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A patient, a few years into analysis, shared in one session that she had an idea for a book cover. She would be standing in front of a tree, leaning her elbow against it, looking serious, emotional, and “super cheesy… only, it would be ironic.”
This image gave me real pleasure, as it seemed to capture her so well: she could be immensely tender, filled to the brim with wonder, care, and sentiment (“cheese,” as it were), but most of the time kept this part of herself hidden and had a great deal of contempt for it, even as she simultaneously and often privately recognized its value.
Outside of my patient’s momentary conjuring, I had not thought much about the clinical value of irony until reading John Steiner’s lovely new book Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis.
Being an avid reader of Winnicott, I am more familiar with the usefulness of paradox, or the articulation of unsolvable, contradictory phenomena (e.g. the transitional object is both created and found). But irony, while sharing with paradox the capacity to express opposite ideas, exhibits important differences. Irony is not the description of phenomena as such, but instead a subjective position in relation to phenomena. More specifically, an ironic stance is one in which different and often contradictory positions are held simultaneously. My patient, for example, is ironic when she expresses both her affinity and contempt for sentimentality simultaneously. For John Steiner, who has grappled with the dueling “wish[es] both to deny and to accept reality” (p. 152) for much of his career, such a concept offers a kind of resolution, if that can be said of something inherently irresolvable.
Where in his seminal book Psychic Retreats,† Steiner articulated a particular type of patient who retreats from reality in order to escape the concurrent pains of paranoid and depressive experience, in his newest work the joke, so to speak, is on all of us, “since we are all patients and all have serious problems with