Subject to Change

Jung, Gender and Subjectivity in Psychoanalysis

Polly Young-Eisendrath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135844110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

What can psychotherapy and psychoanalysis teach us about turning human misery into insight and personal freedom? Polly Young-Eisendrath offers a response that opens new vistas in our understanding of ourselves within the complexity of a postmodern world. Subject to Change is a collection of essays spanning a twenty-year period of theorising and practice of a highly regarded senior Jungian analyst. The diverse ideas and perspectives discussed in the essays deal with the big issues surrounding how Jungian analysts and psychoanalysts understand their profession and what it teaches us about our subject lives. The book is divided into four clear and informative sections: * Subjectivity and uncertainty
* Gender and desire
* Transference and transformation
* Transcendence and subjectivity. The classic essays presented in this book will have significant appeal to all those concerned with Jungian analysis, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, gender development, and the interface between psychotherapy and spirituality.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Changing the subject – the self as a verb

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake in Kazin, 1946/1968: 258)

Subject to Change, the title I chose for this book, is a play on words that suggests the diverse ideas and perspectives expressed in these essays. They reflect a twenty-year span of my own development as a person, woman, Jungian psychoanalyst, feminist, Buddhist, and developmental psychologist – to name only a few of the categories that are relevant to my own subjective life. As you will see, my ideas have changed in various ways and have come under the influence of different authorities over time. And yet, certain themes have continued to focus my interest over the years: the constraints and forms of human transformation; the dialectic of tensions within and between people; the question of what is universal and what is particular in human life.

My own approach to understanding psychoanalytic work has always been open to not-knowing: it has been “subject to change.” I regard not-knowing as an active stance from which to engage with our moment-to-moment experience. I see it as a commitment to reveal ourselves openly and transparently, without too much rigidity or guardedness, so that life can teach us. We discover ourselves and the world by putting forth our thoughts, feelings and actions with a curiosity about how they are supported or resisted by others and the environment around us. The commitment is not only to be transparent, but to remain interested in the responses we get. Naturally, we do this only imperfectly and inconsistently. Not-knowing is a style, not an art or a science.

All of us, as adults, have beliefs and desires and theories about ourselves and others. Uncertainty about what we know keeps us honest and flexible. We can never possess a complete and precise understanding of subjective experience, neither our own nor another's, precisely because it is the lens through which we examine our subjectivity, as well as the subject matter itself. This circularity doesn't mean that psychoanalysis is doomed to subjectivism. To function as a systematic science of subjective life, psychoanalysis must stand for certain methods that govern our inquiry and allow us to craft an objective stance whereby we can make predictions, test our theories, and review our clinical practices. Objectivity is based on consensual agreements about the boundaries and domain of any science – its hypotheses, and the ways in which they are tested. There is no objective fact to be discovered outside of such an interpersonal context, as philosophers of science have clarified over the past two decades. As psychoanalysts we need to study ourselves, our therapeutic results, and our theories of personality so that we can continuously refine our views in a disciplined manner, consistent with our goals. But this refinement must be accompanied by ongoing debate, a knowledge of the limitations of our field (including the circularity of its subject matter), and a willingness to change as our understanding changes.

On a more personal level, when we (as practitioners or persons) believe that we already know exactly how things are with ourselves and others, we risk being defined by the emotional habits that drive us. If we are forever open to inquiry into what we might not know about ourselves and our lives, then we are more likely to become responsive to the complexity of our being.

Another meaning of the word “subject,” to which the title alludes, is the doer of an action or the receiver of an action. In psychoanalysis, we often refer to the subject as the thinking and acting agent, as distinguished from the object of desire or the passive victim of circumstances. This agent is free to change, to experience something which I call “subjective freedom,” permitting us to know ourselves well enough that our habits of mind don't weigh us down or trip us up in our movements through life. To know ourselves means becoming familiar with our unconscious and preconscious patterns and complexes until we become unashamedly accountable for the diversity of states within us, even for the reactions that seize us unawares.

Under these circumstances, even our impulses cannot make us wholly subject to their emotional power. We become what Jung has called a “psychological individual,” acknowledging the range and difficulty of our own personality, with a self-accepting willingness not to enact every feeling or impulse, but rather to return again and again to interpersonal inquiry about, and open-minded reflection on, ourselves and our motives. This subjective freedom is psychological, but depends on the political and social freedoms that allow for a self-determining life.

Subjective freedom leads to the possibility of spiritual freedom: the opportunity to engage in mature spiritual practices and inquiries. In my view, spirituality involves our attempts to answer the bigger questions about our existence: what's the meaning of life, why are we here, why do we die, how do we know what we know? Self-knowledge, self-acceptance and personal responsibility permit us to take ourselves into evermore expansive spiritual landscapes without fraying the edges of the relational fabric on which we depend. There is no religion or spiritual practice that does not rest on an ethic of personal responsibility in which an individual is accountable for her or his actions and expressions. This accountability, and its development into integrity, is the foundation of all mature spiritual or religious practices. Psychoanalysis encourages us to remain engaged in inquiry about ourselves and our motives in order to sharpen our sense of personal responsibility throughout life. It is not possible to know ourselves once and for all, but it is possible to cultivate an openness to inquiry that connects us again and again to both the particular and the universal meanings of a truly human life.

Change and constraint

The word “change” also has multiple meanings. In psychotherapy and life, change seems to be a fairly predictable process of transformation. Subjective life progresses through paradigms of structuring and restructuring of self/other and self/world. I have been very much influenced by structural developmental psychology that begins with the work of Jean Piaget and continues into a vast array of research and theory that includes important studies of moral and ego development.

Subjective life is always and everywhere constrained in both its patterns of change and its possibilities for openness. That sounds like the opposite of “uncertainty,” and in a way it is. As embodied human beings, we are all limited in certain aspects of our knowledge, our bodies (structures and functions) and our life span, our language and culture, and our awareness of ourselves. We are all shaped by our long dependency in childhood and its ambivalent emotional influences on our adult identities and relationships. We are all aware of our mortality from a young age and haunted by it throughout our adult years.

These universal constraints can be studied as archetypes, or primary imprints, on the human subject. To study these patterns scientifically we must, of course, include all types and variations of human subjects: people from all walks of life, different societies, different genders and races and ages, and so on. Only by including all can we trace the universal map of the real constraints on our subjectivity. Otherwise, we are dealing with “observer phenomena” the labels and categories that are imposed from the observer's viewpoint and culture, rather than expressed by the subject. To study the change process we must depend on each other, and our theories, in a process of inquiry. This is the essence of our clinical practice and the direction of our scientific development.

Beyond these universal constraints, though, the particularity of the human subject – the uniqueness of an individual person – makes for a kind of randomness in our experience. The human imagination develops in new and unpredictable ways over a lifetime and throughout centuries. In most of our daily life, though, these aspects of particularity are variations within a powerfully constrained world of human being and relating as persons to persons, other beings, and the world.

I regard change in the human subject as a “dialectic of development” in which opposites, tensions, splits and divisions, both within and outside the personality, are potentially available to new syntheses. When change is possible, we discover a third ground or a new perspective that integrates the original two opposites that were in tension. This occurs in all human relationships at all levels of family and society, as well as within individual reflection. But then new tensions and conflicts will always replace old ones, as we move on in our experience over the life span, just as new problems always replace old ones in human societies. Our insights and solutions are always partial and limited, no matter the accuracy of our machines and sciences, because of the limitations of the human subject. Psychoanalysis was designed specifically to study these limitations in a protected interpersonal environment. Discovering a third perspective in a conflict within or between people does not mean occupying an idealized middle ground. It means remaining open to inquiry and new discovery, as the title of the book suggests.

Jung, gender and subjectivity in psychoanalysis

The subtitle, on the other hand, narrows the field of my particular inquiry. It names those topics that have stayed with me over the years of my development as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. First, there is Jung and his psychology as they have developed within my own reflection and practice over the past twenty years. My roots are Jungian: I trained to become a Jungian analyst and began my serious study of psychoanalysis from that perspective. I call the discipline that I practice “psychoanalysis,” not to obscure the influence of Jungian theory and methods, nor to confuse Jung's contributions with Freud's or others, but rather to be accurate about the context of the work I do and think about. “Psychoanalysis” is the term that has survived in the public domain relating specifically to the study of unconscious life, both within the psychotherapeutic enterprise and in human development. Jung called his approach “analytical psychology” at a time when differing biases were seen as a reason to divorce one “school” from another. Now that the whole field of psychoanalysis has been attacked and devalued by various outside economic and cultural forces, it behooves us to function as a cooperative group, and to heal the step-family mentality that has hurt us badly. As psychoanalysts we need each other in many more ways than we need to be each other's enemies. For these reasons and more, I envision Jung's psychology and Jungian analysis to fall within the scope of the larger psychoanalytic circle (which is small enough).

The second topic in the subtitle, gender, has been a central focus of mine in studying and researching developmental psychology and in doing couples psychotherapy and individual therapy and analysis. Primarily, I have approached gender from a constructivist perspective: that gender categories are empty of any specific content, but are assigned based on body type at birth (or even earlier now) in order to move people into certain roles, identities, status, and jobs. Sex, by contrast, is a limit on our body type. Although people now manipulate that limit, they cannot wholly transcend it. Our sex presents us with inevitable constraints on our wishes and desires within a human society. Whereas gender is relatively flexible across contexts, and changes over the life span, sex is more inflexible and constant. The division of the human community into two gender groups, based on body architecture, leads to many tensions, divisions, and splits in the ways that people relate to themselves and each other – in couples, families and groups. This situation has deeply interested me throughout my career.

The final term of the subtitle, subjectivity, could have been exchanged for “personality” or “intersubjectivity,” but these latter two didn't sound as good to my ears, and didn't really cover the range that “subjectivity” does. Suffice it to say that my interests in subjectivity encompass both the ways in which the human personality forms and functions as an apparent unity – what we call “self” – and how this illusion of singularity and unity always rests on, and is rooted in, self-other functioning. What has interested me throughout my years of study and practice in psychology and life is that the self and the other – not the individual mind, brain, or body – are the fundamental subjective unit, both in our earliest becoming (we come into being inside of someone else) and in every moment in which we conceive of a self. The “other” in this case may be a person, another being, or the environment; it is whatever is providing the contrast to “self” in a moment of perception. Along these lines, I want to introduce my own version of the human self as an action that makes us feel and perceive ourselves as individual subjects. If I could change our language, I would cast the self as a verb rather than a noun. I hope that this account of self will set the tone for the remainder of the book.

Some personal background

I need first to begin with my own background. I started my training to be a Jungian analyst in 1979. Eight (or so) years before that, I had become a student of Zen Buddhism. In my twenties, as I was at that time, I blithely assumed that everything that interested me should fit nicely into a seamless fabric of meaning. Over the years, I have been forced to sew many seams into that fabric. Indeed, my fabric of meaning is a veritable patchwork quilt of highly contrasting pieces combined into a pattern that emphasizes and blends differences. Back in 1979, my seamless fabric was rudely ripped apart when many of my analytic colleagues, especially my Jungian colleagues, were suspicious of Zen as an alien philosophy that produced a disengaged stance. My Zen colleagues were also suspicious of psychotherapists who were “restoring the ego to equilibrium” – as they were described – rather than making it more transparent and fluid. This was before Buddhism became a popular middle-class American religion and the Dalai Lama was a worldwide celebrity. In the 1980s, I stayed in the closet as a Buddhist, as many other psychoanalysts did, as became clear in the late 1990s when the closet doors opened.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, I found that Western postmodern philosophy helped to close the gap in my conceptual understanding between psychology and meditation. I became the Jungian poster child for “constructivism” and “phenomenological hermeneutics” in relation to such concepts as self, instinct, archetype, complex, and therapeutic action. I read and studied contemporary philosophical arguments and engaged in many debates about what might be useful, valid, and reasonable to say about the self, clinically and developmentally. I want to summarize now what I have gleaned in fitting together a couple of pieces in my quilt that connect my experiences in psychoanalysis, psychology, psychotherapy, meditation, and philosophy.

Self and no-self as verbs

I regard the human self as an “action” or a “function” of a “person.” The self does not “do” any actions or think any thoughts; it is the person who does these things. In the 1980s I began to hold a strong distinction between self and person, having read what was then called “philosophy of the person,” especially the contributions of Rom Harrè (1984: 76) who wrote: “I propose … a distinction between the individuality of a human being as it is publicly identified and collectively defined and the individuality of the unitary subject of experience.”

“Persons,” claimed Harrè, “are identified by public criteria” that emphasize the “intentionality of their actions and speeches” and are interpreted “within a social framework of interpersonal commitments rather than as the outward expression of some inner state.” Selves, on the other hand, are “psychological individuals, manifested in the unified organization of perceptions, feelings and beliefs of each human being … organized in that fashion.” He added that there may also be human beings who are “organized in some non-unitary way” (pp. 76-77). Although this early distinction now seems awkward and more than a little abstract, it initiated a process of clarification in my own thinking that has been refined through my meditative and clinical practices in the last two decades, as well as the theories connected to each.

In formal discussions of psychoanalysis, I frequently find that the distinction between self and person is unfortunately erased, leading to unnecessary confusions and awkward descriptions. This is true even though Roy Schafer (1978: 86, for instance) offered many cogent critiques of our self-language more than twenty years ago. For example, he wrote: “The self is … something one learns to conceptualize in one's capacity as agent; it is not a door of actions. In this light, we can see that Heinz Kohut [1971] and other analytic theoreticians of the self have been wrong in speaking of the experiential self as playing its own regulatory role in human action.”

When we make the mistake of saying that the “self,” rather than the person, is intending, feeling or doing, we lose our ability to be precise and convincing in our descriptions of how we work with subjective life. Instead of regarding the self as an action of a person, the self is then named as the actor, opening the door to all sorts of confusions in our conversations with one another.

These problems are nowhere thornier or more troublesome than in our attempts to develop a dialogue between practitioners of psychoanalysis and practitioners of Buddhism, an important conversation of the twenty-first century between two different (and sometimes similar) systematic approaches to subjectivity. We find ourselves at a special loss to describe the actions of a person who has reached states of non-separateness or “no-self.” If we speak of the self as actor, then who is the actor when there is no self? The relational psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell (2003: 96), for example, in a written dialogue with a psychologist who is also a Buddhist teacher, comments on the “centeredness” of such no-self states by asking “Who then is the one who is centered? Is this not a version of the self?” Another example of this confusion is in an essay by Zen teacher and psychoanalyst Barry Magid, who wants to describe what is constant and familiar in his own Zen teacher, although she exemplifies the unfixed no-self in her actions and expressions. Reaching for a way to characterize this seeming paradox of her being, Magid (2003: 295) quotes another Zen teacher, Robert Aitken Roshi, who describes the liberated person in the following way: “The self is still present – but it is not self-preoccupied. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction Changing the subject – the self as a verb
• Part 1 Subjectivity and uncertainty
• Part 2 Gender and desire
• Part 3 Transference and transformation
• Part 4 Transcendence and subjectivity
• Bibliography
• Index