Psychotherapy Integration PapersInfluential Readings
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Correspondence between Lawrence Friedman and Tullio Carere-Comes Dear Dr.
Carere, I am very
grateful for your attention to—and clear discussion
of—my ideas, and for sending me your fascinating
article. I would
agree that the principles of psychoanalysis and
psychoanalytic psychotherapy are the same. I find your
ideas about the need for flexibility in foregrounding
strategy or tactics very plausible. I do have
some old-fashioned reservations about the flexibility. I think
there are problems with a goal-defined treatment in
contrast to a technique-defined treatment. For one
thing, most goals (e.g., "understanding") are hard to
define, and when they get defined by the exigencies of
practice they can become labels for an old and
comfortable way of doing things. I don't
have a formula for resolving this practical problem. I suppose I
go along with the old, common view that psychotherapy
allows more tactical maneuvering, whereas analysis is
more technique-committed. We both agree that there is no
goal so well known that we can just try to get at it
in any old way.
But then I could respect innovative therapies
that do just that. Tullio
Carere-Comes: Dear Dr. Friedman, Thank you for your kind words. We surely agree that "there is no goal so well known that we can just try to get at it in any old way". This is not the same as saying, though, that psychoanalysis has nothing to do with goals. I like Thomä & Kächele's definition of psychoanalysis as "an ongoing, temporally unlimited focal therapy with a changing focus". This definition seems to me to go the middle way between excessive focusing on goals or issues, and total (and illusory, in my view) absence of any focusing. I would go even further than Thomä & Kächele. In their view the foci are interactively determined, but the patient's contribute is only unconscious. In my view the appraisal of the patient's conscious contribution as a major factor in the interactive determination of the changing focus would help bridge the gap between psychoanalytic and cognitive-behavioral approaches. Lawrence Friedman: With regard to the second Benvenuto quotation, it may be impossible to be definitively "objective," but can't one aspire to being objective? I think you feel we can. I very much enjoyed your
respectful critique of some relativistic postmodern
currents, their merits and their hazards for treatment
rationale. You
make an extremely important point in emphasizing the
danger of manipulation in approaches that
superficially seem to be non-authoritarian.
Bravo! for
bringing Piaget to bear on the hermeneutic problem. I think you
are absolutely right in this formulation. On the
other hand, I'm not as ready as you are to find
Heidegger "lucid."
Tullio
Carere-Comes: I find Heidegger often
enlightening, rarely lucid. Sometimes, though, he
has a lucid point. Lawrence Friedman: I am
absolutely fascinated by the notion of an "affect of
truth." It
is a great end-run around the problem of a new meaning
that's also an old truth, and the problem of the
signal of correctness.
I find your discussion infinitely valuable. Do you
think there may be more to be said about this -- more
detail, more explication? Tullio
Carere-Comes: We owe the notion of an "affect of truth" to Benvenuto. You will find more detail and more explication in his papers, on-line at the Journal of European Psychoanalysis web site (http://www.psychomedia.it/jep). Lawrence Friedman: Your discussion of the leap into
newness reminds me of one current trend here among
some Sullivanian theorists to replace specific
Freudian fears with fear of novelty as the pathogenic
factor that treatment overcomes. In regard to your discussion of
Napolitani, I find it plausible to stress the infinity
of meanings and abstractions that humans can achieve,
but implausible to go the whole existential route. In fact
that strikes me as a bit of hubris. Freud may
have been overly reductionistic, but I don't think he
was wrong to see man as still an animal, for all his
pleomorphism. And
when I look around me now and back in history, it
seems to me that I see a lot of repetition and
sameness in that animal. I am
sometimes amused by theories that make it seem that
flexibility is one of the most prominent findings in
the practice of psychotherapy. Tullio
Carere-Comes: We can see repetition as the effect of an innate compulsion or of learning, but the aim of therapy (analytic or whatever) is in both case the same: to free the person as much as possible of the repetitive patterns that trap them. We may not go very far along this way. But is there another way that makes us human? Lawrence Friedman: I love your
formulation in Part 3 of the self-interpretation that
traps the patient, and that he must come to see in
that light. And
I loved your critique of the Lacanian rationale. I think you
are quite right. You are right that the adversarial
attitude has a persecutory shade. I would
argue that "persecutory" is a precise description of
part of the analytic atmosphere in its historical
reality, and in its popular image. That is now
being softened and even sometimes abolished. It is often resented by older
analysts as they recall their training analysis. Beside
being an historic fact, I do think that a vaguely
persecutory shade contributes to the action of
analysis (and I think we should call a spade a
spade). Of
course, if that was the patient's main sense of the
analyst's attitude, it would be counter-therapeutic. And there
must have been many such examples.
I think your concluding schematism, critiquing
my one-sided-ness, and placing my polarities in a
larger, dialectical context, is wonderful. I think you are right that it is
a dialectic. After
all, if I don't quite "believe" my patient's
presentation of himself, he will subtly feel me to be
accepting (or at least appreciating) something else he
can't otherwise display, and he will sense that he is
being given more leeway than when he is accepted on
the terms he demands, as in the rest of his life. Tullio
Carere-Comes: That is what I guessed: it is not that your approach is not dialectic, it is that your dialectic is more implicit than explicit. As I made it clear in the final paragraph of my article, I have tried to make explicit what was only implicit in your work. Lawrence Friedman: Still, isn't there a separate question about the analyst's working psychology? How must he figure himself in order to create the four-fold field of forces? How should he be thinking to combine flexibility and discipline, routine and novelty, endorsement and skepticism, etc.? You might say that if the four-dimensional dialectic is the truest description, then that's what the analyst should have in mind. But that is an empirical question, not a theoretical one. And I don't think the final answer is in yet. Tullio
Carere-Comes: The passage from an implicit to
an explicit dialectic surely helps the analyst (or,
for that matter, any therapist) to find a balance on
a moment by moment base inside the different
polarities. This passage is clearly not just a
theoretical question. I am not sure to understand
what you mean by an "empirical question". If it is
empirical research that you have in mind, we are
very far from any decent answer, leaving aside the
final one. If instead you think of an empirically
(i.e., experientially, not just theoretically)
grounded dialectical ability of the analyst, my
answer could be that a dialectical ability that is
not grounded in experience is no dialectical ability
at all. But I would say the same of any practical
ability; therefore I do not think that I hit the
point. A better answer could be the
following: In order to "combine flexibility and
discipline, routine and novelty, endorsement and
skepticism, etc.", the analyst should install what I
have called an "O vertex" in the relational field.
In this vertex the analyst knows that he or she
knows nothing. With the attitude that Bion called
"Faith in O", the analyst entrusts him or herself to
the unknown, meant as a generative matrix, and the
non-theoretical source of all theories. This enables
him or her to let go of any identification with
specific theories and techniques. Without Faith in
O, clinging to one's theories and allegiances is
almost unavoidable, for fear of falling into a
meaningless and destructive void. The presence of
this faith, on the contrary, allows one to distance
oneself from whatever makes up one's identity,
making thus possible flexibility, novelty, and
radical skepticism. Lawrence
Friedman: It's a
great essay, and I'm honored to have been the occasion
of it. Thank
you again for writing it and sending it to me. Lawrence Friedman rejoinder: Dear Dr.
Carere-Comes, Thank you
for your comments. You start me thinking in many
interesting directions. For the moment, let me just try
to be a little clearer about what I called "an
empirical question."
I was referring to the effect on therapy of the
particular conceptualizations (or lack of them) in the
analyst's head.
It may turn out that a certain kind of
ignorance or illusion is necessary for the optimum
balance and/or flexibility. I am temperamentally inclined to
think that humility is the most realistic and
therefore most useful avenue to the position we
desire, but there is always the possibility that it
isn't. I
find what you say congenial, but I'm not sure that we
will turn out to be right. Isn't it a matter of the
analyst's own psychology (not just his line of
thinking)? He
may need to have faith in something else than "O," in
order to have the tranquility to be receptive. Do we
know—really know—what Bion had faith in? But I am
way out of my depth here, and leave it to you to
elaborate that dimension. Once again,
thank you for the rich discussion in your work and
correspondence.
Cordially,
Larry Friedman |
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