Mapping Psychic Reality

Triangulation, Communication, and Insight

James Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429916052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is about how we can deepen our understanding of subjectivity through the use of the concept of triangulation. Fundamentally, this book seeks to address the question of how we can be objective about subjectivity. If psychology, as a scientific discipline, is concerned with the study of human experience, which is essentially subjective; then we are faced with the problem of how apply the scientific method, as it is commonly understood. If experience is essentially unique to the experiencer, then there seems to be a basic incompatibility with the scientific method. As currently practised, this method searches for psychic phenomena, which can be validly measured e.g. intelligence; showing a range of individual differences. But this does not enable us to examine individual experience. An individual's experience seems to become impenetrable because generalisation across different individuals' experience entails the loss of individuality in the generalisation

PART I
TRIANGULATION, COMMUNICATION, AND INSIGHT

Introduction

This part of the book brings together four papers exploring the relationship between triangulation as a concept and its relationship to the notions of communication and insight. The first is by Paul Whittle, who was an experimental psychologist. In this paper, he identifies and explores what he calls a fault line in academic psychology, which essentially concerns the split between the nomothetic approach and the ideographic (see above). He observes that psychologists seem to split around this fault line each implicitly asking those on the other side “how can you possibly think that that”? His conclusion is that this is an unhelpful split and he advises all psychologists to stand astride this fault line. The fact that there seems to be a split suggests that this is easier said than done.

This is followed by Charles Hanly’s exploration of the philosophical and psychoanalytic notions of what he calls “thirdness”— of obvious relevance to the exploration of the psychic experience of triangulation. It is a discussion of a collection of papers published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2004. In the paper, he makes the observation that the achievement of becoming a subject can seem to make the assumption of a capacity for intersubjectivity, which can be said to constitute another fault line in psychoanalysis.

This is followed by Marcia Cavell’s paper on coming to know our own minds, in which she introduces a philosophical view of how we come to arrive at a sense of our own subjectivity and how we become “subjects”. The link with the notion of triangulation is in her proposal that we come to know our own minds through discourse with another mind about something external to both of us. Cavell’s proposal is seen by many to beg many questions, the answers to which are by no means clear. The reader is invited to think about these issues in the light of Hanly’s summary and to explore how he or she implicitly responds, consciously or not, to these issues in their daily practice.

The question of a capacity for intersubjectivity is further explored by the last paper in this part of the book. This is by Ronald Britton, who approaches the matter from the point of view of his experience of treating narcissistic and borderline patients. He concludes by proposing what he calls a psychic atopia, or a kind of allergy to other minds. This presents many difficulties in psychoanalytic treatment. It is included to balance what might be thought by some to be Cavell’s over-optimistic view, but, to my mind, it reinforces it because a refusal of another mind leads in many cases to the impossibility of achieving a sense of one’s mind, and, thus, can be thought of as a confirmation of her proposal, even if it is thought by some to be in conflict with it.

References

Britton, R. (2004). Subjectivity, objectivity, and triangular space. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73: 47–61.

Cavell, M. (1998). Triangulation, one’s own mind and objectivity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79: 449–467.

Hanly, C. M. (2004). The third: a brief historical analysis of an idea. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73: 267–290.

Whittle, P. (1999). Experimental psychology and psychoanalysis: what we can learn from a century of misunderstanding. Neuro-psycho-analysis, 1: 233–245.

CHAPTER ONE

Experimental psychology and psychoanalysis: what we can learn from a century of misunderstanding^*

Paul Whittle

This paper is a personal and informal ethnography of the subcultures of psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. It is a case study in incommensurability, and was written out of frustration with the incomprehension that each side displays toward the other. The two disciplines shared many common origins, but each now views the other, by and large, with indifference or hostility. I sketch some reasons why their relationship generates discussions, such as those concerning the scientific status of psychoanalysis, that are like trains passing in the dark. I make some tentative suggestions as to why we may always need such different styles of psychology, and for what different goals, and personal and sociological reasons, we have developed them. I make even more tentative suggestions as to what, if anything, we should do about it.

Credit

In 1897, W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922) was appointed to the first post in experimental psychology at Cambridge. He was a doctor, a physiologist (his 1900 encyclopaedia article on vision was “the most accurate and careful account of the whole subject in the English language”), a founding father both of the department and of British social anthropology. What is less often remembered is that he was also a major contributer to the spread of psychoanalysis in Great Britain, in two books stemming from lectures given here and based on his experience as a psychiatrist with First World War soldiers. Here he is writing in The Lancet in 1917:

It is a wonderful turn of fate that just as Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the method of psychoanalysis founded upon it should be so hotly discussed, there should have occurred events which have produced on an enormous scale just those conditions of paralysis and contracture, phobia and obsession, which the theory was especially designed to explain. . . . There is hardly a case which this theory does not help us to understand—not a day of clinical experience in which Freud’s theory may not be of direct practical use in diagnosis and treatment. The terrifying dreams, the sudden gusts of depression or restlessness, the cases of altered personality amounting often to definite fugues, which are among the most characteristic results of the present war, receive by far their most natural explanation as the result of war experience, which by some pathological process, often assisted later by conscious activity on the part of the patient, has been either suppressed or is in process of undergoing changes which will lead sooner or later to this result. [Rivers, 1917, pp. 912–914]

So, here we have another neurologist, probably a more careful and cautious scientist than Freud, reporting the same phenomena that Freud observed, but now of British soldiers not Viennese women, and agreeing with key components of Freud’s explanation and treatment. I had read Rivers as an undergraduate, but forgot about him until reminded by an American feminist historian, Elaine Showalter, talking in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. I think the roundabout route by which I relearnt the history of our department is also significant (Whittle, 1999).

One reason I start with Rivers is that he is so close to home. I could spend an hour telling you stories of other people whose lives link this department or Cambridge to psychoanalysis. In talking about psychoanalysis, we are talking about something deeply interwoven both as practice and thought in British intellectual culture. Particularly in this department, in spite of appearances. Here, it is a cultural unconscious.¹

Introduction

My topic is the fault line running down the middle of psychology. On the one hand we have experimental psychology as practised and taught in virtually all academic departments of psychology; on the other hand we have psychoanalysis, the Freudian tradition and its offshoots, which is much more influential in the culture at large. I shall take for granted, though with some elaboration shortly, that both traditions are alive and well and creative and in their own terms successful, and that the gulf between them is enormous.

It would give my talk a good resounding start if I could say with conviction that this split down the middle of psychology is an intellectual scandal. But I am not entirely convinced that it is. I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be a political compromise that allows a division of labour in which both sides can get on with their work without too much disturbance. In the 1990s, working political compromises are coming to seem increasingly attractive, even when one sees clearly that they also have serious costs.

In this case, there are two heavy and obvious human costs. The first is borne by students, who come to psychology hoping to learn about human nature, including their own, and find that the teaching institutions have been kidnapped by a particular style of thought. This is so in many subjects, but what makes it galling, and, I think, unjust, for those psychology students who are not uncomplainingly socialized into the tradition offered them, is first that experimental psychology has such a monopoly in universities,² and second, that it is obvious that there is another way of thinking about ourselves which is also called “psychology”, which is adopted by large numbers of intelligent people, which has just as impressive a history and literature as the tradition they are taught, and which would probably tell them more about human nature, particularly their own. As well as this cost to students, another personal cost is borne by those who later depend on the services of these same students, if they become psychologists. They have been educated in only one tradition, and their clients’ needs may sometimes be better met by the other one. Many would argue, having in mind, for example, the American experience of the dominance of psychoanalysis in psychiatry over the 1940s and 1950s, that this applies also to the clients of those who are trained in that tradition.³

That already gives ample justification for being concerned about the gulf. A further motive is intellectual. The people on both sides are talking about overlapping sets of difficult problems. It seems obvious to the point of banality that the perspective of each side must sometimes be helpful to the other, and it is easy to see many ways in which the perspectives of psychology and psychoanalysis complement one another. Another way to put it is to argue, as many have, that the mixture of ideas with which Freud started, one foot in neurology and one in interpretation (or however you like to describe the other place), was a fruitful mixture, even if it contained confusions. It clearly did bear fruit. The obviousness of this combin-ing-perspectives argument is what does make some outside observers see the split in psychology as an intellectual scandal.⁴ Yet, by now, after a century of history, to most psychologists this argument seems naïve. It is naïve in the form I have so far put it. I have spent years crossing to and fro over the gulf, unable to commit myself wholeheartedly to science or arts, yet I rarely find myself able to take suitable gifts from one side to the other. In general, neither side wants what the other side has, and when they do, or I think they do, they are put off by the wrapping. But this is puzzling, to put it mildly. If both sides are thriving and creative and their problems at least overlap, how is it that their subject matter and/or their methods have led to such a continuing separation? Even if we don’t want to build bridges, we should surely at least be curious about the geology of the intellectual landscape.⁵

A final reason is the extraordinary fin-de-siècle replay, with a cast of thousands, of exactly the dilemma on which the early Freud was impaled: are memories of what we now call “child sexual abuse”, but which Freud more gently called “infantile seduction”, genuine or fantasy? This makes it harder than even ten years ago for psychologists to see psychoanalysis as old hat. I could add that while cognitive psychologists’ interventions in this furore may have a useful calming effect, they might well be more effective if they had not cut themselves off from half the relevant literature.

That sketches the situation I want to talk about.⁶ I now become somewhat more specific, and start by elaborating what I said I take as given. I proceed partly by an informal ethnography and history of the two subcultures based on my experience of crossing to and fro. I hope this won’t seem too self-centred. I like to think that it is a graspable and unpretentious level. I think it is also an important level, because science is culture, and an essential preliminary to any philosophical treatment, which I am not particularly competent at and which leave many audiences cold.

What I’m taking for granted

First, the continuing achievements and creativity of both sides. Both are strong and vital intellectual traditions. I mean this in a quite superficial sense, as an observation that could be made by a Martian looking at the two institutions, attending their meetings, reading their literature, listening to their discussions, seeing how much demand there is for their services, and so on. In case there are those in this audience who need reassuring about the current vitality of the psychoanalytic tradition, I will mention, rather at random, three manifestations of it. One, the renaissance of psychoanalytic thought in France over the past few decades, where it has become the vocabulary for articulating much psychological and social and political thought, with lasting repercussions in feminist and in literary theory throughout the Europeanized world. To anyone in the English or Modern Language faculties in this university, this goes without saying. It is a symptom of what I am talking about that this may not be so in experimental psychology. Two, the fact that postgraduate courses in psychoanalytic studies are springing up by the dozen in British universities. Three, even closer to home, there is the growth over the past fifteen years in Cambridge of a community of psycho-dynamically orientated psychotherapists, now numbering around a hundred. These are just three out of many examples I could point to of its vitality. Only in the USA, where psychoanalysis suffered the fate of being for a time an orthodoxy, is it frequently asserted that it is moribund. I need even less to argue for the vitality of psychology. Situated in the overlap of cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences, it cannot help but partake of the ferment in all those areas (particularly the first two).

This sort of vitality shows that a tradition is alive and well in what one might, since Foucault, think of as the domain of power–knowledge to indicate that it involves social and political components of practice as well as “knowledge”. It does not mean that there are no major problems with either field; indeed, rather the opposite, since liveliness and problems often generate each other.

So, both are working subcultures. Any of us could be in either of them, but for chances of temperament and biography. In either, we would find criteria for explanation and truth that there would be no more and no less reason to question than there ever is. That’s a fundamental premise of this talk. It’s where I stand. You can gloss it in anthropological terms, seeing cultures as the prime influence on both practice and knowledge, or in Wittgensteinian terms as forms of life or language games, or postmodernist terms as different discourses. It is an injunction to strongly respect and notice cultural boundaries, but not, as I take it, to cease looking for common human characteristics.⁷

I also take it for granted that both traditions work in a somewhat less relativistic sense. Experimental psychology is, in its better exemplars, cumulative, and strong enough to support various kinds of technology, which is the most straightforward criterion of a successful natural science. Psychoanalysis increases personal insight. In what sense this insight is “true”, and how much it helps to solve the problems that people bring to therapy, are other, and difficult, questions, but that people in psychoanalysis have many convincing “aha” experiences about themselves I do not think is worth disputing. Further, psychoanalysis provides concepts that are widely found useful in talking about ourselves and our lives. I mean both in ordinary life and in special domains such as social or literary theory. In most cases, these concepts were borrowed from ordinary (“folk”) psychology in the first place, but psychoanalysis has refined and deepened them.

The third thing I take for granted is the magnitude of the gulf between the two traditions. The size of this split within what outsiders regard as a single subject is without parallel in any other academic discipline. Neither side reads the literature of the other. On the whole, they don’t try to: it does ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor
• Introduction
• Part I: Triangulation, Communication, and Insight
• Part II: Triangulation in the Temporal Dimension
• Part III: Triangulation in the Psychoanalytic Setting
• Part IV: Some Metapsychological Speculations and Some Technical Conclusions
• Index