Thrown into Contact: Trauma, Afterwardsness, and the Relational Encounter
The below is an excerpt from a conference at which I was recently a respondent. The primary paper was a recently published article called “Future tense: Permacrisis, falling out of the world, and our existential moment” by the psychoanalyst Alfred Margulies. The paper threads together Heidegger and Freud’s notions of the uncanny in really poetic and clinically substantive ways. If you can track down a copy I highly suggest you read it.
Over the course of his paper, Al gives us a series of case vignettes which are quite literally “life and death”: a war veteran, a young woman with metastatic cancer, and a Holocaust survivor. These vignettes move and shock us into a recognition of the very phenomena the paper attempts to illuminate, doing—in some ways—exactly what the text endeavors to describe. Allowing ourselves to become absorbed in the vicarious experience of these respective traumas, we as readers are left changed in their aftermath, our conceptual understanding of the relationship between time and the uncanny coming into full focus by the repercussion of these narratives within our own reflective processes. Throughout we are exposed to the strangeness of trauma, to the very fact of trauma’s quality of estranging us from the usually organized structures in which we attempt to operate—alienating us from the referential totality that so often consumes and distracts us from the more complicated projects of living.
However, what I will here call an “admission” occurs about a quarter of the way through the paper, lost to me the first time I heard Al deliver the version of this paper he presented at the Loewald conference a couple years ago, followed as it is by a particularly striking quote from Paul Russell about the unconscious being “that which awaits us”. As I was rereading the paper, I discovered my thoughts organizing around a passage found just prior to the Russell quote. In setting up the section where Al begins to formulate some ideas on the phenomenon of “afterwardsness” he says the following: “Because of the terrible clarity of trauma, it is where I begin this exploration—but with hesitation: my realization is that shock, strangeness, and afterwardsness unfold on a spectrum of existential significance not necessarily tied to trauma as we usually define and understand it. But it is this larger perspective about everyday living and its disruptions, some big, some fleeting and barely perceptible, that I am after.”
I want to take this perhaps one step further in terms of our interest in the impact of this idea. I submit that we not merely concern ourselves with the afterwardsness of the disruptions of everyday living, important though they are, but that we should, in fact, consider that the very process of doing therapy might itself be well understood as unfolding within this dialectical tension between order and disorder; the canny and the uncanny; the strange and familiar; and that it is in the afterwardsness of the psychotherapeutic encounter, specifically as it is positioned within the therapist’s ability to attend to and find some resolution to the internal experience of existential dislocation arising from the enactments of that encounter, from authentically being-with another, that something like psychoanalysis or existential therapy become possible. It is in our ability to play in these dialectical tensions, rather than feeling subjected to their complexity or compelled to indulge the desire for an easy simplification of their paradoxical nature, that we come to find a home in the uncanny, the irremediable, and the unbearable nature of traumas both big and small, and can invite our clients to do the same. In the interest of situating this idea within a theoretical space I feel more comfortable dwelling in, I want to take us briefly away from Freudian drive-theory and into the realm of contemporary relational psychoanalysis.
Perhaps the central contribution of the psychoanalytic approach that emerged out of the interpersonal, intersubjective, and contemporary relational traditions over the last several decades has been the focus on countertransference and the role of enactments in the therapeutic encounter. Eschewing the limitations of traditional drive theory, the theorists in this space expanded on the work of foundational thinkers such as Winnicott, Fairbairn, and Loewald, each of whom challenged elements of traditional drive theory, but still at times seem bounded by a framework that saw the process of psychoanalysis as “me” analyst “over here” working collaboratively with “you” analysand “over there”. The shift to an interpersonal framework, and later a relational and intersubjective one, positioned the work of therapy in an interactional matrix that recognized the ways in which the experiences of both client and therapist become intimately braided over the evolution of the therapeutic relationship, perhaps best exemplified in the idea of the relational third central to the thinking of the analyst Jessica Benjamin. Philosophically, this marks a shift away from Kantian representationalism, which had a clear influence on Freud’s thinking, into a space that invites something more conceptually aligned with Heideggerian phenomenology and hermeneutics. It would seem, to my mind, this shift much more accurately captures what the experience of doing therapy feels like, infused as it is with the often-confusing task of needing to sort out who did what to whom, when, and in what way. These kinds of projective identifications, from this view, are not merely to be understood as what one might be doing to another, but as a mutually established mode of interacting that calls for shared witnessing rather than unilateral explanation.
Following Loewald, time becomes a legitimate concern for many of these writers and something that should be taken up as a matter of psychoanalytic inquiry. Edgar Levenson, in his book The Ambiguity of Change, notes the need for analysts to think about time not as “linear or unidirectional” but as “circular or helical”. Philip Bromberg, as well, in a paper on resistance, describes the need to “struggle against the natural human tendency [toward] linear thinking” and the human vulnerability towards “organizing meaning along the lines of ‘that happened then,’ which led to ‘this happening now,’ and (if all goes well) will lead to ‘so-and-so happening later.’” There is a shared sensibility with these writers—one that resonates with Al’s paper—that elements of the human condition evolve over time rather than unfold in a linear sequence, requiring the ability to see time as a hermeneutical process and reflecting something like the ecstatic temporality of Heidegger’s “thrown possibility”.
The moment we are contacted by a client, the moment our threads of existence intersect, we begin building a world together. How quickly we respond; what they share by means of introduction; our initial reaction to their inquiry; whether we have immediate availability or must negotiate our own schedules; whether we (or the client) communicate intense interest or a perfunctory passivity about getting started; all of this and more initiates the process of structuring meaning into the relationship and lays the foundation for where the therapy will eventually go. Yet, as Al’s paper makes clear, we cannot grasp a fuller significance of what these and other experiences in the relationship will mean until later in the relationship. Even more so, as we invite our awareness of the uncanny into this process of deferred action, it is the unsettling of the familiar world, co-created by client and therapist along an experiential continuum of what has been, what already is, and the as-yet-to-come, that leads to the kind of disruptive processes that dislodge meaning from a fixed and calcified position and open the field of therapeutic play from that of being to that of becoming.
Countertransference—or what we might refer to in the existential-phenomenological tradition as the process of being-with our clients—is relevant here precisely because 1.) this disruption must occur as much in the therapist as it does in the client and 2.) it is foremost the responsibility of the therapist to attend to and assure this disruption is not resolved prematurely. It is in these moments when something that was previously organized begins to become disorganized, that the possibility for genuine contact and newly organized experiences arises. Stripped of the safety of the taken for granted relational patterns that have come to characterized the specific therapeutic relationship—patterns formed through the coming together of both participant’s habitual modes of relating and a shared relational dynamic—something new must emerge if we as a therapist can hold open that discordance and not succumb to the all-too-human experience of rushing towards harmony, ease, and obliviousness. It is through the expressive and creative use of our own experience within those moments that we might aid the client in jostling free of the relational turns they so often use to fall back into comfort and out of their being fallen away.
I feel the need to give pause for a moment here, as in a paper colored by profound instances of existential disruption it might seem thoughtless, careless, or perhaps even harmful to characterize disruptions in therapeutic safety along the same continuum as the profound existential threats which permeate ours and others existence. That “traumatic” might in someways be the wrong word for labeling these kinds of anticipated disturbances in the ordinary flow of relating we sometimes refer to in psychotherapy as rupture and repair. This seems especially true at a time when we are all repeatedly and relentlessly being called to bear witness to an endless cascade of unconscionable acts of systemic and physical violence in communities throughout this country and abroad. Yet, it would seem to be the case that these various kinds of disturbances in the therapeutic process would fall within the realm of trauma as Al describes it, if we are to understand trauma as the alienation of our pre-reflective efforts at worlding our lived experience into something we already know how to handle and finding that some element of that experience is contributing to our failures in trying to organize it. After all, from where do these interactional patterns for smoothing over and diffusing our existential anxiety emerge, but as a response to the interpersonal injuries and suffering to which we have already been exposed, those dark lesions of the soul, and our attempts at covering over their ongoing impact. However, as a careful study of Freud’s repetition compulsion or Heidegger’s concepts of covering over and disclosiveness show us, that which is hidden is so often revealed by that which attempts to conceal it. Here again we find the uncanniness of deferred action, in which ordinary everyday neuroses, the so-called psychopathologies of everyday life, become explicit through our ability to remain open to the existential risk of allowing something we think we understand to become something other than what it already is. Where, if we are willing to see trauma as part of the “thrownness” in which we find ourselves, we can also enjoy the possibility that familiar affects might be lived to unfamiliar conclusions. And it is of course only through that possibility that we might also allow that which ails us to become a source of unforeseen potential, creativity, and change.
