John Kafka, a past president of the Washington Psychoanalytic Society, is currently Secretary of its Institute, where he is a training and supervising analyst. Active in many facets of The American, he is also beginning a second term as one of the two U.S. Vice Presidents of the International Psychoanalytical Association, whose Committee on Eastern Europe he co-chairs.
Born in Austria, Dr. Kafka received his secondary schooling and the beginning of his university education in France. Coming to the United States just prior to the German invasion, he was initially a laborer and factory worker, and attended night school. He then served in the U.S. Army and with the help of the G.I. bill eventually focused more intensively on his studies. He was in the first Veterans Administration Clinical Psychology Training Program, which permitted graduate studies combined with practical experience in a clinical setting. A teaching assistant in Rorschach courses, he completed preliminary examinations for a Ph.D. before embarking on medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic studies. Before entering full-time private practice, he spent ten years on the staff at Chestnut Lodge.
Waugaman: The range of your interests and your multicultural background fit well within the title of your book, Multiple Realities in Clinical Practice (Yale University Press, 1989). What connections do you see?
Kafka: The task of finding my way in different cultural, linguistic, and social settings, the early displacements and disruptions, shaped many of my needs and interests, including those connected with psychoanalysis. On a more purely intellectual level there was also a quite direct connection between the “explication de texte,” a psychologically focused study of literature that is so prominent in French education, and my later interests. In France the teaching of philosophy on the lycée level involved the study of authors who were concerned with the nature of knowledge, of thought and affect. My teachers influenced me not to take “common sense reality” as a given that is not to be questioned. Recently, when I chose “Multiple Realities” as the title of my book, I wanted it to refer primarily to the different psychic reality organizations that we encounter as psychoanalysts. “Multiple Realities,” however, also describes the different cultural settings with their different “average expectable environments” that I encountered personally. There is an obvious connection between all this and my later interest in how we and our patients form “object worlds,” our psychic realities.
Waugaman: I know that the experience of time is one topic that has been of great interest to you. Can you say something about time and psychoanalysis?
Kafka: In psychoanalytic theorizing, spatial metaphors can easily lead to reification of psychic structures. I have long been concerned with temporal processes and so prefer temporal metaphors. I can really only sketch a few ideas here. Consider that the meaning of an event depends on when we think it begins and ends. Meaning—psychic reality—is thus immediately connected to temporal structure. Analytic work is also immediately connected to a loosening of temporal structures, since free-floating attention involves precisely alterations in the contraction and expansion of the attention span.
Waugaman: When an analytic clinician thinks about time, he thinks of the place of memory and its changes over time, about “reconstruction.”
Kafka: When we think about reconstruction in psychoanalysis, we should keep in mind that the meaning of the event being “reconstructed” depends on its temporal limits. Psychoanalytically effective reconstructions involve both the current, broader view of the past experience (made possible by affectively charged, transference-based information acquired in the analysis) and an appreciative understanding of the event's earlier meaning, as experienced then. We constantly recapitulate the past, but the past that we recapitulate is itself in constant flux because it is reshaped by new information in which the cognitive and emotional factors are inseparable. Perhaps we repeat not only what we do not remember, but also what we remember always in the same way. Freud's concept of Nachtraglichkeit has been inadequately translated as “deferred action.” A more accurate rendering would be “retrospective (or retroactive) attribution of meaning.” A closer look, taking into account that the very meaning of the experienced event depends on its temporal definition (when we perceive it as starting and ending) leads to the conclusion that psychoanalytic work involves temporal restructuring. I have used the analogy of a rod in a container that holds different layers of liquid, each with a different index of refraction. The straight rod will seem to have angles where oil and water, for instance, meet. Stirring the liquids will eliminate the perceived angles and the “continuity” of the rod will become apparent. Here and elsewhere there are, without the need to sacrifice any psychoanalytic concepts or insights, possibilities for interesting bridge-building between psychoanalysis and cognitive science. A case in point is the psychoanalytic study of consciousness that I have written about recently. The basic idea is that the self-reflective processes essential for consciousness necessitate a definable time span.
Waugaman: Can you tell me more about your recent involvement in assisting the development of psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe?
Kafka: As you know, interest in psychoanalysis has survived in many countries behind the former Iron Curtain. Even before the recent political changes, some Western analysts had been actively involved in helping those who were interested. More recently there has been an explosion of interest, and many self-proclaimed psychoanalysts (including Lacanians) have been busy with their own “colonization” projects. An article on developments in Eastern Europe will soon appear in the IPA Newsletter, so I will not describe here the work done by the European Psychoanalytic Federation and others in organizing meetings, individual and group supervision, and the general dissemination of psychoanalytic knowledge, or the work by American analysts in Russia which is already familiar to readers of TAP. Alex Moser (my co-chair on the IPA Committee on Eastern Europe), Charles Hanly (who chairs the New Groups Committee of the IPA), and I have, thought that an IPA presence in the meetings organized by the European Psychoanalytic Federation, for instance, is essential. We have established excellent collaboration and can thus avoid a situation in which one group might possibly be perceived as the benign helper and the other group as the policeman who “imposes” standards. There was a very active presence of the IPA at the last East European meeting in Warsaw. Charles Hanly brought his perspective on new psychoanalytic groups worldwide. From the United States, Homer Curtis and Roy Aruffo attended this broader East European meeting after a trip to Russia.
Waugaman: Our conversation has tied together your “multiple realities” in terms of personal background, theoretical and clinical interests, and organizational activities here and abroad. Thank you for spending this time with me.