The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative

Abstract

For the most part psychoanalytic scrutiny of what remains unregistered and unsymbolized has focused on its power to disrupt thinking or prevent integration. Yet what is not represented in words or affect can just as well be nonpathological, ubiquitous and a generative condition of being human. This paper reorients analytic focus on the powerful elements of unrepresented subjectivity, in other words “the negative,” that contribute to generative experience by unleashing energy that fosters creativity. This paper is not meant to be read forward to a prescriptive end. Engaging post-Bionian field theory, experimental clinical writing and the art of Agnes Martin, I write in three sections to explore the possibilities and limits of the analyst’s assumption of a nonsovereign position vis a vis the negative.

This article is referred to by:

Through a Glass Darkly: A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

Thinking Absence: A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

Notes

¹ See Levine (2013), for a discussion of the nuances of registration and representation.

² That work felt like being in the center of a void in Green’s sense (1999) where primitive states of mind reject whatever is intolerable to the ego and point to the destructiveness of the death drive. Still, I think it links more closely to Green’s (1999) sense of an absence always in dialectical relation with presence. The presence/absence dialectic is the substrate that underlies all self-other normative development (Morris, 2005).

³ Bion’s “beta elements” and Stern’s (1983) “unformulated experience” come to mind here, among many conceptions of unrepresentability.

⁴ This happened to me when at age 53 I began to paint portraits with no facility to draw or artistic capacity. What emerged felt miraculous and not from a me I knew.

⁵ An idea appreciated and documented by authors as disparate as in American relational and field theorists to Ogden’s work (1994) on the intersubjective third.

⁶ See Donnell Stern’s (2013) extensive discussion and critique of the post Bionian Field theorists and Levine’s (2013) rebuttal.

⁷ In newer writing, Civitarese (2015) has emphasized the analyst’s need to find the corresponding hallucinosis of his patient, bringing him closer to many relational thinkers’ belief that we must live at the level of the chaos our patient is living, though he does not do that aloud.

⁸ See Chapter 3 for their rich and complex dialogue. All unattributed quotes come from that discussion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jade McGleughlin

Jade McGleughlin, L.I.C.S.W., is Past President, Supervisor, Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member at The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Contributing Editor of Gender and Sexuality. She is a former Instructor in Psychiatry for Harvard Medical School, former Co-Director Sexual Abuse Treatment Team, Psychiatry, Children’s Hospital, and Founder and Director, Center For Alternative Families. She is in private practice in Cambridge, MA providing consultation, supervision, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to children and adults. She specializes in consultations to difficult therapies. Her writing focuses on gender, the negative, the analyst’s necessary nonsovereignty, and uses of visual art to articulate problems in representation. She is a portrait painter.