“Objects” and “characters” in psychoanalytical texts/dialogues

Abstract

The authors propose the use of the narratological category of “character” in psychoanalysis. They consider this notion useful in studying clinical material because it may help in making clearer the distinction between the clinical development of dialogue and the theoretical options that can be used to conceptualize the interaction.In order to facilitate theoretical comparison and effective technical integration, the authors outline three main schemes commonly found in different psychoanalytic traditions: (a) the models with a strong bias toward a reality-oriented approach, which could be defined “individual-historical;” (b) the models focused on the patient's internal world, which will be defined as “individual-phantasmatic;” and (c) the models centered on the study of the intersubjective clinical facts and usually referred to as theories of the “bipersonal psychoanalytic field.” The hypothesis developed in the paper is that the characters of the psychoanalytic materials are to be considered both as a part of a text, which is endowed with a certain stability in the patient's inner world, and as a component of a dialogue that is prone to living dialectical exchanges and transformations.

Keywords:

• Object
• character
• technique
• dialogue
• interpretations
• narrations
• model of the mind

Notes

¹According to Sandler (1993), psychoanalytical concepts evolved, historically, on the basis of a competitive rather than integrative logic. “Until the late 1970s, and even the early 1980s,” he wrote (Sandler 1993, p. 1097), “the different schools within psychoanalysis were regarded as competing with one another. The adherents of each school tended to regard their own theories as the ‘right’ ones, and to see those who espoused other psychoanalytic views as being, to say the least, misguided.” One of the results of this theoretical-political situation was the development of the conceptual strategies that Greenberg & Mitchell (1983) called “adaptation strategies.” From within a given theoretical paradigm/scheme, various authors have expanded the conceptual confines of their original notions to include notions and models that derive from theoretically competing psychoanalytic traditions. One of the principal obstacles to the integration of the different theoretical perspectives is, nowadays, the exisistence of huge areas of conceptual overlap between the different schools—a theoretical hypercomplexity that is one of the elements that determines the babelization of comparison within the analytical community (Wallerstein, 1993). In our opinion, the problem is not that too many languages are spoken but rather that they are translated with too much hurry. The result is that it is difficult to understand where lie the conceptual differences that should be the object of a systematic comparison and conceptual integration.