The World of the Concrete—A Comparative Approach

PERHAPS THE GREATEST OBSTACLE to the conduct of psychoanalytic treatment is the concrete attitude. After all, the essence of the psychoanalytic dialogue is the interpretation of the symbolic meaning of psychic events. In contrast, the concrete attitude is one in which experience is taken at face value; a cigar is just a cigar—never a symbolic representation of a breast, a penis, or feces. The most obvious indicators of the concrete attitude are two negative signs, capacities notable in their absence: the absence of an abstract attitude and the lack of an imagination. In contrast to the abstract attitude, the concrete attitude involves an immersion in the details of a particular situation with an obliviousness to the larger class or category of which the particular may be an example or a part. The abstract attitude brings a breadth of perspective which is lacking in the concrete. The concrete attitude also involves a loss of distance from and a stimulus boundedness to the press of current situational events which seem to compel a particular response, in contrast to the free play of the imagination which allows for a transcendence of the immediacy of current events. In treatment, the concrete attitude is most apparent in the patient's viewing each interpersonal dilemma as idiosyncratic without an appreciation of characteristic patterns of relating, a paucity of reported dreams and fantasies, and impersonal, conventional or nondescript language lacking in evocative metaphor. When fantasy life is consciously entertained, fantasy is construed as a literal rather than a symbolic reality; dreams really do predict the future and ghosts and hobgoblins really do exist. The appreciation of the symbolic dimension which psychoanalysis has investigated requires an imagination