Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Exploration

In this paper, originally given at the Site conference ‘White Privilege, Racism and Psychoanalysis’ in October 2021, I explore how phenomenology can be a useful tool and complement to our practice of psychoanalysis. I am indebted to Lewis Gordon, his book Existentia Africana and the chapter ‘Frederick Douglass as an existentialist’ for the idea of using a piece of narrative to demonstrate a phenomenological approach. It inspired me to use a brief moment in my own experience as a narrative illustration of the dilemma I wish to explore.

But let's start by thinking of some meeting points between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. It's a bit of a tongue-in-cheek exercise but might be interesting nonetheless. One such meeting point is the idea that phenomenology appears always to be beginning and that psychoanalysis never seems to end. Because phenomenology is concerned with experience and the experiencing of experience it is always on the move; one finds it hard to identify a beginning, a place where it starts, as every moment is an experience of a moment and that moment contains lots of preceding moments. The idea of psychoanalysis never seeming to have an ending reflects the difficulty of determining, or lack of desire to determine, what would, in the end, constitute a cure.

To quote Adam Phillips:

Freud's inspired follower Ferenczi famously wrote, ‘The patient is not cured by free-association, he is cured when he can free-associate.’ Lacan said the analyst starts explaining when he becomes frightened of his curiosity. Psychoanalysis, Bion suggested, should be practised without memory and desire. The aim of psychoanalysis, Winnicott said, is that the patient should be able to surprise themselves. With these aims and objectives, no epistemology of the process of cure is possible because there is no knowing beforehand what is there to be said, or felt, or

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found, or used. The aim is not to know beforehand where you are going, or not only to know that (there could be guidelines for psychoanalytic treatment but not maps). A concept of cure, at least in psychoanalysis, could only be pre-emptive; it would bespeak a fear of the future and a fear of the unconscious. It would be too knowing.

In both cases, when phenomenology appears to be always beginning and psychoanalysis appears never to have an ending, each taps into the cure of psychoanalysis – Freud's open-ended character of life that allows one to recognise movement and change, not as chaos but as life itself.

Another point of contact might be that of existence and the unconscious. It is more useful to say that they constitute two styles of approaching the meaning of being human, insofar as both are defining features of what distinguishes human from non-human being. For psychoanalysis there is the unconscious, the contents of which are typically hidden or inaccessible, while for phenomenology the elements of existence are typically taken for granted or non-thematised. In both cases the method is to bring these contents into the light of day and understand their consequences for peoples' lives.

Yet another point of convergence is the phenomenological technique of imaginative variation and the psychoanalytic technique of free association. The task of imaginative variation is to seek possible meanings through the use of our imagination and approaching the phenomenon from divergent perspectives, different positions, roles, or functions in order to concentrate on the phenomenon of interest reduced to its existential core. Free association requires the patient to concentrate on her immediate state of emotional sensibility.

What I have discovered for myself about incorporating a phenomenological sensibility into my approach to the psychoanalysis I practice has great value across my work with all my patients, but specifically when working with those who are disenfranchised by various forms of oppression. I was very fortunate to undergo a training which

equipped me to think beyond traditional psychoanalytic paradigms and to think more broadly philosophically about the work we do, and indeed to incorporate this wider thinking into a way of thinking psychoanalysis differently.

When I was considering what to write for this publication I automatically tried to think of clinical vignettes I could use, but then I became concerned about the ethics of using material that might identify a patient even to themselves. So I decided against this approach. But something happened to me recently which was so unexpected and clinically interesting that I thought I would use myself as a clinical vignette.

It was an experience which I think exemplifies how racism works and the impact it has on our (or at least my) psychic experience. And the telling illustrates the phenomenological approach in practice. The experience of race and racism being something I cannot escape makes it a fitting subject for this exploration.

In the middle of August 2021, so not so long ago, I lost my passport and had to apply for a new one. This, on the face of it, seemed like a straightforward exercise. After all, I had probably had four passports over my lifetime. I picked up the application form from the post office and began to complete it. Section 4 completely flummoxed me, and I had to read it several times before I felt sure of what it was asking.

Section 4 states that

If either parent named below were born on or after 01/01/1983 or were born outside of the UK, you will need to give the full name, town, country, date of birth and marriage of your grandparents (or details of your parents' claim to British nationality) at section 8 or on a separate piece of paper.

The guidance notes at the side said that you must complete section 4 if you are applying for a lost, stolen, or damaged passport, which I was.

Well, I was 60 years of age at the time, my father died 22 years ago. I don't know the details of his parents, nor can I prove his claim to British

nationality. This propelled me into a hysterical and I might say existential panic. I frantically contacted my mother and asked her for her details and if she had any of my father's details. She gave me her passport details and my father's passport details too, which as someone who never throws anything away, thankfully, she still had, but this wasn't enough. I needed his parents' details too and I certainly didn't have them. Nor did she.

I am now panicked with worry, I couldn't sleep. I was convinced that I would be deported on the next plane to Kingston, Jamaica if I didn't have all they wanted (my grandparents' details and details of their marriage). I wouldn't be able to get a passport, I was going to be deported. There was no doubt in my mind about this, but another part of my mind knew that this was nonsense. I was born here, had had several passports before. What on earth was I getting so worked up about? But rationalise as I might, it didn't make any difference to how I felt and the terror of what I was imagining was going to happen to me.

I had made an appointment at the passport office and on the night before the appointment, again, I couldn't sleep and I eventually got up at about 4:00am and read and re-read the application form to ensure that I had completed everything correctly and that I really understood what they were asking in section 4. And indeed, they were asking for my grandparents' details.

I felt sick in my stomach and was sure that I would be subject to intense scrutiny at the passport office appointment. I really was going to be deported. How could this be? Although I was born in Whittington hospital in Manchester in November 1960 I didn't have the specific information they were asking for. Of course, everybody around me was saying, ‘Don't be silly, of course there won't be a problem’, but this is not how I felt.

So I had feelings of a foreshortened future. I was about to be carted off to Jamaica and then subject to homophobic terror, resulting in my death.

I had, for those few days, difficulty falling and staying asleep.

And I became hyper-vigilant, everybody was about to get me. I was losing my marbles, as they say. On the way to the appointment, I remember being frantically worried that I had left my keys at home when in fact they were in the ignition of the scooter I was riding. Go figure.

Any psychologists will surely recognise these as symptoms of PTSD.

I knew that my response to this was both exaggerated and startled, but I also had no doubt about what was going to happen to me. I couldn't shift it, the feeling that I was under attack.

I couldn't believe what was about to befall me. The toxic environment or aggressive environment, or whatever it is they were doing, their hostile environment got right inside me. I felt sick as a dog and as paranoid as one can get.

So, I arrived at the passport office for my appointment. The place was quiet and calm. I still felt sick. I waited a short five or ten minutes for my appointment. I kept looking at the number sequence in the queuing system, even at that point worried that the fact that my number wasn't there indicated that some other arrangements were being made for me.

I was called to the booth. I had with me so many proofs of who I was, my birth certificate, my civil partnership certificate, a very old, expired passport, proofs of my address, all in a neat folder.

The man behind the counter took my application form and my signed photographs, checked a few boxes on the form and said, ‘Thank you, that's it, you'll get your new passport within the next seven days.’ I still couldn't believe it so I asked if he could tell me whether what I had provided in relation to section 4 was enough as it didn't include anything about my grandparents.

He very nicely went on to explain that obviously this didn't apply to me. I was already on their system, so this question didn't apply. It was there because of the 1983 Immigration Act which determined that being born in the UK wasn't any longer enough to establish nationality, or something like that. ‘Don't worry.’ He said

Don't Worry?

At the age of 60 and having ‘worked through’ all of this stuff with many years of therapy and having learnt a great deal from all of my patients and supervisees …

Don't Worry?

Having, in my terms, a successful life, I was made to feel like shit. And I did feel like shit, felt that tomorrow was the last day of my life. And all my psychoanalytic and psychological understanding and self-reflection had no influence whatsoever in that moment.

So what intrigued me and I thought would be useful to contemplate here is what we as psychoanalysts can do with this.

And so I think about my psychoanalytic practice and how I might respond or think with a patient who presented me with this story.

I recognise that my experience was both extreme and short-lived. But there are patients for whom this is a common experience and one that they live with all of the time. The trauma lives in them constantly.

So thinking more broadly about psychoanalysis and thinking with the many philosophical discourses that I have been exposed to over the years and thinking about race and racism and thinking about my attachment to psychoanalysis and thinking about the conundrums and contradictions that all of this brings I have come to understand that, in my practice at least, what is useful is to develop an attitude towards psychoanalysis which incorporates both the philosophies of phenomenology and, for me, American pragmatism. I see in them a possibility of expanding our psychoanalytic horizon and a hope of bringing this phenomenological and pragmatic attitude to our work in order to, as I said earlier, think psychoanalysis differently.

What is at issue here is the convergence of a phenomenological sensibility, an attunement to the immediacy of experience. And that we should remain cognisant that phenomenology does not require a different kind of data, but is a manner or style of thinking, as Merleau-Ponty put it.

Phenomenology seeks to examine the nature of the world as experienced, whatever the object of inquiry may be, including one's self, one's thoughts, and one's experience of others. In other words, instead of applying a theory that presumes to account for what is happening ‘in’ the patient one is analysing, a phenomenological approach goes directly

to the person themselves, by examining their own experience of their relationship to the matter in hand. This is not a matter of speculation but of determining the ground of experience at the moment it is transformed through the inter-human bond shared with others.

I understand that the very formation of the subject is constituted via a trauma, an interruption that forms the very conditions for the subject to come into being. A succession of traumas (oppressions, if you like) reignites the structuring of one's subjecthood and occasions a multiplicity of subject positions that both produce and inaugurate complex and interwoven identities.

[We] do not come with timeless truths.

This is a quote from Frantz Fanon in the introduction to his seminal book Black Skin, White Masks (2021 [1952]: iv).

Of course, phenomenology itself resists definition, because, like experience itself, its method is antithetical to theoretical and causal explanations. Its point of departure here is its rejection of the conceptualising tendencies of most traditional psychoanalytic theorising. The kind of psychoanalysis I am interested in, though, is the kind that places the experiential world at the forefront of our analytic endeavours.

Phenomenology shares with psychoanalysis the view that explanation is inadequate to the task of understanding what is given to experience, and shares with psychoanalysis the task of determining the peculiar and inherently ambiguous nature of suffering itself. This feature of phenomenology (that the object of experience can never be decisively separated from the subject who experiences it) is both intentional and intersubjective, because my experience of the other is always unremittingly mine, with all its attendant ambiguity and baggage.

Phenomenology works for me because it is concerned with the experience of things as they are. The phenomenological method, as I understand it, entails the notion of self-experience, of reflection, and a recognition that one's lived experience constructs one's perception of

the world and the production of meaning which follows from such a construction.

It was Maurice Merleau-Ponty who held that perception of an object is not possible without taking into account the conscious meaning attributed to that object. So, for example, Race as an object cannot be perceived without taking into account the conscious meaning we attribute to it.

According to Merleau-Ponty's perspective, it makes no sense to think of the world of objects and subjects as separate from our experience of them. This is because the appearance of an object depends upon our perception of it and perceptual appearance varies depending upon the perceiver's mental orientation (for example, their desires, wishes, judgements, emotions, and their aims and purposes). He held that self-consciousness not only includes one's ability to make reflective judgements, but also the capability of experiencing the other as doing something, that is as an embodied agent.

‘I’ exist in the world first and foremost as a being of the world from which I cannot extricate myself very easily. The person I take myself to be is essentially an invention that I have a hand in creating, but the greater part of my self's authorship derives from what others make of me. However, who I take myself to be is not just rooted in the past; I am also constantly in the making every waking moment of my life.

So, drawing on Merleau-Ponty for inspiration, one might say that the perceptual practices involved in racialisation are tacit (unspoken), almost hidden from view and thus immune from hypercritical reflection.

And this for me brings pragmatism into the frame.

The pragmatic method tries to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.

I think this is integral to the work we do in the consulting room. Tracing the practical consequences of the issues that our patients bring to us is the heart of the matter, and what they want to do about it seems to me to be the conversation that takes place much of the time.

This means allowing ourselves and our patients to be open to a variety of possibilities without being bound by our own or our patients'

habits, including, for example, the habits that make up our identity as psychoanalysts. And by habit I mean the unconscious predisposition to transact with our physical, social, political and natural world including the habit of making race. All these habits can be questioned. They are not set in stone.

In many ways pragmatism can unstiffen our theories.

We do not enter the consulting room in a vacuum, we bring with us our own life experiences. This returns me to the depth of my experience described earlier. It is not simply a matter of our everyday experiences, but our experiences incorporating the ideologies or discursive practices that surround us and that become embedded in our being. Our beliefs about ourselves are drawn from a history, a history composed of previous beliefs modified through time and utility.

To quote Charles Mills, the black Jamaican philosopher:

The social ontology of a racialised body politics becomes incarnated in the bodies of its member, fleshed out in the reactive behavior. Socialised from birth to discern race we learn to apprehend the world through a grid whose architecture has been shaped on a blueprint still functioning independent of our will and intent.

By social ontology he means the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analysing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction.

The impact of all of this, then, is prime material for psychoanalysis. If you think about the material impact of all of this one can see, to quote another black thinker Hortense Spillers:

the major topics of psychoanalysis are stringently operative in Black communities: things like self division, the mimetic (copied) and transitive character of desire; the economies of displacement; the paradox of the life-death pull; the tragic elements couched in the transfer of social powers from one generation of historical

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actors to the other; the paradox of the negative; the preeminent distinctions that attach to the twin towers of human and social being – mother and father. The life world offers a quintessential occasion for a psychoanalytic reading.

One hope is that the exploration of psychoanalytic ideas through a phenomenological lens, let's say about race in the consulting room, means this can evolve from being understood as purely intrapsychic defences to being understood within intersubjective and trans-generational clinical theories. And as a result the experience of the patient can become more embedded in the thinking of us psychoanalysts.

Back to my experience described above.

The truth of the matter is that I was right to believe the horrible possibilities described above. Because a part of me knows and understands that racism will kill me and has killed so many black people before me, the worst can happen and already has happened. It is unpredictable, it can happen any moment with or without my agency, and it is also true that I was paranoid and traumatised by the passport situation.

Richard Rory says:

Freud gave us a new technique for achieving a genuinely stable character: the technique of lending a sympathetic ear to our own tendencies to instability, by treating them as alternative ways of making sense of the past, ways that have as good a claim on our attention as do the familiar beliefs and desires that are available to introspection. His mechanistic view of the self gave us a vocabulary that lets us describe all the various parts of the soul, conscious and unconscious alike, in homogenous terms: as equally plausible candidates for ‘the true self.’

The grip of the symbolism of the statement in question 4 of the passport application represented more than a simple request, but opened up a

sequence of intergenerational trauma memories that became operative right there and then. And are prime material for reflection.

The longer story is also there to be explored and made sense of. What of my parents' experiences of racism? What impact did it have on their raising of their children or even their belief of it being possible to raise their children safely. A black and white coupling in 1960s Manchester. Go figure. My father's experience, leaving Jamaica as a young man, his reasons for doing that and his experiences when he arrived here – how did that translate to his relationship to rearing his children. And before that, the lived experience of the colonial subject and before that the non-human experience of slavery and now the non-human experience that was mine in that passport office. All rich territory for exploration on the couch.

We live in a time and place in which a ‘hostile environment’ is both operative, and condoned by our government and much of the population. This too ramped up the ante. A reflection upon the validity of all of this as an experience and a resistance to the pathologies of paranoia and delusion, which often cancel this experience, serve, in my view, to be a much more useful way to make sense of our traumatic moments and enable the patient (that's me) to unhook themselves from the messages of being wrong, and to quote the poet June Jordan:

And finally another quote from Richard Rorty:

The best way of tinkering with ourselves is to tinker with something else.