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The thoughtful discussions of my paper by Alan Schore, Wilma Bucci, and James Fosshage raise important considerations about the relationship between theory, research, and the micromoment interactions constituting the activity of psychoanalysis. For the opportunity afforded by their contributions, and to Psychoanalytic Dialogues for publishing our exchanges, I express deep gratitude. I am initially impacted by the appreciation shown by my colleagues for the approach I am illustrating to clinical attention and its value for an expanded and, in certain ways, revised scope of psychoanalytic activity. In particular, I am appreciative of the ways that each commentator has taken up my emphasis on expanding psychoanalytic attention beyond symbolic pathways of exchange and has further contributed to understanding how this can occur. As part of a consideration of points of convergence and difference between us, I address how such convergences and differences shape both the values and pitfalls of comparisons across research, theory, and practice.
Emmanuel Ghent, referred to with fondness as >Mannie,< is remembered for his capacity for sensitive attention. A brief moment shared listening to music serves as a point of departure for a series of reflections on Mannie's love of music and psychoanalysis, his commitment to change, and how his ideas about surrender shaped that commitment and continue to influence the analytic community. In his musings on Mannie's thesis concerning submission and surrender, the author considers how Federico Fellini's ideas about availability can add texture to Mannie's ideas about surrender. The essay closes with a return to the author's experience of the way in which Emmanuel Ghent embodied his credo.
Wish, Need, Drive: Motive in the Light of Dynamic Systems Theory and Edelman's Selectionist Theory
(2005)
Limitations to the process of symbolization for communication in psychoanalytic work are considered as the basis for an expansion of clinical attention to include embodied experience as a source of unconscious meaning. The displacement effect of language and the futility that language meets, as description of lived experience, are key points recognized in the contributions of Daniel Stern and Jacques Lacan. Irwin Hoffman's critique of assumptions underlying Freud's technique for analytic work are reviewed as a point of departure for recommending a relational approach to analytic attention expanded with an emphasis on micromoment-embodied communication in addition to symbolized communication. A clinical narrative is offered, highlighting the rhythms of movement between embodied and verbally symbolized communication as a basis for constructing unconscious meaning. The implications of this approach are summarized for expanding analytic attention to include registers of communication in addition to the verbal symbolic.