The Analytical Process

Journeys and Pathways

Thierry Bokanowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429920059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The term 'psychoanalytical process', though occurring but rarely in Freud's works, has become firmly established nowadays despite being hard to define, explain, or pin down in conceptual or meta-psychological terms. Although it is often employed as equivalent to 'psychoanalytic work', currents of thought that draw on the idea display a certain ambivalence, for it can relate both to a theory of treatment (the practice of analysis) and to a theory of mind (a theory of psychic functioning). Before developing his own original perspectives about the consequences of the heterogeneity of psychic functioning, the author examines how various practitioners have approached this subject since Freud. He shows how each has shed useful new light on this issue, leading to a diversity of points of view, thereby justifying the idea of the 'process' within psychoanalytic treatment.

Chapter One
Some preliminary observations

One session among others

All reflection on the psychoanalytic process necessarily starts with the examination of its basic cell, namely, the analytic session”, André Green writes in Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Green, 2005, p. 33). Here is the case of Mrs A. There could be no better illustration of Green’s observation than the session with this patient presented here.

When I opened the waiting-room door I found Mrs A sitting up straight in a chair, as was often the case, reading a book. She said hello with a smile, though it was somewhat reserved, and I noticed something unusual: whereas she generally came with her handbag, this time she had a large travel bag that seemed to be weighing her down. Once on the couch she remained silent for a few moments and then said that she had “forgotten what we had talked about at the previous session,” as was often the case. She could no longer remember what it had been about. “Though hang on, it comes back to me now,” she added a few moments later. “I can remember that we talked about the very rare occasions when my father played with me when I was a little girl, and how we used to laugh and laugh together.” On hearing her refer to this specific moment at the end of the previous session, which seemed to come back to her now, I, too, saw in a flash all of the things we had talked about, with the impression of having a panoramic overview from which certain details that had caught my attention stood out clearly—in short, a feeling of looking down from above.

The first remark I made to myself was that we had talked about her father, and an uncle, as well as about her maternal grandfather. She had warm, nostalgic memories of how close she had been to the latter when they used to go swimming together during her childhood, and how she would stand up on his strong, broad shoulders, meaning she was looking down from above before diving headfirst into the water. It was the first time she had referred to any such games with men in her family in association with her father, whom she regarded as a good father even though he had been somewhat absent and distant. During the previous session, she had rediscovered one of her few memories of a happy time spent together, bringing with it the image of someone who was able to be in contact with his daughter other than on a purely intellectual level (she had often referred to the complex and guilt-inducing bond between them based on the way he had helped her with certain difficulties she had had at school as a teenager). But equally, the image emerged of a mother who did not encourage or allow such contact, and who did what she could to calm things down, to calm the game down—in short, a mother who was something of a killjoy and whom she saw as an anti-sexual figure.

This partial lifting of her childhood amnesia had struck me as resulting from the lengthy work we had conducted following on from her depressive state, with a lack of self-esteem lying in the background. Hitherto, the treatment had been ineffective because of the counter-cathexes rooted in her narcissistic and oedipal defences, but now a new affective state started to emerge, a warming which was comparable to the end of a long, cold, dark, wet winter she had often alluded to.

She had also recounted a dream she had had the night before and which she seemed to find most entertaining. “I was pregnant and on the whole happy to be so—even if, given my age, it was difficult for me to reasonably accept being a mother once again.” The impression left by her dream and the associated emotion left her feeling that she was oscillating between what is doable and what is not, between what is allowed and what is not, without really being to arrive at any decision—in short, a state of great perplexity.

Her associations had led her in two different directions.

First, the feeling that her dream was related to the benefits accruing from the analysis, as if she were fertilised by it. But would she be able to retain this feeling? It struck me that this dream, via her ambivalent transference, sought to answer that question.

Second, her childhood memories about her siblings (she being the eldest), which she associated with her mother’s many pregnancies, and her memories of this, which were ambivalent at best. Furthermore, the ambivalence of her mother had also emerged, especially with regard to her first pregnancy, directly concerning Mrs A. She had, in fact, been conceived outside any official union between her parents, precipitating their marriage, and she had always felt that without her conception their union would never have taken place.

Finally, during the same session, we had talked about how she had driven the wrong way up a one-way street so as to not be late for a meeting, and had seen and been recognised by someone she knew and respected, and whose judgement she feared.¹ She had subsequently felt so guilty about this transgression that, with the help of the analysis, she had wondered if it did not, in fact, relate to something else entirely.

No-go zones

I had scarcely had enough time to remember all of this when Mrs A wondered out loud why she so often had no real memory of her own lines of association or of our discussions (contributions, interpretations, and constructions) at the beginning of the next session, “and I really cannot figure it out,” she said. It occurred to me, though I did not put it to her, that her apparent (and defensive) forgetting of what we had gone over in the previous session—which had led her to associate with the physical games, her killjoy mother, the dream relating to a desired pregnancy, and the question of going the wrong way up a one-way street and her attendant sense of guilt—did not arise purely from what appeared to be the straightforward development of a paternal transference that was overly warm and exciting due to her reliving the games with her grandfather (which clearly functioned as sexual games, and, thus, revealed the organisation of certain of her oedipal fantasies of seduction and of the primal scene). It seemed to me that her forgetting also arose from an underlying ambivalent (and aggressive) maternal transference, given that she had also referred in the context of the games with her father to those with her maternal grandfather, as well as to the associated fantasies of guilt (about a “no-go zone”): did this guilt relate to the incestuous fantasies of pregnancy and maternity? To the fact that she had “taken” her own father from her mother? Or to the fact that she had been able to enjoy time with her father far more than her mother had been able to at her age?

While I was trying to formulate an interpretation within the transference of the resistance movements she had referred to (as this transpired in her forgetting what had been said in the previous session in so far as she had referred solely to matters relating to her father and maternal grandfather, and not to her dream and the feeling of uncertainty she harboured about her desire to be pregnant), she associated on another question that needed to be settled, which was that of knowing why, at the beginning of the session and on arriving in my consulting room, she had said to herself that she did not want to refer to the travel bag she had brought with her or to her trip out of town after our session to attend the first communion of one of her nieces, who was also her goddaughter.

I said, thinking of the question of pregnancy referred to in relation to her dream, “Its contents?” “Yes, not just the presents but also what I’m going to wear for the ceremony and which makes me think of my wedding dress,” she said. This led her to her wedding and the relationship she had once had—as a young adult—with her future husband, a dalliance she said her mother did not want to know anything about. She then associated on the fact that the first time they decided to go off on a romantic weekend together, she had not talked about it with her parents, and especially not with her mother. Hearing that, it occurred to me that what her hindrances were apparently related to her rivalry with her mother (a “no-go zone”), as well as to the fact that she might be trying to repress the idea that her mother could also feel jealous of her. She then returned to the fact that she “forgot” and her wish to “not talk about” certain things—the resistances which structured the beginning of session—and once again raised the question of what this could mean.

To my mind, this question related to a transference movement in which her associations led to the idea that—within the transference—I had become a mother with whom she was competing yet whom she was unable or unwilling to leave.

At that stage, I said, “As if I had become a mother who forbids things? A mother who forbade you to do as she had done?”, to which she answered, “I hadn’t thought of that,” before adding, after a moment’s reflection, “it’s exactly that—that is what I actually feel.” A long silence followed, and I felt it was a pregnant silence.

While I felt that I had hit the right spot, I was still puzzled by my inability to formulate simply and precisely the movement that had emerged during the session. It seemed that her guilt had more to do with her feeling of having deprived her mother of her own father (or grandfather) than of competing with her for her father (her mother’s husband), and I wondered what would become of my interpretation. At the same time, my patient, taken aback by what I had suggested, associated on how men—her father, her uncle, her grandfather—had viewed her when she was a child. Finally, she declared (and this was a real change in comparison to previous progress she had made), “Deep down, I have to admit that my father accepted my femininity far better than my mother did, and was a lot more interested in it. It’s funny, I had always thought the opposite.”

This marked the end of the session. As she said goodbye, I noticed that the way she carried her travel bag suggested it had become less of a burden.

Processes at work

If I have chosen this very brief fragment of a psychoanalytic treatment and one that is relatively easy to interpret (a session following on from one in which a woman referred to a dream about wanting to be pregnant), it is because the apparent simplicity of the issues involved, as well as their extreme complexity, means that it affords a clear illustration of the countless mental issues affecting both members of the psychoanalytic partnership that are instrumental in creating a common working space. The dynamics of this space are operative in both members—both individually (intrapsychically) and between them (intrasubjectively)—and are at the heart of the process-based action which takes place dependent upon the communicational possibilities established by the encounter (be they infraverbal and/or verbal, unconscious, and/or pre-conscious).

This account of part of a pretty commonplace session leads to numerous remarks about a moment in the working-through process in a classic psychoanalytic treatment, the quality of which is bound up with the transference neurosis characterising the patient’s mental functioning, as well as her “capacity to be alone” in the presence of the analyst (Winnicott, 1958). All this underpinned by the ease with which she fantasised and made associations, which in turn related to her mental representation of the affective sphere (sentiments and emotions).

The mini-process of transformation which occurred at the end of the session (the “I had always thought the opposite”), in the light of the patient’s free association and the analyst’s free-floating attention, arose from the action of positive and negative consequences in both directions (from the patient and back to the patient, that is, the analyst’s countertransference) and which, with the help of an interpretation, resulted in the partial lifting of her childhood amnesia relating to the patient’s oedipal and counter-oedipal positions.

The working-through that drives (and is driven by) the process-based actions of both partners within the session here involved the cathecting of a positive relationship to one of her parental imagos (the father) which, at the same time, was counterbalanced by the negative and forbidding cathexis of the other parental imago (another). Therefore, the secondary oedipal conflict which transpired could be interpreted fairly clearly.

It would appear that the potential fecundity of the session gave rise to a capacity to generate processes (Green, 2005), where some of the productive aspects may be gauged in so far as the associative paths prolonged the processes at the heart of the previous session (that is, the dream of being pregnant that the patient had reported).

While this dream conveyed certain positive aspects of basic transference (Parat, 1995) or of modulated “transference love” (Freud, 1915a), and its analysis enabled a partial lifting of repression, it may also be noted that it raised questions about the patient’s apparent difficulty to remember her associations or recent exchanges with her analyst. In other words, it led the analyst to enquire into her negative internal movement resulting from her sense of guilt about transgression (entering the no-go zone) associated with things her mother forbade. The fact that she immediately mentioned that she had forgotten the contents of the previous session would appear to be a direct prolongation of the oedipal conflict.

It is interesting to note that her remembering certain things (“Though hang on, it comes back to me now. I can remember that we talked about the very few moments when my father played with me when I was a little girl, and how we used to laugh and laugh together”) brought about a countertransference movement on the part of the analyst, resulting in the image of looking down from above, a panoramic overview of the session in question. While this apparently related to an identification with the seduction of and by the maternal grandfather, inviting his granddaughter to stand on his “strong, broad shoulders” and then dive into the water when they went swimming together, one might also wonder whether this feeling of looking down from above did not also correspond to an unconscious desire by the analyst to neutralise (resistance) the seductive and somewhat eroticised motions of the paternal transference so as not to be invaded and penetrated by his patient’s “forgetfulness”, thereby performing a defensive counter-identificatory movement.

By opening the session following her pregnancy dream with the question of her apparently having “forgotten” the contents of the previous one,² the patient was led—due to processes of resistance and seduction—to enquire into the reasons why she had wanted to avoid mentioning her travel bag and its contents, and not wanted to refer to her wedding dress and the presents for her niece, whose godmother she was, which clearly led her to her own feminine sexuality and the wish to be a mother, as announced in her dream. This led her to refer to various memories relating to the desire to transgress her mother’s edicts—to go into no-go zones and feel guilty, associated with her mother’s disapproval of her planned weekend away with her fiancé prior to their wedding. This enabled the analyst to suggest that she might feel he was a mother who forbade things, where this interpretation brought about a lifting of resistance and triggered an insight (“I hadn’t thought of that”, followed by, “It’s exactly that—that is actually what I feel”), leading her to announce that her father acknowledged her, something which had hitherto been partially denied.

Her remark, “I have to admit that my father accepted my femininity far better than my mother did, and was a lot more interested in it. It’s funny, I had always thought the opposite” may also be understood as her displacement of the real father of her childhood history into the here and now of the session caught up with her oedipal conflicts, and as a movement of gratitude at the idea that her femininity and desire of and for seduction could be appreciated and accepted within the transference.

Issues

The purpose of these comments is to act as a reminder that reference to work conducted in a session tends to match (as closely as possible) the form taken by the transformation processes at work in both partners of the analytic situation as these progress, within a clearly established framework which, on the basis of a consultation or, more frequently, a series of interviews, can lead either to one-to-one psychotherapy or to a psychoanalysis involving several sessions per week (three or four depending upon the case).

In other words the psychoanalytic work is joint work governed by the principles stated earlier, on the one hand, the patient’s free association and, on the other, the analyst’s free-floating attention. This generates communications that may be understood (in the two senses of interpreted and of explained) in accordance with two perspectives:

• first, the internal conflict (conscious and/or especially unconscious) within the patient during a session, relating to a “before”—the previous session(s)—and announcing an “afterwards” (the “beforehand” of an “afterwards”, where this, by extension, relates to the very purpose of psychoanalysis, which is predicting the past);
• second, the way in which the analyst—in his neutrality₁ and comprehending receptivity to the words and silences of the other, taken as mental products addressed to him—is led to consider the implicit and explicit angle of this communication (Green, 1999b, 2002b).

This constitutes the process matrix—or the seedbed for generalised process-based action—enabling both protagonists in the medium and long term to cast light on what precisely the patient is looking for help with, where this can alter considerably depending on the paths taken and insights acquired.

There is no need to go any further into the main strands of the two sessions with regard to their transferences and countertransferences to be able to distinguish the various levels of the oedipal conflict at work, taking the form of the patient’s fantasies of seduction on the basis of a dream she offered to her analyst: “See how desirable I am—as a girl, as a woman, and as a mother. Wouldn’t you like to have a child with me?”

Some of the material from the sessions—specifically her repeated “forgetfulness”—only became intelligible later on once the question of the conditions in which the patient was conceived was addressed within the analysis. What was meant to be a brief relationship between her parents had resulted in an enforced union because their senses (which should have remained out of bounds—a no-go zone) had led them to “forget” the difficulties they would be confronted with if their encounter resulted in a pregnancy and motherhood.

This made it possible, retrospectively, to better understand the reasons why the patient hesitated in her pregnancy dream, which evoked her mother’s pregnancies: that she was oscillating between what is doable and what is not, between what is allowed and what is not, without really being able to arrive at any decision—in short, a state of great perplexity. The question her dream seemed to raise was: “Is it reasonable to be pregnant?” And, of course, this q...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Some preliminary observations
• CHAPTER TWO Apprehending psychoanalytic treatment and processes
• CHAPTER THREE Representing the psychoanalytic process
• CHAPTER FOUR Contributions by certain authors
• CHAPTER FIVE Initial encounters
• CHAPTER SIX Movements and changes
• CHAPTER SEVEN The nature of defence mechanisms and anxieties
• CHAPTER EIGHT The heterogeneous nature of psychic functioning
• CHAPTER NINE Transferences
• CHAPTER TEN Sandor Ferenczi: a negative transference somewhere between transference love and love for psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Esther, or a transference love which dare not speak its name
• CHAPTER TWELVE Psychic homosexuality and transference
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN Negativising transference
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN A historical example of negativising transference: the "young Russian" known as "the Wolf Man"
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Narcissism and the psychoanalytic process
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Different levels of listening
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Mr E
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The process as a combination of suffering, pain, and pleasure
• CHAPTER NINETEEN The analytic process and the question of trauma
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX