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| In his pursuit of the laudable goals of more passion, risk-taking, and activity in psychoanalysis Irwin Hoffman, in his keynote address to the Division 39 Spring Meeting in Toronto, made the error of throwing out the baby with the bath water. He dismissed free association and analytic listening in favor of a more natural conversational style of interaction. In doing so Hoffman recommends giving up what is in truth the richest source of the very things he says he is after.
Freud quoted Schiller and his advice to young poets when he described the open attention to what comes to mind. Freud's recognition that he was introducing into therapeutic service a tool of thought used by poets and artists should remind us that rather than a dry and formal routine, the method of free association is rooted in an appreciation of surprise and risk-taking.
'Natural' conversation on the other hand, while apparently more relaxed and informal is heir to all the checks and limits that socialization supplies. Regard for the other's turn in a conversation, indeed for the other's comprehension and general feeling of well-being, place reasonable constraints on what we say in 'natural' conversations. Relaxing these constraints and opening up the possibilities of speech, i.e. the possibilities of what one can say and how one can say it, is a way to let more not less passion enter the discourse.
Hoffman is right that analysis can drag on in a long and lifeless manner. He is also right that it is the analyst's proper responsibility to seek and suggest ways to enliven the work and its effects. However, this is best done by a greater appreciation and attention to the often subtle passion of free association not replacing it with the more obvious expressions of feeling in 'natural' conversations.
--David Lichtenstein
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This seems to me to be a very important statement of a difference between psyhoanalytic work and all other forms of therapy. The insight was available, however, long before psychoanalysis was born. Fromm (2007) found an intriguing passage written in 1850. Hawthorne described a doctor who had theories about an unconscious interaction between mind and body. The character, Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter, understood "If (the investigator) possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more--let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power...to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines only himself to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy, as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood....then...will the soul of the sufferer...flow forth..."
Poets and other creative writers often are ahead of their times. It took another half century before Freud began to formulate these understandings. And in our century, we need to remind ourselves about them again.
References:
Fromm, M.G. (2007). Hawthorne. Austen Riggs Bulletin, 19(1),p.5.
Hawthorne, N. (1990[1850]). The Scarlett Letter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 124.
Johanna Tabin
It is a wonderful quote from Hawthorne. It suggests that not only is the idea of free association recognized by the poets but also that of analytic listening and of a kind of intersubjective relation that is something other than an ordinary conversation.
While I cannot locate the citation, Freud is often quoted as saying, "Everywhere I go, I find the poet has been there before me."
From a newcomer perspective, Hoffman's effort to "liven" the project of psychoanalysis was indeed laudable. But his talk seemed to overly conflate content, attitude, and method. As David Lichtenstein said in raising the topic, Irwin's talk depicted a baby subsumed by dirty bath water, rather than cleansed and renewed.
What I heard seemed to rail against a stereotypic depiction of psychoanalysis that emerged with modernism like everything else in the U.S. during the industrial boom - mechanistically. At this point, is this stereotype actually seen anywhere other than in New Yorker cartoons? I may well be naive or ignorant about the history of the profession... but was it ever true that bits of broken off unconscious, delivered anxiously to the analyst-mechanic, would be wrapped up for the patient in neat intepretive packages and handed back for orderly storage in a newly-organized unconscious warehouse? In terms of inherent power inequalities and other shifts in attitude, it seems to me there have been vast improvements along the way. These changes do no strike me as matters of technique.
I have only my impressionistic memory of the April 2007 keynote to reference, but the fact that Hoffman's talk remains in memory and prompts ongoing discussion is perhaps best evidence of its success at "shaking up" Division 39 members. But from the responses I saw that day and since (including, notably, here), I have to believe there was a rhetorical overstatement of his point and/or an under-estimation of his colleagues.
Priscilla Butler
I think technique is related to what we imagine ourselves to be doing when we practice psychoanalysis. Do we imagine ourselves to be having a conversation or do we imagine ourselves to be listening in a particular way that is both inside and outside of the dialogue, that is, in a way that might be considered bad faith in a conversation and yet aptly describes the analytic position in the clinical encounter.
That's a nice distinction of David's between a kind of listening and a kind of conversation. Useful indeed.
But in practice the distinction is not so clear cut. Don't we do both? Indeed don't we do both everywhere? More of the one in psychoanalysis, more of the other when we're having a drink with a friend, but always a little of both?
In point of fact an ordinary conversation without the aware listening is dead and dull too. (Like many a bar conversation, like talking to your barber about baseball.)
No doubt psychoanalytic listening is derived from something that may also take place in an ordinary conversation, but there is a difference of type and not just one of degree when we make a disciplined effort to hold our tongue specifically in the interest of supporting an experience that is other than the experience of a natural conversation. Certainly, the unconscious speaks in ordinary conversations and sometimes the barber will be the one to hear it, but the analyst's commitment to holding the place of the interpretive listener runs counter to the ethics of a conversation.
It expresses a different ethic, a different sense of why we're talking, and I think this difference is worth preserving. Without it, psychoanalysis moves in the direction of good counsel (at best) and while there is nothing wrong with that, it is not what makes psychoanalysis valuable or interesting.
This doesn't mean that the analyst's speech has to be stilted or aloof in any way only that it come from a place that is other than the place of the ordinary conversational interlocutor. If we think of the difference between the fool and the counselor in Shakespeare, I think the analyst is more like the former in hearing things that the King doesn't know he's saying. Although unlike the fool, the analyst isn't obliged to be clever. What makes them both valuable is that speaking with them is rarely ordinary.
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