Lived Depth: A Phenomenology of Psychoanalytic Process and Identity

ABSTRACT

In this article, I lay out the implications of a phenomenological perspective in which subject, world, and others are given in one stroke, part of the same emergent process. Trends in contemporary psychoanalytic theory lean toward this radical nondualistic view but never quite relinquish a perspective in which subject and object, subject and subject are separate. Through my early studies in phenomenology, I have come to see that psychoanalytic process is better understood as a perceptual engagement in which meaning is formed in the relationship between what is experienced and its context/background/field, a process of lived depth. Strikingly, psychoanalytic identity is a similar process. Inchoate shifts in meaning and investment that we cannot know in formation come clear in relation to a coalescing sense of our place in a professional context. We come to know ourselves retrospectively, an act of après-coup that momentarily stills a continual shape-shifting process, one part of the lived experience of depth.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Beauvoir’s delightful description provides the opening scene for an engaging and informative book on the lives and ideas of the existentialists and phenomenologists of Europe written by Bakewell (2016), a rich and engaging introduction to the lives and ideas of the core group of existential phenomenological philosophers.

² This was only later translated into English (Sartre, 1970).

³ Fink (1995/1932) clarifies an important distinction between two simultaneous moments in Husserl’s phenomenological reduction: the epoché and the “reduction proper.” Where the epoché is the method of freeing ourselves from captivation-in-acceptedness of the everyday world, the reduction proper is recognizing this acceptance as acceptance, as an attitude. This is a move to a transcendental stance, a stance outside the acceptance that captivates us. From this stance, the “human I” caught in the belief in the world is transformed into the “transcendental I” that transcends this natural belief and reflects on the nature of the world as constituted by this consciousness. There is an extensive debate regarding whether Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology becomes yet another idealism, but this is far from our immediate concern. Merleau-Ponty (2012) offers a perspective suggesting that Husserl, especially in his later work, holds that we never step outside of the world we attempt to describe, that we bring with our reflections “all of the living relations of experience, like the net that draws up both quivering fish and seaweed from the seabed” (p. xxix).

⁴ This kind of process analysis has a continued tradition of thought drawn from mathematical and physical systems in von Bertalanffy’s (1968) General System Theory; in Gregory Bateson’s (1972) work on self-correcting “cybernetic” systems; in Nonlinear Dynamic Systems Theory used, for example, to describe developmental processes by Thelen and Smith (1996); and in Complex Systems Theory (Waldrop, 1992), applied to psychological processes, for example, by Piers, Muller, and Brent (2007). And yet rather than rely on physical systems as metaphor for the organization of experience, we can begin with and describe experience itself to determine the specific kinds of organization found there.

⁵ In this article, I refrain from elaborating the many resonances in contemporary psychoanalytic theory that provide different theoretical frameworks for undifferentiated processes. There is compelling literature developed from Bion’s (1959) work on the “proto-mental system,” a forerunner of his later concept of beta-elements, “in which physical and psychological or mental are undifferentiated” (p. 102), such that self-other, internal-external, self-world cannot be distinguished. This is elaborated by Bleger’s (2013) “glischro-caric position and stage,” by Meltzer (1986), Tustin’s (1984) framing of “autistic shapes,” Ogden’s (1989) “autistic-contiguous position,” Cartwright’s (2010) “proto-containment,” Scarfone’s (2015) “actual” and Goldberg’s (2012) “sensory symbiosis.” From the French we have Aulagnier (2001/1975) “pictograms,” de M’Uzan’s (2013) “chimera,” and Anzieu-Premmereur’s (2015) “dyadic sensuality.” And of course the field concept is central in conveying undifferentiated intersubjectivity, developed in South America by the Baranger and Baranger (2008, 1964), in Italy by Ferro (1999, 2002, 2009) and Civitarese (2008, 2012, 2014), and in North America by Sullivan (1940, 1947), Levenson (1972, 1983), Bromberg (2001, 2006, 2011), Fiscalini (2004), Stern (1997, 2013a, 2013b, 2015), and Foehl (2013), among others.

⁶ This description is different from a social constructivist account that frames the interpersonal dialectic found in relational psychoanalytic theory, for example. Although both social constructivism and a phenomenological approach reject the notion of a world separate from our experience and knowledge of it, they differ on the nature of both subjectivity and world. Constructivist and relational perspectives hold that intersubjective meaning, the nature of subjectivity and world, are constituted in the relationship, communication or interaction between two separate subjects. A phenomenological account holds that the nature of subjectivity and world is an emergent phenomenon out of the porous undifferentiated primacy of intersubjective experience in dialectic with separate first-person perception. See Reis (1999) for his remarkable interpretation of Ogden’s work along these lines, a perspective he elaborates substantially in subsequent publications (2006, 2010). Coelho (2012, 2016) presents a similar argument, as does Foehl (2011, 2014a).

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John C. Foehl

John C. Foehl, Ph.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst at Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute where he is President-Elect. He is Faculty and Supervisor at Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and Harvard Medical School; Clinical Associate Professor (part time) at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Associate Editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues; and Editorial Board Member of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.