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January 15, 1984. ON SEEING THINGS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ANALYZING INSTRUMENT. M. Robert Gardner, M.D.
Dr. Gardner presented an excerpt from his book, Self Inquiry. The book offered us a view of Dr. Gardner's ten-year experiment involving his effort to try to discover what guides his work and to learn about the interplay between his curiosity and that of his patient. He wanted to take "a fresh look at how one analyst listens." Highly personal in the subject of its investigation, intimate in tone, idiosyncratic in style, this work eludes a more objectifying analysis. A mixture of poetry, penetration, and willful entertainment of ambiguity, it evokes responses to the personal nature of its search and draws attention to self-exploration as it evolves in a two-party situation. Attempts to explain the inner and interactive processes that shape one's effort in analysis frequently lead to certain expectable difficulties: a notable one is that of depicting the subtle intermingling of perception, reflection, recollection, and drift of thought so fundamental to analytic listening; another involves the challenge of engaging people's receptivity to the associative method. Much more than is usual, in Dr. Gardner's account, play of language, prose style, rhythm of thought, and autobiographical detail combine to create in the reader or listener a state of mind attuned to the idea of associative drift ever present in the foreground of exploration. Literary form, as it were, grows from the content it means to explore, vivifies it, generates similar states, and then turns back to the content for its investigation.
What is then examined is a moment, drawn from Dr. Gardner's practice, in which one of the analyst's visual images, and the discovery of its inner workings, makes clearer the interplay of forces shaping the analytic discourse. Image, treated as dream and associated to, becomes both instance and investigation of psychoanalysis. What Dr. Gardner found, and what w