In his plenary address at the December meeting, Arnold Modell spoke of how metaphor organizes experience across sensory modalities. Experiences in one modality can provide insight into another. My experiences of art, music, and theater while in New York came together with the analytic meetings to help organize my thinking about current debates over the utility of the classical technical concepts of neutrality and abstinence, as against the contemporary emphasis on the analyst's participation and spontaneity.
Discussions on the role of the analyst were a central theme at the meetings. The panel Neutrality and Abstinence, with papers by Boesky, Levenson, Renik, and Stolorow, drew a standing-room-only crowd. Theodore Jacobs's plenary address presented his version of the analyst's participation in the analytic process. I also attended the discussion groups Interaction in the Analytic Process and The Spontaneity of the Analyst. The intersubjective perspective was well represented at the meetings, and in general there was a good deal of criticism of neutrality and abstinence.
I found myself, as in previous exposures to these arguments, in agreement with most of the criticisms and sympathetic to the call for acknowledging the role of intersubjectivity and interaction in the analytic process. Yet I also had a familiar, uneasy feeling that something equally important was not adequately being addressed. How do we describe what we don't do? How do we conceptualize the constraints on our interactions with patients that enhance their spontaneity, their discovery of their own subjectivity? If the concepts of neutrality and abstinence are so outmoded and unhelpful, why do they persist?
My experiences in other modalities spoke to this issue. “Freedom within structure” is a phrase jazz musicians have used in describing their music. Mastery of technique is necessary in any art form to achieve beauty. It is technical mastery that provides a structure within which the artist can create what the late saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk spoke of as “magic moments.”
I experienced several of those magic moments in New York this December. One was viewing the Piet Mondrian exhibit at MOMA. My appreciation was enhanced by having attended a discussion group at the meetings on the artists life and work. The discussion focused on the seeming contradiction between Mondrian's obsessive personality, constricted personal life, and aversion to emotional expression, and the vitality and beauty of his painting. Mondrian's stated goal was to make his work free of emotion and representation, and to achieve thereby a higher, more refined aesthetic. Yet his work, particularly when seen in person and in the scope available at MOMA, is moving and emotionally powerful. It has luminosity, variation, and spontaneity.
A fascinating thing about Mondrian is that he loved jazz and constantly listened to it while he painted. The audiotape that accompanied the exhibit included commentary by Wynton Marsalis and samples of the music Mondrian listened to. Mondrian's tightly constructed yet unique and spontaneous work was inspired in part by the jazz rhythms and innovation he loved so much. Crossing sensory modalities, Marsalis makes the point that Mondrian's use of line (the dark grids that separate planes of pure color) forms a kind of rhythm, inspired by jazz, that both defines and opens his use of space. The variations in the lines open and play with space in evocative ways and give the solid planes of color a base off which to work. Marsalis's commentary started me thinking of neutrality and abstinence as descriptions of an element of psychoanalytic technique that forms a kind of baseline, a rhythm section if you will, upon which analytic discourse is built. Or, in visual terms, they form a kind of line that defines and opens analytic space. This rhythm or line is essential to the analytic craft. For all the cogency of the critiques of neutrality and abstinence, these terms remain some of the best descriptors of the indispensable technical structure out of which appropriate spontaneity grows, and out of which analytic freedom can emerge. They describe the other side of the technical dialectic, the complement of spontaneous, interactive engagement.
I think there remains a place for neutrality and abstinence in our vocabulary, because, however flawed and problematic the concepts may be, they speak to a fundamental principle of analytic technique. They are descriptors of a crucial aspect of the analytic stance — a listening position, a default mode that the analyst returns to between interventions, a place to go while deciding how next to be spontaneous.
Later that same evening, at the Village Vanguard, the musical analogy was brought home to me in an even stronger way by the music of Jackie McLean, an alto saxophonist who came up with the second generation of beboppers in the wake of Charlie Parker's innovations. Now in his fifth decade as a distinctive voice in jazz, McLean was leading a sextet. My companions and I, having descended the flight of stairs leading to this intimate cellar that has long been the mecca of the jazz world, were seated three tables from the bandstand. Listening to the horns ride in on the base built by the rhythm section was a beautiful example of what Marsalis had been describing. The freedom and spontaneity of the solos depended on the structures formed by the rhythm.
On the next night, three of my classmates and I went off-Broadway to see the play Mrs. Klein. In the midst of our second year of training, it was a treat to see this superbly acted play, which dramatizes Melanie Klein's personal life while effectively conveying the spirit of psychoanalysis. This was captured in the play's final scene, in which Paula Heimann, the only other character besides Mrs. Klein (played by Uta Hagen) and her daughter Melitta, begins her analysis with the title character. Amid the turmoil and acrimony of her life, Mrs. Klein assumes the role of analyst. In doing so she takes on a restraint uncharacteristic of her in her personal relationships — dramatizing again for me the importance in the analytic stance of something that the words neutrality and abstinence attempt to capture.
I am attracted to analysis for aesthetic reasons among others. While I often find giving or receiving “neutrality” uncomfortable, I also recognize it as indispensable to the analytic endeavor. It is a crucial part of what distinguishes analysis from other therapies and contributes to its aesthetic appeal and therapeutic potential. At the conclusion of the panel on neutrality and abstinence, the reporter, George Makari, mentioned that a jazz musician had explained to him that the key in jazz was listening to the mistakes. I think he neglected to say, as do the critics of neutrality and abstinence, that the utility and beauty of mistakes can occur only in the context of the discipline and structure of the medium. I found in New York a combination of experiences that brought home to me the necessity of such discipline in the analytic attempt to find meaning and create beauty.
William Glover, Ph.D., is a candidate at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.
Correction
In the article on the meeting of BOPS in TAP 30/1, it was reported that Edward Schiff, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Selection Issues, “presented a comprehensive document covering the qualities needed in analysts selecting candidates” This was inaccurate. The committees sreport in fact described the qualities to be looked for in analytic candidates.