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Irwin Hoffman's book Ritual and Spontaneity includes, but goes well beyond, his series of seminal papers—written over the past several decades—developing a psychoanalytic, constructivist perspective. A new, existential framework depicts what Hoffman calls the “psycho-biological bedrock” at the core of the human process of constructing meaning—the lifelong effort to create a livable, subjective world in face of our ever present sense of loss, suffering, and, ultimately, mortality.
This review describes Hoffman's encompassing, existential perspective and discusses how, within this framework, he uses his dialectical sensibility to frame our understanding of both parenting and analysis as “semisacred” activities. The “dialectic of ritual and spontaneity”—the vital clash between disciplined adherence to the analytic frame and personally expressive deviations from it—represents the creative tension between the “magical” dimension of analytic authority and the healing influence of a genuinely expressive human relationship. Hoffman's perspective on the self-interested, “dark side” of the analytic relationship is compared with Winnicott's views on the vital, therapeutic role of “hate” and the paradoxical process by which the patient comes to “use” the analyst.
Unlike most postmodernist “constructivists,” Hoffman openly reveals his underlying belief in certain “transcultural, transhistorical universals”—his “psychobiological bedrock.” In acknowledging these
Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D. is the Past President of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, Director of Training Emeritus of the Tufts University Counseling Center, a Coeditor of the Journal Comparative Psychoanalysis, and coauthor of The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology and the Therapeutic Process.
“essentials” (assumptions about human nature) that in some form are integral, yet often hidden, elements of any system of thought, Hoffman saves his own dialectical constructivism from falling into dichotomous (constructivist vs. essentialist) thinking.
To be an analyst means … accepting one's daunting responsibility as the inheritor of functions that used to be reserved for the omniscient parents, for “the gods,” at the same time that one interprets and participates in a spirit of mutuality with the patient, a spirit that exposes one's personal vulnerability, fallibility and even one's possible exploitativeness.
Irwin Z. Hoffman Ritual and Spontaneity
Any radical constructionism can only be built on the foundations of a hidden essentialism.
Diana Fuss Essentially Speaking