4 Clinical Understanding and Explaining: The Empathic Vantage Point

Francis Bacon noted several centuries ago that once people become wedded to a certain idea or concept, their minds are no longer open. They will continue to look for evidence, however flimsy it may be, to buttress preconceived notions, and will reject all evidence that contradicts them.

Bacon's idea is broadly valid. It has practically turned into one of the “covering laws” of a depth-psychology-informed social psychology. It holds true for all people, in all human endeavors, including psychoanalysis. At a first glance this should not be surprising, after all, psychoanalysis, as an avenue to self-knowledge and self-healing, evolved naturally out of immanent gifts and propensities inherent in our psychic structures as human beings. These everyday, ubiquitous gifts and propensities for empathy and introspection were, sooner or later, bound to be elaborated into a method: the scientific endeavor of psychoanalysis. On further reflection, however, the idea that Bacon's judgment includes psychoanalysts as well, is greatly surprising. Have psychoanalysts not developed a method whereby their very enslavement to an idea, concept, fantasy, or preconceived notion was to be lifted? Is not psychoanalysis in general—and the psychoanalyst's training analysis in particular—supposed to transform this human propensity for ideological enslavement into a modicum of cognitive-emotional freedom, the achievement of “analyzed man”?

The successes of psychoanalysts on this score have thus far been greatly disappointing even if psychoanalysts do, indeed, have a method for the diminution of ideological enslavement. This polarity between ideological enslavement and ideological freedom in psychoanalysts is also a function of the social-psychological matrix in which the psychoanalytic enterprise is embedded.

Analytically attained openness or ideological freedom was to fashion in us a listening perspective in which our theories would essentially serve