists, Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz. Their book noted that increasingly more people have fewer confidants and live alone, and that many of us are too busy and irritable for friends and self reflection, causing us to feel “left-out” despite it being a situation of our own making; all of this aggravated, of course, by the mythological American ideal of independence, autonomy, and self-reliance.

Both the course title and book review struck me, I think, because in classes recently at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc., we, students and faculty alike, often find ourselves discussing what a lonely profession solo private practice is for the psychoanalyst/psychotherapist. Professional loneliness makes classes, meetings, and conferences all the more valuable to clinicians. This experience of professional loneliness seems equally worthy of discussion, and deserves exploration as to how it affects our relationships with patients.

Relational theories of psychoanalysis have helped us understand how unrealistic autonomy is as a goal in analysis if it does not also balance the reality of the embeddedness of humans in a human community. Relational psychoanalysis, offering reconfiguration of relationship paradigms, then becomes an important antidote to loneliness and avoidance, for both analysand and analyst. In fact, if what Olds and Schwartz write is true, then therapy may be the rare haven which allows for self-reflection while in relationship, and therapists may be the sole confidant for many people, making a relational approach in treatment all the more valuable.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

by Lycia ALexander-Guerra, MD

A road, a journey, the myriad of metaphors for life or life experiences, and for an analyst, a metaphor for the experience of psychoanalysis itself. But the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy [who also won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses, (1992)], a book of "gratitude" dedicated to his young son John Francis, is almost too much to bear. I recall writing the film review, based on another of McCarthy's novels, No Country for Old Man, and alluding to psychoanalysis as no country for the faint of heart. The opening page of The Road had me reevaluating thinking myself of pretty strong constitution. McCarthy writes "the frailty of everything revealed at last."

I thought the novel might be describing the metaphoric annihilation of a severely depressed person, an existential angst par excellence of aloneness in a cruel world. The father in The Road says "if only my heart were a stone." And he recognizes that "he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own." The Road is profoundly sad, but, unlike depression, beautiful. Tenderness and sacrifice evident in a yellow toy truck or a half packet of cocoa. Frighteningly, aliveness seemed to interrupt the relentless deadness only in passages that described a kind of kill-or-be-killed mentality, and a spark of love or tenderness almost too much to bear. I thought of patients who cut themselves.

There is a kind of 'be here now' to their lives, whether vigilant for marauders or a swim in a mountain pool. There is no past, and no place to be. The compelling reality is the search for food and for shoes.

The terse sentences, the paucity of dialogue, the bleakness, all reminded me of Hemingway, but, in The Road, even with the man sometimes dreaming of "aching blue" sky, or of his bride, or of flowering woods, there is no room here to entertain illusion, as Jake (The Sun Also Rises) thought Brett might, evident in his question to her, the book's last line: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" The Road has not a chapter, not a name (except Papa; and a name used as a lie); with almost every thing barren, sometimes not even a completed sentence, not an apostrophe, save one, for contractions, the daylight, grudging, the sun, indifferent. Corpses grimace, and the mummied dead are everywhere.

The boy is (understandably) frightened, alot. Perhaps the most heartbreaking of all is the recognition of what children in this (our) world always bear. The father, exhausted, irritable, tells his son, "You are not the one who has to worry about everything." The boy replies, "Yes, I am. I am the one."

Though the environs in The Road stand in stark contrast to descriptions of nature's lushness in McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper, I was nonetheless reminded by The Road of the journey of Inman, in Charles Frasier's Cold Mountain, on his intrepid trek, plodding through starvation, murdering marauders, and cold. But in The Road the man and his son trek through a nuclear winter of total destruction. If there is parallel devastation for Inman, it was what he thought became of goodness within himself, whereas the boy in The Road still carries the "fire" within, and his father believes this enough to keep them both alive against all odds for as long as necessary. Sometimes the analyst carries the belief inside, enough to propel analyst and analysand through the devastation. Sometimes it is the analysand who is responsible.

Perhaps in the last line of her NY Times review (Sep 25, 2006) of The Road, Janet Maslin said it best: "'The Road' offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be." Another Janet, Janet Malcom, might have written that about psychoanalysis, had she read The Road before writing The Impossible Profession.

key words: psychoanalytic literary criticism, Cormac McCarthy

Norman Holland: We Understand Our Perception of Literature

CLICK HERE

to read an interview with the

University of Florida's

Professor Norman Holland

by Ismail salami, Press TV

'We Understand Our Perception of Literature'

February 10, 2008

From www.presstv.ir

"Norman Holland has, over a long career, explored how the human mind relates to literature."

"He is best known for his books concentrating psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology on literary questions: Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966); The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968); Poems in Persons (1973); 5 Readers Reading (1975); Laughing (1982); The I (1985); The Brain of Robert Frost (1988); Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology (1990); and The Critical I (1992), an interrogation of contemporary literary theory through what we think we know about the way our minds work. "

Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=42514&sectionid=3510302

Professor Holland is also moderator of the online discussion group PSYART http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/psyart.htm

It Takes Two, Baby, Me and You

It Takes Two, Baby, Me and You

(Intersubjectivity)

Having read 3 books by Jessica Benjamin (The Bonds of Love, 1988; Like Subjects, Love Objects, 1995; and Shadow of the Other, 1998), I wanted to discuss with colleagues philosophical and clinical thoughts gleaned from and engendered by them.

* Humans are in a constant dialectic with self-assertion and recognition.
That is, there is a struggle to sustain the tension of one’s own subjectivity with that of the other’s subjectivity; we keep wanting the other subject to be an object who fulfills our desires as if the other had no independent desires. What’s more, to balance one’s own subjectivity with the other’s is a Herculean task, and doomed to fail. The good news is we can continually renew the task.

Hegel writes that each strives to be recognized as an independent self while, paradoxically, requiring (depending on) an other for recognition.

Benjamin writes that mutual recognition is necessary to fulfill the potential of both our autonomy and our relatedness. This desire for recognition as a separate self , including to have an effect on the world, fuels the therapeutic relationship.
Intersubjectivity posits a place, a third, between two subjects, where there exists the possibility of the sharing of a like experience by two different minds. This moment of recognition that two different minds are sharing the same experience brings joy to mother and toddler, to erotic union, and to the clinical experience. It is where empathy lives.

* The capacity to recognize the other as an independent subject is a developmental achievement. Winnicott writes that a child’s self-assertion includes negation of the (m)other, a destruction (in inner life) that she must survive (in external reality) to aid a child in its ability to differentiate inside and outside, fantasy and reality, self and other.
To live in the dialectic, one must keep negation alive alongside recognition.

For therapists, this can mean recognizing and tolerating the negative views of us by the patient, as well as exploring the therapist's real relationship contribution to these negative views.

* The different other is a threat to self because we are reminded we can’t be everything nor can we have everything. This has an impact on gender development, on the oedipal resolution, and on the grieving process inherent in the clinical situation.