Reply to Commentaries

Abstract

My first reply in this symposium is to Reis regarding his elaborations of Mitchell's ideas that lend to comparisons of the Relationalists and the Intersubjectivists. I concur with Reis that differences between the two have less to do with language use per se than their views about analytic authority, to which I add the issue of analytic attitude. In replying to Clement, I underscore her important elaboration that Kohut's self psychology revolution has for Relational Psychoanalysis. In my final reply I address Jacob's argument that my comparison of the Relationalists and the Intersubjectivists is mired in “category errors” as well as my conflation of the “explanatory versus the phenomenological” levels of abstraction, which leads to spurious comparisons of the two theories. I argue instead that the “levels of abstraction” is essentially a specious argument that complicates rather than clarifying both theories use of language.

If illusion is defined as a false appearance, a belief that does not have its correspondence in the physical world, the current view in neuroscience is that everything the brain constructs is an illusion. Selves do not exist in the physical world; our perception of the self is a construction of our brain. Therefore, the self can also be described as an illusion. We essentially imagine ourselves. But we should not depreciate or disparage belief in illusions as false conceptions; if the self is an illusion and the feeling of agency is an illusion, these are illusions without which we cannot live. (Modell, 2008, p. 362)

All theories are metaphors; metaphors help us bridge from the theory to the phenomenology. (Thelin, 2005)

Notes

¹For the record, I too have never been completely comfortable with my strategy for comparing these two incredibly important and yet disparate paradigms. However, I simply could not think of a more fitting way. Nor, for that matter, have I yet read any other comparison that has succeeded in accomplishing the task any better. So, I am very grateful to be able to respond to the discussants in hopes of further clarifying some crucial points of comparison. Also, for the record, the final paper published in this issue of Dialogues represents a seventh major rewrite. The original title of the paper was “Between the ‘Doer’ and the ‘Done-to’ and the Context Made Me Do It: A Comparison of Relational Psychoanalysis and Intersubjective Systems Theory.” The other six versions spanned 3 years in development and were graciously vetted by over 50 readers, some reading several versions of it. Most importantly, the vast majority of these readers were more identified with of the intersubjectivists school than that of the Relationalists.

²Regarding the potentially prescriptively linear course the advocacy of affect attunement can take. Slavin (in press) wrote, “At many moments in [Orange's] discussion of recognition, she focuses heavily on what sounds like one person, the analyst, recognizing, while the other, the patient, receiving an experience of the other's recognition. … In the absence of the vantage point of the patient as an often perceptive interpreter of the analyst's subjectivity (Aron, 1992; Hoffman, 1998) Dr. Orange's model seems to keep the process of recognition more unidirectional and, I think, unnecessarily, limited.” Correspondingly, Benjamin (in press) wrote, “As I read Orange's critique, the subtext of her argument is actually that only one partner can contribute—attune, formulate or recognize—at a time, indeed, that the complementarity of giver and given is never truly overcome. … If anyone, and only one, ‘must’ recognize, it should indeed be the therapist. But if things remain polarized in this way, so that different realities never come to be held in mind by both partners together, [italics added] it is hard to see how healing actually takes place. … If the patient were only to absorb without returning all this good nourishment of recognition, the patient would never develop faith in her ability to feed herself or others. I believe this would be an unnecessary price to pay in order to receive empathy, witnessing, and yes, recognition.”

³For example, both parties' experiences are constituted by mutual and reciprocal influence. The fact that neither party in the dyad can ever step outside their ongoing mutual influence means that the analytic process can never be “neutral, anonymous, or objective.” The parties' emotional experiences are contextually intertwined and are therefore sensitive to and in effect dependent upon the contextuality or relationality of their pairing. Furthermore, their positions vis-à-vis one another are inherently “perspectival” and since “perspectivalism” eschews “objectivism,” they are also inherently “fallibilistic.” The “explanatory” level also involves processes reflective of chaos and complexity theory (Orange, Coburn, Weisel-Barth) with “emergent properties” in the analytic work arising from an indeterminate “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” (the so-called butterfly effect) that are nevertheless organized in relation to “attractor states” that can only be discerned retrospectively. Finally, in accordance with principles of nonlinear dynamic systems theory (Stolorow, 1997), “all living systems are part of a hierarchy of subsystems,” which, for the purposes of psychoanalytic investigation, the “dyadic system” of analyst and patient is the most relevant system. This dyadic system is further elaborated into two subsystems, that is, the two analytic participants, and these respective subsystems (analyst and patient) are further parsed in terms of the two subsystem organizations of their respective “organizing principles.”

⁴ Bacal (2006) wrote, “In other words, therapeutic efficacy is a function of the specific capability for requisite responsiveness of the particular participants interacting within a particular system” (p. 135) and this cannot be known until we take up the phenomenology of the analytic pair.

⁵An excellent example of how paranoia as a syndrome constrains the information processing of the analytic dyad is Artificial Paranoia: A Computer Simulation of Paranoid Processes by Colby (1975).

⁶What is frequently missing from the IST's argument is the impossibility of evading “decontextualization,” which is inherently the case the moment we employ language to either describe or explain phenomena. See Cilliers's (1999) quote in footnote 3 of my paper in this issue.

⁷As Strenger (1998) indicated, “The more the individual's image of a life worth living is formed by images created in fantasy, the more the distance between actual life and a life informed by authorship is increased. The fantasy image transcendentalizes the idea of a ‘real’ life to the point where nothing in actual life could correspond to it anymore. In therapeutic work this manifests itself by the patient's contemptuous rejection of real-life options which could provide a step toward authorship, because he or she cannot see any connection between these steps and the image of real life they have gotten used to in fantasy” (p. 180).

⁸The problem, as Steinberg (personal communication, 2009) noted, is that reading these case vignettes begins to feel like “the intersubjectivists appear to rest their case at the ‘trigger’ of the patient's response, as in what it is the analyst appears to have done to them. If fear of re-traumatization dictates treatment, there's a risk of foreclosure on exploration and discovery.”

⁹Jacobs says that the illumination of the patient's “organizing principles, central themes and emotional convictions” is (much like the Relationalists) a focal point of treatment. However, the clear emphasis in most of their case illustrations seems to land more on the contextual “trigger” of this organization and therefore the risk of retraumatizing the patient, than in illuminating the patient's organizing principles.

¹⁰The principle of parsimony, often referred to as “Occam's Razor,” argues “Do not multiply postulated entities without necessity.” In other words, unless retranslating theory with other language makes a real difference in explanation, it is a questionable proposition.