Language and the Nonverbal as a Unity: Discussion of >Where Is the Action in the >Talking Cure<?
(2002)
All understanding is context dependent, and one of the most significant contexts for clinical purposes is the self-state. How we understand the other, and ourselves, depends on the state(s) we occupy. Dissociations between an analyst's self-states can, therefore, limit or impede understanding of the analysand by depriving the analyst of a fitting context within which to grasp what the analysand says and does. Clinical understanding may require the breach of such dissociations. I lay out some of the implications of thinking about transference and countertransference along these lines, with detailed examples illustrating the consequences of the analyst's dissociations and their eventual resolutions. Among the advantages of this way of thinking is that it amounts to a psychoanalytic account of the hermeneutic circle.
Arthur H. Feiner, 1922-2005.
(2005)
Theory and change. Commentary on Morris Eagle's >enactments, transference, and symptomatic cure<
(2005)
The author posits that Pizer's use of both narrative and lyrical style is not typical in psychoanalysis, whose scholarly tradition tends to favor a denser, more academic style of writing. The ways in which psychoanalysts read these two forms of writing are mirrors of one another. Both kinds of reading are forms of discipline both forms of writing are necessary in psychoanalysis. The author also writes that Pizer's >nonanalytic third< does not have to be a >good< thing like a poem it can be almost anything important to the analyst. The nonanalytic third is a soulful metaphor that can be used to create alternatives to rigid experience. Because rigidity in psychoanalytic relatedness is usually the result of problematic unconscious involvements between analyst and patient, the nonanalytic third can be significant in the negotiation of enactments.
Whenever the subject is explicitly addressed, all analysts agree that empathic perception is an attitude one takes toward making observations, not a privileged means of perception. Furthermore, analysts seem to agree that observations made with an empathic intention are interpretations like any other observations. Empathy is not a conduit to the patient's inner life. But despite these points of consensus, it often seems to be implied in the psychoanalytic literature, usually unintentionally, that empathy is a privileged means of knowing another person. This undercurrent is sometimes present even in the work of theorists who simultaneously state their opposition to this very point of view. In this paper, after presenting an example from the literature of this kind of contradiction, I, basing my argument in hermeneutics, offer the view that all observation, inside and outside psychoanalysis, is interpretation. Then, turning to the three papers of the symposium individually, I take the perspective that in one way or another they all portray empathic perception as a privileged means of observation. These portrayals are examples of the unconscious politics of theory.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
The insufficiencies that Joan Copjec finds in the work of Judith Butler are the same kind Dyess and Dean want to alert us to in relational psychoanalysis. Two dangers of this nature are reification (that is, the relational position's becoming >the Book<) and a flirtation with superficiality (a potential outcome of believing that all experience can be understood in the terms of social relatedness). Theorizing >the impossibility of meaning< may be a first step in addressing these problems without having to limit the terms of the discussion to nature and nurture, or essence and social construction. But the idea of the Real is inextricably interrelated with, and mutually defined by, other parts of Lacan's theory. And so, if we simply import into relational psychoanalysis Lacan's conception of the Real, we are mixing apples and oranges and thereby risking conceptual confusion. We should instead use Lacan's idea as inspiration for the construction of a conception of >the impossibility of meaning< that can be used in theorizing the particular kind of problems relational psychoanalysis sets itself.
My approach in this review of Irwin Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process is historical and explicative. I discuss the book's reprinted works in their original publication sequence in order to highlight the emergence of themes over time. I then discuss the chapters written expressly for this volume in light of these themes.
Today the concept of the interpersonal field, while seldom credited to those who created it, is widely used in psychoanalysis. After reviewing how the concept of the field defines interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, I take up the rejection of the idea in American mainstream psychoanalysis in the decades just after it was proposed by Sullivan and Fromm, why that rejection took place, and how the entire discipline of psychoanalysis in North America might have fared if the idea had been widely recognized earlier than it was.