Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis

A Model for Theory and Practice

Lewis Kirshner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317383505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Lewis Kirshner explains and illustrates the concept of intersubjectivity and its application to psychoanalysis. By drawing on findings from neuroscience, infant research, cognitive psychology, Lacanian theory, and philosophy, Kirshner argues that the analytic relationship is best understood as a dialogic exchange of signs between two subjects—a semiotic process. Both subjects bring to the interaction a history and a set of unconscious desires, which inflect their responses. In order to work most effectively with patients, analysts must attend closely to the actual content of the exchange, rather than focusing on imagined contents of the patient's mind. The current situation revives a history that is shaped by the analyst's participation.

Supported by numerous case studies, Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice is a valuable resource for psychotherapists and analysts seeking to refine their clinical goals and methods.

Chapter 1
What is intersubjectivity?

Intersubjectivity as a concept cannot be defined precisely. It may be one of those words whose sense becomes clearer in the negative, like “empathy,” to which it is related. Different disciplines with their own independent histories and literature have applied the term to deal with concerns specific to them. While originally a product of philosophy and a cornerstone of phenomenologic thought, perhaps most notably explored by Husserl, it was adopted by pioneer infant researcher Colin Trevarthen in the form of “primary intersubjectivity” to characterize early mother–infant communications. It entered psychoanalysis through Jacques Lacan during his Hegelian period and was subsequently taken up independently by the Interpersonal School in the United States. Rather rapidly, the use of the term spread through different psychoanalytic groups, even gaining a school of its own: the “inter subjective psychoanalysis” of Stolorow and colleagues (discussed in Chapter 3) (Stolorow, Brandchaft & Atwood, 1987). Finally, cognitive neuro science arrived on the scene, attempting to naturalize intersubjectivity through systematic research. The discovery of mirror neuron systems in the brain gave impetus to this approach. Neuroscientists argue rightly that, if the close intrication of the individual subject with other subjects is a fact of human life, then this state of affairs must have evolved like other traits and originate from processes in the brain that can be studied. Social cognitive neuro science builds on this approach, looking at two-person interactions by empirical measures (Hari & Kujala, 2009).

In this chapter, I proceed by summarizing the conceptual approaches of phenomenology, Lacan, and neuroscience from the perspective of their own geneologies and problematics without attempting an integrated or unified theory. Although it is correct to say that intersubjectivity deals with the complex processes that go on in the relationship between two persons or subjects, each discipline has its own vocabulary and set of assumptions, so that one cannot equate them without distortion or oversimplification. When advocates of one approach—phenomenology is a good example—turn to other disciplines like neuroscience or infant research, they tend to use them to support their particular model, rather than pursue a true synthesis. Given their considerable differences, a synthesis is not feasible in any case. The goal of establishing a basic definition of intersub jectivity by incorporating evidence from different sources assumes that such an entity exists as an object that can be studied. It is always useful to remind ourselves that concepts like intersubjectivity in human affairs use highly abstract language to construct alternative ways of speaking about personal interactions, not to identify an object independent of the words employed. The extensive findings of empirical research as well as conceptual analyses in philosophy and the humanities all contribute valuable perspectives to a psychoanalytic understanding of human behavior.

The problem of pseudo-consistency across disparate theories occurs within psychoanalysis more broadly. For example, Bohleber et al. (2013) have documented the very different ways a commonly used technical term like “enactment” is employed and the assumptions behind it in different theories. Greenberg (2015) has made a very similar point with his concept of a “controlling theory” that creates a context for specific interpretations, even when the language of description suggests a common atheoretic understanding. In the case of intersubjectivity, tolerating the ambiguity resulting from multiple ways of conceptualizing interpersonal interaction may be the optimum method of dealing with the phenomena of greatest interest to psychoanalysts.

Why is there such a profusion of tongues around definitions of the word intersubjectivity? Apart from the politics of analytic schools, the reason seems quite basic. The interpretation of the concept depends on how one thinks about the nature of the human subject: of which subject is it a question? And this remains a real problem for psychoanalysis, which tolerates a wide discrepancy around how terms like self and subject are actually employed. On a broad scale, there remains a tension across psychoanalytic theories between the assumption of a field-independent subject, with a discernible internal structure of unconscious fantasies or desires, and a field-dependent, malleable subject that arises out of intersubjective messages and contextual interplay. The “naturalized” subject as a product of normal operations of the brain, as proposed by some neuroscience researchers, offers another model, and each holds implications for defining psychopathology.

The subject/the self

A focus on human subjectivity in psychoanalytic practice, so prevalent today, has not always been obvious. Freud, in his pioneering explorations, sidestepped the thorny philosophical problem of subjectivity as irrelevant to psychoanalysis as a science. Through the first half of the last century, his followers approached the psyche as a system dealing with the channeling and discharge of energies through its structural model of drives, conflicts, and defenses. The terms “subject” and “self” were not part of the major concepts of classic analysis, and Freud tolerated the ambiguity of his term Ich, referring to the system ego, the self, and the speaking subject in different contexts (of course, literally meaning “I” in German). For him, raising the problematic of the subject belonged to purely philosophical speculation. He looked instead to a more scientific view of the mind as the product of internal forces, without the humanistic concept of a personal self, an approach that persists in many disciplines. Over the past decades, however, the emphasis of analytic thinkers of different schools has turned toward the agentic self and the old concept of a desiring subject as the objects of therapeutic concern.

Phenomenology

As traditionally defined, phenomenology refers to the branch of philosophy that studies experience from the standpoint of individual consciousness. Philosophers who pursue this discipline have been associated historically with the concept of intersubjectivity, especially as it relates to basic structures of conscious experience. Phenomenology takes the perspective of a subjective or first-person point of view on behavior, with its intrinsic “intentionality” (which means simply that experience always pertains to an external object in the world to which attention is directed). It then analyzes the conditions for the manifestations of personal agency—for example, what kinds of properties of consciousness are necessarily involved in organizing actions, relationships with other subjects, and using language.

Phenomenology carries important implications for how analysts approach and address patients in clinical practice. The assimilation of the phenomenologic tradition into contemporary psychoanalytic models represents in part a reaction to classic theories of an objectified mental apparatus and a medical stance that sees patients as clinical objects. The paradigm of subject-to-subject relations that emphasizes recognition of the other as a primary ethical obligation has rightly become an influential component of clinical thinking. Strictly speaking, of course, both subject-to-object and subject-to-subject relations are “intersubjective” in that participants in each version are equally subjects. A phenomenologic use of the term focuses on the “second person” approach of an “I–you,” subject-to-subject perspective. Rather than supporting a specific theory or school of psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity represents a vantage point, a conceptual frame, and a position to occupy.

For psychoanalysts, inviting first-person accounts of experience, along with undertaking a second-person dialogue of inquiry, provides access to another person that would be otherwise unobtainable. When we ask the other to tell us about his experience or what he is seeking from therapy (saying “you”), we invite a direct address (from an “I”) that calls on us immediately and, at least for the time of the exchange, creates a relationship, an entanglement, which can decenter us from our usual postures.¹ We don’t know what the other will say, and the spontaneity can surprise and disturb. As Freud discovered, the unpredictable flow of speech provides unique access to the life of the subject. Although several ways of knowing another person, including different theories and applications of empirical knowledge, play their parts in a typical psychoanalysis, the intersubjective turn over the past twenty-five years has shifted the balance of clinical listening toward the I–you register.

The Hegelian influence

The philosopher G.F. Hegel’s famous parable of the encounter between master and slave has frequently been interpreted as a metaphor for the development of individual self-consciousness and has served as a starting point for numerous philosophers, political scientists, and ethicists dealing with human relationships. In psychoanalysis, Lacan was the first to discuss the parable on several occasions in his early work. Among others, Jessica Benjamin and Arnold Modell have also explored its implications, emphasizing the subject’s search (and need) for recognition from an intersubjective counterpart. Blunden (2005) comments that the dialectic of recognition portrayed in the parable is today by far the most famous passage of Hegel’s works, despite the fact that it makes up just 19 of the 808 paragraphs of the phenomenology and was never mentioned by Marx or Engels in their entire oeuvres.

Hegel portrays an imaginary encounter between two consciously aware but reflectively unconscious subjects in what can be regarded as both a stage in the moral progress of humanity and a personal crisis in individual development. For each subject of the parable, the confrontation with the existence of the other is a mortal threat to his own self-definition.² Hegel’s original German phrase, Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, has been translated as lordship and bondage, which sets up a bipolarity of positions. The confrontation between the two consciousnesses inevitably sets up a struggle for dominance—hence the terms master and slave, each subject seeking to impose its desire for an absolute confirmation of self on the other. Their contest takes the form of a “struggle to the death,” since everything seems to be at stake. In brief, in Hegel’s scenario one subject saves his life by surrendering to become the slave, but the master soon realizes that a slave cannot provide the freely given affirmation he seeks. Neither subject can yet grasp that self-affirmation requires a recognition by another subject belonging to a social reality of which they both are part. Hegel asserts: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only by being acknowledged” (Hegel, 1807, p. 111).

In taking the phenomenology of consciousness as his reference point, Hegel remained within the Cartesian tradition with its idealist orientation. Like Kant, he renounced the notion of an introjected self that views representations of the world from “inside,” by proposing that the world as experienced is essentially constructed by an active consciousness. An important difference from Kant was his rejection of a transcendental self existing a priori. Instead, he proposed that self-consciousness—the experience of having a self—requires engagement with another subject. The self comes to be, as Ver Eecke (1983) summarizes, through an intersubjective relationship in which each subject must discover in another entity a quality of being it possesses itself but of which it is not yet aware (p. 121). The French scholar Jean Hippolyte (Wilden, 1968) interpreted Hegel’s rather obscurely worded passages as an attempt to show that “self-formation is only conceivable through the mediation of alienation or estrangement. Self-formation is not to develop harmoniously as if by organic growth, but rather to become opposed to oneself through a splitting or separation” (p. 372). In other words, man splits himself into a subject, recognizing himself in another, and an object, viewed through the eyes of another. In the Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of this process (Wilden, 1968), consciousness presses for a kind of absolute recognition from the other, a recognition of its desire for the other to attribute “an absolute value to his free and historical individuality or to his personality” (p. 292). This dialectic involves a kind of mirroring process, a passage back and forth from self-objectification in the eyes of the other to self-aggrandizement in obliterating the separateness and freedom of the other subject.

The Hegelian themes of the subject’s search for recognition, of a mirrored consciousness that founds the subject, of the always problematic encounter with the other, and of a mediating system that transcends both subjects have permeated philosophical and psychoanalytic thinking since his time. We might see Freud’s own parable of the meeting with the first object, the Nebenmensch, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) as a commentary. Winnicott, however, was the first to situate the encounter at the level of the newborn’s relationship with the mother. Stepping away from the encapsulated, representational tradition of regarding the interpersonal dynamic as a matter of projections and introjections, Winnicott began his story with the mother–baby relationship, prior to any conception of the infant as a separate subject. In his well-known paper on the mirror role of the mother (Winnicott, 1956), he discussed the self-formation of the infant within the matrix of affective exchanges communicated by facial expressions, so that when the child looks at the mother’s face, it sees itself, while the mother’s communication depends in turn on what she sees of herself reflected in the baby. Winnicott famously summarizes this phenomenon: “When I look I am seen, so I exist. I can now afford to look and see. I now look creatively and what I apperceive I also perceive” (p. 114). Here, he affirms that recognition by the other as a self—one might say, by the other’s desire to receive an affirming response from one’s own self—is more basic than drive or need satisfaction in permitting the active emergence of an infantile subject that can construct a perceptual world, not merely passively receive one.

The fundamental shift in perspective or paradigm brought about by Winnicott’s views on the formation of the self has been recognized most consistently by Modell, whose summary of the matter is clearly a version of Hegel’s dialectic:

The psychology of the self is embedded in this fundamental dilemma, namely, that the sense of self needs to be affirmed by the other, and yet a response from the other that is nonconfirming or unempathic can lead at best to a sense of depletion or at worst to the shattering of the self. This results in a defensive quest for an illusory self-sufficiency which is in conflict with the opposite wish to surrender the self to the other, to merge, to become enslaved.

(1984, p. 131)

The notions of recognition or affirmation become quite complex in this formulation. How they are conceived will influence the analyst’s therapeutic behavior.

Phenomenology and intersubjectivity

The universal desire to gain recognition underlines the inseparability of intersubjectivity from the ancient philosophical question of what it means to be a subject among other subjects. The problem runs through the writings of the great phenomenologists—Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to name the most important. Merleau-Ponty asserted in his Phenomenology of Perception that we do not begin our lives immersed in a private self-consciousness encased somewhere inside the skull but in the experience of being with others. This undeniable truth about human life was richly developed by Husserl and Heidegger well before the beginning of infant research and psychoanalysis. Subjectivity is inconceiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is intersubjectivity?
• 2 Intersubjectivity in the case of Ms. B.
• 3 The turn to intersubjectivity in American psychoanalysis
• 4 Passions and affects in psychoanalysis: an intersubjective approach
• 5 Affect in clinical work
• 6 A semiotic approach to intersubjectivity
• 7 The subject as text: the limits of semiotics
• 8 Intersubjectivity in practice: beyond semiosis
• Index