As I mentioned in my previous post, I was struggling with the question of what forms of transference acted as resistance within psychoanalysis and what forms support the work of psychoanalysis. In "The Dynamics of Transference," Freud takes on this question directly. He admits that some forms of transference, "a relation of affectionate and devoted dependence," can "just as easily serve to facilitate admissions, and it is not clear why it should make things more difficult." He goes on to say that "we readily admit that the results of psycho-analysis rest upon suggestion... by employing suggestion in order get [the analysand] to accomplish a piece of psychical work ." I think the word "admission" here is particularly telling -- this is Freud working from the perspective that all you need to do is get the analysand to admit the repressed memory that already exists within their unconscious. If we are using a view of the unconscious as a proto-conscious rather than a second mind (see this post if you want to read more about the difference), then admission is not the ultimate goal, and the picture is going to get more complicated than that very rapidly.
Freud seeks to resolve this conflict by differentiating between the forms of transference. Positive transference manifests as affectionate feelings, while negative transference manifests as hostile ones. "Positive transference is then further divisible into transference of friendly or affectionate feelings which are admissible to consciousness and transference of prolongations of those feelings into the unconscious." Freud then goes on to say that only the unconscious positive transference and negative transference have to be made conscious, and because the other form of positive transference is "admissible to consciousness and unobjectionable" it "persists and is the vehicle of success in psychoanalysis."
First off, isn't the entire point of transference the fact that it's not "admissible to consciousness and unobjectionable"? It wouldn't be transference if it was done freely and consciously, it would be something else entirely, or at least this is the position Freud seems to suggest elsewhere in the essay. He asks, "How does it come about that transference is so admirably suited to be a means of resistance?", that is, why does the resistance of the unconscious to becoming conscious and the resistance to psychoanalytic treatment manifest so freely in the form of transference? Freud glibly notes that we find it hardest to be open about our feelings and desires to the objects of those desires. But that's the precise moment where he begins to talk about forms of positive treatment that aid treatment. He suggests that this is a solution, but it seems nonsensical to suggest that transference manifests are resistance becomes sometimes transference isn't really resistance.
Perhaps it is not useful to think of transference as the resistance the unconscious throws up when it's on the run. Otherwise, why would transference manifest so readily in other relationships? I believe that Freud has everything flipped around. Transference can only manifest as resistance within the psychoanalytic encounter. What sets psychoanalysis apart is not the fact that it elicits transference, positive or negative. In day to day life transference is experienced as natural, inevitable, but within the psychoanalytic encounter it can become a developmental tool. This perspective lessens the importance of Freud's psychophysics (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and for every advance in analysis there is an actual and opposite resistance) and focuses more on psychoanalysis as a way of harnessing the developmental thrust of the unconscious.
I'm still very suspicious about distinguishing between positive and negative transference, and assuming that it is impossible for negative transference to be beneficial to treatment. I also have problems with the focus on the power of suggestion within psychoanalysis, if for no other reason than that there are many other forms of therapy that seem better suited towards telling people how they should run their lives. There are probably much better techniques suited for convincing people of some truth about their lives than psychoanalysis, although psychoanalysis has certainly been treated as such.
I have more to say about this, but I'll talk about it for my post on the case study of Dora, because it is very related.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
"Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex."
Before I start talking about Freud's essay "Observations on Transference-Love," I'm gonna take a moment to talk about terms. There aren't very many good terms to refer to someone who is in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. "Client" is a commonly used one, but it focuses a bit too much on the economic dimension of therapy for me to like it very much. "Patient," which Freud uses often, is too medical for me. I like the term "analysand," which refers specifically to psychoanalysis, mainly because it's kind of a cool word and I like the symmetry it suggests. I will generally use that term in this blog, unless I'm talking about other non-psychoanalytic forms of therapy, in which case I'll use the most common one, "client."
To give a bit of historical context, Freud wrote this essay because evidently women falling in love with their analysts was a big problem for the legitimacy of psychoanalysis. Freud is put into the amusing position of arguing that psychoanalysis upholds the norms of "conventional morality" while still claiming that psychoanalysis is not about upholding conventional morality. Freud tries to argue that transference-love is different from "genuine love," but eventually the only difference between the two that he can actually be certain about is that transference-love happens within the analytic situation. Reading him struggle with this realization is both amusing and intriguing, because it makes me wonder what the actual difference between the two is, and why that difference matters.
Two things struck me as I was reading this, and I should probably mention them before I delve into talking about the meat of the essay. First, Freud's notorious sexism is definitely coming through strong in the entire essay. This is mainly because the problem of transference-love for Freud is mainly a problem between male analysts and female analysands. The gendered quality of this interaction leads Freud astray in his theorizing at various points in the essay, or at least constricts the conclusions he can make about the differences between "genuine love" and "transference-love." Second, this essay is full of legitimizing rhetoric about psychoanalysis. Freud worked hard not just to create theoretical space for psychoanalysis but also to win over the hearts and minds of the general public. Interestingly, these discussions from Freud meant to legitimize psychoanalysis typically fall either into the category of "arguments that continue today" and "arguments where Freud is definitely on the right side of history." For example, in one place in this essay Freud basically defends the basic premise of therapy, that women should be able to have close (nonsexual) relationships with their male therapists. I think this wouldn't seem like a big deal today, but back then it appears that this kind of relationship was seen as taboo to some extent.
Freud states that an analysand falling in love with "her" analyst is just another form of resistance, something that interferes with treatment but at the same time makes room for analysis. Interestingly, Freud in an aside states that it wouldn't make sense to urge analysands to "go ahead and fall in love with the doctor so that the treatment may make progress." On the surface, this feels like an obvious point: Freud is right that the transference loses its spontaneity. But what does it mean that spontaneity is an important (maybe even necessary) characteristic for transference to have? On some level, it seems strange that Freud is concerned with analysts encouraging a process that supposedly happens naturally -- after all, if the transference-love is going to happen, won't it occur whether or not the analyst officially suggests it? To put the question in a different way, would it be more beneficial for the treatment if the analysand experienced transference-love or if they experienced no transference at all? If there was no resistance then wouldn't psychoanalysis be impossible? You might say that if there was no resistance then psychoanalysis would be unnecessary.
The point I'm trying to make is relatively straightforward -- transference is not something that happens in a vacuum. The analyst elicits the transference along with the analysand who provides it. Different analysts will push the psychoanalytic relationship in different directions, and those directions will provide the field within which the transference manifests. Freud believes that transference is inevitable -- all you have to do is be a neutral observer, and the transference will naturally show itself. But in reality the stance of the "neutral observer" creates a specific kind of field for the transference -- one in which transference-love is experienced as resistance and where "genuine love would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with expected it of her."
Another way of putting this is that unless the stance of the analyst is flexible in regards to the transference, then there will always be limitations on what transference can be analyzed and what transference is taken for granted. It is completely reasonable to imagine an analysand whose "transference-love" -- whose resistance -- would lead her to be docile, and another analysand for whom being able to fall passionately in love with his analyst is a sign of the therapy's success. This goes back to Freud's sexism, by the way -- because he sees the role of women within the analytic encounter in a specific light he is unable to remember that the transference has to be analyzed within its own psychic context. It turns out that the lack of resistance as Freud saw it could be a form of resistance itself, while what may look like resistance may actually be a sign of the analysand's newfound freedom.
One of the weighty questions that Freud attempts to tackle in this essay is the difference between "genuine love" and transference-love. As I've shown, the places where Freud starts looking for this answer rapidly fall apart, when we realize that the difference is going to be specific to each individual. I think that Freud rapidly realizes this, however, as he begins to backpeddle by saying that "being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is also more similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena." He also says that "[transference-love] is lacking to a high degree in a regard for reality, is less sensible, less concerned about consequences and more blind in its valuation of the loved person that we are prepared to admit in the case of normal love. We should not forget, however, that these departures from the norm constitute precisely what is essential about being in love." In short, Freud says that at best the only difference between the two is a matter of degree, and besides that the only true difference is that one happens within psychoanalysis and the other doesn't.
At the end of the day though, I do have to agree with Freud that there is a difference, and even if this is the only one it is a big one. Transference-love is transference-love because it is there to be analyzed. If analysts were having intimate relationships with their analysands, then the self-reflexive quality of this relationship would end. In part, this is because of the loss of asymmetry between analyst and analysand, but I think more importantly there is a certain amount of reflexiveness that is impossible without the limitations. In romantic relationships, talking about the relationship itself is a task slipped into the cracks, in brief flurries of frankness. But within psychoanalysis the feelings and everyday moments that two people experience within the context of a relationship are what falls through the cracks. Being able to zoom in on these moments in this way is something that is practically impossible in the context of an actual relationship.
If you haven't noticed, there's this tension in Freud's essay (and in this post) between transference as a result of the intersubjectivity of the analytic encounter and transference as a process that occurs throughout one's life. In the former, transference is an artifact of psychoanalysis, while in the latter transference is something that exists objectively within the life of the analysand, even outside of psychoanalysis. Both of these are called transference, and they are both meant to be the same thing, but why do they have to be? Maybe there is something fundamentally different about transference within psychoanalysis and transference outside of psychoanalysis. After all, if there is any difference between transference-love and genuine love the two must be fundamentally different in some way.
Transference can help the analyst on its own, by providing a connection between the analyst and the analysand which furthers treatment. Or it act as resistance, something to be analyzed. The problem for me theoretically is that I see no reason why these two manifestations of transference couldn't happen simultaneously. How can an analyst tell if this or that manifestation of transference is a resistance or an aid to analysis? I think this is a broader problem of transference -- what forms of transference in life are to be encouraged and what forms are to be discouraged?
Fortunately, the paper I'm writing about next, "The Dynamics of Transference," definitely talks about this problem and about the different forms of transference, so I'll continue writing about these questions in that post. I'll end with some notes on different specific passages that stood out to me. (Also, by the way, the quote I used for the title of this post is by Adam Phillips.)
- "To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be, not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one. It would be just as though, after summoning up a spirit from the underworld by cunning spells, one were to send him down again without having asked him a single question."
Wow, this quote is so ridiculous and amazing I laughed out loud when I read it, this is probably my favorite quote from this essay, although I don't really think of psychoanalysis this way personally.
- "The psycho-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist."
More awesome psychoanalytic metaphors. Even though I don't really agree with this metaphor's implications, I still find hilarious the image of psychoanalyst as scientist carrying a beaker full of hazardous material with tongs.
- "Genuine love, we say, would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with expected it of her."
Uh, yeah, this is by far my least favorite quote of this essay, just in case you were curious, for obvious reasons.
To give a bit of historical context, Freud wrote this essay because evidently women falling in love with their analysts was a big problem for the legitimacy of psychoanalysis. Freud is put into the amusing position of arguing that psychoanalysis upholds the norms of "conventional morality" while still claiming that psychoanalysis is not about upholding conventional morality. Freud tries to argue that transference-love is different from "genuine love," but eventually the only difference between the two that he can actually be certain about is that transference-love happens within the analytic situation. Reading him struggle with this realization is both amusing and intriguing, because it makes me wonder what the actual difference between the two is, and why that difference matters.
Two things struck me as I was reading this, and I should probably mention them before I delve into talking about the meat of the essay. First, Freud's notorious sexism is definitely coming through strong in the entire essay. This is mainly because the problem of transference-love for Freud is mainly a problem between male analysts and female analysands. The gendered quality of this interaction leads Freud astray in his theorizing at various points in the essay, or at least constricts the conclusions he can make about the differences between "genuine love" and "transference-love." Second, this essay is full of legitimizing rhetoric about psychoanalysis. Freud worked hard not just to create theoretical space for psychoanalysis but also to win over the hearts and minds of the general public. Interestingly, these discussions from Freud meant to legitimize psychoanalysis typically fall either into the category of "arguments that continue today" and "arguments where Freud is definitely on the right side of history." For example, in one place in this essay Freud basically defends the basic premise of therapy, that women should be able to have close (nonsexual) relationships with their male therapists. I think this wouldn't seem like a big deal today, but back then it appears that this kind of relationship was seen as taboo to some extent.
Freud states that an analysand falling in love with "her" analyst is just another form of resistance, something that interferes with treatment but at the same time makes room for analysis. Interestingly, Freud in an aside states that it wouldn't make sense to urge analysands to "go ahead and fall in love with the doctor so that the treatment may make progress." On the surface, this feels like an obvious point: Freud is right that the transference loses its spontaneity. But what does it mean that spontaneity is an important (maybe even necessary) characteristic for transference to have? On some level, it seems strange that Freud is concerned with analysts encouraging a process that supposedly happens naturally -- after all, if the transference-love is going to happen, won't it occur whether or not the analyst officially suggests it? To put the question in a different way, would it be more beneficial for the treatment if the analysand experienced transference-love or if they experienced no transference at all? If there was no resistance then wouldn't psychoanalysis be impossible? You might say that if there was no resistance then psychoanalysis would be unnecessary.
The point I'm trying to make is relatively straightforward -- transference is not something that happens in a vacuum. The analyst elicits the transference along with the analysand who provides it. Different analysts will push the psychoanalytic relationship in different directions, and those directions will provide the field within which the transference manifests. Freud believes that transference is inevitable -- all you have to do is be a neutral observer, and the transference will naturally show itself. But in reality the stance of the "neutral observer" creates a specific kind of field for the transference -- one in which transference-love is experienced as resistance and where "genuine love would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with expected it of her."
Another way of putting this is that unless the stance of the analyst is flexible in regards to the transference, then there will always be limitations on what transference can be analyzed and what transference is taken for granted. It is completely reasonable to imagine an analysand whose "transference-love" -- whose resistance -- would lead her to be docile, and another analysand for whom being able to fall passionately in love with his analyst is a sign of the therapy's success. This goes back to Freud's sexism, by the way -- because he sees the role of women within the analytic encounter in a specific light he is unable to remember that the transference has to be analyzed within its own psychic context. It turns out that the lack of resistance as Freud saw it could be a form of resistance itself, while what may look like resistance may actually be a sign of the analysand's newfound freedom.
One of the weighty questions that Freud attempts to tackle in this essay is the difference between "genuine love" and transference-love. As I've shown, the places where Freud starts looking for this answer rapidly fall apart, when we realize that the difference is going to be specific to each individual. I think that Freud rapidly realizes this, however, as he begins to backpeddle by saying that "being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is also more similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena." He also says that "[transference-love] is lacking to a high degree in a regard for reality, is less sensible, less concerned about consequences and more blind in its valuation of the loved person that we are prepared to admit in the case of normal love. We should not forget, however, that these departures from the norm constitute precisely what is essential about being in love." In short, Freud says that at best the only difference between the two is a matter of degree, and besides that the only true difference is that one happens within psychoanalysis and the other doesn't.
At the end of the day though, I do have to agree with Freud that there is a difference, and even if this is the only one it is a big one. Transference-love is transference-love because it is there to be analyzed. If analysts were having intimate relationships with their analysands, then the self-reflexive quality of this relationship would end. In part, this is because of the loss of asymmetry between analyst and analysand, but I think more importantly there is a certain amount of reflexiveness that is impossible without the limitations. In romantic relationships, talking about the relationship itself is a task slipped into the cracks, in brief flurries of frankness. But within psychoanalysis the feelings and everyday moments that two people experience within the context of a relationship are what falls through the cracks. Being able to zoom in on these moments in this way is something that is practically impossible in the context of an actual relationship.
If you haven't noticed, there's this tension in Freud's essay (and in this post) between transference as a result of the intersubjectivity of the analytic encounter and transference as a process that occurs throughout one's life. In the former, transference is an artifact of psychoanalysis, while in the latter transference is something that exists objectively within the life of the analysand, even outside of psychoanalysis. Both of these are called transference, and they are both meant to be the same thing, but why do they have to be? Maybe there is something fundamentally different about transference within psychoanalysis and transference outside of psychoanalysis. After all, if there is any difference between transference-love and genuine love the two must be fundamentally different in some way.
Transference can help the analyst on its own, by providing a connection between the analyst and the analysand which furthers treatment. Or it act as resistance, something to be analyzed. The problem for me theoretically is that I see no reason why these two manifestations of transference couldn't happen simultaneously. How can an analyst tell if this or that manifestation of transference is a resistance or an aid to analysis? I think this is a broader problem of transference -- what forms of transference in life are to be encouraged and what forms are to be discouraged?
Fortunately, the paper I'm writing about next, "The Dynamics of Transference," definitely talks about this problem and about the different forms of transference, so I'll continue writing about these questions in that post. I'll end with some notes on different specific passages that stood out to me. (Also, by the way, the quote I used for the title of this post is by Adam Phillips.)
- "To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be, not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one. It would be just as though, after summoning up a spirit from the underworld by cunning spells, one were to send him down again without having asked him a single question."
Wow, this quote is so ridiculous and amazing I laughed out loud when I read it, this is probably my favorite quote from this essay, although I don't really think of psychoanalysis this way personally.
- "The psycho-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist."
More awesome psychoanalytic metaphors. Even though I don't really agree with this metaphor's implications, I still find hilarious the image of psychoanalyst as scientist carrying a beaker full of hazardous material with tongs.
- "Genuine love, we say, would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with expected it of her."
Uh, yeah, this is by far my least favorite quote of this essay, just in case you were curious, for obvious reasons.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
_________?, Repeating, and Working-Through
I'm gonna confess something here first off. I haven't actually read very much of Freud's work. Up until this point, I've only read Three Essays on Sexuality, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various snippets here and there quoted by texts that I've read.
Why? I think primarily it's because I got the sense that Freud's work has many places where he had the right idea but the wrong approach. I didn't want to latch onto the wrong parts of his thought, but I also didn't want to just discard his ideas because I wasn't able to separate out the parts where he went off course from their more important core. Part of the reason that I'm choosing to read Freud now is that I feel more like I have a good sense for what aspects of Freud's work are crucial and where he gets himself tripped up by various assumptions or frameworks he was working off of. Lear talks of Freud's "legacy-as-task" and I think this a good way to approach Freud's work. He started psychoanalysis, a vibrant, flexible framework, knowing that it would undergo changes and that it would continue to be improved upon and rethought.
The essay "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" starts along these lines, with Freud looking backwards to how psychoanalysis had progressed up until that point. He describes the shift from using hypnosis in order to bring the "patient" back to the moment that was causing the symptoms, to using free association to access the moment or problem that was causing the symptoms. Eventually psychoanalysts no longer felt the need to hone in and interpret the one moment or problem themselves and instead focused on the resistances that were preventing the analysand from remembering that moment or problem. The focus was still on trying to "fill in the gaps in memory."
Initially, my cognitive psychological side reacted to this passage with abject horror. "This is it! The entire point is bringing up repressed memories? There is no such thing as a repressed memory! Memory doesn't work like that!" Cognitive psychology has described the ways in which memories are actively created and reconstructed, and during the "memory wars" cognitive psychologists went to great lengths to show that memories aren't concrete entities within the mind that can be plucked out by an adept psychotherapist.
Fortunately, I think that the core of this essay does not rely on this conceptualization of remembering. In reality, the remembering that Freud is outlining as the goal of psychoanalysis is very different from that kind of remembering, and there are several places within this essay where Freud seems to be very close to (or edging around) this realization. The first one is actually within that opening passage I just described, because it seems like the next logical step from a de-emphasis on the analyst uncovering the memories themselves would be relinquishing the entire focus on "uncovering" memories in the first place.
The next passage focuses on how repeating takes the places of remembering. People who cannot remember are forced to repeat, they are forced to act out their conflicts and symptoms rather than bear their memories. Freud says that everything that happens within the psychoanalytic situation starts out as a repetition -- the analysand transfers their prior relationships onto the analyst in the form of transference, and this is just one form of repeating. But strangely Freud does not describe what it would be like to act with remembering in mind -- that is, if repeating is acting out, then what would it look like for an analysand to act in some other way besides out? Presumably remembering would enable them to be acting in a different way than repeating, but it seems very strange to describe, for example, someone who decided to terminate an abusive relationship after going through therapy as "remembering," even though according to Freud that person would be acting based on their memories rather than repeating. This lack of symmetry between the two concepts tells us that Freud must need the word remember to be doing something besides just describing a recollection or uncovering of concrete memories.
Lear describes the unconscious as fundamentally different from the conscious, in that unconscious mental activity lacks "propositional structure." People don't act unconsciously so that they can accomplish anything -- they just act, specifically in a way that escapes their ability to effectively describe why. This view of the unconscious runs counter to the view that the unconscious is just a second conscious mind that is hidden (the view that Freud is leaning on here). If the contents of the unconscious aren't coalesced memories that have been repressed from consciousness but instead are loose pattens of connections that defy any sort of propositional structure, then obviously remembering needs to take a very different form.
Freud then discusses how analyzing the transference is crucial toward the interpretation of resistance and enabling the analysand to remember. This is very interesting, because it means that our "compulsion to repeat" is the same force which enables psychoanalysis to work. The cure and the symptom are intricately connected. I think this is why Lear describes the unconscious as "striving for consciousness," or as being developmentally oriented. Making the unconscious conscious doesn't involve enabling the analysand to uncover their own repressed memories -- instead, it is a way of enabling the analysand to develop a propositional structure for their unconscious actions. Remembering in this context does not refer to the recollection of repressed memories but instead to the creation of new "memories" -- lifting the complex patterns of associations in the unconscious into ways of thinking about the world that are not simply reactive repetition.
This shift in focus away from a view of the unconscious as a collection of memories that need to be remembered fits in nicely with the conclusion of this paper, where Freud talks about the concept of working-through. Working-through is the process by which the analysand takes the analyst's interpretation of the resistance and comes to understand that resistance on their own terms. Basically, Freud sees working-through as the hardest part of analysis, because although others can tell you what they think your problem is, it only makes a difference if you understand what they are saying on your own terms. If the process of making the unconscious conscious, of converting repetition into "remembering," is not a straightforward process of getting someone else to accept the analyst's version of their history, then working-through will be the most important part of psychoanalysis because that is where the loose associations of the unconscious are formed into conscious mental activity -- where the new ways of being are incorporated into the existing psychic framework of the analysand . Otherwise, working-through will just be a process of pressuring the analysand to accept the story that the analyst believes based on their interpretation.
According to Freud, working-through just takes time, and I'm not entirely sure if that makes sense. After all, there are ways of saying something to someone else that are more or less persuasive, and you can imagine two interpretations that convey the same sentiment but in completely different ways. Freud sees the process of working-through as "the part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion." This makes me wonder about other forms of therapy and what they do when the client refuses to accept whatever the therapist has to say -- in particular I know that a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy involves pointing out negative thought patterns.
One of the potential advantages of psychodynamic therapy over other forms of therapy (based on empirical studies I've seen) is that clients show improvement over time (rather than decreases as seen in other therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy). If this is the case, then I think the process of working-through is the reason for this advantage. Gradual improvement post-treatment fits more with the conceptualization of "remembering" I have outlined in this post, because if remembering just required accepting the interpretations of the analyst and "uncovering" the "repressed memories" then the benefits of working-through would be less gradual and would occur within the context of treatment more than anything else.
As a side note, there is something about the process of working through that suggests that psychoanalysis does not just work with the unconscious. Part of "making the unconscious conscious" is learning the ways in which the unconscious already is conscious, the ways in which the analysand has already developed effectively, and hanging the work of psychoanalysis onto those parts. After all, what else is there for the unconscious to be worked into? I'm curious about this side of psychoanalysis -- Freud talks often about how dysfunction and conflict are everywhere in the psyche, but a lot of his theorizing requires the possibility of stability or successful negotiation of the conflicts of living.
Anyway, I haven't gotten as far in my reading list as I would have liked to, but I don't feel too bad for spending a lot of time on this essay, because it is, according to Lear at least, Freud's most important essay. After reading it and spending a lot of time thinking about it I can see why he said that, because you can see hints of where Freud's theorizing is reaching almost beyond itself to ways of thinking about unconscious that he didn't possess at the time. My next post will be about a few more essays on transference: "Observations on Transference-Love" and "Dynamics of Transference."
Other random notes about this essay:
- Here's my favorite passage:
"The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind... The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but on which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature."
- Here's my least favorite passage:
"The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment--weapons which we must wrest from him one by one." I don't really like what this implies symbolically about the analyst-analysand relationship -- that it is necessarily confrontational and requires the analyst to be seizing power from the analysand. After all, it's very easy to imagine someone whose problem is that they are always handing away their "weapons" to someone else, analyst included!
- This passage reminded of an article I read by McAdams, a psychologist who studies personality based on a "life story approach." He found that people who underwent therapy and conceptualized their illness as a outside force they were fighting were more likely to show improvements. Freud writes: "His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. The way is thus paved from the beginning for a reconciliation with the repressed material which is coming to expression in his symptoms, while at the same time place is found for a certain tolerance for the state of being ill." This is interesting to me, because Freud seems to be arguing that people need to think about it both ways at once -- mental illness is a part of personality AND an enemy to be fought off. I don't really know if that is possible, but it seems like if it was that would give you the best of both worlds, because it would combine self-acceptance with the will to work hard in therapy. I don't know if those two are mutually exclusive but this is definitely something I'll be thinking about. (I wonder if you would find an interaction effect between treatment modality and the narratives people told about their therapy -- for example, maybe this mixed point of view Freud outlines would correlate with improvements in psychodynamic therapy, but in cognitive-behavorial therapy improvements with only be correlated with conceptualizing the illness as an enemy.)
Why? I think primarily it's because I got the sense that Freud's work has many places where he had the right idea but the wrong approach. I didn't want to latch onto the wrong parts of his thought, but I also didn't want to just discard his ideas because I wasn't able to separate out the parts where he went off course from their more important core. Part of the reason that I'm choosing to read Freud now is that I feel more like I have a good sense for what aspects of Freud's work are crucial and where he gets himself tripped up by various assumptions or frameworks he was working off of. Lear talks of Freud's "legacy-as-task" and I think this a good way to approach Freud's work. He started psychoanalysis, a vibrant, flexible framework, knowing that it would undergo changes and that it would continue to be improved upon and rethought.
The essay "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" starts along these lines, with Freud looking backwards to how psychoanalysis had progressed up until that point. He describes the shift from using hypnosis in order to bring the "patient" back to the moment that was causing the symptoms, to using free association to access the moment or problem that was causing the symptoms. Eventually psychoanalysts no longer felt the need to hone in and interpret the one moment or problem themselves and instead focused on the resistances that were preventing the analysand from remembering that moment or problem. The focus was still on trying to "fill in the gaps in memory."
Initially, my cognitive psychological side reacted to this passage with abject horror. "This is it! The entire point is bringing up repressed memories? There is no such thing as a repressed memory! Memory doesn't work like that!" Cognitive psychology has described the ways in which memories are actively created and reconstructed, and during the "memory wars" cognitive psychologists went to great lengths to show that memories aren't concrete entities within the mind that can be plucked out by an adept psychotherapist.
Fortunately, I think that the core of this essay does not rely on this conceptualization of remembering. In reality, the remembering that Freud is outlining as the goal of psychoanalysis is very different from that kind of remembering, and there are several places within this essay where Freud seems to be very close to (or edging around) this realization. The first one is actually within that opening passage I just described, because it seems like the next logical step from a de-emphasis on the analyst uncovering the memories themselves would be relinquishing the entire focus on "uncovering" memories in the first place.
The next passage focuses on how repeating takes the places of remembering. People who cannot remember are forced to repeat, they are forced to act out their conflicts and symptoms rather than bear their memories. Freud says that everything that happens within the psychoanalytic situation starts out as a repetition -- the analysand transfers their prior relationships onto the analyst in the form of transference, and this is just one form of repeating. But strangely Freud does not describe what it would be like to act with remembering in mind -- that is, if repeating is acting out, then what would it look like for an analysand to act in some other way besides out? Presumably remembering would enable them to be acting in a different way than repeating, but it seems very strange to describe, for example, someone who decided to terminate an abusive relationship after going through therapy as "remembering," even though according to Freud that person would be acting based on their memories rather than repeating. This lack of symmetry between the two concepts tells us that Freud must need the word remember to be doing something besides just describing a recollection or uncovering of concrete memories.
Lear describes the unconscious as fundamentally different from the conscious, in that unconscious mental activity lacks "propositional structure." People don't act unconsciously so that they can accomplish anything -- they just act, specifically in a way that escapes their ability to effectively describe why. This view of the unconscious runs counter to the view that the unconscious is just a second conscious mind that is hidden (the view that Freud is leaning on here). If the contents of the unconscious aren't coalesced memories that have been repressed from consciousness but instead are loose pattens of connections that defy any sort of propositional structure, then obviously remembering needs to take a very different form.
Freud then discusses how analyzing the transference is crucial toward the interpretation of resistance and enabling the analysand to remember. This is very interesting, because it means that our "compulsion to repeat" is the same force which enables psychoanalysis to work. The cure and the symptom are intricately connected. I think this is why Lear describes the unconscious as "striving for consciousness," or as being developmentally oriented. Making the unconscious conscious doesn't involve enabling the analysand to uncover their own repressed memories -- instead, it is a way of enabling the analysand to develop a propositional structure for their unconscious actions. Remembering in this context does not refer to the recollection of repressed memories but instead to the creation of new "memories" -- lifting the complex patterns of associations in the unconscious into ways of thinking about the world that are not simply reactive repetition.
This shift in focus away from a view of the unconscious as a collection of memories that need to be remembered fits in nicely with the conclusion of this paper, where Freud talks about the concept of working-through. Working-through is the process by which the analysand takes the analyst's interpretation of the resistance and comes to understand that resistance on their own terms. Basically, Freud sees working-through as the hardest part of analysis, because although others can tell you what they think your problem is, it only makes a difference if you understand what they are saying on your own terms. If the process of making the unconscious conscious, of converting repetition into "remembering," is not a straightforward process of getting someone else to accept the analyst's version of their history, then working-through will be the most important part of psychoanalysis because that is where the loose associations of the unconscious are formed into conscious mental activity -- where the new ways of being are incorporated into the existing psychic framework of the analysand . Otherwise, working-through will just be a process of pressuring the analysand to accept the story that the analyst believes based on their interpretation.
According to Freud, working-through just takes time, and I'm not entirely sure if that makes sense. After all, there are ways of saying something to someone else that are more or less persuasive, and you can imagine two interpretations that convey the same sentiment but in completely different ways. Freud sees the process of working-through as "the part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion." This makes me wonder about other forms of therapy and what they do when the client refuses to accept whatever the therapist has to say -- in particular I know that a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy involves pointing out negative thought patterns.
One of the potential advantages of psychodynamic therapy over other forms of therapy (based on empirical studies I've seen) is that clients show improvement over time (rather than decreases as seen in other therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy). If this is the case, then I think the process of working-through is the reason for this advantage. Gradual improvement post-treatment fits more with the conceptualization of "remembering" I have outlined in this post, because if remembering just required accepting the interpretations of the analyst and "uncovering" the "repressed memories" then the benefits of working-through would be less gradual and would occur within the context of treatment more than anything else.
As a side note, there is something about the process of working through that suggests that psychoanalysis does not just work with the unconscious. Part of "making the unconscious conscious" is learning the ways in which the unconscious already is conscious, the ways in which the analysand has already developed effectively, and hanging the work of psychoanalysis onto those parts. After all, what else is there for the unconscious to be worked into? I'm curious about this side of psychoanalysis -- Freud talks often about how dysfunction and conflict are everywhere in the psyche, but a lot of his theorizing requires the possibility of stability or successful negotiation of the conflicts of living.
Anyway, I haven't gotten as far in my reading list as I would have liked to, but I don't feel too bad for spending a lot of time on this essay, because it is, according to Lear at least, Freud's most important essay. After reading it and spending a lot of time thinking about it I can see why he said that, because you can see hints of where Freud's theorizing is reaching almost beyond itself to ways of thinking about unconscious that he didn't possess at the time. My next post will be about a few more essays on transference: "Observations on Transference-Love" and "Dynamics of Transference."
Other random notes about this essay:
- Here's my favorite passage:
"The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind... The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but on which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature."
- Here's my least favorite passage:
"The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment--weapons which we must wrest from him one by one." I don't really like what this implies symbolically about the analyst-analysand relationship -- that it is necessarily confrontational and requires the analyst to be seizing power from the analysand. After all, it's very easy to imagine someone whose problem is that they are always handing away their "weapons" to someone else, analyst included!
- This passage reminded of an article I read by McAdams, a psychologist who studies personality based on a "life story approach." He found that people who underwent therapy and conceptualized their illness as a outside force they were fighting were more likely to show improvements. Freud writes: "His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. The way is thus paved from the beginning for a reconciliation with the repressed material which is coming to expression in his symptoms, while at the same time place is found for a certain tolerance for the state of being ill." This is interesting to me, because Freud seems to be arguing that people need to think about it both ways at once -- mental illness is a part of personality AND an enemy to be fought off. I don't really know if that is possible, but it seems like if it was that would give you the best of both worlds, because it would combine self-acceptance with the will to work hard in therapy. I don't know if those two are mutually exclusive but this is definitely something I'll be thinking about. (I wonder if you would find an interaction effect between treatment modality and the narratives people told about their therapy -- for example, maybe this mixed point of view Freud outlines would correlate with improvements in psychodynamic therapy, but in cognitive-behavorial therapy improvements with only be correlated with conceptualizing the illness as an enemy.)
Monday, May 24, 2010
Introduction
This summer, I'm planning on spending a lot of time reading psychoanalytic theory, and I wanted to have a blog that I could use to write down my thoughts about what I'm reading.
As a bit of personal introduction, my name is Rowan, I'm a senior psychology major at Reed College. I am interested in becoming a psychoanalyst or a psychodynamic therapist in the future, although I'm not exactly sure what path I'm going to take in order to get there. Because I spent the last couple years being trained empirically in the psychology department, I'm in a very tenuous position as far as where my future education will be. Among the psychological establishment, the psychoanalytic approach has a very marginal position. However, there are some signs that psychodynamic psychotherapy (psychodynamic is, as far as I can tell, the euphemism that psychoanalytic psychologists use in order to refer to a psychoanalytic approach) is experiencing a resurgence of support within psychology (see Shedler, 2010).
In the most recent issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology, there's an article about how psychoanalysis needs to have an empirical element. In order to support this, the author talks about a psychoanalytic clinic where they were using a policy (based on their theoretical ideas) of not giving outpatient support to patients after their period of institutionalization had ended. Basically, they would kick people out onto the street thinking that it was crucial for them to stand on their own feet. I'm sure they had some kind of bullshit theoretical explanation for this. The author goes on to say that only after they ran studies comparing the different treatment approaches did they discover that their method was not effective.
My first reaction is, "You needed to run a study to figure this out?" Yes, if clinicians are running around engaging in very potentially harmful policies they should probably be grounded in empirical evidence to support their theories. But I think, quite frankly, any theory that states that this is a good approach (not just a good approach, but the right approach one hundred percent of the time) is a crappy theory, and you could probably debunk the theory on its own terms, within the context of psychoanalysis. Interestingly, also, this example that the author provides has nothing to do with the actual psychoanalytic setting -- only the trappings and policies that surround it.
Empiricism would prevent psychoanalytic clinicians from engaging in counterproductive policies based on their theoretical frameworks, but the author presents very little evidence that there is actually something to be contributed to the psychoanalytic encounter itself. Empiricism may be able to prove that psychodynamic therapy is effective (a useful endeavor, certainly!), but it doesn't seem to have done very much to aid the craft of psychoanalysis.
On the other hand, I would agree with the author that there is something ludicrous about the position taken by many psychoanalysts that psychoanalysis can only be studied from within the psychoanalytic encounter. That approach just seems potentially rife for abuse, and in a certain light it smacks of elitism and arrogance. This might just be a strawman, because most psychoanalysts that I read don't base their clinical approach solely on case studies or information gained from psychoanalysis itself. They orient themselves within psychoanalytic theory using other texts and knowledge gained from other fields. Of course, those approaches still aren't empirically based, and so they will inevitably be subject to the kinds of errors that cognitive psychology focuses on.
Basically, a large part of cognitive psychology is the study of the way that people see patterns that aren't there and generally fail at detecting causal relationships. Self-serving attributions, self-defeating thought patterns -- these phenomena aren't things that psychoanalysis is unfamiliar with, but cognitive psychology took a different step and claimed that empiricism was the solution. Part of me thinks that the power of psychoanalysis is that it can encourage a form of understanding that transcends casual theories of behavior. If this is true, then perhaps the psychoanalysts are right and trying to differentiate between different psychoanalytic causal theories using empiricism is a worthless endeavor. In this light, the power of a psychoanalytic theory is not in the certainty of its claims but in its flexibility.
Needless to say, my opinions on the relationship between psychoanalysis and empiricism are very tenuous, and that tenuousness is also a source of uncertainty for me about my future career path. I could, for example, be trained as a clinical psychologist at a psychoanalytically inclined university, if I decided that empirical training was a necessary part of being a good psychotherapist. Alternatively, I could go to a psychoanalytic institute (after going to grad school in philosophy or some other area), if I decided that I didn't want to be involved with empirical approaches at all.
Anyway, let me end with a bit about this blog and what I'll be writing about. As well as talking about psychoanalytic theory within its own context, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the intersections between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, as well as the role psychoanalysis can play in thinking about literature. So I imagine those topics will probably be discussed here also.
Just in case you are curious, my favorite psychoanalytic authors are Jonathan Lear (who got me into psychoanalysis with his book Love and Its Place in Nature), Adam Phillips (whose adept play with psychoanalytic theory has given me faith in its flexibility), and Nancy Chodorow (who made me feel better about saying, yes, there are parts of Freud that we can discard, or at least hold as far away from us as possible).
I haven't completely set out the syllabus yet, but I know that the next two weeks are going to be spent reading about transference (my favorite psychoanalytic concept!). This week I'm reading several of Freud's papers on transference and starting the case study of Dora, and next week I'll be finishing that case study and reading essays written about transference by other psychoanalysts. I'll probably spend something like 6-8 weeks on Freud, 1-2 each on Winnicott, Lacan, and Klein, and maybe I'll spend a week near the end good psychology papers if I can find enough of them (I already have one sitting around that I've been meaning to read). There's also one more book by Lear that I haven't read yet and I'd like to get around to that.
As a bit of personal introduction, my name is Rowan, I'm a senior psychology major at Reed College. I am interested in becoming a psychoanalyst or a psychodynamic therapist in the future, although I'm not exactly sure what path I'm going to take in order to get there. Because I spent the last couple years being trained empirically in the psychology department, I'm in a very tenuous position as far as where my future education will be. Among the psychological establishment, the psychoanalytic approach has a very marginal position. However, there are some signs that psychodynamic psychotherapy (psychodynamic is, as far as I can tell, the euphemism that psychoanalytic psychologists use in order to refer to a psychoanalytic approach) is experiencing a resurgence of support within psychology (see Shedler, 2010).
In the most recent issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology, there's an article about how psychoanalysis needs to have an empirical element. In order to support this, the author talks about a psychoanalytic clinic where they were using a policy (based on their theoretical ideas) of not giving outpatient support to patients after their period of institutionalization had ended. Basically, they would kick people out onto the street thinking that it was crucial for them to stand on their own feet. I'm sure they had some kind of bullshit theoretical explanation for this. The author goes on to say that only after they ran studies comparing the different treatment approaches did they discover that their method was not effective.
My first reaction is, "You needed to run a study to figure this out?" Yes, if clinicians are running around engaging in very potentially harmful policies they should probably be grounded in empirical evidence to support their theories. But I think, quite frankly, any theory that states that this is a good approach (not just a good approach, but the right approach one hundred percent of the time) is a crappy theory, and you could probably debunk the theory on its own terms, within the context of psychoanalysis. Interestingly, also, this example that the author provides has nothing to do with the actual psychoanalytic setting -- only the trappings and policies that surround it.
Empiricism would prevent psychoanalytic clinicians from engaging in counterproductive policies based on their theoretical frameworks, but the author presents very little evidence that there is actually something to be contributed to the psychoanalytic encounter itself. Empiricism may be able to prove that psychodynamic therapy is effective (a useful endeavor, certainly!), but it doesn't seem to have done very much to aid the craft of psychoanalysis.
On the other hand, I would agree with the author that there is something ludicrous about the position taken by many psychoanalysts that psychoanalysis can only be studied from within the psychoanalytic encounter. That approach just seems potentially rife for abuse, and in a certain light it smacks of elitism and arrogance. This might just be a strawman, because most psychoanalysts that I read don't base their clinical approach solely on case studies or information gained from psychoanalysis itself. They orient themselves within psychoanalytic theory using other texts and knowledge gained from other fields. Of course, those approaches still aren't empirically based, and so they will inevitably be subject to the kinds of errors that cognitive psychology focuses on.
Basically, a large part of cognitive psychology is the study of the way that people see patterns that aren't there and generally fail at detecting causal relationships. Self-serving attributions, self-defeating thought patterns -- these phenomena aren't things that psychoanalysis is unfamiliar with, but cognitive psychology took a different step and claimed that empiricism was the solution. Part of me thinks that the power of psychoanalysis is that it can encourage a form of understanding that transcends casual theories of behavior. If this is true, then perhaps the psychoanalysts are right and trying to differentiate between different psychoanalytic causal theories using empiricism is a worthless endeavor. In this light, the power of a psychoanalytic theory is not in the certainty of its claims but in its flexibility.
Needless to say, my opinions on the relationship between psychoanalysis and empiricism are very tenuous, and that tenuousness is also a source of uncertainty for me about my future career path. I could, for example, be trained as a clinical psychologist at a psychoanalytically inclined university, if I decided that empirical training was a necessary part of being a good psychotherapist. Alternatively, I could go to a psychoanalytic institute (after going to grad school in philosophy or some other area), if I decided that I didn't want to be involved with empirical approaches at all.
Anyway, let me end with a bit about this blog and what I'll be writing about. As well as talking about psychoanalytic theory within its own context, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the intersections between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, as well as the role psychoanalysis can play in thinking about literature. So I imagine those topics will probably be discussed here also.
Just in case you are curious, my favorite psychoanalytic authors are Jonathan Lear (who got me into psychoanalysis with his book Love and Its Place in Nature), Adam Phillips (whose adept play with psychoanalytic theory has given me faith in its flexibility), and Nancy Chodorow (who made me feel better about saying, yes, there are parts of Freud that we can discard, or at least hold as far away from us as possible).
I haven't completely set out the syllabus yet, but I know that the next two weeks are going to be spent reading about transference (my favorite psychoanalytic concept!). This week I'm reading several of Freud's papers on transference and starting the case study of Dora, and next week I'll be finishing that case study and reading essays written about transference by other psychoanalysts. I'll probably spend something like 6-8 weeks on Freud, 1-2 each on Winnicott, Lacan, and Klein, and maybe I'll spend a week near the end good psychology papers if I can find enough of them (I already have one sitting around that I've been meaning to read). There's also one more book by Lear that I haven't read yet and I'd like to get around to that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)