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A More Natural Conversational Style?
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
Speaking of Pain
Here's a lovely poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai--a piece of a longer poem sequence from his book Open Closed Open (2000). It raises an interesting question for psychoanalysts. Everything we've been taught about repression and, more recently, about dissociation would have us predict that we should be better able to talk about joy than about pain--and yet....
The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I'm thinking
how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor's office.
Even those who haven't leaned to read and write are precise:
"This one's a throbbing pain, that one's a wrenching pain,
this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain
and that--a dull one. Right here. Precisely here,
yes, yes." Joy blurs everything. I've heard people say
after nights of love and feasting, "It was great,
I was in seventh heaven." Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, "Great,
wonderful, I have no words."
The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain--
I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness
and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.
(From "The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy: the touch of longing is everywhere", a poem sequence by Yehuda Amichai in Open Closed Open, (translated form the Hebrew by Bloch and Kronfeld) Harcourt NY, 2000, p. 105.)
Clearly Amichai is on to a deep truth. How do we account for this fluency about what is painful--and our relative wordlessness when it comes to joy?
Comments welcome!
A New Riddle of the Sphinx?Our new masthead features an image of Oedipus contemplating the riddle of the Sphinx --a reminder that for us question is at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise.
What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening? Oedipus, famously, solved the riddle, answering that man crawls on all fours in infancy, walks upright on two legs in adulthood, and uses a cane in old age. I've always felt that that answer--correct though it be--is a disappointment, anticlimactic and fundamentally unsatisfying. (There might be a better modern answer. Maybe the question hints at an evolutionary awareness: a progression from beast on all fours, to homo sapien with upright posture, to human being in human culture dependent on his tools.)
Also famously, the answer Oedipus gives is no real solution to anything; it only leads him further into a trap. He defeats the questioner, becomes king of Thebes, marries his mother and embroils himself still more deeply in his (Freud will make it our) tragedy. (If anyone wants to be reminded of the whole story, here's one of many summaries available on the internet: Sphinx) The moral, I guess, is watch out for pat answers, especially if fate (or your deepest nature) is against you.
Still, the riddle evokes a timeless and compelling human situation--answer correctly or die! And there's the possibility that (at least temporarily) human reason will defeat brute supernatural force. And the matter the riddle addresses is nothing less than the nature of human nature!
The Sphinx came to the ancient Greeks from still a more ancient Egypt (for a capsule history, see History). The Sophoclean question arose in an age we can hardly expect to apprehend directly. But the times must have privileged simple and certain answers. Today the Sphinx might pose a different riddle altogether, one expressing one or another of the puzzles of our own age. And a modern riddle would have to have a different form--an open-endedness: it would have to be a riddle without an already-known answer.
What would a comtemporary riddle about the natue of human nature be like?
What is mind that it can know and not know what it knows?
or:
What is the nature of human beings that we strive against ourselves?
or:
Why do we seek out and create the very life circumstances we'd most want to excape?
Anyone else interested in formulating a riddle?
~Henry Seiden
After trauma.... a new essayAFTER TRAUMA, HIDDEN OR OBVIOUS: POSSIBILITIES FOR TREATMENT.
Johanna Krout Tabin, Ph.D. ABPP
Note: These papers were presented at the Section V Panel, APA, New Orleans, LA, August, 2006. (They are also online as downloadable pdfs on the Section II link on the Division 39 home page .)
An important part of the mission of Section V is to keep abreast of innovation in psychoanalysis. The papers which follow offer ground-breaking applications of psychoanalytic understanding in trying to help victims of trauma. Marvin Hurvich contributes a theoretically grounded but clinically practical exploration of annihilation fantasies. Sharon Farber speaks in the same way to the use of cutting and other self-harming mechanisms. She shows the clinical importance of recognizing the adaptive function of such behaviors.
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Withholding APA dues in protest over policy on tortureGhislaine Boulanger writes:
Should we withhold our 2007 dues to the American Psychological Association?
There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether to withhold dues from the APA in light of the continuing use of psychologists in Guantanamo and other sites in which 'enemy combatants' are being tortured. Some have been categorically opposed to withholding dues, arguing that it is better to stay within the organization and work from there, saying that not paying dues is poor strategy; others have urged a wait and see attitude. For some of us this is not a question of strategy, it is a question of conscience. Which is not to say that sometimes acts of conscience cannot also be strategic. Be that as it may, let me speak for myself, I simply cannot in good conscience continue paying dues to an organization whose ethics code supports the use of psychologists in facilities that do not observe international human rights law.
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