Psychoanalysis in a Phenomenological Spirit

Putting aside for the moment all the recent talk of relationalists and intersubjectivists, levels of discourse, language games, and even of Descartes, let us consider what it might mean to think and practice psychoanalysis in a phenomenological spirit. I think it means at least three important things: (a) a focus on lived experience that leaves aside, “brackets,” or suspends our interest in categories, dualisms, and in the “facts” studied by the natural sciences; (b) viewing relatedness as our primary human situation and, specifically, I–You relatedness as the condition for the possibility of agentic subjectivity; and (c) embracing the indispensible asymmetry of our work that leads phenomenological psychoanalysts and therapists to live out the quiet discipline of placing ourselves in the background.

The primacy of lived experience means that, as psychoanalysts, we concern ourselves with what our patients are suffering. We attempt to understand that suffering—including their ways of coping with it until now—through our own situated and limited lived experience. We try to notice when our patient feels that we make him or her an It—reducing, observing, diagnosing, judging, knowing better, controlling, distancing—and when we seem to connect as a We, the I and You of genuine dialogue, of communion. Instead of “treating” depression or psychosis, we undergo the situation with

the other. Carrying our preconceptions—personal, cultural, and theoretical—as lightly as possible, we attempt together to make sense of and to understand the patient's suffering within the always-already living relation in which we find ourselves and which we continue to develop together. It is written that we should rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Unfortunately, in our work with devastated human beings, we weep more often.

Working phenomenologically also means to me seeing relatedness as our primary human situation. This means that we are born into relatedne