or, Whose Unconscious Is It Anyway?

21 Pages·2016·0.14 MB·English

(2001). Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11:683-702
It Takes One to Know One; or, Whose Unconscious Is It
Anyway?
Anthony Bass, Ph.D.
This essay explores the sometimes uncanny quality of
unconscious experience and unconscious communication that
often characterizes life in psychoanalytic relationships. As
Ferenczi noted some 70 years ago, the psychoanalytic
relationship may “significantly promote the development of
subtler manifestations of receptivity.” Special qualities of
unconscious receptivity and deep points of contact in the
psychoanalytic relationship are explored, with reference to the
history of psychoanalytic ideas (e.g., Freud, Ferenczi, Singer,
Loewald, Symington) and to findings from other fields such as
contemporary quantum science. Clinical vignettes are provided to
illustrate such phenomena.
“If thou wouldst know what poets felt / In poets' lands thou must have
dwelt,” wrote the 19th-century poet Goethe. So began Erwin Singer's (1977)
incisive critique of the notion that an analyst can ever be truly anonymous:
“Indeed,” Singer continued, in a poetic idiom of his own, “only he who risks
experiencing
—————————————
Anthony Bass, Ph.D. is Faculty and Supervising Analyst, New York
University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, and Manhattan Institute for
Psychoanalysis.
An earlier version of this paper was awarded the First Erwin Singer
Memorial Award, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis
and the Psychoanalytic Society of the (NYU) Postdoctoral Program, Inc.
Erwin Singer, Ph.D. was a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and teacher held in
great esteem. His 1970 classic text, Key Concepts in Psychotherapy, and
numerous articles on a range of topics—including emotional need for
symbolization, reduction of analytic anonymity, self-disclosure, and
therapeutic usefulness of patient to therapist—were instrumental in the shift
within psychoanalysis from an emphasis on one-person psychology to the
current emphasis on two-person psychology. The prize is awarded for a
paper that has been judged to reflect Singer's creative, independent,
humanistic, and clinical style.
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the poet's world and in doing so admits familiarity with it can meet the poet
fully. But he who chances to expose himself by hearing truly his fellow's
anguish and ecstasy can hope to be met equally exposed by him. In any
genuine meeting, both participants stand equally bared before each other” (p.
181).
Although in recent years it has become part of the common ground of
understanding among analysts of a variety of theoretical persuasions that the
analyst's contribution to the work, interpretive or otherwise, is highly
personal, subjective, and ineluctably self-expressive, Singer was among a
much smaller group of interpersonal analysts who took the lead in making this
aspect of psychoanalytic life explicit and, decades ago, showed through word
and deed how we might live it day in and day out with our patients.
Singer's two key papers, “The Reluctance to Interpret” (1968) and “The
Fiction of Analytic Anonymity” (1977), foreshadowed much of the work that
followed over the next 30 years as interpersonal/relational theorists and
clinicians highlighted the central importance both in human development and
in clinical psychoanalytic work of subjective and intersubjective aspects of
experience and redefined the nature of relations between analyst and patient at
both conscious and unconscious levels.
Singer (1977) wrote, “If the analytic process represents a series of
situations in which all the patient's acts, be they commissions or omissions,
reveal him…then exactly the same must be true for the analyst” (p. 183). He
continued:
I am not talking about the analyst merely sharing with the patient
events or facts of his life…. I am talking about a much more subtle
process in which the patient, in exposing the structure and content of
his concerns, simultaneously reveals what Fromm once called the
person's private religion or the genuine hierarchy of values by
which he lives no matter what fancy pretenses he may cherish or
proffer. Similarly, the structure, focus and content of the analyst's
response to the patient reveals the analyst's private religion, no
matter what his pretense to himself and others [p. 183].”
Or, as he put it in “The Reluctance to Interpret” (1968) a bit more
colloquially but no less vividly, “It takes one to know one, and in his correct
interpretation, the therapist reveals that he is one” (p. 369).
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Returning now to the question serving as the point of departure for these
considerations (i.e., whose unconscious is it, anyway?), Singer's observations
point us to an intriguing possibility. If it is yours, and I can recognize it,
mustn't it be mine as well? And if it is mine, you will know that soon enough
as you come to know your own. Yet such a deceptively simple response might
obscure the fact, if we didn't know better, that our question invites a
meditation on one of the most venerable and dangerous of all psychoanalytic
koans. It is a riddle that, traveling under a variety of aliases, has stirred
controversy from the beginning of psychoanalytic time, leaving deep scars,
breaking up great friendships, ending marriages, making some deathly ill,
driving others crazy, and in general fueling the great psychoanalytic wars of
the 20th century. One prominent New York training program, mindful of the
uncannily explosive alchemy, like collisions between matter and antimatter,
generated by contact between analysts favoring different solutions to the
riddle, actually went so far as to develop an arcane system of parallel tracks
to keep potentially disastrous encounters at a minimum.
Controversy—personal, clinical, and metapsychological—has centered on
questions such as the relationship between transference and
countertransference, one-person versus two-person and more-than-two-
person psychologies, the nature of analytic space, the structure and meaning of
an analytic frame, and all the workaday details of analytic technique, even the
very structure of the mind itself.
Practicing a discipline that, from its inception, has placed the unconscious
uniquely at the center of its distinctive exploration, psychoanalysts have
always recognized two minds engaged with each other at both conscious and
unconscious levels of experience in ways that are fundamental to its process
and therapeutic action. “It is a very remarkable thing,” said Freud (1915),
speaking of what was quintessentially psychoanalytic about the interaction,
“that the unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another,
without passing through the conscious. This deserves closer investigation…
but, descriptively speaking, the fact is incontestable” (p. 194).
The development of analytic technique itself was shaped in large part by
an awareness of unconscious experience at the heart of the relationship
between analyst and patient. Ogden (1997) noted that the use of the couch, a
critical component of the original framework in clinical psychoanalysis,
“helps provide conditions of privacy in which
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the analyst might enter a state of reverie in which he gives himself over to the
current of his unconscious thoughts, and renders his own unconscious
receptive to the unconscious of the analysand” (p. 113). Freud (1912)
recognized that the analyst's state of mind in free-floating attention was the
requisite counterpoint to the patient's commitment to the fundamental rule of
free association and the sine qua non of true psychoanalytic listening. He
taught that the analyst's unconscious must be the prime instrument of his
endeavor:
The analyst must bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ
toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust
himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the
transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver transmutes the
electrical oscillations induced by the sound waves back again into
sound waves, so is the physician's unconscious mind able to
reconstruct the patient's unconscious, which has determined his free
associations [pp. 115-116].
And, more concretely, looking back from a 1923 vantage point on the
evolution of the clinical method itself, Freud noted:
Experience soon showed that the attitude with which the analytic
physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender
himself to his own unconscious mental activity in a state of evenly
suspended attention, to avoid as far as possible reflection or the
construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that
he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the
drift of the patient's unconscious with his own unconscious [p. 239].
But even as Freud was penning these words, initiating the fateful dawning
of a psychoanalytic age, the first generation of psychoanalysts began to differ
sharply about the nature of the relationship between participating minds. For
Freud, the analyst's unconscious was to be used as a highly sensitive listening
instrument, though his or her discipline (captured in guiding principles such as
the analyst's neutrality, anonymity, blank screen, or mirror function) meant that
its own transmitting function must remain well controlled lest its reception by
the patient's listening apparatus endanger and contaminate the process through
which transference, the sine qua
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non of analysis, must develop unhampered. As Freud (1912) wrote, “The
analyst should be impenetrable to the patient, and like a mirror, reflect nothing
but what is shown to him” (p. 118). For Freud, the inevitable encounter
between one unconscious and another takes place on what seems to be a one-
way street. His friend and protégé Ferenczi, however, soon reported
encountering crucial experiences with his patients that would bring him to
forge a widened scope of psychoanalytic understanding and enable him to
consider bipersonal and reciprocal dimensions of psychic experience,
communication, and transformation. As Ferenczi wrote, “When two people
meet for the first time, an exchange takes place not only of conscious but also
of unconscious stirrings” (Dupont, 1988, p. 84). With the help of a patient,
Ferenczi coined the expression “dialogue of unconsciouses” to describe the
observation that, when two people converse, not only does a conscious
dialogue take place, but an unconscious one does too. Ferenczi detailed the
many forms that such reciprocal communications take in the
transference–countertransference field and demonstrated, especially in his
posthumously published clinical diary, the impossibility of any secrecy
between patient and analyst. The patient, according to Ferenczi, “detects,
from little gestures (form of greeting, handshake, tone of voice, degree of
animation, etc.) the presence of affects” (Dupont, 1988, p. 11) which may
reveal to the patient more about the analyst than even the analyst may know.
(This was evidently, disruptively, and fatefully a road quite divergent from
the one Freud had been traversing so faithfully, with his emphasis on the
transference neurosis playing a key role in organizing the patient's perceptions
of the analyst.) Ferenczi's observations made the mirror metaphor obsolete for
many analysts and were carried forward by interpersonal analysts like Singer,
and Wolstein (1992), who, commenting on Ferenczi's groundbreaking
contribution to countertransference analysis, put it this way: “The
psychoanalyst may…adopt a professional attitude of expertise—attitudinalize
so to speak a therapeutic facade…but…a patient's capacity to perceive the
unconscious psychic experience of others, including the psychoanalyst, does
not shut down by virtue of taking the socially defined role of patient” (pp.
185-186).
The two broad viewpoints regarding the nature of relations between
participating unconsciouses became a key point of divergence between
classical and relational schools of technique. For relational schools,
bipersonal dimensions of the analytic relationship were emphasized,
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with transference and countertransference seen as a unity and each creating,
defining, and breathing life into the other.
In 1932, Ferenczi, typically several generations ahead in his thinking,
reported on his experiments in mutual analysis, depicting in his clinical diary
the following remarkable therapeutic exchange, which reflects a quality of the
unity of experience, a sense of the implicate connection as it existed between
patient and analyst:
19 January, 1932: RN's dream. Former patient Dr. Gx forces her
withered breast into RN's mouth. “It isn't what I need; so big, empty
—no milk.” The patient feels that this dream fragment is a
combination of the unconscious contents of the psyches of the
analysand and the analyst. She demands that the analyst should “let
himself be submerged,” even perhaps fall asleep. The analyst's
associations in fact move in the direction of an episode in his
infancy (at the age of one year); meanwhile the patient repeats in
dream scenes horrifying events at the ages of one and a half, three,
five and eleven and a half, and their interpretation. The analyst is
able, for the first time, to link emotions with the above primal event
and thus endow that event with the feeling of a real experience.
Simultaneously, the patient succeeds in gaining insight, far more
penetrating than before, into the reality of these events that have
been repeated so often on an intellectual level….It is as though two
halves had combined to form a whole soul. The emotions of the
analyst combine with the ideas of the analysand, and the ideas of the
analyst (representational images) with the emotions of the
analysand; in this way the otherwise lifeless images become events
and the empty emotional tumult acquires an intellectual content
[Dupont, 1988, pp 13-14].
Such moments, reflecting deep and sometimes mystifying points of
connection and receptivity, have always been part of the experience of being
an analyst. Ferenczi noted that such moments could not be explained in “the
present state of our knowledge of the physiology of the sensory organs and of
psychology” (Dupont, 1988, p. 85). Ferenczi continued:
Others before me have already drawn attention to the remarkable
frequency with which so-called thought-transference (telepathic)
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phenomena occur between physician and patient, often in a way that
goes far beyond the probability of mere chance. Should such things
be confirmed some day, we analysts would probably find it
plausible that the transference relationship could quite significantly
promote the development of subtler manifestations of receptivity”
[Dupont, 1988, p. 85].
And in a similar vein, Ferenczi wrote in a letter to Freud (a letter dated
November 22, 1910), “Imagine, I am a great soothsayer, that is to say, a
reader of thoughts. I am reading my patient's thoughts (in my free
associations). The future methodology of psychoanalysis must make use of
this” (cited in Brabant, Falzeder, and Giampiori-Deutsch, 1994, p. 235).
Symington (1983) observed what I think is a related phenomenon, once
again reflecting the deep and abiding patient-analyst interconnection, which
he referred to as the “x-factor.” The relationship between what takes place in
the analyst's inner world and in the patient's is integral to the process of
change. Symington wrote:
My contention is that the inner act of freedom in the analyst causes a
therapeutic shift in the patient and new insight, learning and
development in the analyst. The interpretation is essential in that it
gives expression to the shift that has already occurred and makes it
available to consciousness. The point though is that the essential
agent of change is the inner act of the analyst and that this inner act
is perceived by the patient and causes change. Even the most inner
mental act has some manifest correlate that is perceptible, though
this perceptibility may be unconscious and probably is [p. 260].
The analytic relationship offers a uniquely fertile potential for conducting,
processing, and using unconscious experience to bring about psychological
awareness and change. The transference-countertransference embodies a form
of entanglement, perhaps itself reflecting and deriving its power from the
unity of early life, its origins in merger, boundarylessness, and primary life-
sustaining attachment. Our hunches, intuitions, the workings of our third ear—
and our patients'—all reflect the hidden links embedded deep in the structure
of relationship itself.
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An analyst in a deeply attuned and resonant supervisory relationship often
expresses a feeling that his patient must have been in on the previous
supervisory hour. “I did not say a word about what we talked about in our
previous session, and the patient started by saying ‘X.” Supervisor and
supervisee shake their head in amazement. Some time ago, while conducting a
clinical seminar, a patient's dream was presented to me. The presenter had not
told her patient that she would be presenting their work in a seminar. In the
patient's dream, a group of people is observing the dreamer's analytic session
on a television screen. The camera is hidden in a painting on the wall. One of
the observers is called by my name. How did the patient know that her
therapist was presenting their work in a class—let alone the name of one of
the participants? It is not difficult to imagine evidence of sessions being
presented elsewhere, being communicated unconsciously in the form of a
change in the therapist's anxiety level, body language, note taking, or activity
level. But the name of a participant? Coincidence? Two-way communications
bypassing conscious awareness are fundamental to the transformational
potential of psychoanalysis and seem to be fostered by the analyst's
disciplined attention to both his own inner experience and that of the patient.
Such subtle movements are registered, through every known sense in a myriad
of ways, and mixed in dazzling permutations. Much of the process is
subliminal—moments of awareness locating the tip of a vast iceberg. Yet it is
useful to let our attention oscillate, scanning from what we might find, shifting
back and forth between self and other like a searchlight cutting across the
night sky, illuminating a narrow swathe of psychic awareness through the
darkness. As Reik put it, in order to find the patient, we must look for him
within ourselves—and, I would add, we find ourselves in the patient as well.
The artist Chuck Close, speaking about seeing the work of fellow artist
Brice Amaarde, said,
He said he had made a red painting. Then when I got to his studio I
saw a gray painting, that sludgy gray he made. But he had made it
from mixing these high-intensity reds and blues, which canceled
each other out, so that hidden in the gray and broadcasting in that
subtle way, like a radar beacon, was this rich, rich, full-intensity,
full-saturation color, but neutralized and contained. It couldn't have
been less like a battleship gray slapped out onto the canvas [cited in
Kimmelman, 1997, p. C1].
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“In the mutual interaction of the good analytic hour,” wrote Loewald
(1975), “patient and analyst each in his own way and on his own mental level
becomes both artist and medium for each other. For the analyst as artist his
medium is the patient in his psychic life; for the patient as artist the analyst
becomes his medium. But as living human media they have their own creative
capabilities so that they are both creators themselves” (p. 369).
Analysts nurture in themselves a sensibility tuned to see the colors that lie
mixed, neutralized, and contained underneath the surface blend. As a
relationship develops, each partner begins to discern the colors in the other's
palette and in his own. Part of the therapeutic action involves the mutual
enrichment that accrues as each palette expands through contact with the other.
It happens through play, through humor, through an appreciation of the
intersubjective elements that inform mutual awareness, and through a wide
variety of forms of analytic presence, understanding, and relating. Rilke's
advice to a young poet, “Be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it
above everything that you observe about you,” can serve as a helpful reminder
to the analyst on the road to the unconscious as well.
I still see a patient who many years ago told me that she had a way of
knowing things about people long before she knew how she knew. She thought
that she was psychic, and she found this terribly disturbing. It gave her a sense
of being crazy, and she was really scared when the images she had were of
bad things happening. She also feared her dreams, which were sometimes
very disturbing because they threatened to tell her more about herself than she
wanted to know. I first knew her in an eating-problems therapy group I led at
a hospital. She didn't say much in the group; when she did, she spoke in a
singsong, childlike way that could deceive one into overlooking her
considerable intelligence, and she was quite capable of lulling me to sleep.
After a few months in group, she entered analysis with me. She didn't have
much to say in analytic sessions either. The major exception was her
dreams—multiscened, vivid, colorful, fascinating. She recalled them in such
minute detail and in such a tone of voice that she seem to be dreaming them
during the session. (I realized later that this was substantially the case—she
lived life in a series of hypnoid states, the ultimate discovery and
investigation of which became an important part of the analysis.) Each dream
filled a session or two. But she didn't have a sense of herself as actually
dreaming these dreams. They were
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more like visitations. Often, she finished telling a dream, stopped, and then
had little to say about it; if I made a comment or interpretation, however, she
found it extremely interesting. I was the creative one, she thought. “Who is
dreaming these dreams?” I wondered with her. I saw little sign of the vivid
dream palette in her everyday life, which was more a battleship gray.
When she told me that she knew things about people that she had no way of
knowing, I asked her, naturally enough, whether there were things she knew
about me that she might not have mentioned. As a matter of fact, she said in
that singsong voice, she knew I would be leaving the hospital a few months
before I did to open my private office. And she was pretty sure that my wife
had had a miscarriage about four months earlier, just before Thanksgiving.
Well, her second consecutive bull's-eye just about knocked me out of my
chair. I had never spoken of my wife, much less her miscarriage. She couldn't
explain how she knew about the miscarriage, which had indeed taken place
four months earlier, except that for a while she had sensed that I was quite
excited, flying high—the way a young man might feel while expecting his first
child. If she had to put words to it, maybe it had been something about my
color, my posture, voice—she wasn't really sure. And then, after a while, I
had seemed somehow deflated to her…so naturally she assumed….Well,
whose unconscious is it anyway? Clearly, I was broadcasting loud and clear,
at least to her, whose own receiver, I was suddenly beginning to learn, was an
extraordinarily sensitive instrument. She hadn't learned to trust it and rely on
it; in fact, most of her encounters with it had frightened her. But as we talked
more about how she knew what she knew, it became clear that her ambivalent
relationship to her intuitive gifts related directly to how much of herself she
seemed to need to keep hidden underneath a rather gray facade. What began to
emerge were recollections of incest with a grandfather—incidents that, as she
put it, she had never really forgotten but never really known. She had come to
sense her grandfather's state of mind at a distance, to know what he would be
expecting from her, whether he would be coming to her for sex or for
something more grandfatherly. Dream images of buried babies, maybe alive,
maybe not, began to emerge. Had she killed a baby? Was she the baby? She
could begin to think about these images and their meanings, begin to link them
up to her early experiences before and during the incest years. As she began
to experience intense, sometimes unbearable feelings about what she knew
and didn't know,
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