The Work of Confluence

Listening and Interpreting in the Psychoanalytic Field

Madeleine Baranger, Willy Baranger, Leticia Glocer Fiorini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429922800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book expands the authors' oeuvre to the English language and, consequently, to a broader spectrum of readers. These contributions represent a pioneering work of great interest to the field of psychoanalysis. Their proposals concerning the concept of psychoanalytic field, "basic unconscious fantasy", bastion and insight, address the whole question of the analytic situation and anticipate current debates.

1

“Insight” in the analytic situation

Madeleine Baranger & Willy Baranger

“What do they do? They dialogue.”

Sigmund Freud

The necessary character of the rules that determine the particulars of the analytic situation, the goal of the study of its dynamics, the aim of the instrument of psychoanalysis, interpretation, the core of the specific process of cure: all this is insight.

Given the crucial importance of this phenomenon, we cannot help wondering why insight has not been the object of more systematic specific studies and why its concept has not yet been more clearly delineated.

Our purpose here is to examine the function of insight within the analytic situation, starting from the generally—albeit not universally—accepted tenet among analysts since Freud that insight is the essential goal of all analytic processes.

This implies, then, that the analyst acts through his interpretation and not through “being”, contrary to what some people think—erroneously, in our opinion. The analytic experience is built on a basis of natural communication, artificially modified and codified by the pre-established framework of the analytic situation, between two human beings with functions determined by the very structure of the situation. This communication is the matter of psychoanalytic knowledge and work in so far as it is interpreted, producing a new communication between both parties on a different, elaborate level, corresponding to the “logos”. If this dialectic turn is missing, the psychoanalytic process fails, regardless of the “therapeutic” result.

In our study of insight, we start out from certain findings or a frame of reference outlined in a previous work (M. Baranger & Baranger, 1961-62). We will briefly summarize these points.

I. Characteristics of the analytic situation

(A) The analytic situation is, essentially, a bipersonal situation. All that takes place in it, all that can be formulated about it, is anchored in this basic fact.

This artificial situation has a determined frame in space, in time, in the asymmetric functional structure (an analyst, a patient).

Even though this situation comprises two people, a third, absent-present one is immediately introduced, thus reproducing the oedipal triangle “crucial in neurosis” and also in normal evolution. Particular states turn this triangular relationship regressively into an actually bipersonal situation or into a multipersonal relationship. In any case, the triangle is the basic situation from which all the other situations are structured.

(B) The analytic situation is essentially ambiguous. It functions in an “as if’ condition (as if the analyst were my father, etc.). If it loses this ambiguity (if the analyst is my persecutor, or if he is just my analyst), the process stops functioning. It is also ambiguous in time (to experience past or future situations in a present situation), in space (to be there and, at the same time, here), and in a bodily sense (the analyst’s and the patient’s body sensations can erase the real physical limits—the patient may experience the analyst as a foetus inside his own body, etc.).

(C) The bipersonal field of the analytic situation is structured according to three basic configurations—the structure determined by the analytic contract (fundamental rule, commitment to understand and not to judge, etc.), the structure of the manifest material (the patient tells his analyst, presumably gratifyingly, the frustrations his wife makes him suffer, for example), the unconscious fantasy that gives rise to the emergence of this manifest content: the latent or unconscious material (such as a fantasy of homosexual union with the analyst-father).

The point of urgency of the interpretation is determined by the significant intersecting of these three configurations. They converge at this point.

(D) This point of urgency does not depend on the patient alone (although the analyst strives not to suggest or impose anything). Via his interpretation and the selection of the material, the analyst gives direction to the process (Lacan, 1958). The point of urgency is an unconscious fantasy, but a couple fantasy. Despite the analyst’s “passivity”, he is involved in the patient’s fantasy. His unconscious responds to it and contributes to its emergency and to its structuring.

The point of urgency is an unconscious fantasy of the couple (which is created within the couple as such). This fantasy can be defined as “the dynamic structure (of the couple) that at any moment confers meaning to the bipersonal field”.

(E) The analytic situation can be defined as “a couple situation in which all the other imaginable situations of the couple (and others) are experienced, but none is acted”. So its mobility and indefiniteness are essential.

The analytic couple is defined by the reciprocal projective identification (Amado Levy-Valensi, 1963) of its members, that is, by an interplay of projective identification on the part of the patient and of projective identification and projective counteridentification (Grinberg, 1956) on the part of the analyst. This process has special characteristics in the patient and in the analyst.

(F) The dynamics of the analytic situation—or of the primary structure that we later define as transference/countertransference—depend on two things: the primary field structured as a common “gestalt” with the analyst’s and the patient’s unconscious material and the analyst’s interpretation. The analyst, in turn, because of his orientation, partly conditions the dynamics of the field by selecting the material. A common language develops between analyst and patient, which is different in each analytic situation, although it takes place with the same analyst. The dynamics of the analytic situation depend on the analyst, on his personality, his technical modality, his tools, his framework, as well as on the patient and his conflicts and resistances, his whole personality.

(G) What has, since Freud, been called “transference neurosis” and also, later, “transference psychosis” is, in fact, a transference/countertransference micro-neurosis or micro-psychosis. It is a pathological process not within the patient, but in the bipersonal field. Every analyst is aware of how much he is involved in the process.

It is in the essence of the analytic process that the patient tends to repeat the vicious cycles of his life in the analytic situation and that the analyst does the same. The analyst’s function consists in allowing himself to be involved, partly, in a pathological process specific to the field in which he finds himself—and in which he is already involved because of his relationship with the patient—but also in trying to rescue himself as well as the patient, since both are on the same boat.

(H) The dual rescue can only occur by interpretation. This allows—if it is adequate—the passage from the primary couple community of the bipersonal field to another kind of community, in which some of the field neurosis or psychosis has been overcome or elaborated. The analyst’s training is essentially used to enable him to be involved in the field pathology and at the same time to provide him with the elements to elaborate it. The previous aspects and remnants of his personal neurosis are of great importance. Hence the desirability of a determined patient to be in analysis with a determined analyst.

(I) The concept of the patient’s “neurosis” or “psychosis” does not have any operational value in itself (this does not rule out the importance of the diagnosis or the patient’s structure), but only in connection with his future analyst and the predictable phenomena in the bipersonal field.

Insight may be defined as a trait of an individual gifted with an easy access to his intrapsychic processes, and there are several varieties. Here we regard it as bipersonal, correlative to interpretation, and specific to the analytic situation.

(J) The process of elaboration of the field consists in the analyst’s interpretation and the patient’s “understanding”. If we delve deeper into this we realize there are not two processes, but only one. An interpretation that does not reach the patient is useless and can be dispensed with. The patient’s single understanding has no bearing on the analytic process. The specific analytic insight is the process of joint understanding by analyst and patient of the unconscious aspect of the field, which permits it its pathological present content to be overcome and the respective involved parts to be rescued.

II. Processes underlying the analytic situation

What is the analytic field composed of? What does it constitute as such? At first sight, it is a field of communication, where things are said and listened to, and where other things are transmitted and received in a nonverbal way. It makes sense to think, with Liberman (1962), that intrapersonal communication in the patient, with its impediments, is reproduced in the interpersonal communication in the field. The same can be said about the analyst, although to a different extent.

The field is structured by the interaction of communications to and from both centres: analyst and patient. However, communication is established at very different stratified levels, which interweave or separate according to the vicissitudes of the dynamic processes taking place. Beneath the verbalized “material” there is a rich interchange, the transmission of multiple experiences, sometimes even in the body (transference and countertransference somatic reactions to the nonverbalized aspects of the communication).

That which structures the field is unconscious fantasy, which can be conceived by analogy with what we know about unconscious fantasy in the individual psyche. In fact, this definition should be stated in an inverse sense, from the immediate object of our knowledge, the fantasy of the analytic situation, towards fantasy as it works in the psyche of each one of the members considered in isolation. The bipersonal unconscious fantasy of the field is what gives it meaning at any given moment of its functioning and what conditions the emergence of the manifest verbal content. It includes a distribution of roles between analyst and patient, the activation of diverse impulses, the presence of danger for the patient (and perhaps for the analyst as well), the use of defence mechanisms, reciprocal projection and introjection of objects and of parts of both “selves”.

Field fantasy tends by its essence to erase the individual boundaries between analyst and patient, including the space between their respective bodies (this is one of the reasons why patients stay in a position from where they cannot see the analyst: looking, as a way of establishing and controlling the distance, would work in a sense inverse to that of communication). In this manner, the analytic situation lends itself to facilitating projective identification. The field is constructed and functions from projective identifications, with their natural corollaries, introjective identifications (Klein, 1952a, ch. 6 and 9; Klein, Heimann, & Money-Kyrle, 1955, ch. 13).

Nevertheless, the nature of the processes of projective and introjective identification in the analyst is different from that in the patient. This difference accounts for the asymmetry in the field. They are not merely quantitative differences. On a certain level, projective and introjective identification phenomena are of the same nature in analyst and patient. The analyst can view the patient according to some aspects of his “self’ or of his internalized objects or react with “projective counter-identification” (Grinberg, 1956) to the projective identification unconsciously accepted from his patient. But, on another level, the analyst keeps—normally—these phenomena under control to avoid invasion by the patient. This difference led to countertransference being regarded at first as a disturbing phenomenon in the analytic process instead of an integrating part of its essence, and it contributed to maintaining the myth of the analyst as mirror. On this second level, the analyst uses introjective identification to let himself be penetrated to a certain extent by the patient’s projections and his own projective identification, in order to recognize himself in what has been introjected by the patient. These two phenomena can take place in the analyst in a correlative and communicated form or in an isolated way. In the first case, the spontaneous introjective-projective situation provides food for interpretation. In the second, the analyst’s understanding and interpretation run close to the analytic situation without penetrating it, and so an obstacle or an aspect of field neurosis appears. We do not think that the second situation can be completely avoided, as that would mean that it is possible to avoid the bipersonal field reflecting the neurotic areas and the patient’s neurosis becoming neurosis in the transference.

To put this into metapsychological terms, this means that the observer ego of the analyst may or may not be communicated with his own spontaneous processes in relation to the patient. From this perspective, the observer ego is not merely a pure observer, but an interpreting ego with the analyst’s own theoretical framework, his fantasy and his concept of the analytic work, his fantasy and his concept of what is happening in the field and in the patient, and with the knowledge he has gained about himself and with his capacity for clinical work obtained from his training and his personal analysis.

Conversely, in the patient, because of the regression induced by the analytic situation itself, the observer ego generally stops functioning and sinks into the less differentiated functioning of psychic organizations. There are two exceptions: “resistance” states (corresponding to states when the analyst suffers from lack of communication) in which the subject, threatened by an unconscious danger, refuses to regress and maintains a defensive schizoid splitting that isolates a part of his ego, with the intention of monitoring the nearness of danger and protecting his frontiers with his inner world and with the analyst. In this case, he can use false insight as a way of defending himself against interpretation, reducing it to abstract terms and emptying it of any experienced content. When this situation arises, the analyst feels that all his efforts have failed at this point.

The other exception to the patient’s undifferentiated functioning is found in the true insight. We shall come back to this.

These considerations only attempt to develop what Freud described (1913c, 1916-17) as the analytic situation: the fundamental rule and evenly suspended attention.

III. Stereotype in the field and the paralysing of insight

Both the regressive aspect of the analytic situation and the importance of repetitive phenomena combine to render it necessarily pathological. On the other hand it is the basic condition for it to achieve its aim and help the patient. A really “terminable” analysis, if such were possible, would be one in which the field functions freely, without pathological crystallizations. The analytic process can be conceived as the successive resolution of all the impediments that time and again hinder communication and the mobility of the field.

If, as Freud thought in one of his unfinished works (1940e [1938]), every defence mechanism implies a certain “Spaltung”, some splitting within the ego, then every pathological construction of the field implies a splitting of one of its sectors, which then escapes the general dynamics and creates a more or less marked paralysis. Even if there is some mobility in the field, the splitting functions to isolate the split sector, so that it remains out of the dynamics of the situation. This splitting does not mean repression: some parts of the split sector are conscious or can easily become conscious. Others, on the contrary, are repressed and correspond to more archaic splits that support the present splitting (M. Baranger, I960; M. Baranger & Baranger, 1961-1962).

In the bipersonal situation, this process becomes really detrimental when the patient’s attempted splitting meets the analyst’s unconscious complicity or a blind spot. A restriction in the analytic process can be observed. The process continues, there is elaboration of part of the material, but something very important is left out of the process and remains crystallized.

And this, of course, places too great a limit on the result of the analysis.

This bastion (M. Baranger & Baranger, 1961-1962) hinders progress. There are bastions the patient is determined to keep out of the contract. It may be an object relationship, a pleasant activity the patient considers “perverse”, some information concerning his economic situation, an ideology, and so forth. If there is no complicity on the analyst’s part, then the patient’s bastion is just a difficulty for the analytic work or a “resistance”, but it is not a bastion in the field. The patient tries one way or another to breach the fundamental rule, and the analyst strives to reintegrate into the general movement the content avoided by the patient. However, when such complicity is present, communication is divided: a sector of the field crystallizes, comprising the patient’s resistance and the analyst’s counter-resistance, unconsciously communicated and operating together, while on another separate level an apparently normal communication goes on.

Yet the disadvantages of such situation are immediately felt, and if the field bastion is strong, the general dynamics tends to be paralysed. This is what happens in those analyses that “do not work”. Freud (1916-17) described the process in a rather different way but along the same lines when he compared analysis to the re-conquest of a territory invaded by neurosis and noted that the invasive army could fight at any point it chose, and not necessarily at the same points at which it had fought to achieve the conquest. We can add that if the analyst counts on allies in the invaded territory, the invader also has agents working for him in the liberation army, which brings about the paralysing of some of its forces and may even cause failure of the conquest.

Very often this resistance/counter-resistance collusion transforms the dynamics of the field, which Pichon-Rivière (1956) has compared to a “spiral process”, into a uniform and monotonous circular movement—like walking a treadmill, to use a frequent metaphor. Both analyst and patient keep walking the treadmill or the bastion that both have unwittingly built.

The most extreme example of field pathology is when the patient lives on the analyst as a parasite. If part of the analyst’s task is to be penetrated by the patient’s projective identifications or serve as depository of the patient’s feelings, the session finishes in general with the restitution of what has been deposited. But there are times when this reparation does not take place (perhaps because the penetration has be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEAS AND APPLICATIONS SERIES
• ABOUT THE EDITOR
• FOREWORD
• 1 “Insight” in the analytic situation
• 2 The notion of “material” and the prospective temporal aspect of interpretation
• 3 Spiral process and the dynamic field
• 4 Process and non-process in analytic work
• 5 The mind of the analyst: from listening to interpretation
• 6 The infantile psychic trauma from us to Freud: pure trauma, retroactivity, and reconstruction
• 7 Contradictions between theory and technique in psychoanalysis
• 8 Bad faith, identity, and omnipotence
• 9 The dead-alive: object structure in mourning and depressive states
• 10 The ego and the function of ideology
• Final comments
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX