In Praise of Actuality

ONE EVENING RECENTLY, a prominent speaker, a man who has written many books and who comes from a venerable tradition, presented a clinical discussion before a distinguished audience of analysts. In it he outlined in great and touching detail the data: the early infantile deprivations and subsequent losses sustained by a man who throughout his long and very productive life suffered great anguish of spirit and unsatisfying object relations. He offered clinical formulations which had not only coherence and power but which also, he thought, accounted for the patient's regressive yearning and search for the absent mother typical of pathological mourning. Early and repeated deprivation, it was said, determined his adult character, and the effort at reparation led, at the deepest level, to the subject's creativity. In corroboration images were deciphered and similar findings among a significant number of patients with early parent loss were offered to substantiate the theoretical claims and confirm diagnostic predictions. An appreciative discussion closed the meeting. At the end of the presentation, many people in the audience applauded, a significant number of psychoanalysts however, felt their own thought and experience had not been represented. I was one of them. I thought to myself, "This is not the state of the art in psychoanalysis. Prescriptive encoding and causal historical explanation do not account for the vitality of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. The heart of the psychoanalytic endeavor is not in this kind of closed form and exclusiveness of construction." Though we long for order, predetermined truth speaks to an order which the experience of psychoanalysis itself belies.

It will be my thesis that the truth we look for in psychoanalysis is not to be found while searching for historical events or causes, nor in recreating, restoring, or repairing the past. Neither would I locate it in a hermeneutic exegesis, a coherent and logical narrative.