Self Inquiry

M. Robert Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317758419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1989. Covering subjects such as empathy, transference, and countertransference, as well as the nature of the psychoanalytic process, the author of this work argues that there can be no psychoanalysis without self analysis.

I

In Pursuit of Psychoanalysis

PSYCHOANALYSTS fritter away large chances in half-truths. Psychoanalysts ape the forms and foul the spirit of yesterday’s classics and of today’s revolutions. Psychoanalysts are beset by orthodoxies of the right, orthodoxies of the left, and orthodoxies of the middle of the road.

Psychoanalysts try to prove themselves and psychoanalysis “classical” or prove themselves and psychoanalysis “not classical.” What is “classical”? Pure? What is “not classical”? Impure? Popular? Purer than pure?

Psychoanalysts say: “I know this sounds classical, but…” They say: “I know this does not sound classical, but…” What is all this concern for how things sound? What are all these buts?

Adventure is perverted to debenture. Exploration gives way to oughts and shoulds. We ought to psychoanalyze this. We ought to psychoanalyze that. A good psychoanalyst always psychoanalyzes this before that, always does this or does that. A good psychoanalyst has good psychoanalytic hours, good psychoanalyses, and good patients. Can such pervasive talk of oughts, of shoulds, and of goods really be good?

Psychoanalysts boast of practicing X rather than X-1 or X-2 hours a day. And they boast of practicing X-1 or X-2 rather than X hours a day. What are we coming to? Should the carpenter boast that he hammered and sawed all day? Or that he did not hammer and saw all day?

Psychoanalysts talk of “suitable” and of “unsuitable” patients. What have we come to when it no longer seems bizarre to talk as if the method is what counts and the patient either fits or is a misfit? Mechanical gears rattle and creak where mechanical gears have no place.

And psychoanalysts try mechanically not to be mechanical. They try to show they are human. How can we show we are human? Either we are human or we are not. We are human enough in some ways, not human enough in others. Will a smile change that? A favor? A confession of faults? A folksy manner? Or what? And if psychoanalysis requires a “holding environment,” will we try to make it more “holding”? If some is helpful, is more better? If the spontaneous is helpful, is forced better? If empathy, hope, and compassion count, will we make psychoanalysis into empathy, hope, and compassion therapy? Will we try to be latter-day good-enough mothers? If separation counts, will we make psychoanalysis separation therapy? A “chance to grieve”? If “facing facts” counts, will we make psychoanalysis one long look at the “facts”? “Optimal disillusionment”? A blow to “entitlement”? A look at “reality”? If reliving and revising things past counts, will we define psychoanalysis as reliving and revising things past therapy? Must we pounce on anachronism as a hawk upon its prey? If we and our patients need an “alliance,” must we make psychoanalysis read like a chapter of How to Win Friends and Influence People or like a tract from the Salvation Army? Will we and our patient be more “we” if we cling to the habit of saying “we” — whether we feel “we” or not? “And how are we this morning, Mrs. Smith?” Has it come to that?

Psychoanalysts push pat explanations for the complexity of the individual, and for the complexity of large social events — love, hate, work, play, art, sports, politics, crime, war and peace — and only tomorrow knows what else.

Afflicted with au-courant-ism, we confuse science with scientism. We play follow the leader and turn a brave method of inquiry into a timid tracing of obligatory topics.

Psychoanalysis so mauled and so mangled stops being inquiry and becomes a faddish search, a balanced survey course of previously discovered and categorized ideas, aims, feelings, events, complexes, urges, fears, defenses, transferences, resistances, disorders, arrests, stages, phases, and assorted etceteras. Powerful insights with fresh possibilities are cheapened into laundry lists of items to be identified and checked off. Love of inquiry, the act of inquiry, and the growth of the ability to inquire are sacrificed to a false reverence for particulars to be inquired into.

These unhappy ways testify not only to a failure of psychoanalysts to practice the self inquiry they preach, but to a failure to overcome the compulsion to name, the mania to manage, and the furor to cure, all of which, in our darkest hours, embrace the madness of believing that by treating someone as less than a person we can help him or her to become more of a person.

But who are “we”? Who are the psychoanalysts who do these things? Some do many of them all the time. All do some of them some of the time. At least, all I know. We want to be one way, and we find we are, over and over, despite our best efforts, exactly the opposite.

If I am talking about the occupational hazards not only of being a psychoanalyst but of being alive — I think I am talking of both — I refuse to drown my indignation in a sea of platitudes about human frailty. I mean to take these matters seriously. I mean to sacrifice the luxury of railing at “us” to the necessity of looking closer to home. I want to look at what I hope psychoanalysis to be and what I hope to be when I do what I hope to be psychoanalysis. I mean to find a way to think about self inquiry, my patient’s and my own, so I may do more of what I hope and less of what I regret.

The first psychoanalyst found what most had failed to see, feared to see, and refused to see. He found disavowed purposes, and he found disavowed purposes for disavowing purposes. Finding these in himself helped him to find these in others/helped him to find these in himself. He used whatever genius he had for self inquiry to help others use whatever genius they had, and whatever genius others had to help him use whatever he had. These were large steps in the advance of self inquiry, his own and others’.

We can regard such advances as the rare possibilities of an unusually large talent or as the ongoing possibilities of the rest of us. We can leave the advances to Freud in the glow of his golden era of creativity, or we can claim the challenge and the chances for ourselves. Mainly we do better, I think, when knowingly or not — and better when knowingly than not — we do the latter rather than the former. I want at least to see where we are taken and where we can take it when we pursue the idea that the psychoanalyst’s main aim, now as in Freud’s time, is, or might well be, to advance his or her own self inquiry to help his or her patients to advance their self inquiry to help him or her to advance his or hers. And so on. And so on.

In this spirit, let me frame the assumptions in this set of assertions:

Departures from the ideal notwithstanding, the pursuit of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of two self inquiries. If the aim is simple, the carrying out is not. Every patient and every psychoanalyst, the first and each after, has struggled and will struggle between aims to advance self inquiry and aims to obstruct it. The aim to obstruct lies not only in the aim to avoid the pains, and pleasures, of facing the music to which self inquiry leads, but in the aim to preserve the pains, and the pleasures, of playing detached and laudable disseminator, or receiver, of arrived “truths.”

The most radical, enduring, and worth-conserving contributions — those that most conserve worth and, therefore, are most worth conserving — have come, I believe, and will come from reciprocities of self inquiry. When things go best, psychoanalyst and patient advance their own inquiries and, in the advancing, each other’s. This reciprocity asks and creates a fuller mutuality. By a fuller mutuality, I mean not only the mutually satisfying — that alone might only be barter — but a mutual harmony that expresses and favors the beneficial growth of both the patient and the psychoanalyst.

This struggle to advance from the traditional authoritarian to a fuller mutuality has been central to the psychoanalytic encounter from the beginning. It is a struggle that seems to anticipate, reflect, and consolidate the main social thrust of our times.

In the late twentieth century, we begin to look back upon the early twentieth and the nineteenth as a zenith of benign domination, of one-up and one-down, of upstairs and downstairs, in the connections of men to women, parents to children, teachers to students, doctors to patients, politicians to constituents, management to labor, rich to poor, upper classes to lower, nation to nation, race to race, man to nature, and man to things. In the late twentieth, now here and now there, invidious distinctions of status, previously comfortable, begin to sound strange to the ear. Some distinctions, and the related acts of domination, no matter how agreeable in some ways, how useful for some ends, how seemingly “benign” in some intentions, we find increasingly wrong. What, yesterday, seemed “liberal” and “tolerant” today is no longer tolerable. More and more of yesterday’s “benign” seems, today, as ruthless as, or more ruthless than, the patently ruthless.

We try, today, if not always more successfully, usually more openly, to overcome inclinations to put down and be put down; we try to honor inclinations to find common ground. These efforts, though not new, and not consistent, seem now more critical; more promising one way, more damaging the other.^*

If I were to guess at the unknowable, I would guess that the most pressing needs and the most rewarding opportunities, our new frontiers, now lie in the urgency and the appeal of our search for fuller mutuality. This search, no matter how avidly we pursue it, no more commits us to wild millenarianism than we are committed to unremitting pessimism by Thomas More’s “All things will not be well until all men are good, which I do not think will be lo these many long years.” Though the kinds and degrees of mutuality desirable and possible in one place differ from those in another, the struggles in the advancing and the retarding, in the one and the other, seem to me alike enough to encourage me to write of one effort toward a fuller mutuality in the small world of the psychoanalytic ensemble. This is not, therefore, a book on the psychoanalytic method but an inquiry into one aspect that shares common ground with other efforts toward fuller mutuality. And it is not intended as a practical guide to psychoanalysis, or to other efforts, but as a frame within which psychoanalysis, and other efforts, might be considered.

Note

*  To call the climate of one’s times “critical” may be both cliché and conceit, but it is not, on that score, I think, necessarily wrong.

II

The Analyst’s Job

WHEN one of my children was eight or nine, she asked: “What does an analyst do?”

“An analyst,” I said, “helps people to decide.”

I told of a patient who wondered at work if she should do this first or that, wondered at play if she should play this game or that, wondered at a restaurant if she should eat this food or that.

My daughter listened, looked at me, and asked: “Didn’t she wonder if you were the right doctor?” She did. Soon and often. People are always wondering. They wonder about all sorts of things. They wonder especially who is right for whom.

Today, if I were asked what an analyst does, I would say an analyst helps people to wonder. Circumstances permitting, I’d say an analyst helps people to wonder at center-of-awareness what they’ve been wondering at edge. An analyst helps — tries to help — people to find what they’ve been wondering and to pursue it more persistently and respectfully. That is central, I believe, and the rest, implemental.

People are full of wonder. The analyst’s job is to help them to find the ways in which they are wonder-ful. People are always inquiring. They inquire into what goes on within and around them. They try to match the one world and the other. They try to unify the fragmentary, the divergent, and the conflicting within themselves and between themselves and others.

At edge-of-awareness, people are always trying to find, to refine, and to make actual their hidden visions of harmony: truth, beauty, goodness, and fairness. They are always trying to make sense of and to make harmonious their feelings, their ideas, their aims, and their acts, one with the other and with those of others.

If people were not trying to do all this, the analyst’s job would be as impossible as, or more impossible than, it is said to be. This struggle for unity within self and with others, and the ever-present edge-of-awareness inquiry that quietly seeks it, is what makes humankind most human, and occasionally, kind.

What does it mean to think this way about how we think? Do I weave naive theories of natural rationality, roseate tapestries of innate goodwill? Am I buyer and seller of saccharine? Have I become follower and purveyor of romantic fallacies?

Perhaps so. Some days I feel almost sure.

I have known my share of those who, out of complacency, out of lack of skill, out of fear of what they might find, or out of delight in keeping all in careful disarray, never seem self-inquiring. They seem never to inquire for the advance of mutualities and rarely for any other purpose. I have known those long moments when the voice of self inquiry seemed mute in me and in everyone else I thought I knew.

What can I mean, then, to say we are al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• SELF INQUIRY
• 1. In Pursuit of Psychoanalysis
• 2. The Analyst’s Job
• 3. Connections
• 4. Duet
• 5. On Seeing Things
• 6. In Step and Out
• 7. Indirection
• 8. The Moment
• 9. The Field before You