Some years ago, I was invited to participate in a symposium on solitude at an international psychoanalytic meeting. I wrote a short paper about a little book I knew well, Christopher Burney's Solitary Confinement. In this book, the author described the subjective states he had experienced during his imprisonment by the Germans for many months during World War II, before a longer period in a concentration camp. The book is insightfully and sensitively written, and seemed to me to admit of interpretation, not in any great depth, but with pertinence to the topic of the symposium.
As it turned out, everything went wrong: The time allotted for the papers was curtailed, the harassed chairman was a last-minute substitute, and the other contributors wrote not about the actual experience of solitude, but about the illusion of solitude in analytic sessions. When I had finished, having been the last to speak, a youngish South American analyst asked me the only question to be put my way: “What would you say is your theoretical point of reference?” Truthfully, if also wearily, I replied, “Phenomenology.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, and walked off.
I concede that my answer could have been off-putting. Phenomenology, strictly speaking, is nihilistic with respect to theory. In the words of Georges Thines, it denotes “enquiry into one's conscious and particularly intellectual processes, any preconceptions about external causes and consequences being excluded.”
My own position is not nearly that stringent. For one thing, attention to emotional processes has to be at the heart of our work. Mine has been a limited phenomenology, in the sense of resisting any finality of psychoanalytic “preconceptions.” Assisted by philosophical readings and discussions, I came over the course of years to a pluralism that regards all rational theories of mind as having potential clinical merit, while skeptical of the exclusive Tightness or indeed the possibility of any consistent scientific theory.
Reading and reflecting on philosophy have accompanied my life in psychoanalysis. I discovered Martin Buber's I and Thou the same year of my psychiatric training that I began to read Freud. I had no initial awareness that the two would be on speaking terms, but it was inevitable that they would interact in my mind. Buber's dialogical philosophy impinges directly on Freud's massive attempt to objectify and systematize mental life as a scientifically knowable universe.
For Buber, there is a radical difference between “I-Thou” and “I-It.” To address a fellow human is a psychically different act from talking about him or her, or a physical object. It is different not only with regard to the other person but also with regard to the self. Addressing another person, I speak from one acknowledged inner world to another. When I describe some physical object or explain a physical process, or when I try to account for the mental operations of that other in objective terms, I constrict my lens to a narrower range, dictated by a theoretical structure, much as I might try to explain the effects of physical exertion — or mental anxiety, for that matter — on the heart rate. There always remains a very important element of our minds that can only be spoken to, not about.
Buber's dialogical philosophy extends into human relations. Ethical principles dominate in his thinking, but as analysts we see that complex interchanges take place in which the view of the other, and the imagining of the other's view of oneself, are the stuff of inner life. It makes a lot of difference whether I hold that other as “you,” a self like me, or as “it,” someone instrumental, to be put to use or disposed of.
Whether we hold to object relations theory, or self psychology, or the Lacanian Other/other distinction, the subjective reality is the same. It would be naïve or disingenuous for me as a Freudian psychoanalyst to assert that my turning to Buber, and later to a series of phenomenological philosophers, occurred independently of my own character disposition and history. Materialistic or mechanistic interpretations of experience, with their accompanying determinism, always ran counter to my grasp of the spiritual life. As early as my college days I had encountered enthusiastically Henri Bergson's anti-mechanistic philosophy, for example, and Alfred North Whitehead's understanding of “concern” as efficacious in world processes. While Freud's bold and brilliant explanations of human expression in terms of libido theory and the tripartite personality were persuasive at the beginning of my studies, I eventually lost conviction in the face of their inadequacy to lived experience — what I learned later to call with Heidegger “being-in-the-world.” I came to see that I was always working with a person, a totality, engaged in a personal world. I was not analyzing an “ego” somehow separable (even conceptually) from my analysand.
Where psychoanalysis fits closest to phenomenology is in its technique. What better way than free association to speak one's mind? Or to explore one's “autobiographical self,” as the neurologist Antonio Damasio uses the term? What better way to promote the process of the analysis of defense and transference? Freud's findings clarified that the expanding exposure of the inner milieu, including its revelation in the address to the imaginary person of the analyst, led to conflict. No need here to hypothesize a “libido” or an “anatomy of the mental personality”; minds, given the chance, speak for themselves. Given enough time, and enough insight on the analyst's part to recognize the automatic disguises included in the utterances, there will be healing disclosure.
I made little headway in my attempt to read the founder of modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, who remains best known to me in textbook summary. In the case of his ungrateful pupil, Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, I found the struggle to understand fruitful. His focus on experience as Dasein — existence, literally “being there” — meant to me that the person is known at first hand through self-awareness, at second hand through language and speech.
A phenomenological approach to psychoanalysis runs head-on into the unconscious as a necessary postulate of our thinking. What is left of psychoanalysis, if we are not permitted to infer from consciously formed statements intentions not previously open to awareness?
Freud's basic concept of the unconscious as a “second state” of mind radically differentiated from consciousness, however, seems to me to turn a powerful inference into a concrete entity. We come into contact clinically with unconscious ideas in the form of unforeseen metaphors that convey meaning to one another. We discover through free association that ideas, images, fantasies that have hitherto stood by themselves are part of an unexpected company. Pursuit of their inner relations increasingly enriches consciousness.
This line of thought was dramatized — I think that's the right word — in the writings of Jacques Lacan, especially in his earlier work, when he was guided by both Heidegger and the linguist Ferdinand De Saussure. By sticking closely to the verbal expressions of his analysands, Lacan followed the analysis as an elaborate symbolic process, in which the interplay of signifying words exposed unconscious intent. His systematic theories of psychoanalysis, however, ended in grandiose, esoteric schemata, as far away from the clinical scene as you could get.
A phenomenological critique of psychoanalytic theories holds that our theories end by deflecting us from insight and recognition. Theories tend toward abstract hypotheses and their attempted verification. As I now understand it, differing theories are differing points of view, in the literal sense (from theoria, “viewing” or “observing”) that they are good enough as long as you want to take the same observation post as the theorist.
During the business of analyzing, it is useful to be able to switch from one post to another, in order to get a better grasp of the elusive data. Since the intention of analyzing is the analysand's self-recognition, not his or her persuasion, paths may vary without danger of getting lost.
Stanley A. Leavy, M.D., now retired, was a training and supervising analyst at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.
Many others have reached this pluralistic stand in psychoanalysis independently of philosophical criticism. On the other hand, the philosophically trained Hans Loewald, with little fanfare, invested traditionally Freudian theory and language with existential meaning in which the person is never lost.
In the interest of thinking clearly, his way may be the way to go for those who want to adhere to systematic theory without clinging to obsolete implications of it. Some acquaintance with philosophy deserves our concern, if only as a critical stand in the face of the many psychoanalytic theories claiming empirical validity beyond the possibilities of the subject.