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Abstract
This article is framed by the question of whether or not different academic disciplines’ or individual persons’ scientific paradigms—meta-assumptions about what is true and real—must be commensurable in order for interdisciplinary, or personal therapeutic, dialogue to be constructive. In respect of personal scientific paradigms, the author contends it is crucial to appreciate the historical nature of any psychoanalyst’s meta-assumptions about self, other, and world when considering this issue of commensurability. The author shows how his own traumatic father loss as a child, and others’ responses to his emotional reaction, gave rise to his personal values of relationality, affectivity, and courageous knowing. He then illuminates the ways in which those historically rooted organizing values motivate him to evaluate his conversation partners’ philosophical convictions and values, their compatibility with his own, and, by extension, the possibilities for expansive interdisciplinary integration.
Notes
1 The two articles by Maduro and Coburn, which comprise this panel, are based on earlier papers that were presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology in Los Angeles in October, 2015.
2 Specifically, the strength of my feelings for him was completely impactless as against his years of chain smoking and the consequential and determinative influence of nicotine on his vascular system.
3 It obliterated what for me then were inviolable convictions, including that my world was as it appeared, and that my “Dad” was and would continue embracing and returning my love.
4 Frankly, it remains to this day dubious whether I can fully comprehend such things other than intellectually—to genuinely feel them in depth.
5 Incidentally, this was a young me whose face then and through much of my life was tearless, showing little overt sign of heartbreak and fear. (My mother, brothers, and I each had our own tricks in respect of such disguising).
6 Arguably, relational psychoanalysis knows this truth even more directly through its clinical empiricism than contextual ontologies (see, e.g., Heidegger, Citation1927) can achieve in their transcendental methodologies.
7 This two-fold relational truth sprouted into awareness when my father died because it was at this precise, unimaginable point that I became acutely in need of my mother’s recognition and holding—and others’ too. The needed maternal love might start with my mother seeing what just happened, and the reactive heartbreak, horror, and terror in me (and her, and my siblings) that reflected its reality and incisive impact on my heart and imagination. I don’t mean the ordinary love of parent that protects and holds a child in the parent’s heart. Rather, I refer to a love that is called for when that protection and holding is breached by a blast-wave of extreme, shocking existential finitude, the raw force and effect of which the child encounters directly.
8 By virtue of such an emotional equation, these painful feelings may have also led her to an insanity-anxiety. Regarding this anxiety, I suspect she feared she too might become lost to a catatonic detachment, that is, fall into an abyss of madness (Atwood, Citation2011), if she felt them.
9 Further, in my mother’s case, it was concretized and reinforced with faith. She was already a Christian Scientist and believed that “matter,” or the physical/biological dimension of human being-in-the-world, had neither divine intelligence nor truth. Her faith concretized in religious conviction her already-formed accommodative (Brandchaft, Citation2007; Brandchaft et al., Citation2010) commitment to not-acknowledge tearful feelings like heartbreak, and the quite “material” losses—like loss of husband and father—that transpired before her eyes, and mine.
10 For example, by virtue of the above described early unmet need for love, I have forever longed for a romantic love with a woman that would blast into the depths of my soul in a manner that matched in impact the penetrating epistemic shock and heartbreak of my fatherloss. Lynne Jacobs (Citationin press), in a different context, warns—wisely, I believe—that such longings, and the sad unmetness they invariably promise, must be mourned.
11 The legacy or demon itself might be called a traumatic memory. Yet it has more of an alive, present “me” in it than memory conveys. This demon lies in wait in the experiential background until awakened by circumstances in my current relational context. The circumstances that awaken the demon are what—borrowing from Rowling’s (Citation2000, p. 70) “Harry Potter”—Stolorow (Citation2007, p. 18) calls “portkeys.” Portkeys are the features of current lived-situations, relationships, or events that evoke demons that transport the person from lived-present into the frightening meanings and states encoded with his/her traumatic, relational past. When emotional trauma is re-animated by portkeys, Stolorow (Citation2007) writes, the “unity of temporality—the sense of stretching along between past and future— … is devastatingly disturbed … past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition” (p. 20).
12 There is always a moment and abruptness in which this vulnerability or loss seems to occur. In turn, and invariably, I become psychologically preoccupied with this pointed moment.
13 These psycho-biographies suggest correlations between not only a theorist’s personal history and the substantive content of his/her theory, but also a theorist’s personal history and his/her motivation, method, and style of theorizing and writing (the process behind his/her substantive theory).
14 Moreover, given the disintegration of family, can it be any surprise that I am interested in the embeddedness of self not just in the dyadic systems that characterize much of our clinical practices, but in larger human contexts, like those in focus in disciplines like history, sociology, and gender studies, in which we are all more broadly embedded as a human family? These disciplines are substantively, even if not methodologically, commensurable with my psychoanalytic paradigm since they speak to broad matrices of human interconnection.
15 Philosophy does not study the ontic phenomena of the individual’s lived-experience in particular relational contexts, but rather the a priori universals (e.g., the a priori relationality of human being-in-the-world) that would govern any understanding or manifestation of human being that might appear before us within our psychoanalytic practices.
16 In the types of decontextualizing theories to which I object—whether rooted in philosophy, like Descartes’ (Citation1641), the natural sciences, or psychoanalysis—disconnection between self, other, and world is absolutized and insulated from recognition, dialogue, and challenge. In such processes, the theorist-clinician flees his/her own, and by extension his/her patients’, emotional experiences of intersubjective-vulnerability (Orange, Citation2008; Maduro, Citationin press), producing intellectual and emotional distance between him/her and those in need of relational understanding.