Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis

207 Pages·2017·1.728 MB·English

by  Warren S. Poland

Intimacy and Separateness
in Psychoanalysis
Clinical psychoanalysis serves as our best laboratory for exploring the riddle of
what it is to be a person, and how a person is at once singularly unique while always
a piece of the interpersonal fabric of humanity. In Intimacy and Separateness in
Psychoanalysis, Warren Poland casts a freshly erudite eye on this paradox, resist-
ing individual or intersubjective bias and avoiding the parochial allegiances
common in our age of pluralism.
Poland combines vivid reports from clinical analyses, literary readings, and his
own life – all unfolding original observations on a person as both a part of and
apart from human commonality. His consideration of how one person’s witness-
ing facilitates another’s self-definition, a concept extended here in his study of
outsiderness as part of human nature, has been marked a keynote contribution.
Clinical illustrations of moments that matter but are usually omitted from public
presentation are set alongside examples of reading powerful fiction to show how
analyst and author both incite fresh openness in a person’s mind. Poland goes far-
ther, exposing the personal power of union and separateness in its keenest form,
facing the ultimate separation of one’s own actual death.
Only with separateness can true intimacy grow, and only within the fabric of
others can true individuality exist. This evocative book, ranging from the light-
ness of whimsy to the dread of dying, allows every reader to taste and to learn
from Poland’s thinking. Psychoanalyst or patient, writer or reader, each one living
one’s own life – all can find new understandings in this work.
Warren S. Poland, M.D., has practiced clinical psychoanalysis for over half
a century. His observations and reflections, including in his early book Melting
the Darkness: The Dyad and Principles of Clinical Technique, were honored by
his receipt of the Sigourney Award in 2009. In personal essays, in considerations
of literary works, and centrally in his clinical psychoanalytic studies, he explores
the paradoxical simultaneity of intersubjectivity and individuality. He is also the
former editor of the JAPA Review of Books.
“This is no ordinary psychoanalytic book. It has no peer in the way it struggles to
come to terms with the paradox of the essential otherness of people to one another
despite all we hold in common. This book is also like no other psychoanalytic
book in the way it draws on language as the custodian of our accrued experience
as a civilization. What a pleasure it is when once in a great while we come across
a book such as this one where we find ourselves pausing after reading a sentence,
reading it several times before going on, or simply taking time to sit with its rever-
berations and echoes.” – Thomas H. Ogden, author most recently of Reclaiming
Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis
“I was moved to tears a number of times by this book, as Warren Poland cut
through the psychoanalytic jargon and took the reader to the heart of what it is
to be human – messy, vulnerable, mortal and incapable of living up to what we
would like to be. Yet a form of hope emerges from his writing that I find downright
inspiring. I will return to this book again and again.” – Glen O. Gabbard, M.D.,
author of Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting
“Wisdom is a quality rarely encountered in life or literature, still more rarely in
writings on psychoanalysis. Warren Poland has given us that rarest of gifts; a book
rich in the wisdom that only a clinician of long experience, striking originality,
and unique sensitivity to the paradoxes of our human condition could produce.
This is a truly wonderful book, the culmination of Warren Poland’s invaluable
contributions to psychoanalysis.” – Ted Jacobs, Clinical Professor, Emeritus,
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Training and Supervising Analyst, The New
York and IPE Psychoanalytic Institutes
“Warren Poland writes of analysis as contact between separate people, a contact that
leads to change in both. In his writing he achieves a similar contact. He describes
the psychoanalytic experience with such clarity and emotional depth that his
words touch the reader as words in an analysis touch the other. This book is for
all analysts, to be returned to again and again, both for the knowledge it contains
and for the pleasure provided by his beautiful and accurate description of what
actually takes place during psychoanalysis.” – Judith Fingert Chused, M.D.,
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Clinical Professor
of Pediatrics, George Washington University School of Medicine, Emeritus
Training and Supervising Analyst, Washington Center for Psychoanalysis
Intimacy and Separateness
in Psychoanalysis
Warren S. Poland
Edited and introduced by
William F. Cornell
With a preface by Nancy Chodorow
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2018 Warren S. Poland
The right of Warren S. Poland to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-09775-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-09776-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10472-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Psychoanalysis is ...
... a celebration of the emergence of the self, a unique, unprec-
edented event in the history of the universe, an awareness of the
continuity of experience in a unique entity, one that never existed
before and will never exist again. This miracle is confirmed by
the others, the witnesses to one’s uniqueness, just as the self
gives meaning to the uniqueness and individuality of others ...
This is the dramatic element in psychoanalysis, a continuous,
mutual reaffirmation of two independent but related selves,
something that makes the long hours and the tremendous cost of
psychoanalysis a very special and worthwhile experience. Psy-
choanalysis defines and celebrates both the changing uniqueness
and the continuity of the self over time and experience. The self
thus stands as a commentary on the essential nature of time, and
vice versa. We are witnesses of and witnessed by the others and
by the universe. They will always be there, no matter how brief
a sojourn we have in time and life. It reminded me of the lines of
Lamartine’s “Le Lac”:
L’homme n’a point de port, le temps n’a point de rive ;
Il coule, et nous passons !
Jacob Arlow
Personal correspondence

Contents
Preface: Warren Poland – humanist, ethicist, friend ix
NANCY CHODOROW
Acknowledgments xv
Editor’s introduction: a freedom of mind – Warren Poland
in word and deed xviii
WILLIAM F. CORNELL
PART I
Opening conclusions 1
1 Regarding the other 3
2 Rather my own shortcomings 9
PART II
The psychoanalytic situation 13
3 The analyst’s witnessing and otherness 15
4 Outsiderness in human nature 30
5 The interpretive attitude 46
6 The analyst’s approach and the patient’s psychic growth 60
7 The analyst’s fears 73
viii Contents
PART III
Challenges within the psychoanalytic process 85
8 Problems in pluralism: narcissism and curiosity 87
9 On immediacy: “vivid contrast between past and present” 100
10 The limits of empathy 102
11 Beyond bedrock: the trap of abandoning psychology 108
12 Oedipal complexes, oedipal schema 113
PART IV
Beyond the clinical setting 117
13 Reading fiction and the psychoanalytic experience:
Proust on reading and on reading Proust 119
14 Psychoanalysis and culture 134
15 The mind beyond conflict: whimsy 137
16 Pathologizing mental processes: whimsy 142
17 Polymorphously normal sexuality 146
PART V
Endings in poetry, psychoanalysis, and life 151
18 What play did Shakespeare write when he
wrote Twelfth Night? 153
19 Ephemera: unfinished thoughts on endings and death 156
20 Slouching towards mortality: thoughts on time and death 163
Index 170
Preface
Warren Poland: humanist, ethicist, friend
Nancy Chodorow
As analysts, we meet our patients in the consulting room, but we often meet our
colleagues and forebears, beginning with Freud, through their writings. I first met
Warren Poland, I do not remember when, through his writings – highly theoreti-
cal, deeply clinical, straightforwardly personal, pervasively ethical, and flat out
gorgeous – writings that I return to again and again. He is one of psychoanalysis’s
great writers. As we read him, we are bathed in the language of the patient, in
his empathy for his patients, and in what he says to them and feels about and for
them, so eloquently and to the point. We are bathed in his always-pertinent self-
reflection and self-observation but never inundated by the analyst’s subjectivity.
And we find references to Shakespeare, Proust, Vuillard, the Nabis, Yiddish tales,
Japanese Noh mask carving. Analyst and author, author and analyst, seem to go
seamlessly together, both underpinned by an ethical humanity.
Warren Poland is among our most elegant, sophisticated, and as right as you
can be contemporary writers about the simple and straightforward, yet complex
and amazing, work that is psychoanalysis. He gives us clear concepts and rich
case descriptions that seem to provide in themselves guidance to how we want to
work. His clinical sensitivity, the cases he describes, Warren’s own feelings as he
works – these all come alive as he creates narratives about the deepest feelings,
meanings, and histories of his patients, about their work together, about change
and the internal and external impediments to change. “Vignette” does not do jus-
tice to Warren’s case writing, and “theory” does not do justice to his seamless,
grounded accounts of the clinical consulting room and the goals of analytic work.
We wonder, as we also wonder about our other great writers, beginning with
Freud – and for each of us, a select additional few – are they separable, being an
analyst and being a writer? For Warren, they seem to be inextricably intertwined.
In Melting the Darkness, Warren writes,
It is misleading to speak glibly of one-person psychology versus two-
person psychology. No single person exists outside a human, object-con-
nected field; the analytic space colors how such a single person comes to
understanding by the other and to insight. At the same time, the mind of any
individual can be engaged by another yet is always crucially apart, a private
universe of inner experience.