Weeds on the Ruins: Agency, Compromise Formation, and the Quest for Intersubjective Truth

Abstract

Using Kundera's metaphor of “weeds on the ruins” to examine the impact of organized destruction of memory on the survival of a people, this paper explores the role of symptoms in negotiating a relational “compromise formation” by tracing their evolution as signifiers of previously dissociated intersubjective knowledge. It suggests that recent theorizing on the mutual constitution of agency and intersubjectivity creates the possibility of resurrecting the dramatic tension that characterized dual drive theory by relocating that tension between the desire to know (oneself, the Other) and the destruction of that desire. To do so, the paper contemplates an internally consistent lens for reconciling the terrain of deficit and dissociation with that of conflict by offering a process-oriented view of agency as “drive” that is rooted between subjective and material contexts. Finally, the paper explores the quest for intersubjective truth as offering a means of living beyond the ubiquity of compromise formation.

Notes

An excerpted draft of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Athens, Greece, July 2007. Lew Aron, Ph.D., Mark Konecky, Ph.D., Malcolm Slavin, Ph.D., and several anonymous reviewers enriched this paper with their careful readings and helpful comments. Michael Macrone, Ph.D., and Jonathan Slavin, Ph.D., made especially generous contributions to this paper by offering hours of thoughtful readings and many, many graceful and substantive editorial suggestions.

¹It is worth noting that while it is commonplace in psychoanalysis, and in relational psychoanalysis, for us to take for granted the desire to know, and the desire for desire as inherent aspects of the human condition, we have far more skepticism about the desire to destroy, to dread knowing or being known; or what we might regard as the destruction of desire. Freud wrestled with what is at stake in achieving self-knowledge, inevitably linking this with our incestuous (and parricidal) fantasy; relational theory, to date, generally rejects these bedrock assumptions, and has become far more interested in the project of mutual knowing (for its own sake and as a path to self-knowing, self realization). However, what renders the achievement of mutuality so utterly challenging has not been well established in the literature, although both Benjamin (1995) and Ogden (1994) suggested that the tensions between survival and destruction (as per Winnicott's conceptions of discovery of mother as subject) make this quest a daunting one.

² Rothstein (2005) first recognized the relevance of intersubjectivity—as a relationship of mutual regulation—to a theory of compromise formation. Aron (2005), discussing Rothstein's contribution, highlighted instead the significance of intersubjectivity as a relationship of mutal recognition to a theory of compromise formation. It is this latter view that is central to this essay.

³Conceptions of deficit and dissociation, although far from synonymous, are both derived from ideas of trauma and therefore are conceptually linked throughout this paper.

⁴Even if theories accounting for deficit and conflict pathology tend to be incompatible, as a practical clinical matter, there is some consensus that we often must address unmet developmental needs prior to pursuing the analysis of conflict (e.g., Bromberg, 1998, 2006; Busch, 2005; D. B. Stern 1997, 2004). But such common ground may mask underlying differences in theoretical assumptions about unconscious versus conscious conflict (Smith, 2005).

⁵According to Marks-Tarlow (2008), “Nonlinear results are not more true or descriptive than linear ones. This is not an either/or issue partly because linear realms are included within the nonlinear” (p. 6).

⁶I am indebted to John Muller's writings (especially Muller, 1996) for my appreciation of Peirce's theory, and for Muller's conception of developmental semiotics.

⁷Megan spoke here with such a startling directness that, although I imagine that I interpreted her communication, it felt to me as if it was an unmediated communication and there was no mistaking her intent or desire.

⁸ Macrone (1990) called attention to Shakespeare's dramatic irony here in the father's advice to his son. Noting that “Polonius has in mind something much more Elizabethan than the New Age self-knowledge that the phrase now suggests” (p. 166), Macrone interprets Polonius as implicitly recognizing the art of compromise formation as one between truth and camouflage: Being true to oneself, in Polonius's view, involves a capacity for self-interested deception far more than earnest authenticity.

⁹As Marks-Tarlow (2008) put it, “To watch fractal patterns manifest at increasingly subtle, more sophisticated ways is a beautiful, moving portrait of self-as-it-constitutes-and-is-constituted-by-world” (p. 206).