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Work - 2

Posted in Freud, History, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Re-Parenting, Winnicott, Work on 29 April 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan


        The following is partly in response to Ktismatics’ comments on a recent post.

        The method of free association was Freud’s response to one of the most challenging tasks with which psychoanalysis has had to grapple over its history: the elaboration of a system of contact, traversal, and translation between the primary and secondary processes as two ways of thinking, and hence as two ways of being, that are radically alien to one another.

        In their elaborations of the unconscious, Lacanism and Ego Psychology seem to stand on the opposite ends of a conceptual scale that pits the ineluctable foreignness of the symbolic against the domesticity of development. One recognizes the effects of such theorizing in the tone of the texts as well: from the turgidly undecipherable to the rigidly banal. What a shame it is to have reduced the workings of the unconscious to the structures of language or the chronologies of development, and to have colonized the former with the disciplines and strategies of either of the latter.

        While relying heavily on Klein’s notion of unconscious “phantasy,” Winnicott articulates the fact of an in-between that facilitates and organizes the passages between subjective and objective, self and other. Neither a hallucination nor a concretization, the “transitional” object is the site of infantile illusion and, by extension, adult creativity. It is neither simply given nor autocratically created; it is a found object in the sense that, while belonging to an external reality, it is invested with the qualities that suit the momentary psychodynamic purposes of the individual that “finds” it. It becomes “transitional” at the very moment of its finding.

        Of all the principal figures in the psychoanalytic pantheon, and in spite of the ideological restrictions of his parental metaphors, Winnicott is perhaps one of the most faithful of Freudians. Rather than upon the uncovering of history, the enunciation of truth, the resolution of conflict, or the mastery over anxiety, it is upon the capacity to “find” and re-deploy creatively one’s own objects, in other words to play, that Winnicott bases his principal mark of health. Instead of merely a tool for analytic inquiry, the capacity to associate freely has now been clearly identified as the goal of that inquiry and, ultimately, as a necessary strategy for “healthy” living. (I think there is a bridge here between Winnicottian play and Deleuzo-Guattarian bricolage.)

        This makes a lot of sense to me. And yet, rare indeed are those that undertake an analysis because they want to “play.”

        More …

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Work

Posted in Dreams, Freud, History, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Repetition, Schizoanalysis, Work on 26 April 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Freud grounded psychoanalysis in terms of a collaborative uncovering of the unconscious as dynamic and over-determined. That such uncovering occurs in a fraction of the time “psychoanalysis” occupies or that it necessitates much preparation does not deny it its status as the core and defining element of the practice; if anything, it reinforces it as the however infinitesimally small but not any the less defining marker of a practice that is singular and specific, a practice that is irreducible to this or that of the modes of relating with which we are already familiar.

        That such uncovering leaves open the questions of “efficacy” and so-called “therapeutic value,” that, in other words, the uncovering does not necessarily make people “feel better,” assuming we already know and agree on what the expression actually means, the way doctors and parents are presumably supposed to make patients and children “feel better,” may be a concern for those attempting to justify the practice in the eyes of a culture grounded in the principles of expediency and comfort. But it is precisely the work of such a culture that psychoanalysis has been designed to counter. This is no less true nowadays than it was in the time of Freud. Sadly, the practice has become increasingly consolidated around the safety and satisfaction certain objects may bring to the process of reproduction and less around the complexity and unpredictability of our desires.

        It is for this reason that, I believe, the parental metaphor has continued to hold great sway over the profession. Unlike all the other models that have enjoyed varying degrees of success (I am thinking of friendship, education, witnessing, or even healing) parenting comes closest to elevating repetition from a basic physiological need and/or a pathological compulsion to the status of a stable and overarching principle of psychic life.

        However, and by the standards of not only this or that of the various leading orientations in psychoanalytic theory or practice but by those standards that the discipline itself has held as its foundational and distinguishing mark, repetition could not be any further from the either the truth of the unconscious or, for that matter, the history of its science. As regards the former, and even at those times when the unconscious is trapped in the most monotonous and debilitating of cyclical scenarios, it is still, and however minimally, an unconscious that dreams, phantasises, mourns, defers, displaces, remembers, thinks, and compromises; it is still an unconscious that works. It is a machine that affords a rest only once in its lifetime, in that very same ground where it finds its final resting place. Otherwise, it is in constant movement. As for the science of the unconscious, it has managed to thrive precisely because many of its practitioners, famous or otherwise, have resisted the institutional demands and methodological requirements for repetition and homogeneity.

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Parental Ambivalence

Posted in MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Winnicott on 1 September 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        The bulk of my discussion has focused on Winnicott’s parental metaphors: the analyst as, on one hand, the fatherly source of truth and discipline and, on the other, the motherly seat of comfort and safety. My choice of Winnicott as focus for a critique here is based in the fact that he occupies a rare and most peculiar position in the history of psychoanalysis as successor to one and progenitor to the other of these two metaphors.

        For all his shortcomings, Winnicott’s sense of the analytic relationship as essentially between an essentaily hermaphroditic parent and a conflicted/needy child allowed the analyst to recognise and speak a dynamic rarely referenced and addressed in the literature. In highlighting the constitutive function of hate in the countertransference, Winnicott points not only to the analyst’s inherently ambivalent stance vis à vis the analysand but also to that of the parent toward the child. André Green is yet another major theorist who has pursued a similar line of thought in suggesting that the Oedipal wish to kill the father need not be all that shocking considering the father had already experienced the son as a rival and acted on the wish to get rid of him.

        Winnicott and Green point not so much to a parenting that is failed, perverted, or derailed. Their observations strike at the core of our stock of platitudes that collapse the “healthy” onto the “loving” when it comes to child rearing. What is striking here is the resilience and longevity of such insipid and one-dimensional notions of parenting in the context of a therapeutic culture that, for the most part, has recognised ambivalence as a central psychological dynamic.

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Psychoanalyst as Child

Posted in MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Winnicott on 30 August 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        If, and mine is a highly tentative and provisional “if,” the parental trope is to have any relevance at all in analytic practice, perhaps it would be more consistent and indeed useful to argue that it is precisely the analyst who occupies the role of the “child” that is always on the lookout for opportunities to elicit more playful stories, fantasies, and associations from an “adult” analysand who, often enough, wants nothing more than to resolve life’s dilemmas as concretely and expediently, which is to say as un-psychoanalytically, as possible.

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Psychoanalyst as Father

Posted in MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Winnicott on 29 August 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        There is a side to Winnicott that the advocates of holding environments and good enough mothering would all too gladly see ignored.

        In his elaborations on the counter-transference, Winnicott distinguishes between three types of responses:

  1. a subjective counter-transference routed in the analyst’s un-worked through psychology, and hence an obstacle;
  2. a subjective counter-transference rooted in a shared experience or background between analyst and analysand, and hence a bridge for further empathy and understanding; and
  3. an objective counter-transference appropriately experienced by any sufficiently analysed, and hence qualified, analyst in any given situation.

        
        Winnicott understands the last of these responses as caused by the analysand’s psychology and hence a useful pointer to the correct analytic intervention. In a classic clinical vignette from “Hate in the Counter-transference,” Winnicott interprets what he deems an objective counter-transferential hate he feels toward his troublesome adolescent patient as sufficient justification for the disciplining action the boy deserves—namely, to be left outside, rain or shine, and not allowed back in till after he’d calmed down. No, Winnicott does not suffer from a Jekyll and Hyde complex. What we have here is merely the other side, the paternal side of discipline and truth, of the same parental coin.

        If the trope of analyst-as-mother is grounded in a simplistic two-person psychology, the paternal trope harks back to and ultimately is hardly anything more than a re-framing of the atomistic view from which Winnicott had supposedly separated himself. There is barely any structural difference between the model of the analyst as a blank screen onto which pathology gets projected and that of the analyst as an empty vessel into which pathology gets projected.

        The hate Winnicott experiences in the vignette is supposedly his patient’s; it is engendered by the very things the latter does in his “crude” way of loving (”Hate …” 203) and its enactment by the analyst is justified on the grounds that the patient can appreciate only what he is capable of feeling (195).

        As well, Winnicott substitutes the interpretation and resolution of the transference with that of the analysand’s hate, via the analyst’s, as the culmination of analytic work prior to which the “patient is kept to some extent in the position of infant—one who cannot understand what he owes to his mother [or to his analyst]” (202). While verbal communication is substituted with affective enactment as the preferred mode of analytic work, it is still the analysand’s psychology that is the principal agency here.

        What guides Winnicott in identifying his hate as objective rather than a by-product of a so-called un-worked through psychological hurdle for instance is a standard associated with the notion of a “mature healthy adult.” If, at any given moment, the analyst’s affective experience is equivalent to that of what would be expected from said adult, if, in other words, it is “justified,” then that experience is deemed objective and the analyst is, in a manner of speaking, off the hook.

        The masculinist aetiology and cultural baggage of this notion of a “mature healthy adult” has not been entirely overlooked, in some analytic circles at least. Ridding that notion of its male specificity and speaking instead of the mature but genderless healthy adult does not really help matters all that much. In either case, the notion remains self-serving since that adult could only be defined as he, or she, who has undergone good parenting at the hands of a parent and/or an analyst as parent.

        Structurally, the bottom line is that the notion of a mature healthy adult is used to legitimize and justify a process of which it is also the product. Instead of recognising the circularity of the argument, it is the recipient and provider of good parenting who emerges into the mind of the analyst as the standard of health and of sound clinical practice.

        If the fetishist disavows the reality of the vagina for fear of loosing the penis, the analyst disavows the vicious circularity of the Winnicottian approach for fear of loosing his or her only pole of health.

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Psychoanalyst as Mother - 2

Posted in MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Winnicott on 29 August 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

Clinically, a post-Winnicottian generation of psychoanalysts has taken up the motherly banner and, unknowingly, the double bind attendant to its implicit attitude of “no one is going to tell you how to do it but you’d better do it right; otherwise…” (see Mothers and Psychoanalysts ).

At its extreme, this double bind is now sadly and unwittingly transformed into a theoretical justification and a privileging of the clinical picture of the analyst as melancholic.
Note for instance said analyst’s

  1. inability to relinquish the ideal, and hence dead, object (the unmediated and gratifying mother);
  2. identification with the dead object (analyst as substitute source of gratification);
  3. sadism inverted into self-deprecation (readiness to assume responsibility for every disruption in the gratification as index of the analyst’s empathic failure);
  4. self-exposure (analysis is the analysis of the counter-transference);
  5. narcissism (cure is contingent on an internalisation of the supposedly healthy analyst).

And the list goes on.

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