Field of Vision: Radical Uncertainty and the Analyst's Conduct: Commentary on Paper by Donnel B. Stern

Abstract

There is a relationship between biography and theory. The analyst's ideas or formulations about his patients—theories really—must be determined, to some degree, by the certain and uncertain impact of his own history. Harry Stack Sullivan brought psychoanalysis squarely into the ambit of the relational/historical world by insisting that the mind is thoroughly and inherently social. In doing so, he staked a claim for the link between history, that is, social experience, and personhood. Our personalities and our theories are social-historical constructions. In relation to this, some differences between the interpersonal/relational and Bionian concepts of field theory are provided. One important difference pertains to the role of the analyst's conduct. Two meanings of conduct—to behave or to organize behavior—are at the center of what distinguishes the interpersonal/relational view of the analyst's position in the field from the Bionian view. For the relational analyst, action in the analytic field, including enactment, is conduct, and conduct is always bidirectional. The analyst, then, is a medium to alter, to reconstruct the self. He does not provide experience, he is experience. The form of an analytic exchange gives shape to the field and its content.

Notes

¹Sullivan did not think it a good idea to tell a patient—or anyone for that matter—that what they were saying was not what they were saying or what they meant. He thought this was patronizing and condescending and would get the analyst exactly nowhere.

²By including its role in the development of theory, this view represents an understanding of the analyst's participation that is apart from and beyond what Sullivan intended. He did not, to my knowledge, explore the relationship of theory to the theoretician's history.

³This was a significant departure from Freud's metapsychological formulations, most of which posited instincts as fundamentally active, willed and enacted by the subject alone. But sometimes Freud reconvened interpersonal experience in the realm of the intrapsychic without saying as much. For example, his concept of repetition compulsion, an important component of his theory of masochism, is really something of an anomaly for him in that it clearly suggests that the subject exists in relation to others and is a product of relationships. Repetition compulsion is residual of Freud's initial thinking about neurosis: that it was caused by trauma. While Freud eventually abandoned the seduction theory to develop his theory of mind—a crucial shift from the interpersonal to the intrapsychic—some of his ideas, like repetition compulsion, remain bound to the intersubjective. Paul Russell (1998) has argued that, where trauma is concerned, “the thing that is in fact traumatizing is not the repetition, which has to happen in some measure, but the therapist not being in touch with what he or she feels” (p.17).

⁴Neo-Kleinian theorists include Betty Joseph, Elizabeth Bott-Spillius, Hanna Segal, and many others who are more identified with Klein's contributions than with Bion's. Bion himself may be regarded as a neo-Kleinian.

⁵I would argue that to some degree the analyst also wishes to be seen and known for himself and is in conflict about it. To deny this motivation for his participation—and even for his choice of profession—is to welcome the kinds of boundary violations that others argue self disclosures represent.