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From the time I was six or seven years old, I was aware of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment for psychological problems, such as feeling unhappy and frightened all the time; but it was not until I was 16, on reading Freud’s (1916–1917) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, that I first discovered psychoanalysis as a set of ideas concerning how we come to be who we are. In using the term discovered, I am borrowing a word from a memorable sentence in that introductory lecture series: “I shall not, however, tell it [psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method] to you but shall insist on your discovering it yourself” (1916–1917, p. 431). How better to be introduced to psychoanalysis than by means of an invitation not to be taught, but to discover?
I have spent a good deal of my life since that initial discovery rediscovering psychoanalysis. In an important sense, a psychoanalytic life cannot be spent in any other way. After all, psychoanalysis, both as a set of ideas and as a therapeutic method, is from beginning to end a process of thinking and rethinking, dreaming and re-dreaming, discovering and rediscovering.
The thread that weaves through every page of this book is the idea that it is the analyst’s task to engage in a process of rediscovering psychoanalysis in everything that he or she does: in each analytic session, in each supervisory hour, in each meeting of a psychoanalytic seminar, in each reading of an analytic work, and so on.
Rediscovering psychoanalysis entails an act of freedom of thought and an act of humility; an act of renewal and an act of fresh discovery; an act of thinking for oneself and an act of recognition that
no one who attempts to put forward to-day his views on hysteria and its psychical basis [or any other aspect of psychoanalysis] can avoid repeating a great quantity of other people’s thoughts . . . Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the following pages.
(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895, pp. 185–186)
In this book, I will discuss three overlapping and interwoven forms of my own experience of rediscovering psychoanalysis: (1) creating psychoanalysis freshly in the process of talking with each patient in each analytic session; (2) rediscovering psychoanalysis in the experience of supervising and teaching psychoanalysis; and (3) “dreaming up” psychoanalysis for oneself in the act of reading and writing about analytic texts and literary works. Although I discuss each of these forms of rediscovery as separate subjects, the topics refuse to keep an orderly queue: thoughts on supervision creep into discussions of talking with patients; close readings of analytic texts invite themselves into discussions of supervision and teaching; responses to creative literature show up in analytic case discussions; and so on. In fact, all three of these forms of rediscovering psychoanalysis are in conversation with one another in each section of this chapter and in each of the succeeding chapters of this book.
Rediscovering psychoanalysis in the experience of talking with patients
A principal medium, perhaps the principal medium, in which I have the opportunity and the responsibility to engage in the work of rediscovering psychoanalysis (and, in so doing, rediscovering what it is to be a psychoanalyst) is the work of being with and talking with patients. Specifically, I view it as my role to create psychoanalysis freshly with each patient in each session of the analysis. A critically important aspect of this rediscovery of psychoanalysis is the creation of ways of talking with each patient that are unique to that patient in that moment of the analysis. When I speak of talking differently with each patient, I am referring not simply to the unselfconscious use of different tones of voice, rhythms of speech, choice of words, types of formality and informality, and so on, but also to particular ways of being with, and communicating with, another person that could exist between no other two people on this planet.
There are occasions when I am more aware than usual that the patient and I are talking in a way that I talk with no other person in my life. At these moments I have a strong feeling that I am a fortunate man to be able to spend so much of my life inventing with another person ways of talking about what is most important to the patient and to me. In this experience, I am being drawn upon, and am drawing upon myself, emotionally and intellectually, in ways that do not occur in any other part of my life. In this regard, Searles has put into words what I have often felt and thought but have not often had the courage to say, much less write. In discussing an experience that occurred in the psychotherapy of a schizophrenic patient, Searles (1959) states (in a way that only he could have put it), “While we were sitting in silence and a radio not far away was playing a tenderly romantic song . . . I suddenly felt that this man [the patient] was dearer to me than anyone else in the world, including my wife” (p. 294). (See Chapter 8 for a discussion of this and other aspects of Searles’s contribution to psychoanalysis.)
It requires a very long time – in my experience, something on the order of a decade or two of full-time clinical practice – to mature as an analyst to a point where one is able, with some consistency, to talk with each of one’s patients in a way that is uniquely one’s own, and unique to that moment in the analytic conversation with that particular patient. One must have thoroughly learned psychoanalytic technique before one is in a position to “forget it” – that is, to rediscover it for oneself. Talking with patients in the way I am describing requires that the analyst pay very careful attention to the analytic frame. When I am able to speak with a patient in this way, it feels to me that I have ceased “making interpretations” and offering other forms of “analytic interventions,” and am instead “simply talking” with the patient. “Simply talking” to a patient, in my experience, usually involves “talking simply” – that is, talking in a simple, clear way that is free of cliché, jargon, and “therapeutic” and other “knowing” tones of voice.
A recent experience in supervision comes to mind in this regard. A seasoned analyst consulted me regarding an analysis that he felt had “ground to a halt.” He told me about the various types of interpretations that he had made, none of which seemed to be of any value to the patient. As he spoke, I found myself feeling curious about the analyst. He seemed like an “odd duck” in an interesting and appealing way. Where had he grown up? Probably in the South – maybe Tennessee. What sort of boy had he been? Maybe a little lost, doing the right thing, but with a rebellious streak that he kept a well-guarded secret.
I said to the analyst that it seemed to me that the only thing he had not tried was talking to the patient. I suggested that he stop interpreting and, instead, try simply to talk with the patient as a person who had come to him with the hope and the fear of talking about what was most disturbing in her life. He responded by saying, “You mean I should stop doing analysis with this patient?” I responded by saying, “Yes, if ‘doing analysis’ means speaking and listening as the analyst you already know how to be. Why don’t you see what it would feel like to be an analyst with the patient who is different from the analyst you’ve been for any other patient you’ve ever worked with?”
At the end of the consultation session, the analyst said that he felt at a loss to know how to proceed with his patient. I thought that this response to the consultation was a good indication that the analyst had made use of our conversation. When we next met six weeks later, the analyst told me that after our consultation, he felt so lost that during the sessions with his patient that took place in the weeks immediately following the one he had read to me, he found himself saying very little. “Instead, I tried to listen for what I’ve been missing. Being quiet helped clear my mind, but straining to listen in that way, session after session, was exhausting. I found myself dreading the patient’s sessions.” The analyst then told me that at the beginning of a session about a month after our consultation, he finally “gave up” and asked the patient, “How can I be of help to you today?” He said that the patient seemed surprised by his question and responded by saying, “I’m so glad you asked me that. I’ve been feeling like such a failure at psychoanalysis that I’ve been thinking for a long time that I shouldn’t waste your time. I just don’t know how to think and talk the way you do. I was afraid before coming here today that you would tell me that you would be ending the analysis.” The patient was silent for a couple of minutes and then said, “If you really meant what you said, what I’d like your help with is how to be a better mother to my children. I’ve been a dreadful mother.”
The analyst then told me that for the first time in a very long time he had found what the patient was saying in that session to be genuinely interesting. I was reminded of my own curiosity and imaginings about the analyst in the first consultation session. It seemed to me in retrospect that I was “dreaming up” the analyst in response to his difficulty in “dreaming himself up” as an analyst in his own terms. The analyst responded to his patient by saying, “I think that you are full of dread when you try to be a mother and that makes you feel like a dreadful mother. I think that you find that trying to be a mother is not at all the same as simply being a mother. I think it terrifies you to feel that you have no idea how to go about just being a mother in a way that feels natural to you.”
I said to the analyst that there was no doubt in my mind that he and the patient had begun to talk with one another in a way that they had never before talked with one another, and that it seemed possible to me that neither of them had ever in their lives talked with anyone else in quite that way.
In the sequence described, it was necessary for the analyst to rediscover for himself the experience of becoming an analyst by “giving up” on being the analyst he already knew how to be. In so doing, the analyst began to be able to make room in himself for the experience of being at a loss to know how to be an analyst – how to listen to and how to talk with the patient. The patient was clearly relieved by her conscious and unconscious perception that the analyst had become better able to think and talk for himself and to live with the experience of being a “dreadful analyst” who had no idea what he was doing. It was only at that point that the patient was able to recognize and talk about her feeling of being a dreadful mother. Of course, what I have quoted is not taken from a transcript of what the patient and the analyst said; rather, it is my construction of the analyst’s construction of what occurred in the session. This is not a deficiency inherent in the method of enquiry I am using; it is an important element of that method in that it helps capture something of what was true to what occurred at an unconscious level in the analysis, in the supervision, and in the relationship between the analytic experience and the supervisory experience. (In Chapter 3, I discuss this and other aspects of the analytic supervisory experience.)
In discussing this supervisory experience, I have used the term dreaming in the phrase ‘“dreaming up” the analyst.’ The conception of dreaming that underlies the idea of dreaming up another person or dreaming oneself into being plays a fundamental role in all that follows in this book. In the tradition of Bion (1962a), I use the term dreaming to refer to unconscious psychological work that one does with one’s emotional experience. This work of dreaming is achieved by means of a conversation between different aspects of the personality (for example, Freud’s [1900] unconscious and preconscious mind, Bion’s [1957] psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality, Grotstein’s [2000] “dreamer who dreams the dream” and the “dreamer who understands a dream,” and Sandler’s [1976] “dream-work” and “understanding work”). When an individual’s emotional experience is so disturbing that he is unable to dream it (i.e. to do unconscious psychological work with it), he requires the help of another person to dream his formerly undreamable experience. Under these circumstances, it requires two people to think. In the analytic setting, the other person is the analyst; in supervision, it is the supervisor; and in a seminar setting, it is the group leader and the work group mentality (Bion, 1959).
Dreaming occurs continually both during sleep and in waking life, although we have little awareness of our dreaming while we are awake. Reverie (Bion, 1962a; see also Ogden, 1997a,b) and free association constitute forms of preconscious waking dreaming. Dreaming conceived of in this way is not a process of making the unconscious conscious (i.e. making derivatives of the unconscious available to conscious secondary process thinking); rather, it is a process of making the conscious unconscious (i.e. making conscious lived experience available to the richer thought processes involved in unconscious psychological work) (Bion, 1962a). Dreaming is the process by which we attribute personal symbolic meaning to our lived experience, and, in this sense, we dream ourselves and other people into existence. By extension, when an analyst helps a patient or a supervisee to dream his formerly undreamable experience, he is assisting the patient or supervisee in dreaming himself into existence (as an individual or as an analyst).
With this conception of dreaming in mind, I will turn to a form of rediscovery of psychoanalysis that occurred in the course of my work with patients who have very little, if any, capacity for waking dreaming (for example, free association) in the analytic setting. After years of analytic work with a number of such patients, I have found myself (without conscious intention) engaging in seemingly “unanalytic” conversations with these analysands about books, plays, art exhibits, politics, and so on. It took me some time to realize that many of these conversations constituted a form of waking dreaming which I came to think of as “talking-as-dreaming.” These conversations tended to be loosely structured, marked by mixtures of primary and secondary process thinking and replete with apparent non sequiturs. “Talking-as-dreaming” superficially appears to be unanalytic; but, to my mind, in the analyses to which I am referring, it represented a significant achievement in that it was often the first form of conversation to take place in these analyses that felt real and alive to both the patient and me.
As time went on in the work with these patients, talking-as-dreaming became established as a natural part of the give-and-take of the analytic relationship and began to move unobtrusively into and out of “talking about dreaming” – that is, self-reflective talk about what was occurring in the analytic relationship and in other parts of the patient’s life (past and present). These patients experienced their enhanced capacity to dream and to think and talk about their dreaming as an experience of “waking up” to themselves. Once able to “wake up,” their relationship to their waking and sleeping dreaming was profoundly altered – they could begin to think about their dreams as expressions of personal symbolic meaning. In our “discovery” of talking-as-dreaming, these patients and I were rediscovering dreaming and free association.
Dreaming up psychoanalysis in analytic supervision and teaching
Analytic supervision and the teaching of psychoanalysis in a seminar setting have been, for me, important forms of analytic work in which rediscovery of psychoanalysis takes place. I view not only the clinical practice of psychoanalysis but also analytic supervision and teaching as forms of “guided dream[ing]” (Borges, 1970a, p. 13). In analytic supervision and in case presentations that take place in the seminar setting, it is the task of the supervisory pair and the seminar group to “dream up” the patient whose analysis is being discussed. The patient being presented is not the person who lies down on the couch in the analyst’s consulting room. Rather, the patient is a fiction, a character in a story that the supervisee or presenter is creating (dreaming up) in the process of presenting the case. The creation of a fiction is not to be confused with lying. In fact, the two, in the sense I am using the terms, are opposites. Since the analyst cannot bring the patient to the supervisory meeting or to the seminar, he must create in words a fiction that conveys the emotional truth of the experience that he is living with his patient.
From this perspective, the presenter consciously and unconsciously not only tells, but also shows, the supervisor (or seminar group) the limits of his capacity to dream (to do conscious and unconscious psychological work with) what is occurring in the analysis. The function of the supervisor and the seminar group is that of helping the analyst to dream aspects of the experience with the patient that the analyst has been unable to dream.
Regardless of how many times I take part in the experience of dreaming with a patient, a supervisee, or a presenter, I am each time taken by surprise by the psychological event, and each time find that I have rediscovered the concept of projective identification. Projective identification at its core is a conception of one person participating in thinking/dreaming what another person has been unable to think/dream on his own. I have spent the past thirty-five years rediscovering this concept.
I will close this section by briefly mentioning two areas of ongoing discovery and rediscovery that take place in the context of my experience as an analytic supervisor and teacher of psychoanalysis. The first of these rediscoveries, to which I alluded earlier in this chapter, involves my recognizing that the role of the supervisor and seminar leader is that of assisting the supervisee or seminar member to overcome what he has learned about psychoanalysis in order genuinely to begin the process of becoming a psychoanalyst in his own terms.
The second of these ongoing rediscoveries is my recognizing how critical to my method of teaching psychoanalysis is my practice of reading aloud, line by line, sentence by sentence, the entirety of the analytic or literary text being studied (being read closely). In the next section of this chapter, I will demonstrate what I mean by a close reading of a piece of writing. I have found that reading texts aloud in this way allows the seminar members and me to hear and feel the ways in which the sound of the words, the voice of the speaker, the author’s word choice, the rhythm and structure of the sentences, and so on, together create emotional effects that are inseparable from the content of what is being said. In hearing the sentences read aloud, it becomes clear that words are not merely carrying cases for ideas. Rather, words – whether it be the words of an analytic text, a poem, a short story, a patient’s comment to the analyst in the waiting room, or the analyst’s response to a patient’s dream – do not simply re-present the writer’s/speaker’s experience, they create an experience for the first time in the very act of being read/spoken/heard.
Analytic reading and writing as forms of “dreaming up” psychoanalysis
Writing about analytic works, poetry, and other imaginative literature has been critical to my development as an analyst, and has served as an important medium in which I continue to rediscover psychoanalysis. In this book, I offer close readings of analytic papers by Loewald and Searles; transcripts of clinical seminars conducted by Bion; a passage from a short story by Lydia Davis; some comments on novels by DeLillo and Coetzee; and a monologue from the film Raising Arizona. In these discussions, I am not simply explicating the work of Loewald, Searles, Bion, and others. I am “dreaming up” the works for myself and then inviting the reader to do the same, both with the text about which I am writing and with my “dreamt-up” version of that text. When I speak of “dreaming up” a text, I am referring to the conscious and unconscious psychological work of making something of one’s own with the text one is reading. In this process, the text is the starting point for the reader’s own creative act that is unique to him and reflects his own “peculiar mentality” (Bion, 1987, p. 224).
When I begin to write about an analytic text, I have only a vague sense of what I think about the aspect of psychoanalysis that the text addresses. I write to find out what I think. I aspire in my writing about analytic texts to do with the text something that is, in some small measure, akin to what Glenn Gould (1974) said that he tried to do with each piece of music he played: “I recreate the work. I turn performance into composition.” Similarly, in writing about an analytic text (for example, individual works of Bion, Loewald, and Searles in Chapters 5, 7, and 8, respectively) or an analyst’s life-work (Bion’s theory of thinking in Chapter 6), I try to turn close critical reading and writing into composition, I attempt to turn the author’s discovery into a discovery of my own. My discovery, my act of dreaming up the text, is different from, and sometimes at odds with, the discovery/dream that the author is making.
Let me elaborate here on the way I am using the term dreaming. In waking life, our conscious thinking is, to a very large extent, limited by sequential, cause-and-effect, secondary process logic. In our dream-life, we are able to engage in a far more profound type of thinking. In dreaming, one is “able to imagine with a freedom . . . [one] does not have in waking” (Borges, 1980, p. 34). We are able, while dreaming, to view a situation from many points of view (and points in time) simultaneously. A single figure or situation in a dream may encompass a lifetime of experiences – both real and imagined – with one or with many people. The dreamer has the opportunity to rework the situation – to try it this way and that way, to view it from this perspective and that perspective, separately and together. The dreamer brings to bear upon his rendering of an emotional situation in a dream the most primitive and the most mature aspects of himself, and, most importantly, these aspects of the self talk to one another in a mutually transformative way.
What we dream when we are asleep is a rediscovery of our waking experience, a rediscovery that not only sheds light on that lived experience, but transforms it into something new, something with which we can do unconscious psychological work. That psychological work (the work of dreaming) is work that we have not been able to achieve in the more limited medium of waking thinking.
This broadened conception of dreaming will serve as a framework for a greater understanding of what I mean by dreaming a text in the act of reading it and writing about it. In writing about Loewald’s (1979) “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex” (Chapter 7), I am not only concerned with what Loewald thought, I am interested in what I can do with what Loewald wrote. It might be said that Loewald had a dream-thought, and that his act of writing his paper was his dreaming that thought. Once dreamt/written, Loewald’s dream/paper becomes a “dream-thought” that I have the opportunity to dream in the act of reading it and writing about it. It is only to the extent that I am able to dream (“recreate”) Loewald’s paper as my dream that there is any reason for a reader to read my work, and not simply read Loewald’s and leave it at that.
In talking about dreaming an analytic text, I am reminded of Borges’s comment, “Dreams . . . ask us something, and we don’t know how to answer, they give us the answer, and we are astonished” (Borges, 1980, p. 35). The “answer” that we get from dreaming in the act of critical reading and writing is not the solution to a puzzle; it is the beginning of a creative act in its own right. Moreover, in saying, “Dreams ask us something,” Borges, I believe, is suggesting that dreams ask something of us. For example, an analytic text, when viewed as a dream-thought, is a thought asking to be dreamt by the critical reader or writer. When the dream-thought is an analytic text, the “answer” (more accurately, the response) is psychoanalysis rediscovered in the reader’s or the critical writer’s own terms.
To illustrate what I mean when I say that reading and writing are forms of dreaming, I will briefly discuss a couple of sentences taken from the end of a short story by Lydia Davis (2007), “What You Learn About the Baby”:
How responsible he is, to the limits of his capacity . . . How he is curious, to the limits of his understanding; how he attempts to approach what arouses his curiosity, to the limits of his motion; how confident he is, to the limits of his knowledge; how masterful he is, to the limits of his competence; how he derives satisfaction from another face before him, to the limits of his attention; how he asserts his needs, to the limits of his force.
(Davis, 2007, p. 124)
The title of the story, “What You Learn About the Baby,” frames everything that follows, including the final lines just cited. It is a remarkable title, not for what it says, but for what it withholds. Virtually every word of the six-word title contributes to its somewhat eerie emotional restraint: What [could there be a less descriptive word?] you [a surprisingly impersonal pronoun that takes the place of “I”] learn about [not “learn from” or “learn with,” much less “get to know”] the [not the possessive pronouns “my” or “your,” but the chillingly impersonal article, “the”] baby.
Despite the chill created by this use of language, these final sentences of the story are quite beautiful. The repetition (seven times) of clauses or sentences that begin with the word how, and are divided in the middle by a comma, creates a sound and rhythm suggestive of a lullaby. But this is no ordinary lullaby. Words are meticulously being refined, for example, as the word responsible is qualified by the phrase to the limits of his capacity, and the word curious is carefully pruned by the phrase to the limits of his understanding.
And this is no ordinary mother. (The reader is never told whether the speaker is a mother or whether the speaker is a man or a woman. I will indicate with a question mark where I am making a conjecture about something left in doubt in the story.) The speaker (mother?), with her (?) highly crafted use of language, is at once tightly holding the baby, and holding him at arm’s length; at once tender, perspicaciously observant, and emotionally distant; at once devoted to the baby, and perhaps even more devoted to writing “about the baby.”
What is being raised in this passage, and in the story as a whole, is the never spoken question, “Is the speaker a mother-who-is-a-writer or a writer-who-is-a-mother?” No doubt the answer is both, but that does not solve the emotional problem created in the writing: How is the speaker to be both completely a writer (which, to my ear, is no doubt the case) and completely a mother (about which there is some doubt)?
The speaker succeeds in finding at least a partial solution to this emotional problem by accepting her strangeness as a mother – what kind of mother allows herself to talk about “the baby” (instead of “my baby”) or parses words with such subtlety in describing her (?) baby? The acceptance of her (?) own strangeness (as reflected in the ease and grace with which she writes such oddly motherly things) seems to allow the speaker also to accept the strangeness of her (?) baby – babies are indeed very strange creatures.
The pleasure that this mother (?) takes in her (?) baby includes a profound appreciation of the ironies that saturate his situation in life: “How masterful he is, to the limits of his competence.” The words how masterful carry the double meaning of a question (how masterful?) and an appreciation (how masterful!). Whether it is a part of a question or an expression of amazement, the word masterful bumps awkwardly, humorously into the phrase to the limits of his competence. The use of irony here seems to me to convey a sense of the way in which the writerliness of the mother (?) provides a psychological/literary sanctuary into which the speaker may go when she needs a rest from her (?) baby, a place the infant cannot conceive of, a place into which he is not invited.
The sequence of clauses culminates in what, for me, is the most powerful of the observations: “how he asserts his needs, to the limits of his force.” The word force (the final word of the story) is a surprising word – darkly ominous. The word stands in stark contrast with the six words that have stood in a similar place in the six previous clauses: “capacity,” “understanding,” “motion,” “knowledge,” “competence,” “attention.” The word force breaks the rules of constraint that have held sway up to this point: all bets are off, no previous “understandings” between mother (?) and infant (or between writer and reader) hold. The baby will use every means available to him to get what he needs. There will be no compromises; there will be no sanctuaries in which to find respite from the baby.
The subtle mixture of feelings and complexity of voice in this passage defies paraphrase. Responding to this passage, in the act of writing/dreaming it, is, for me, an experience of rediscovering “primary maternal preoccupation” (Winnicott, 1956), the mother’s healthy hatred of her baby, the analyst’s healthy hatred of his patient (Winnicott, 1947); it is also an experience in psychoanalytic “ear training” (Pritchard, 1994); and, perhaps most of all, it is an experience of emotionally responding to, and making something of my own with, the extraordinary beauty and power of language artfully used.
I will now leave it to the reader to dream this book, to dream my dream-thought, to make something of his or her own in the experience of reading.