Challenging Relational Psychoanalysis: A Critique of Postmodernism and Analyst Self-Disclosure

Abstract

This paper is based on two lectures given at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, on February 13, 2015. These lectures were largely derived from my book Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Mills, 2012) and serve as the focus of critique and rebuttal from five panelists who responded to my lectures delivered at the conference. Here I provide an adumbrated critique of the adoption of postmodernism within contemporary relational theory and the excessive use of analyst self-disclosure. Although these lectures have been merged into a formal paper, they remain mostly unrevised and represent what transpired at the conference despite being cut in length for the purposes of publication.

Keywords:

• analyst self-disclosure
• critique
• Jon Mills critics
• postmodernism
• relational psychoanalysis
• relativism
• therapeutic excess

Notes

¹ For example, see Hartman’s (2005) inaccurate assessment of the role and meaning of postmodernism in contemporary psychoanalysis.

² These propositions problematize the whole contemporary psychoanalytic edifice. If nothing exists independent of language and the social matrix that sustains it (in essence, the relational platform), then not only is subjectivity causally determined by culture, subjectivity is dismantled altogether. When analysts use terms such as construction, hence invoking Foucault—whose entire philosophical project was to get rid of the subject and subjectivity—or even worse, deconstruction, thus exalting Derrida—the king of postmodernism, whose entire corpus is devoted to annihilating any metaphysical claims whatsoever, thus collapsing everything into undecidability, ambiguity, chaos, and chance—analysts open themselves up to misunderstanding and controversy, subsequently inviting criticism.

³ Mitchell’s epistemological critique of metaphysical realism—that is, on the knowability of the object world—in favor of linguistic interpretive construction may very well be the hallmark of relational pomocentrism. Based on his antiobjectivist dismissal of scientific observation and analytic neutrality, from this standpoint there is no such thing as a fact. Instead, all human experience is predicated on language and interpretation, and this specifically means conscious conceptual thought. Not only does this privilege consciousness over unconsciousness, it logically displaces the presumption that unconscious mentation precedes conscious thought, for language is a socially constructed enterprise. I have grave concerns with this conceptual move in contemporary circles because psychoanalysis loses its contribution to the human sciences, which places unconscious processes at the pinnacle of mental operations.

⁴ Schelling’s (1800/1978) System of Transcendental Idealism may be said to be the first systematic philosophy that dissolved the subject–object dichotomy by making pure subjectivity and absolute objectivity identical: mind and nature are one. It can be argued, however, that it was Hegel (1807/1977, 1817/1991) who was the first to succeed in unifying the dualism inherent in Kant’s distinction between phenomenal experience and the noumenal realm of the natural world through a more rigorous form of systematic logic that meticulously shows how subjectivity and objectivity are dialectically related and mutually implicative. Relational psychoanalysis has left out one side of the equation, or at least has not adequately accounted for it. When relational analysts return to the emphasis on subjectivity by negating the objective, they foreclose the dialectical positionality that is inherently juxtaposed and reciprocally intertwined in experience (see Mills, 2002, for a review).

⁵ One persistent criticism of relational theorizing is that it does not do justice to the notion of personal agency and the separateness of the self (Frie, 2003). It may be argued that relational thinking dissolves the centrality of the self, extracts and dislocates the subject from subjectivity, decomposes personal identity, and ignores the unique phenomenology and epistemological process of lived experience by collapsing every psychic event into a relational ontology, thus usurping the concretely existing human being while devolving the notion of contextualism into the abyss of abstraction.

⁶ In section 4 of the Regulated Health Professions Act (1991), under subsection 3, “Sexual abuse of a patient,” it states, “In this Code, ‘sexual abuse’ of a patient by a member means, (a) sexual intercourse or other forms of physical sexual relations between the member and the patient, (b) touching, of a sexual nature, of the patient by the member, or (c) behaviour or remarks of a sexual nature by the member towards the patient. 1993, c. 37, s. 4.” Last amendment: 2009. Notice that Davies’s remarks would clearly fall under paragraph (c) of this clause under Ontario legislation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon Mills

Jon Mills, PsyD, PhD, ABPP, is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis, Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto, and runs a mental health corporation in Ontario, Canada. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship, and he is the author of 19 books, including Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality (Routledge, 2017).