Search Yourself: Commentary on Paper by Kenneth A. Frank

Abstract

This commentary has as its point of departure essential questions about selfhood, self-knowledge, and therapeutic action. Frank's contemporary redefinition of “mutual analysis” and its impact on the clinical surround are examined, with a special emphasis placed on the willingness of the analyst to change and grow. The vital role and theme of the analyst's emotional honesty are explored with an eye toward the clinical impact of contextualism, psychoanalytic complexity, and the personal attitudes that inevitably permeate the analytic relationship and its trajectory. This commentary, in concert with Frank's paper, encourages clinicians to embrace a more collaborative, mutually analytic posture in their clinical endeavors.

Notes

¹See Stolorow (2005) on the importance of use of language, as well as Wittgenstein (1953) and Orange (2003), in defining how we think and how we interact in and with the world.

²See Coburn (2007, 2009) for an examination of the importance of distinguishing between “the explanatory” and “the phenomenological” dimensions of discourse.

³I do not imply that these perspectives are mutually exclusive—it depends on how they might be elaborated and understood—but rather that they reflect contrasting “language games” (Wittgenstein, 1953). Among other considerations, understanding their meanings rests on determining whether we are thinking phenomenologically or explanatorily.

⁴See Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage (2011) for a more recent and persuasive understanding of “the self” through the lens of self and motivational systems theory.

⁵In contexts of danger and fear (given a sound responsiveness from the environment), while the child is learning that he can be safe, calm, and secure in the presence of a stronger, idealized figure, the idealized figure is learning, via the responsiveness of the child, that she can be, in fact, a strong, idealizable, efficacious, and nurturing person. Each is learning something about oneself and about the other, and each is becoming a self and an other as well.

⁶For a thorough explication of the application of complexity theory to a variety of fields, including psychoanalysis, see Poincaré et al. (1900); Thom (1983); Bak (1996); Waddington (1966); Kauffman (1995); Lorenz (1993); Cilliers (1998); Taylor (2001); Prigogine and Holte (1993); Coburn (2002, 2007); Galatzer-Levy (1978); Sashin and Callahan (1990); Moran (1991); Spruiell (1993); Thelen and Smith (1994); Stolorow (1997); M. Shane, Shane, and Gales (1997); Palombo (1999); Miller (1999); Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage (1992); Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991); Scharff (2000); Beebe and Lachmann (2001); Trop, Burke, and Trop (2002); Charles (2002); Magid (2002); Bacal and Herzog (2003) Ghent (2002); Harris (2005); E. Shane and Coburn (2002); Seligman (2005); Thelen (2005); Weisel-Barth (2006); Pickles (2006); Sucharov (2002); Sander (2002); Piers (2005); Orange (2006); Dubois (2005); and Steinberg (2006).

⁷Emotional experience emerges always at the interface of one's history, one's current state, and one's environment, and the lines of demarcation between each can never be clearly drawn, if at all. This psychoanalytic complexity sensibility helps subvert our natural human propensity to simplify reductionistically emotional experience and meaning into neat, understandable components.

⁸See Layton (1999) on the role and meaning of “expert.”

⁹For an extensive treatment of the distinctions between empathy and authenticity, see Orange (2002).