Adam Phillips (Citation2014) writes in his book Becoming Freud:
We spend our lives, Freud will tell us, not facing the facts, the facts of our history, in all their complication; and above all, the facts of our childhood … And to face all these improbable facts we need a different way of listening to the stories of our lives, and a different way of telling them … Psychoanalysis, which started as an improvisation in medical treatment, became at once, if not a new language, a new story about these fundamental things, and a new story about stories. For Freud the modern individual is ineluctably, compulsively a biographer and an autobiographer. (p. 6)
Freud’s project was a project of finding new ways to tell the stories of our lives, lives now understood as springing from infancy, and in seeking a model for this new way of telling, Freud also looked to the depths – seeking inspiration less frequently from the fictional artists of his day than from the dramatic writers and theorists of ancient Greece. From Aristotle he drew his concept of catharsis, which he called “abreaction,” and from Sophocles he borrowed the storyline of Oedipus, which came to infuse his theory from all directions. One might even argue that Freud’s later theory of conflict derives from Hellenistic drama, whose effects also depend upon a clash of ideologies and motives. Freud’s structural theory is essentially a dramatic theory in which the analyst discerns efforts of cooperation and antagonism between regions of the psyche. McDougall (Citation1987) was able therefore to conceptualize Freud’s mental apparatus less as structure than stage, summed up in a phrase she made famous, “the theater of the mind.”
In the last fifty or so years, psychoanalysts have increasingly conceptualized core psychoanalytic ideas such as knowledge, reality and the self as taking shape through affectively charged interactions with other humans, rather than just in the private space of the mind. Parents participate in these shaping interactions. As do analysts. And sometimes there’s an interesting confusion between the two. Most of the writers in this issue see the psychoanalytic situation as dramatic not so much for its ability to lift into consciousness a contemporary variation of the drama of Oedipus, but because the process itself is dramatic, at once staged and spontaneously interactive. At its simplest, psychoanalysis is just two attentive people taking on various roles, and by taking on those roles getting to know various sides of one another. Sometimes the roles are that of interpreting analyst and storytelling patient. Sometimes the roles are from the past. The analyst may step back and comment, but the commenting isn’t what is really important. As with the audience of a drama, insight comes packed in the form of an experience rather than as a lesson.
Our issue opens with an article by Alan Karbelnig, who presents a historical overview of how psychoanalytic thinkers have applied ideas from drama to the psychoanalytic situation. Karbelnig understands the interpersonal dialogue of the psychoanalytic situation as a kind of performance about the patient, which might contain dramatic re-enactments drawn from old storylines or original actions that break free of the past, but inevitably reveals a narrative arc as much lived as told. Karbelnig puts particular focus on an element of the action which theorists of drama have called the “denouement,” from the Latin meaning “untie the knot.” These key moments elicit “a mixture of surprise (‘I can’t believe that happened’) and confirmation (‘Oh, that all fits now’).”
Civitarese and Boffito start with a famous phrase from Aschylus “To patei mathos” – meaning literally “through suffering, knowledge.” The chorus in the theater of ancient Greece “suffers with” the protagonist, instead of assuming a distant explanatory stance. The analyst operates in a similar mode, “reverberating and returning the emotional content, sometimes slightly modified, so that the protagonist [read also patient] can listen to his own voice and enact a moment of transformation.” Theirs is an immersive, rather than an interpretive, psychoanalysis – one that converts an “I” experience into a “we” experience.
Ringstrom offers an even more immersive model drawn largely from theories of dramatic improvisation, in which the analyst is more directly involved in the action – a “participant/participant” mode of interaction. The analyst inevitably becomes a character in the patient’s (and the analyst’s) drama, in which the two enact possibilities of interaction and ultimately press up against constraints in the field. Drawing on information theory, Ringstrom conceptualizes two dimensions of change on the analytic stage. The first he refers to as “first order change,” which emerges from the seemingly natural to-and-fro of interactions within the constraints of the field. “Second order change” comes out of “surprise” – a spontaneous breaking out of the constraints of the field that open up heretofore unimaginable possibilities of dramatic interaction.
Since the frontier days of psychoanalysis, analysts have understood that the work of being an analyst requires a special kind of listening. This listening has been conceptualized as unconscious to unconscious, as right brain to right brain, as like a telephone receiver, as listening with a third ear, as listening from the patient’s perspective, and so on. The next two articles, one by Weigert (a working actress) the other by O’Connell (an actor turned analyst), compare the listening attitude of an analyst to that of an actor. Weigert proposes that when two actors listen to each other, their lives (in other words the characters they embody) depend upon the fierceness of the listening act. The two literally “listen the other into being.” O’Connell describes this action of listening as “listening with presence” and quotes a line from stage director Liesl Tommy, “Take space to make space.” In short, acting entails a constructive as well as a receptive form of listening, a response that allows the other to take form in their response. “What I have trained myself to recognize,” Weigert writes, “is the sensation of being joined – that is what signals I am on the right path.” As analysts, we know we are doing good work, or at least that we’re getting somewhere, when the other person shows up in a way we recognize as “authentically” engaged, if I may use a thin adverb to describe what has no word.
I draw on Aristotle’s brilliant analysis of tragic drama in The Poetics and on my fifteen years writing screenplays for Hollywood to examine how the process of writing drama and performing psychoanalysis map onto one another. The areas of overlap between the two modes bring out rarely discussed aspects of our work: the ways we attend to text and subtext as fugue rather than division, the ways we manage timing and rhythm, the ways we unconsciously seek to discern moments of reversal in the dramatic action, the ways we simultaneously shape and let go of the action. At the heart of all these attitudes is a common need to hold attention (that of the audience or the psychoanalytic dyad) by fostering an environment in which the unexpected coincides with moments of recognition.
Federici and Nebbiosi open their paper by describing the tragic view of humanity expressed by the dramatists of ancient Greece, in which the protagonist acts in ignorance of what his actions will turn out to mean. A similar interplay goes on between implicit and explicit communications, between gesture and word, an interplay which leaves human beings forever living in tension between two modes of meaning, one that takes form in lived action, the other afterward in descriptive language. The authors lean on Aristotle’s understanding of dramatic action as an “imitation of action” to describe how in-the-moment imitation mediates understanding of this implicit form of communicating between infants and caregivers (and by extension analysts and analysands). In two parallel vignettes, the analyst’s internal miming of their patients in important moments reveals ways patients live in the world inaccessible to all but the most poetic language.
Lothane coins the word “dramatology” to describe the lived stories of psychoanalysis. “In order for patients’ dramas to unfold,” he argues, “therapists need to be free enough to respond to the patients’ invitations by letting themselves be drawn into these dramas to a degree that enables them to experience and understand these patterns.” He applies his concept of “dramatology” to Freud’s famous narratives of Dora and Schreber.
Gray draws from the teaching of the famous acting coach Sanford Meisner to describe the psychoanalytic action of a particular case. Meisner invites actors to translate the dramatic situation in which their character participates into a fictional situation (meaningful to the actor) that matches up affectively to that of the text – a method Gray employs to enter into his patient’s predicament more emphatically. Gray’s new affectively charged response generates a change in his patient’s affective state. Meisner conceptualized such a shift in the other as an “impulse” that signals that something new has entered the field.
Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D.
Issue Editor
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Daniel Goldin
Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D., serves as editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and associate editor of Psychoanalysis: Self and Context. He has written numerous articles for Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalysis: Self and Context and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. His book Storying: Bringing Nature, Nurture and Culture Together in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life will be published by Routledge early next year.