Confrontation and the Fool’s Method

ABSTRACT

The history of the term confrontation is reviewed. It is suggested that the reason it was so difficult to define the term over the years is that it is fundamentally an interactive term, imported into an era in which many analysts behaved as if there were no interaction—or should be none. Contemporary analytic process can be seen as a series of confrontations between two people by virtue of the intrinsic differences between them. Three clinical vignettes illustrate this point and its implications. A final section of the article examines the dialogue between the Fool and King Lear in Shakespeare’s (1606) play, which allows consideration of the complex nature of confrontation and other aspects of therapeutic dialogue often neglected.

Notes

¹ The term does mysteriously show up the following year in an abstract of the paper, published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Loewenstein, 1952). The authorship of the abstract is unclear.

² What I am describing here is similar to what LaFarge (2016, this issue) calls confrontation with “the stranger within” and “the stranger without.”

³ I have described this hour in greater detail elsewhere (Smith, 2000). The patient is in a four times weekly analysis on the couch.

⁴ I have described this hour at greater length elsewhere (Smith, 2006). The analysis is conducted on the couch at a frequency of five times per week.

⁵ All quotations from the play and line references are from the Arden Shakespeare edition, edited by K. Muir (Shakespeare, 1606).

⁶ Rose (1969) looked at some of this material nearly 50 years ago and, applying traditional principles of analytic technique and goals, concluded that the Fool “failed in his ‘therapeutic’ efforts” by being “too reality-oriented, superficial, gratifying, etc.” (p. 931). I argue precisely the opposite, including that the Fool’s success must be measured from within the play by the growing awareness Lear achieves.

⁷ At the risk of being prosaic, it may be worth remembering that, because I am examining a play and not an actual analysis, the action of the dialogue between the Fool and Lear necessarily moves very quickly, giving the Fool’s confrontations a headlong quality. In an actual analysis, the clinical experience of time would be completely different, and there would be opportunity to analyze and understand what is taking place between the Fool and Lear as itself a kind of enactment, fueled by the affective needs and wishes of both, and driven by their mutual confrontations.

⁸ The hedge-sparrow had its head bit off by the cuckoo.

⁹ This second reading is supported when one considers the source for Shakespeare’s play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir. There the old King Leir says more straight-forwardly, “And think me but the shaddow of myselfe” (I, iv, note to l. 228).

¹⁰ Dollar was the Elizabethan word for the German thaler (sounds like dollar) and Spanish peso, the currencies of their respective countries at the time (II, iv, note l. 52; Oxford English Dictionary, 1971).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry F. Smith

Henry F. Smith, M.D., is the former Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.