Beyond Intersubjectivity: Science, the Real World, and the Third in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Jessica Benjamin's seminal contribution to the intersubjective turn of contemporary psychoanalysis raises some general issues that are discussed. Is the relational turn owned by psychoanalysis? No, we should recognize important relational findings of other human sciences. Does relational psychoanalysis rely too much on beliefs and confessions? Unfortunately yes, but as a human science it should instead be based on interdisciplinary knowledge. Is psychotherapy only an encounter of patient and therapist? No, besides subjectivity and intersubjectivity there is the objective reality as the “missing” third. Can we get rid of the psychoanalytic attachment to the past? No, there is no patient without his or her biography. Do we have to reconsider our epistemology of radical constructivism? Yes, we should stick to the “weak” constructivism of Winnicott claiming that reality has to be found and invented at the same time. Finally, some remarks on the current crisis of psychoanalysis: the issue is modernization versus fundamentalism.

Notes

¹Freud himself was ambivalent toward empirical research. Sometimes he counted on neurobiology and its findings to eventually validate the speculative assumptions of his metapsychology or reject them and deliver better foundations. Sometimes he rejected empirical data—"it can do no harm” to the psychoanalytic method (Freud, 1934, in a letter to Saul Rosenzweig quoted by Gay, 1988, p. 523; cf. Grunbaum, 1984, p. 1)—when it was brought to him; he said the data from the psychoanalytic process was all he needed (I owe this reference to Joseph Schachter, personal communication, August 2012).

²“In further developments, the Middle Group … established a new model of the mind, deriving from Ferenczi and developed by Balint, Winnicott, and, later in the United States, by Kohut. … A new concern emerged … that did not rest on attaining truth and that considered the personal influences of the analyst—e.g., his support, advice, and comfort—to be integral to the analytic process. Here the changes in technique were of a kind that made them essentially nonanalytic. They went against the psychoanalytic effort to bring about change through the search for truth” (Segal, 2006, see pp. 288ff.).

³Mitchell's Relationality (2000) is a highly “ecumenical” book, which I had the pleasure to translate into German.

⁴Cf. Kultur der Niederlage [Culture of Defeat] (Altmeyer, 2006) and Antisemitismus von links [Anti-Semitism from the Left] (Altmeyer, 2009); both articles appeared in the Berlin tageszeitung (taz).