Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity

Contemporary Freudian Explorations of Trauma, Memory, and Clinical Process

Bruce E. Reis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000300857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity looks at contemporary Freudian and post-Freudian theory through an intersubjective lens. Bruce Reis offers views on how psychoanalytic conceptions from the last century uniquely manifest in the consulting rooms of this century – how analytic technique has radically evolved through developing Freud's original insights into dreaming, and hallucinosis; and how the presentation of today's analysands calls for analyst's use of themselves in unprecedented new ways.

Taking up bedrock analytic concepts such as the death instinct, repetition, trauma and the place of speech and of silence, Reis brings a diversely inspired, twenty-first century analytic sensibility to his reworking of these concepts and illustrates them clinically in a process-oriented approach. Here the unconscious intersubjective relation takes on transformative power, resulting in the analyst's experience of hybridized chimerical monsters, creative seizures, reveries and intuitions that inform clinical realities outside of verbal or conscious discourse -- where change occurs in analysis.

Drawing on an unusually broad selection of major international influences, Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists across the schools of thought.

Chapter 1

Monsters, dreams and madness

Explorations in the Freudian intersubjective

It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1869, p. 115)

It seems fitting to begin this book with an examination of the Freudian and post-Freudian intersubjective approaches that will constitute a large part of its theme. Here I will introduce contemporary analytic theorists from the French, British and North American tradition, all of whom started with Freud’s (1912) ideas on unconscious communication and his recommendation to analysts that they use their own unconscious ‘as an instrument of the analysis’ and then developed this idea well past one of communication. French analysts, such as de M’Uzan and Ithier, have concentrated on the hallucination of the analyst as an expression of the creation of the ‘chimera’, a monstrous hybrid of unconscious connection with their patients. The approach to the intersubjective within the British tradition has emphasized the analyst’s states of ‘reverie’ (Bion, 1962) and will be represented in this chapter through the work of two American born analysts, Odgen and Bollas, who practice in and have extended that tradition. Perhaps most innovative in all of these approaches is the common reexamination of the issue of identity that springs from conceptualizing intersubjective exchange in terms of unconscious subjects and what their intermingling will produce.

Monsters

Within Greek mythology, the chimera is a fire-breathing creature, part goat, part lion and part serpent. Within genetic biology, the term refers to a single organism composed of two distinct sets of DNA. Quoting a 1994 text in French by de M’Uzan, Ithier introduces this concept within the analytic space:

A new organism may emerge, that is to say, a ‘psychological chimera’ which has its own modes of functioning. By the very nature of their encounter, the analysand and analyst will, unwittingly, give birth to this ‘fabulous child’, a powerful being, a monster ‘which works in the shadows but whose growth may be affected by all influences coming from its creators’.

(Ithier, 2016, p. 455)

The emergence of de M’Uzan’s chimera is dependent upon the analyst adopting a mode of ‘paradoxical functioning’ associated with the intertwining or interpenetration of the unconscious minds of the analyst and the analysand. De M’Uzan describes experiences in this mode, where the analyst is

subject to a very special state of passivity; he is at the mercy of something that is happening within him … the analyst experiences, witnesses, lives – all words conveying the extent to which he is caught up in this aggravated state of passivity – and undergoes an inner transformation.

(2013, pp. 89–90)

Within this state, the analyst may respond to something the patient hasn’t said, he may experience images within his mind that feel vivid, yet which he has no feeling of responsibility for, or he may see abstract forms or faces that morph into each other. Just as suddenly and usually, after only a brief period of time, the ego may intervene so that

words and sentences insert themselves that can undoubtedly lead to the formulation of interpretations, but also serve to help the analyst get a grip again on the consequences of passivity. The protagonists then find that acceptable boundaries have been re-established.

(p. 91)

In his chapter ‘Invitation to Frequent the Shadows’, de M’Uzan (2006, pp. 161–162) presents several examples of clinical moments in which the boundary of identity between patient and analyst may be experienced as in flux. In a 1994 report on a more pedestrian form of this phenomenon, resulting from the paradoxical thoughts of the analyst De M’Uzan begins by observing that there was little he found especially disquieting about his patient who had been in analysis for several years. At the end of the session prior to the one he concentrates on, the patient left in an unusual way, saying to her analyst, ‘Au revoir, Monsieur’. Her associations to this phrase during the next session provoked a memory that the patient had ‘more or less forgotten’. The memory was from when the patient was 2-and-a-half years old and is reported as follows: She had been walking along the street when suddenly she found herself in the police station. The policemen made her stand on a table and were questioning her. In listening to the patient’s memory, de M’Uzan experienced a sense of depersonalization, which he described as a background experience from which his paradoxical thoughts emerged into consciousness. Then ‘an unusual thought came to my mind: I would happily gobble you up, you handsome sailor’. De M’Uzan did not share this surprising thought with his patient or make an interpretation, he simply noted to himself the association, which relates to Billy Budd, the hero of a Herman Melville short story he had read years before, and which he felt intuitively was connected to the ‘monsieur’ of the patient’s farewell. Later on, he remembered that it is customary in the British or American Navy to address officers as ‘sir’. As he was having these thoughts, the patient continued to recount her childhood memory. At the police station, she felt intense shame, and she stressed the peculiar quality of her experience. Then she saw her Uncle Pierre enter. The patient then shifted to talking about a dream she’d already told the analyst, but which he felt ‘for some obscure reason … [he] wanted to hear again’. In the dream, there was a slab of stone covered in black fabric that reminded the patient of a tombstone and a table. The patient’s father had once offered her a marble-topped table. The patient said she wanted to get rid of that table and replace it with another that she would choose herself: a dining table (‘table à manger’). Then the patient started talking about food, telling the analyst about a local dish from her country of origin she strongly disliked: ‘And yet’, she insistently added, ‘j’étais de bonne composition’ (i.e. ‘not fussy’). Once again, the analyst experienced an alteration in his thinking and without evaluating the logic of the sequences, he replied, ‘In saying ‘de bonne composition’, perhaps you mean ‘bon à manger’! (‘good to eat’). Taken aback, and seemingly a little worried, the patient replied, ‘Yes, it’s true! I am thinking again now of that Uncle Pierre who used to frighten me so much. He used to say to me: ‘I’m a lion; I’m going to eat you. I was fascinated, excited, and terrified’. The next day, de M’Uzan explored his association with Melville’s character, recalling that the patient’s neck had been ‘conspicuously bare on that day’. Billy Budd, nicknamed the ‘handsome sailor’, ended up being hanged from the ship’s main yard, bringing into focus the link between the tombstone and the condemned hero. De M’Uzan reported that

at the end of this phase in the treatment, a repression with its roots in the drives and oral eroticism was lifted, in such a way that it would colour the Oedipal conflicts of the patient, in her past, and also in the actuality of her transference.

De M’Uzan writes that his experience in the session was not a countertransferential interference, as the representations that occurred ‘did not depend specifically on my inner life’. According to the author, neither were they a personal reaction to the patient’s transference. Instead, it was an instance in which the analyst’s psychical apparatus literally became the analysand’s, as it had been invaded and taken possession of so that the patient’s mental process could occur there. By annexing the analyst’s psychical system, the patient sought to be understood through the interposition of her representation. For his part, the analyst withdrew his individual passions and history so his functional capacities could be made use of. ‘Nothing seems so convincing,’ writes de M’Uzan (1999, p. 111), ‘as the sudden appearance of a monster at the heart of what I have called the paraphrenic realm; and this apparition imposes itself decisively, just like a delusional idea, with incomparable clarity’.

Dreams

De M’Uzan’s chimera may be compared to a form of analytic thirdness described by Ogden (1994a) as the ‘subjugating third’, and such a comparison has been made by Ithier (2016). Brought about through the use of projective identification, the subjugating third has the effect of subsuming within it the individual subjectivities of the participants. Important to note is the distinction between this form of thirdness and what Ogden elsewhere describes as the ‘intersubjective analytic third’ (1994b), which, like Green’s (1975) analytic object, arises as a product of the dialectical relation between the unconscious subjective involvements of analyst and analysand. Utilizing and extending Bion’s (1962) concept of ‘reverie’, Ogden describes his own inner transformations, resulting from dreamlike states often involving the quotidian and mundane, which lead eventually to deeper understandings of the patient and the interpretations. He writes,

I believe that a major dimension of the analyst’s psychological life in the consulting room with the patient takes the form of reverie concerning the ordinary, everyday details of his own life (that are often of great narcissistic importance to him). I have attempted to demonstrate in this clinical discussion that these reveries are not simply reflections of inattentiveness, narcissistic self-involvement, unresolved emotional conflict, and the like. Rather, this psychological activity represents symbolic and protosymbolic (sensation-based) forms given to the unarticulated (and often not yet felt) experience of the analysand as they are taking form in the intersubjectivity of the analytic pair (i.e. in the analytic third).

(1994b, p. 82)

In the experience of the chimera, de M’Uzan writes of the analyst becoming the patient and of his need to ‘withdraw[s] the most individual aspects of his personality’ in order to allow himself to be ‘invaded’ and ‘occupied’ (1989 p. 84). The subjugating third that Ogden describes forming as a consequence of projective identification also involves the analyst unconsciously ‘enter[ing] into a form of negation of himself as a separate I’. As he describes it, ‘The recipient of the projective identification becomes a participant in the negation of himself as a separate subject, thus making “psychological room” in himself to be (in unconscious fantasy) occupied (taken over) by the projector’ (p. 100). Ogden chooses words with a similar affective tenor to those de M’Uzan uses to describe this intersubjective moment, such as ‘kidnapping’, ‘blackmailing’, ‘seduction’, ‘mesmerization’, ‘being swept along by the irresistible frightening lure of an unfolding horror story’ (p. 105). Thus it would appear that both de M’Uzan and Ogden regard this process as a vehicle by which the analyst allows an unconscious occupation of himself so that he can experience something the patient cannot.

Madness

To the comparison of the work of de M’Uzan and Ogden I would add the work of Christopher Bollas (1987), who in an early contribution described the creation of an internal space within the analyst which can receive the patient’s unconscious material. Bollas takes the view that allowing himself to ‘become lost’ (p. 203) in the patient’s material enables a process of creation ‘through transference usage into object identity’ (p. 203). For this to happen, the analyst needs to be able to ‘tolerate the necessary loss of his personal sense of identity within the clinical situation’ (p. 203). As the patient’s representation of aspects of the troubled mother, father or infant self are experienced by the analyst, he allows a part of himself to become ‘disturbed’ by the patient and ‘situationally ill’ (p. 204), staying ‘receptive to varying degrees of “madness” in myself occasioned by life in the patient’s environment’ (p. 204). In more recent work, Bollas continues his earlier emphasis on the unconscious dimensions of intersubjective exchange, painting psychoanalysis as an unconscious object relation. He writes, ‘Even as an unconscious subject I am still shaped by another’s effect on me. My self is given a new form by the other’ (1995, p. 25, my italics). The analyst’s access to this level of exchange occurs through ‘a form of intersubjectivity that assumes unconscious perception, unconscious organization, unconscious creativity and unconscious communication’ (2001, p. 95). Bollas places both patient and analyst within the dream space where this relation occurs:

Freud’s unconscious receiver, the dream set of counter-transference, processes the patient’s unconscious communications on its own terms: one dreamer to another. Dreaming the analysand during the hour, bringing the patient to another place, transformed into other persons, events, and places, the analyst unconsciously deconstructs – displaces, condenses, substitutes the patient.

(1995, p. 12)

These three clinical psychoanalytic approaches are predicated on innovative understandings of identity. For each of these theorists, their ability to move into the psychic spaces they describe relies on their use of Freudian and post-Freudian thought to ground their original technical contributions. By appreciating the unique approach each theorist takes to the issue of identity, one may better appreciate the novel clinical approaches they have introduced.

New approaches to identity

Comparing de M’Uzan with Ogden and Bollas brings us to the issue of the foundational changes each has envisioned with regard to the notion of identity. At the heart of their approaches is a revised Freudian understanding of this notion that allows clinicians to go to the psychic places their patients take them. It is interesting to note that one finds similar notions in the work of Searles (1979, p. 508), who wrote of using his own ‘sense of identity as a perceptual organ’ in the treatment of schizophrenic, borderline and neurotic patients by entering states of therapeutic symbiosis with them.

According to de M’Uzan (1978), the ego is not entirely encompassed within the ‘I’, nor entirely in the ‘other’. There is no fixed boundary between the domains of the ego and non-ego but, instead, a transitional area,¹ a spectrum of identity that is defined by the set of diverse positions narcissistic libido can occup...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Monsters, dreams and madness: explorations in the Freudian intersubjective
• 2 An introduction to dreaming
• 3 Zombie states: reconsidering the relationship between life and death instincts
• 4 Symbiont life
• 5 Performative and enactive features of psychoanalytic witnessing: the transference as the scene of address
• 6 Silence and quiet: a phenomenology of wordlessness
• 7 Form and content
• 8 Duende and the shape of things unknown
• 9 Creative repetition
• Index