Commuting Theory
As the weather has shifted from spring into summer, I have lately been trying to take the time to walk or run into my office. Part of the responsibility I have tasked myself with is not merely to use this time listening to my usual rotation of political podcasts, but to reintroduce some long-form psychoanalytic listening. As such, I have lately found myself going through old and recent episodes of New Books in Psychoanalysis and Berlin Psychoanalytic. I want to spend a little time today responding to a couple items I had been listening to lately. The first will be from Berlin Psychoanalytic and a criticism of projective identification I found somewhat unsatisfying and want to challenge. The second will be from a New Books interview with Irwin Hirsch, which struck me as a great piece of spontaneous thinking through as he offered a response to a question posed by that episode’s host.
The projective identification piece was a short stand-alone episode from the analyst Dr. Leon Brenner. Dr. Brenner offers a scathing polemic against the use of the “erratically interpreted” and “unforgivably oversimplified” idea of projective identification.
Brenner begins with a short history of the concept, outlining its origins in the work of Melanie Klein. For Klein, projective identification was an experience that was contained to the early developmental phase of the paranoid-schizoid position. This version of projective identification was a response to the infant’s need to split off good and bad parts, given the underdeveloped aspects of their ego. For the infant, the only way to deal with their own angry and aggressive impulses is to split these off and project them into the mother, leading to a fear of the persecutory nature of the parent, thus the “paranoid” part of the paranoid-schizoid position. Though for Klein, these states are not “actually” projected, and these complex interactional patterns are resolved as the infant matures into the depressive position, leaving projective identification exclusively to the realm of early infant development and the severely regressed states of the psychotic.
Wilfred Bion, a student of Klein’s, then extends these ideas, bringing them somewhat closer to the problematic usages that Brenner notes animus towards. For Bion, these states are “actually put into the parent” and, crucially, Bion extends this possibility into the psychoanalytic relationship. Bion develops the idea of the container and contained. For Bion, the observation is that the infant brings a considerable amount of unprocessed affect into the relationship that cannot be made sense of by the infant. The infant subsequently projects these into the mother, who absorbs and tolerates them, thereby returning them in a more bearable form to the infant. Clinically, this maps onto the analytic relationship, where it is believed that it can be the responsibility of the analyst to do the same.
Brenner has a lot of problems with the idea of this being a measurable or grounded way of thinking about communication. He fears there is something too magical or a kind of “quasi-telepathy” at play in this dynamic. He uses the fictive notion of “the empath” to criticize the possibility of this kind of communication, sharing a sense that any communication that is understood as taking place beyond the realm of language cannot be useful for the process of analysis and reliance on countertransference can only lead to a wild analysis. He also offers the suggestion that any sharing of the analyst’s states in this regard can only lead to a usurping of the analysand’s subjectivity and forces the subjectivity of the analyst onto the analysand.
This all, obviously, diverges meaningfully from the contemporary relationally informed approach I often write about here. I won’t offer a full response to Brenner’s points, but I do want to highlight a couple of immediate thoughts that arose and felt like they were too quickly dismissed by Brenner in his criticism. The first is the idea that outside of language there is only a limited amount of communication that can happen between human beings and between bodies. Brenner’s primary criticism seemed to be that there has not been much successful study of embodied communication between people (he seems to think yawning contagion is the only real replicable form of nonverbal communication people can participate in). It seems to me the major criticism here is about the limitations of what gets studied in academic psychology and what can be realistically be studied in those spaces. However, the notion that certain types of nonverbal communication cannot be real simply because they have not been proven to be so in an operationalized and falsifiable way seems quite limited.
For one, as our tools for measuring the brain become more and more sophisticated, there seems to be a growing body of evidence suggesting that human beings are wired for all kinds of communication, not just communication symbolized through speech. The idea that, even neurologically, there are ways in which humans might communicate through subtle and largely undetectable shifts in embodied presence, or other subliminal modes of interaction, feels to me obvious. And it seems weird that someone who spends a considerable amount of time across from people, attempting to make sense of what they are unconsciously organizing at any given point, would not be able to draw on personal examples of feeling as though there was some presence emerging in the interaction that could not be fully understood to be that of the analyst or the analysand, but was rather some communication of emotion arising between the two of them, grounded largely in unconscious emotional processes.
I also want to take some exception to the idea that the only way to work within the countertransference and bring those ideas to bear on the relationship is by usurping or overwhelming the subjectivity of the other. Interpersonal, relational, and intersubjective practitioners are exceedingly careful and thoughtful about how they encourage clinicians to use their subjectivity and countertransference in the context of therapeutic practice. Whether it is freely sharing one’s thoughts or finding one’s self in an enactment that is demanding commentary, the idea that one’s experience should be shared in these settings is intended to be done in a way that invites the reflective and subjective presence of the other. This argument is actually so sloppy as to have me wondering if it is a deliberate straw manning of relational technique or merely a poorly considered bias of Brenner’s. But the kind of interventions the discipline encourages, whereby careful analysis of the relationship is made to determine the degree to which this kind of sharing could be tolerated, while making sure to language these disclosures in a way that promotes creative dialogue around them, seems to me like a clear example of explicating the intersubjective nature of human interaction. All said, whatever the merits of Brenner's theoretical objections, his critique of relational technique reads as either a deliberate straw man or a poorly considered bias and, in either case, transparently underinformed.
The other moment I wanted to highlight briefly comes from an interaction in an early episode of the New Books podcast, where they invited Irwin Hirsch on to talk about his book Coasting in the Countertransference. There comes a point in the podcast where the host asks Hirsch about “the analyst’s need to be loved”. Hirsch, consistent with a theme he had identified and been expanding upon throughout the conversation quickly notes the importance of the analyst’s own theoretical biases in determining what it might even be to “be loved” in the first place. He observes, I think quite correctly, that a clinician that prioritizes empathy as a theoretical ground for their own work might have a sense that a true empathic resonance is the road to admiration and love from the client. Conversely, for a client working in a model that feels unlocking unconscious aggression might only feel they can be “truly loved” by a client who is willing to bring aggression into the therapeutic relationship. Hirsch’s point is that even something like “What does it mean to be loved and/or admired as an analyst?” is not immune to the subjective biases the analyst brings to the work.
The response from Hirsch seemed to me remarkably thoughtful and one of those moments where I often feel the deep sense of privilege of being in the presence of someone with a strong sense of craft, conceptual understanding, and a real mastery in the practice of talking about psychoanalysis. It’s such a subtle way of reframing the question, yet produces an interesting string of possibilities and enhances the conversation in a way that you can even hear it pleasantly surprise the host. Hirsch deftly shows that even a benign question, to compare to the Brenner point we were just speaking, cannot be fully separated from the analyst’s own personality structure and desires as they manifest in human relationships. It’s a quick observational note in a longer episode that I think warrants listening for anyone intrigued by relational modes of practice. It’s an interesting conversation between two practitioners coming from different, and occasionally opposed, theoretical schools and serves as a great opportunity to be in the presence of someone who appears to be an uncommonly warm and incisive conversationalist.
