Everything Counts: The Organizing Activity of an Interpretive Attitude

Abstract

The author brings a complexity sensibility to the concept of interpretation by conceptualizing an interpretive attitude as both a continual internal striving to understand and organize the multiplicity of experiences and states that emerge in an analytic field and an emergent property of that field—a complex dynamic system in which everything counts. Her interpretive attitude helps her patient to bring more coherence to his internal confusion and chaos. Inevitably, she communicates meaning to him implicitly, and when it seems useful, explicitly, as she strives to bring disparate things together lightly so he can move forward in his life with more freedom and vitality.

Notes

¹ In 2010 after too many LGBTQ suicides, Dan Savage and Terry Miller founded the It Gets Better Project to give hope to gay youth.

² The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the breakthrough TV program that portrayed a single career woman, didn’t begin airing until 1970.

³ It was when I read Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) that I understood why I wanted a different life from my mother’s. I wanted more, and money, of my own.

⁴ Complex dynamic systems theory (complexity theory) has found its way into psychoanalytic theorizing through the work of so many analysts, some of whom I cite in earlier papers (2007, 2011b, 2015).

⁵ Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage (2002) might call this a “spirit of inquiry.”

⁶ Carleton and Shane (2013) view memory as ongoing relational “process rather than static representation,” as “creation rather than a replication, as idiosyncratic in the moment rather than faithful to the past, as fluid rather than fixed” (p. 230).

⁷ My favorite illustration is in Kohut’s (1979) “The two analyses of Mr. Z.”

⁸ I’m using lightly in the sense that Orange (2003) did about theory and conviction, as shorthand that it is good to communicate with a light touch.

⁹ Symington (1983) called “acts of freedom” those moments of inner freedom when he has an unexpected thought that frees something in him that he then can use to free something in his patient (p. 283). I say that his inner freedom allows new organization to emerge in the field.

¹⁰ In Gabbard and Westen’s (2003) schematic model of therapeutic actions, new experiences weaken old, maladaptive brain pathways while simultaneously creating and strengthening new ones.

¹¹ Lane et al. (2015) concluded from their research that the locus of therapeutic action in all talk therapies is the revising and updating of emotional memories in states of emotional arousal through a process of reconsolidation that incorporated new emotional experience.

¹² Stern (2013) wrote that “whatever we can do to make it possible for the analytic relationship to evolve freely, without constraint or constriction, is the best way we have to encourage the freedom to experience [which] underpins therapeutic action” (p. 227).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carol B. Levin

Carol B. Levin, M.D., is Faculty and Member, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and Society; Analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic Council; Council Member, International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology; and Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Inquiry.