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In poststructuralist thought, in particular ethnographically oriented studies of culture, language, action, or text, context has become an indispensable concept as a way of challenging the claims of an autonomous meaning-making subject with the corresponding depiction of the mind as an encapsulated formal representational system that can be detached from the various strata of social organization. Instead, context is recognized as providing a frame of interpretation for the production of meaning in terms of which events embedded within the frame must be understood. In psychoanalytic theorizing, the recent shift from a one-person to a two-person paradigm can similarly be characterized in terms of an appeal to context. Whereas invocations of the relevance of context in determining the patient's subjective experience in the analytically based process typically lead to a concern with the therapist's subjectivity or countertransference, thus promoting the view of the clinical process in terms of the mutually reciprocal influence of the patient and therapist, in contrast, the present paper focuses on another
The research on which this paper is based was, in part, supported by The Program on Conscious and Unconscious Mental Processes directed by Mardi Horowitz, M.D. and Charles Stinson, M.D. and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The authors would like to thank Susan Ervin-Tripp, Jiansheng Guo, and especially Nathan Adler for insightful, typically contentious, comments on the manuscript. Also, many thanks to Nathan Adler, Luca Di Donna, Stephen Schultz, and Marc Zussman for the many discussions of psychoanalytic theory and therapy.
Julie Gerhardt is Associate Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. She is also a member of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.
Charles Stinson is Codirector of the Program on Conscious and Unconscious Mental Processes of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Program on Mental Health and Human Development. He is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.
© 1995 The Analytic Press
dimension of the context in analytically based work, namely, the particular set of the theoretical assumptions that constitute the therapist's professionally grounded preconceptions about the nature of psychological distress. It is argued that these assumptions function as “demand characteristics” in that they structure the therapist's mode of intervention and thus, ultimately, how the therapeutic work is carried out. In particular, the argument is made that these demand characteristics play a role in bringing about a self-reflexive stance on the patient's part in which one part of the self observes and reflects on other parts of the self (thoughts, feelings, fantasies, etc.) and begins to cultivate the skills of self-expression and self-formulation as the key to understanding personal distress. We refer to this self-reflexive stance as one of “analytic subjectivity” and raise the question of how such attention to the self is brought about. Then, after having characterized this aspect of the contextual frame, in the second part of this paper we go on to examine a particular event that occurs within the frame. Specifically, we examine a patient's use of the discourse marker i don't know from the transcripts of a psychotherapy study and suggest that its use can be understood in terms of the context-driven agenda of having the patient self-inspect and self-reflect.