The Genesis of Interpretation Between Subjectivity and Objectivity: Theoretical-clinical Considerations

Abstract

The patient “employs” and “enlists” the analyst in his various transference forms, not so much by attributing a role to him, but by inducing subtle and deep changes in his person. What the patient makes us experience transforms our potential interpretation into words that arise from the emotional “turbulence” established between the patient and the analyst, prompted by the patient's suffering, made “real” by the analyst’s temporary suffering. Interpretation can become alive, meaningful, usable by the patient, only if the analyst allows that turbolence to temporarily become his own, not just to understand the patient, but to transform him through a partial transformation of the analyst himself. To realize this, we have to maintain an ongoing dialogue between our objectivity and our temperate and floating subjectivity.

Keywords:

• Interpretation
• transformation
• analyst’s subjectivity
• objectivity
• clinical fact
• transference-countertransference

Notes

1 I am not suggesting a co-constructive or narratological vision. I am not framing the analytic situation within a framework of mere symmetry, and I do not give up on the usefulness of the clinical dimension of neutrality, provided such a neutrality does not transform us into neutral analysts (Heimann 1980; Goretti 2001).

2 This theoretical-clinical innovation was also reinforced by reflections on communication and the need not to communicate (Winnicott 1963), on the use of silence and dream as communication (Khan 1963, 1972), on projective identification as communication (Bion 1962), on acting out as a mode of communication. Until the 1960s, the latter was considered a phenomenon whose sole purpose was to attack the setting and the analyst’s mental functioning. Thanks above all to the contributions of Grinberg, Limentani, and Khan, thanks to the experience of child psychoanalysis, and through a new understanding of the analytical situation and technique, for several decades we have been treating acting out as a communication that the patient directs at the analyst using action instead of verbal language.

3 On the other hand, it has become necessary to “counterbalance” what has become a sort of fundamental option with the idea that the patient needs “zones” of non-communication that preserve his individuality and his non-communicating central self (Bonaminio 1996; Winnicott 1963).

4 The structure and the effectiveness of the meaning that is found will inevitably depend on such a meaning having been produced through a method and its rules (first of all, those of free associations and evenly suspended attention); within a process based on and made possible by a frame that defines the place of the transference and countertransference movements; from the living presence of analyst and patient.

5 “An analyst can aim for maximum awareness of the personal motivations that determine his or her analytic activity without assuming that acting in a way that satisfies personal motivations will necessarily oppose the analytic process.” (Renik 1993, p. 563). For an in-depth critique of Renik's positions, see Louw, Pitman (2001).

6 In the attitude that predominantly emphasizes the subjective experience of patient and analyst, Gabbard (1997) sees the risk of stopping on a phenomenological level, thus losing sight of the unconscious communications of the patient.

7 According to Loewald (1986), countertransference pertains to the relationship between analyst and patient; it is strongly influenced by the patient's transference, which the analyst “counters” in his answers; it is influenced by the analyst's movements (transference repetitions) and by the relationship with the patient. With regard to the transference-countertransference dimension, a similar stance is supported by P. Heimann: “Although a conceptual distinction between transference and counter-transference is possible, in the actual experience the two components are fused” (1960, p. 156). Finally, we can agree with Pontalis (1977) in saying that analyst and analysand are subjected to the same unconscious processes, but not in the same way.

8 Nissim Momigliano (1982) highlighted this aspect, as well as the need to differentiate between having to “contain the patient in one’s own mind” and the risk of “possessing him, re-educating him, taking care of him.”

9 On the importance of the patient's history, see Heimann (1977) and Rosenfeld (1987).

10 Freud himself, who had first suggested such a contraposition, already largely moved past it when he realized the dual nature of transference that leads one to remember and repeat what was removed.

11 Among the examples reported by Forrester, there are “the words ‘I do’, uttered in the marriage ceremony, words which constitute the act of getting married; the word ‘Done!’, which is the conclusion of a wager accepted; the words, ‘I name this ship Mister Stalin’—which is the naming of the ship, and not the description of the ship” (1990, p. 150).

12 On analytic listening as a function that is also aimed to pre-verbal and non-symbolic elements, and able to anticipate, on a sensory and auditory level, psychic states that have not been verbally expressed yet, see Di Benedetto (2001).

13 In a work from the seventies, devoted to how interpretations are born in the psychoanalyst, Nissim Momigliano described the need for the analyst to speak to the patient after taking him in, greeting and metabolizing his anxieties, without denying the awareness of the process that is happening inside the analyst too (1974).

14 During May 1895, which saw him feverishly compose the Project, Freud described himself as spending the hours of the night “with such fantasizing, interpreting, and guessing” (letter to Fliess, May 25, 1895). The same triad returns, almost unchanged, 40 years later, as evidence of the presence in Freud's thought of a dialectic between an imaginative-speculative style and a critical-rational style, that crosses through his whole work (Fabozzi 1996).

15 Think of Bion, Winnicott, Khan, and Ogden. Bollas in particular states that the analyst “makes the patient’s material into his own, not only containing it, but by distorting, displacing, substituting, and condensing it” (1992, p. 103).

16 It is useful to remember what Caper (1997) and Feldman (1997) wrote about the risks that the analyst sometimes faces in his receptive function, when the patient's projections are connected with areas of conflict for the analyst himself, preventing him from recovering his analytical stance and his personal identity.

17 In a suggestive chapter titled “Off the wall”, Bollas so reflects on the use that the patient makes of the analyst and on the sources of interpretation: “we ‘find’ different patients in different locations depending on how we are unconsciously invited to process them. I may be working with someone in my soma – in the stomach, the back, or in my respiratory system. I may be considering someone on the wall, in a cloud, or somewhere in the carpet. I may textualize a patient’s discourse into a phonemic script, listening to the puntuation of the unconscious” (1989, p. 59).

18 Maternal order (which supports the production of the patient's unconscious material) and paternal order (which affects the production of meaning through interpretation) are indispensable dimensions of the analytic work so that, through the use of this parental “couple” by the patient, real knowledge can be generated (Bollas 1999).

19 See Winnicott (1971) on potential space, in which the child can separate himself from the mother through the use of symbols and through creative play, which afford him a new form of union. See also Loewald (1988): “Sublimation is a kind of reconciliation of the subject-object dichotomy” (p. 20); “In these reversal – a restoration of unity there comes into being a differentiated unity (a manifold) that captures separateness in the act of unting, and unity in the act of separating” (p. 24).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paolo Fabozzi

Paolo Fabozzi is a Training and Supervising Analyst and Member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and an Adjunct Professor at “Sapienza,” University of Rome. Translation by Adriano Bompani.