The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process

The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process by Frank Summers is an important book for both clinicians and scholars of psychoanalysis. It is highly readable and informative. Although Summers is a relational analyst deeply influenced by Kohut and Winnicott, there is much in this book that reminds me of Fromm, Sullivan, and other theorists who attempted to bring culture and philosophy to the center of the psychoanalytic stage. Summers expands the context of psychoanalytic ideas, articulating the wider philosophical and cultural contexts, providing arguments against the dominant models of scientism that treat people as things that can be studied quantitatively, controlled and manipulated as if they are things or nonsentient beings. He is critical of the biological, deductive, and objective biases of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and psychological establishments, arguing for a hermeneutic approach, which expands the experiencing subjects’ capacity for self-reflection, developing personal meaning, and enriching the possibilities of living. Summers's effort is highly commendable because this kind of critical, contextual thinking has been absent from much of the more parochial, narrow approaches of many contemporary psychoanalytic and psychological authors.

Summers begins by tracing two lines of thought present in psychoanalysis and that reflect the two directions suggested by Freud: the deductivist/scientific paradigm and the hermeneutic paradigm. The deductivist/scientific paradigm attempts to address patients’ current issues and problems by reducing experience to theoretical categories and looking to the past for causes of current behavior, whereas the hermeneutic paradigm, with which Summers identifies, suggests listening closely to patients and helping patients articulate their experience and develop their own voice, to speak rather than act out their unspeakable truth. Summers expands this developmental hermeneutic