Relational Freedom

Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field

Donnel B. Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317657842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoanálisis

Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field addresses the interpersonal field in clinical psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, especially the emergent qualities of the field. The book builds on the foundation of unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment defined and explored in Stern's previous, widely read books.

Stern never considers the analyst or the patient alone; all clinical events take place between them and involve them both. Their conscious and unconscious conduct and experience are the field's substance. We can say that the changing nature of the field determines the experience that patient and analyst can create in one another's presence; but we can also say that the therapeutic dyad, simply by doing their work together, ceaselessly configures and reconfigures the field. "Relational freedom" is Stern's own interpersonal and relational conception of the field, which he compares, along with other varieties of interpersonal/relational field theory, to the work of Bionian field theorists such as Madeleine and Willy Baranger, and Antonino Ferro. Other chapters concern the role of the field in accessing the frozen experience of trauma, in creating theories of therapeutic technique, evaluating quantitative psychotherapy research, evaluating the utility of the concept of unconscious phantasy, treating the hard-to-engage patient, and in devising the ideal psychoanalytic institute.

Relational Freedom is a clear, authoritative, and impassioned statement of the current state of interpersonal and relational psychoanalytic theory and clinical thinking. It will interest anyone who wants to stay up to date with current developments in American psychoanalysis, and for those newer to the field it will serve as an introduction to many of the important questions in contemporary psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of all kinds will profit from the book's thoughtful discussions of clinical problems and quandaries.

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D.., a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, serves as Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, and Adjunct Clinical Professor and Consultant at the NYU Postodoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the founder and editor of "Psychoanalysis in a New Key, " a book series published by Routledge.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Emergent properties of the interpersonal field

I remember feeling, even as a graduate student seeing my first patients in the early 1970s, that the clinical process took place between the patient and me, and that my experience and the patient’s were not only our own, but also parts of a larger whole. In my first book (Stern, 1997), Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis, I recently reread a description of the interpersonal field. It brought back to me those first experiences of that sense of the clinical situation and reminded me of how long the interpersonal field has been central in my mind—longer, even, than I have known it by its name. Here is the passage.

A fully interpersonal conception of treatment is a field theory. The psychoanalytic relationship, like any relationship, takes place in a field that is defined and ceaselessly redefined by its participants. It is not only the intrapsychic dynamics patient and analyst bring to their relationship that determine their experience with one another. The field is a unique creation, not a simple additive combination of individual dynamics; it is ultimately the field that determines which experiences the people who are in the process of co-creating that field can have in one another’s presence. It is the field that determines what will be dissociated and what will be articulated, when imagination will be possible and when the participants will be locked into stereotypic descriptions of their mutual experience. Each time one participant changes the nature of his or her involvement in the field, the possibilities for the other person’s experience change as well. . . . The field is the only relevant context.

(p. 110)

Now jump ahead with me nearly two decades, from 1997 to this year. As I reviewed the articles I have written over the last few years, which make up the bulk of this book, I saw that my interests in the recent past, like the more distant past, have revolved around the interpersonal field, and I began to see that the chapters of this book organized themselves around this theme.

Emergence in the third person

One characteristic of the field has always held a particular fascination for me: its emergent properties. The field comes into being between two or more people in a way that cannot be predicted or controlled. It can only be accepted or rejected. To the extent that we can accept it, we sense and understand (and these are not necessarily the same thing at all) something of how this emergent quality informs and shapes the clinical process.

There is a link in psychoanalysis between the unconscious and the quality of emergence. This is not a very well-theorized link, and in fact, it is not at all clear exactly what we are referring to when we invoke it, as indubitable as I think its existence is to most psychoanalysts. Actually, the quality of emergence is itself no better defined than the link that connects it to the unconscious. And so, before going on to discuss the link to the unconscious, which I do later in this chapter, I begin by trying to say what I mean by emergence.

In psychoanalysis, we often experience the phenomena that we understand to “emerge” to be separate from us. That is, we think of emergence in the third person—some “it” emerges, so that the quality of emergence exists apart from subjectivity. Consider, for instance, the frequent appearance of the concept of emergence and the descriptor “emergent” in recent applications of nonlinear dynamic systems theory to the clinical situation (e.g., Seligman, 2005; Boston Change Process Study Group, 2010; Coburn, 2013). The emphasis in this work is not phenomenological—the primary emphasis is not the experience of the analyst or the patient, but on their interaction as a self-organizing system. Emergence in this frame of reference is not really part of our “felt sense” of things, but a characteristic of clinical process itself—clinical process as an object of observation. When the word “emergence” is used in this way, it describes attributes that are experienced as if they exist apart from the one who perceives them (even if, as in this case, we must also grant that the observer is part of the phenomenon in question).

Most of the time, psychoanalysts use the word in this third-person sense. We use it to describe aspects of treatment and characteristics of mind. Most of us, including me, continue to write and speak this way more or less routinely; and I will continue to use these meanings here and there throughout this book.

Emergence in the first person: the “felt sense” of emergence

But the way I intend to use the word “emergence” in this introductory chapter, and the way I generally find emergence to be most compelling in my daily clinical work, is not as a reference to attributes of things that feel as if they exist apart from me, but as a way of representing certain parts of my first-person experience, and the patient’s, in the consulting room. This is emergence in the phenomenological sense. I have learned from my patients that they and I often have a simultaneous sense of the emergent quality of our experience, although sometimes I have that sense myself without knowing if the patient shares it. In either case, I have learned to value such moments highly, because they herald the appearance of something unexpected.

I have observed for many years that all experience is unbidden. It comes to us, we never plan it, and in that sense it is always a surprise (see Chapter 5 and Stern, 1990). Most of the time we are unaware of this unbiddenness. It simply escapes notice.

But the moments in which I have a felt sense of emergence are different in this respect. At those times I feel the unbiddenness of experience. I have a felt sense of the arrival of experience in my mind, of how little my conscious intentions seem to have to do with the whole process. I feel myself as a conduit for experience that comes into being through me. Paradoxically, this kind of experience, more than any other part of my experience—and precisely, I think, because it seems to come to me from elsewhere—feels most thoroughly of my own making. I feel it firmly as mine. My patients’ sense of this kind of experience is similar, to the extent to which they have been able to articulate it to me.

A mild sense of emergence is common, an everyday event in my clinical experience. The more intense and gripping experience of emergence is rare. Any sense of emergence, though, mild or gripping, is vital, alive. It is often emotionally powerful, but even when it is not, it is arresting. It carries a sense of mystery, ranging from a feeling of surprise that merely raises the eyebrows, to sudden, intense curiosity, to awe and wonder, and once in a great while, to the numinous or magical.

“Emergence” in this frame of reference describes a certain affective state of things. It is the felt sense of moments that portend the unexpected, or are themselves unexpected. In moments of emergence I am connected to unseen things that feel, despite their invisibility, greatly important to matters at hand. There is a sense of nascence, of budding, of coming-to-be. Jack Foehl, in describing the quality of “depth” in clinical work, brings words to what I am trying to express: in moments of emergence, we are suddenly privy to “a sense of the boundless reaches of what we do not yet know” (Foehl, 2014, p. 295).

I have had experiences of emergence that were private. These generally have happened while I was alone, and I have been aware of this aloneness. I was not only physically by myself, in other words, but I also felt alone—but not necessarily lonely. Many of these times have been in dreams; others have taken place while I was in nature, or overlooking the city from a height. They have happened as I watched a film, read a novel, stood looking at a painting—or as I wrote a paper, finding myself amazed at the appearance in my mind of some expression that captured what I wanted to say in a way that carried me beyond what I had understood in the moment before.

But most of the emergent experiences I have had in the consulting room have not been private in this way. The unseen things I feel connected to in my office, whatever else they may be, are part of the context of my relationship with the particular person who is with me. That much I can tell, even though I can’t make out what those things are. It is a feeling of opening-into, of possibility, and so it is generally welcome even when whatever will come next does not necessarily feel pleasant or fulfilling.

Now let me come full circle to my primary subject, the field. The experience of emergence is, to my mind, one of the most important ways any clinician can experience the interpersonal field. Conditions are not always right for it to take place, because it usually (but not always) requires a certain synergy of purpose between patient and analyst, a clinical collaboration that is not always available.¹ (Enactment, as I describe below, is one of the primary obstacles in this regard.) No doubt there are more prerequisites than a collaborative clinical atmosphere, but those other conditions are always unknown to us. We don’t know why we have this kind of experience when we do. But in any moment in which my patient and I are working collaboratively, an experience of emergence is possible.

Is “depth” exclusively associated with the internal world?

Like emergence, the idea of depth is both closely associated with unconscious process and only infrequently theorized. Wachtel (2003, 2014), who wrote about the phenomenon in the third-person sense I have already described (i.e., some “it” has depth), concluded that psychoanalysts often lose sight of the fact that the idea of depth is a metaphor, mistaking it instead for a feature of the natural world and thereby creating some unfortunate effects on psychoanalytic understanding. Depth, Wachtel (2003) observed, is equated with profundity: the “farther down” something lies, the closer to the beginning, the more profound, it is. Wachtel’s primary objection to this equation is that it leads us to accept unthinkingly the view that earlier, “deeper” events in a person’s history are therefore more profoundly influential than events that come later. For my present purpose, while I appreciate Wachtel’s point, my primary objection is the equation of depth with internality. We take for granted that the internal is more profound than the external, and therefore more important in the creation of experience and living. Social interaction, wrote Wachtel (2003),

enter[s] into the psychological equation from the direction of the senses, that is, from the “surface” rather than the “depths.” From the vantage point of the depth metaphor, social influences are therefore at risk of appearing “superficial.”

(pp. 20–21)

Wachtel also quotes Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), who, in their description of “drive/structure” models in psychoanalysis, make the point that in these models,

social reality constitutes an overlay, a veneer superimposed upon the deeper, more “natural” fundaments of the psyche constituted by the drives. Any theory omitting or replacing the drives as the underlying motivational principle and, in addition, emphasizing the importance of personal and social relations with others is, from this point of view, superficial by definition, concerned with the “surface” areas of the personality, lacking “depth.”

(p. 80)

While today many psychoanalysts, perhaps most, are not adherents of drive/structure models, we all are nevertheless prisoners, to a certain degree, of assumptions contributed by those models. They are our history, and the wide acceptance that the internal life is profound and the social is superficial—and the interpersonal field is certainly social—is one of the artifacts of that history.

None of this is meant to deny the profundity of the internal; the clinical illustration I offer later in this chapter should be enough to do away with any impression that I feel that way. Instead, what I mean to argue is that profundity is not exclusively associated with the internal. As Wachtel points out, social influences can also be unconscious. One might say, in fact, that this was the great insight of Harry Stack Sullivan (e.g., 1956), who understood problems in living as the outcome of our dissociation, on the basis of anxiety, of significant parts of social living. We simply do not see, feel, or understand those parts of interactions with others that would call out too much anxiety if we were to grasp them. Just as social phenomena can be unconscious, they can also be emergent. That, as I have said, is in fact my understanding of the interpersonal field. I hope that this point, too, will take on more substance in the clinical illustration.

The felt sense of emergence and the phenomenology of depth: depth as a field concept

Foehl (2014) brings the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and the thinking of Bion to bear on the phenomenology of depth in psychoanalysis. Foehl’s focus on experience—depth in the first person—and his revision of the idea of depth in terms of a contemporary epistemological perspective suitable for grasping the idea as a field concept make his work especially relevant to my consideration of the felt sense of emergence. In his essay, Foehl replaces the vertical, internal-world metaphor of depth with one rooted in relationships: between figure and ground (“form to field”), self to world, and subject to other. It is the relationship between our explicit experience of the foreground (for example, figure, self, or subject) and our less articulated sense of the background (ground, world, or other) that gives us the feeling of depth.² The vaguely perceived presence of the background—it is “there” but its meaning is unrealized in this moment—adds a dimension to our explicitly grasped experience.³ In this way experience gains “an affective resonance and fullness . . . that would otherwise be flattened into either an univocal regularity of ‘it is how I see it’ or an undifferentiated haze of not specifying what might be experienced” (Foehl, 2014, p. 298).

I imagine “flattened” experience to be like a painting without perspective: its two dimensions allow no movement from the surface of the picture into its background; everything in the picture exists on the same plane. Add perspective, though, as European painters in the Renaissance learned to do, and the eye is free to travel from the painting’s surface into any level of the background, and we can in that way discover spatial relations between elements existing at any layer of depth. But we don’t need to explicitly formulate every one of those relations to be affected by their presence. Even to view for a moment a painting made with perspective awakens a recognition of the possibilities it offers. Depth is our awareness of the possibility that relations we have not yet imagined will emerge, and it appears only when those possibilities, like three-dimensional perspective, are already present and alive in our experience.

I think this feeling of possibility is closely related to Foehl’s “affective resonance and fullness”; and the felt sense of emergence, it seems to me, grows from both. The felt sense of emergence, we might say, is a manifestation of depth.

We can use the phenomenon of enactment to lend this point substance. Enactment is an example of a part of clinical process that we can certainly describe as emergent in the third-person sense, because it arises from unconscious sources; there is no sense of conscious volition. Because the unconscious root of enactment is, by definition, missing from its conscious experience, that experience is typically constricted and often rigid. Enactment feels as if it is just the way things are. One’s own involvement with the other—that is, one’s motivation to create and maintain the very state of affairs that is later revealed to have been problematic—is invisible. It often feels as if the enactment is the other’s fault, as if one is being provoked into an uncomfortable affective state that one would be able to avoid if it weren’t for the troublesome behavior of the other, or as if one is reacting to the other in a way that is nothing but reasonable.

And so enactment, despite being emergent in the third-person sense, is perhaps the epitome of the kind of clinical process that, in Foehl’s words, is “flattened into . . . univocal regularity.” Could any experience be a better illustration of what it means to say (again, in Foehl’s words) that, “It is how I see it”?⁴ Enactment is defined precisely by that taken-for-granted attitude, that feeling that what is happening in the clinical relatedness means what I think it means, and nothing more. Depth and ambiguity collapse. This point is recognized by analysts everywhere. The Barangers (1961–62/2008), for instance, write, “It could be said that every event in the analytic field is experienced in the ‘as-if’ category. . . . [It is crucial that] each thing or event in the field be at the same time something else. If this essential ambiguity is lost, the analysis also disappears” (p. 799).

Now consider the new, spontaneous perceptions of oneself and the other that, when they become available, resolve enactments (Stern, 2004, 2010a).⁵ These new perceptions reveal, often quite suddenly, a new and different meaning in what has been transpiring in the clinical relatedness. Sometimes it is the analy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: emergent properties of the interpersonal field
• 2 The interpersonal field: its place in American psychoanalysis
• 3 Field theory in psychoanalysis, part I: comparing Madeleine and Willy Baranger, and Harry Stack Sullivan
• 4 Field theory in psychoanalysis, part II: comparing Bionian field theory and contemporary interpersonal/relational psychoanalysis
• 5 Relational freedom and therapeutic action
• 6 Witnessing across time: accessing the present from the past and the past from the present
• 7 Unconscious phantasy and unconscious relatedness: comparing contemporary Freudian and interpersonal/relational approaches to clinical practice
• 8 Implicit theories of technique and the values that inspire them
• 9 Psychotherapy is an emergent process: hermeneutics and quantitative psychotherapy research
• 10 The hard-to-engage patient: a treatment failure
• 11 Curiosity: dealing with divergent ideas in the ideal psychoanalytic institute
• References
• Index