Building a Bridge Across the Ocean: Commentary on a Dialogue Between Adrienne Harris and David Lichtenstein

Abstract

This essay is a commentary on the dialogue between Adrienne Harris and David Lichtenstein and aims to address the points of contact and divergence between relational and Lacanian perspectives. As a starting point, I focus on issues that are central to both schools of thought, including (but not limited to) the self as subject, transference and countertransference, the analytic relationship, interpretation, transformation and the goals of treatment, and the question of analytic authority. These areas are discussed with an eye toward understanding the way that theory informs technique and comes alive in the clinical situation ultimately effecting change.

Notes

¹ Lacan’s thinking was deeply influenced by Alexandre Kojeve, George Bataille, Maurice Merleu Ponty, and Andre Breton, with whom he shaped many of his ideas. In his paper “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan (1953) launched an attack on psychoanalysis and called for a return to Freud while also integrating structural linguistics and social sciences, effectively building a bridge between psychoanalysis and Heidegger’s version of existentialism. His was an oral tradition, which deeply influenced French intellectual thought and the likes of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucalt, and Jacque Derrida—who adopted many of his ideas and disseminated them in other fields.

² Recognition for Benjamin involves mutuality, where one feels the other as a like subject despite having separate feelings and perceptions. It involves implicit as well as explicit communication. The survival of the other as a subject is crucial for recognition to come into being in that a preconceived internal other has to be surrendered in order to allow for the other to come into view as a subject. In fact, for Benjamin, recognition involves an ongoing tension between recognizing the other and asserting the self.

³ The difference between the terms “recognition” and “witnessing” is important here. Bromberg (personal communication, 2010) maintains that the concept of witnessing reduces consciousness to external reality and does not encompass the rest of internal reality, which may or may not be shared or known with and by another.

⁴ Even though Ferenczi was famous for lengthening his sessions, sometimes to two hours or more, whereas Lacan shortened his and made them contingent on the patient’s speech.

⁵ Lacan viewed psychosis as collapsing the symbolic into the imaginary. Later in his thinking, he reformulated his approach to psychosis into the notion of the Borromean knot: where the three rings representing the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic become disentangled in psychosis (see Evans, 1996, pp.154–155).

⁶ Sullivan’s interest in psychosis and schizophrenia in particular made him stand out from the group of neo-Freudians of his time who assumed that such disorders were fixated at a preoedipal stage of development and could not be treated psychoanalytically. Sullivan continued to believe that despite their serious psychopathology the personality of persons with schizophrenia was shaped through interpersonal interactions.

⁷ Lacan revised his ideas about countertransference but always held it suspect. In 1950, he viewed it as an obstacle to psychoanalytic treatment and the “sum of the prejudices, passions, perplexities and even the insufficient information of the analyst at a certain moment of the dialectical process” (Lacan, 1953, p. 225). In 1960, he saw it as an unnecessary term and felt that transference was sufficient in that it implicated both the analyst and analysand (see Evans, 1996, p. 30).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Velleda C. Ceccoli

Velleda C. Ceccoli, Ph.D., is in private practice in New York. She is training and supervising analyst at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies and clinical supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality and writes a psychoanalytic blog called Out of My Mind.