Representations, Schemas, and Living-in-the-World

Abstract

Responding to Kenneth Frank’s paper on therapeutic action, the present paper focuses especially on Frank’s emphasis on emotion schemas as a central therapeutic target across the spectrum of approaches. While strongly agreeing with the value and importance of the emotion schema concept as a unifying foundation for understanding therapeutic action, this paper highlights the differences between primarily one-person versions of the concept and conceptualizations of emotion schemas more rooted in contextual, two-person, and bidirectional interactive models. In elaborating on this distinction, the paper addresses as well as differences between a primarily representational psychology and one focused on living-in-the-world.

Keywords:

• emotion schemas
• representations
• living-in-the-world
• one-person and two-person models
• psychotherapy integration

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Rethinking Therapeutic Action: Finding Commonalty in Diversity

Notes

¹ In considering the range of possibilities for conceptualizing emotion schemas and their roles in people’s lives, we may note that Bowlby’s concept of internal working models is also a schema model in which emotional meanings occupy center stage. And although attachment too has been addressed and described in more static, one-person ways, it is fundamentally a two-person concept (Wachtel, 2010).

² Kohut’s biographer, Charles Strozier (1999), has suggested that Mr. Z. was actually a disguised representation of Kohut himself, both as he was initially treated by his analyst and as he wished to be treated.

³ To be sure, there was some legitimacy in complaints that Alexander’s specific version could be seen as potentially manipulative or narrowly prescriptive. Alexander was a brilliant thinker and clinician—Freud referred his own son for analysis with Alexander—but he was not necessarily an easy person to like or admire (Alexander, 2015). But as Erik Erikson (1963) said, in offering a less reductionistic, more culturally attuned version of Freud’s instinct theory, “true insight survives its first formulation.” (p. 64)

⁴ See the work of Barlow and colleagues (e.g., Barlow et al., 2016) for an important, if still limited, exception.

⁵ This is especially troubling in light of Friedman’s (2002) contention that “if you asked an analyst what he did, he would say, ‘I interpret.’” (p. 544)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul L. Wachtel

Paul L. Wachtel, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor of psychology in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a faculty member of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. He was a cofounder of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI) and is a past president of that organization. Among his books are Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World; Family Dynamics in Individual Psychotherapy; Race in the Mind of America; Relational Theory and the Practice of Psychotherapy; Therapeutic Communication: Knowing What to Say When; Inside the Session; The Poverty of Affluence; and Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self: The Inner World, the Intimate World, and the World of Culture and Society. He was awarded the Hans H. Strupp Award for Psychoanalytic Writing, Teaching, and Research; the Distinguished Psychologist Award by Division 29 (Psychotherapy) of APA; the Scholarship and Research Award by Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of APA; and the Sidney J. Blatt Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychotherapy, Scholarship, Education, and Practice.