On: transference, countertransference and projective identification

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In this essay, I define the psychoanalytic concept of transference and its development in the hundred plus years since Freud’s discovery. I illustrate it with a clinical example of a patient’s transference to me. I follow by using the same structure; define, historicise and illustrate, for the concepts of countertransference and projective identification. How countertransference is used differs by analytic school and I make a reference to the differences between Freudians, Kleinians and Independents. These foundational concepts do not belong to the consulting room only. I reference how they inform the psychosocial worlds, notably race, before concluding.

Transference is a process. Its key is ‘displacement’, displacing an unconscious idea, from the object to which it was once attached, and on to the analyst. For Freud, what was transferred was a window into unconscious assumptions, via feelings that properly belong elsewhere (Frosh, 2012). In his ‘Dora’ case study, Freud (1905) had defined transference as “new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies … aroused during the progress of the analysis”. Transference, then, is the “actualisation of unconscious wishes” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967) and a form of the mother-infant dyad (Winnicott, 1960), an illusion where someone, not consciously recognised, represents something, which forms the basis for a repetition of a relationship with an important historic figure (Sandler, Dare and Holder, 1973). The impulses (Freud, 1937) have their source in the earliest object relations and come forth as a consequence of the compulsion to repeat. The analyst works to strengthen the analysand’s ego, so that there is less displacement and the gap between fantasy and reality becomes better understood.

Its discovery and its evolution began with the attachment formed by a patient of Freud’s colleague, Breuer, later anonymised as ‘Anna O’. (Freud, 1893). Freud’s original frustration with transference, that it was a resistance to the analysis, shifted to recognition that it made the therapeutic alliance about emotion (Freud, 1910, 1912, 1914). Freudians consider that treatment is about recognising how the analysand’s transference is informed by an attempt to gratify drives, designed to reduce unpleasure (Lemma, 2016). Freud’s initial focus, was on erotic and romantic transference. Therapy was effected by love, and early appreciation of what is now described as positive transference. The negative transference, (Klein, 1952) when an analysand brings forth hostile feelings from developmental relationships, was not really considered until Klein’s work. Kleinians believe hostility is linked to the death instinct, and that hatred and envy are innate. Klein also hypothesised that what might be transferred on to the analyst might be parts of the analysand’s self, such as the superego, rather than historic relationships. (Klein, 1952, 1957). Transference today is more a projection (Kleinian) model than a displacement (Freudian) one. Post-Kleinians, including Winnicott and Bion, look at the transference developmentally. Just as the mother receives the projections of the infant and moderates and mitigates, so that the infant can receive them back, so the analyst behaves for the patient. The analyst needs to remain alert and thoughtful, in a state of ‘reverie’ (Bion, 1962). All of the communications from the patient “contain something relevant to the transference situation”. (Segal, 1981)

To illustrate the concept, I share an experience from my personal clinical work: I have been working with a patient, ‘A’, who was largely raised by a disciplinarian stepfather, who appears to have had little affection for his stepson. His biological father left when he was three. In the transference, I am sometimes the stepfather: ‘A’ splits an eagerness to please me, to get it ‘right’, but also an anxiety that he will draw my ire. ‘A’’s childhood in his stepfather’s home was, as he recalls it, dominated by the demands to be useful, by completing a number of chores. At the outset of the therapy, he talked about decorating the NHS consulting room, if he had the right tools. I understood A’s inner world to be shabby and neglected, and his need to show he could be useful, and compliant. This is evidence of displacement, as are other times, when I sense I become A’s father, albeit idealised, as someone who was understanding and interested. What emerges then, is A’s infantile desire to be interpreted and loved. In my countertransference, I feel something parental and am reminded of the unconscious desire many therapists have to repair, something Klein (1952) highlights.

Countertransference like mine, is unresolved, unconscious elements within the analyst (Freud, 1910), evoking intense feelings. (Carpy, 1989) The analyst has an unconscious reaction, identifies the analysand’s role in bringing it about, and then examines the effect on both parties (Money-Kyrle, 1956). Freud had regarded it as an impediment that should be resolved by the analyst developing more ego strength in their own analysis. No analyst is “wholly free of infantile dependence” (Racker, 1948) and feelings and impulses are determined by the past, meaning that aspects of the Oedipal situation are repeated in every countertransference. Forty years after Freud’s anxieties about countertransference, Heimann (1950) redefined it as “an instrument of research” into the patient’s unconscious, because the analyst’s unconscious understands that of his patient. The analyst, is both an interpreter and an object of the impulses felt by the patient. Klein (1952), although prioritising the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, held similar views to Freud, claiming that only by analysing “the transference situation to its depths” could the past in both real and phantasy be understood.  However, it is the ‘post-Kleinians’ (Bion, 1959, Segal 1975, Rosenfeld, 1987) that have been at the forefront of countertransference’s development. Currently, it is usually defined as being both the analyst’s own transference and the analyst’s response to the analysand’s transference.

Despite the significance of Ferenczi and Alice Balint’s views, that the analyst’s own feelings should be shared with the analysand (Heimann, 1950), little was written about countertransference until the end of the 1940’s (Racker, 1948). In developing Klein (1946), Winnicott (1947), had been amongst the first to grasp its significance for working with psychotic patient populations when describing hatred towards the patient. This is relevant for our contemporary understanding of issues like racism, founded upon the “irrationality of the unconscious” (Timimi, 1996). It was Heimann, though, that encouraged a more constructive view of something she felt was created by the patient; the aforementioned instrument of research. Klein (1952), who prioritised the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, rarely used the term countertransference until writing about the infantile roots for both parties in seeking ‘reassurance’ (1957). Ten years after Heimann, writing that the analyst needed to ‘sustain’ and not ‘discharge’ feelings, the word countertransference was “in danger of losing its identity” according to Winnicott (1960). He was inclined to Freud’s view and defined countertransference as “neurotic features” disturbing the analysis and spoiling the analyst’s “professional attitude.” Independents and post-Kleinians have been at the forefront of subsequent development, making it a “fertile, intersubjective field” (White, 2006). Winnicott (1963) and Bion (1965) looked at it developmentally, and Ogden (1994) has made it more about intersubjectivity, with his concept of the ‘analytic third’. More contemporary views are that the analyst should allow themselves to participate in the enactment required by the patient’s projections, in order to become conscious of the phantasy and emotion (Rosenfeld, 1971, Joseph, 1989, Bollas, 1987,1992).

In my work with a woman, ‘B’, I often find myself struggling to concentrate. I wonder if she is making me mad (Winnicott, 1960). I find myself wanting the sessions to come to an end and notice her need for attention, but how I seem to be resisting giving it. Her mother was diagnosed as schizophrenic, after ‘B’ reached adulthood. Her father left pre-adolescence and had a second family, so she has half-brothers. Everything about her world and world view appears to be influenced by splits. Her maternal care and her parents’ divorce concretised her views, I believe, and pulled her back from a developing depressive position to paranoid schizoid (Klein, 1946). I experience her as happiest when complaining about her family, friends, colleagues, and employment. I, guilty with inattention, sense a whining child, starved of gratification. Racker (1953) would suggest the patient is emotionally blocking and I am succumbing to “pampering”, initiated by my guilt at my wandering attention. By pampering, I re-focus intently and become a good Object for ‘B’, as the father was before he left. Sometimes my countertransference is paternally protective, (Money-Kyrle, 1956), but I think I often act out the neglectful mother, creating a guilt, which is a consequence of my inability to be a necessary container for her anxieties (Bion, 1959, 1962). This acting out has made me sympathetic to the Joseph, Rosenfeld and Bollas approaches.

Projective Identification, (PI), pre-dates Heimann’s constructive view of countertransference but had already transformed the transference/countertransference dynamic from a displacement to a projection focus (Klein, 1946). PI is an unconscious, omnipotent phantasy best captured by the lay phrase ‘giving someone a piece of my mind’. It is not everything that makes up the countertransference, (Heimann, 1950), but invariably seems to be the dominant feature in a therapeutic relationship; most commonly manifested as a part of the patient’s self, projected into the object (Segal, 1964) and where the projector is psychically aligned with the person into whom it has been projected. This is done, with the aim not simply of expulsion, but of using the projection to control the therapist, (Segal, 1981) inducing feelings or thoughts or by provoking forms of enactment. The object is transformed by the projection (Feldman, 2009). The projector fantasises taking over the therapist and influencing the recipient so that they think and respond in a way that is congruent with the projection (Ogden, 1982). The therapist processes what is projected, so that it can be palatably returned and the projector can introject what had needed expelling.

PI has been taken up by many theoreticians, notably Bion (1959, 1970), who adapted it by identifying what was projected as ‘beta elements’ that the therapist made sense of thanks to utilising ‘alpha function’, and then being able to reproject them. He considered that PI was understood as ‘a three-dimensional space’, into which patients projected the parts of their personality that they had split off. Klein thought that this was ‘observable’ in psychotic and borderline patients and Bion agreed with her that the ‘degree of fragmentation’ and the distance to which split-off fragments were projected was a measure of the distance a patient had from contact with reality. In his studies of the containment process (1959,1962), he observed how a mother takes in and allows herself to be affected by her infant’s projection of distress. The mother/analyst has not only contained an experience but transformed it. For some, enactment opens analytical work to “deep unconscious identifications and primitive levels of functioning” which are beyond the reach of the intellect, (Tuckett, 1997) albeit recognising one’s own feelings can be difficult (Brenman-Pick, 1985)

One of my experiences of PI came from a patient, ‘C’, presenting as depressed and unable to develop relationships. ‘C’ earned his PhD at Oxford, where his father was a fellow, while his grandfather was a celebrated and distinguished medic. He now edited a well-known scientific magazine, but felt his achievements were inferior to his family history, and he was ‘phoney’. (Winnicott, 1960). In our early work, he let me know that he thought that psychotherapy was “pointless”. Anyone working in the NHS, was probably unable to develop a private practise. He projected feelings of inferiority into me, in order to rid them from himself (Rosenfeld, 1987) and to enable him to adopt the superior status he associated with his father and grandfather. I found myself identifying with the intellectual inferiority, responding by making theoretical and technical interventions in the sessions. I became the boy he had been, desperately trying to show my academic and intellectual accomplishments to a demanding father. I was compliant and beginning a “defensive collusive arrangement” (Feldman, 2009).  I had acted out something congruent with what had been projected into me, seeking attention and admiration. Once I became aware of what was happening, we were able to think about the competitive need for superiority. Eventually, he was able to introject the split off part and to accommodate it, recognising that he was still seeking parental love.

The concepts of transference, splitting and PI are fundamental to our psychosocial world. Klein (1952) asserted that transference operated throughout our lives influencing all relationships. Transference includes other significant figures beyond the parental couple, taking in the realm of the collective social unconscious. The social world contains multiple projected and introjected transference contents. External events, such as those affecting race or gender often catalyse a regression in psychic functioning activating defences. (Hamer, 2006) ‘D’, a Pakistani male patient of mine, projected his feelings of being unwelcome, on to outbursts against the Polish builders working on his apartment block, because of their use of their native tongue. He wanted to rid himself of being identified as an immigrant Other, and identify with my white, native born status. Reciprocal projective identifications can establish a preferred element of the self in the white. (Timimi, 1996). He may also have harboured suspicions of my unconscious and unexpressed attitudes to race. Racism might be transference in a regressed state (Hamer, 2006) characterised by splitting of the self, obscuring the ‘true self’ (Winnicott, 1960) to protect it from annihilation. Splitting is the psychoanalytic basis for racism (Timimi, 1996)

I have defined and illustrated the concepts of transference, countertransference and projective identification. In my work, I find I incline more to the Freudian displacement of past relationships, than to Kleinian split off parts of the self, but appreciate the contemporary use of enactment, intellectually and affectively. I like Racker’s (1948) observation that psychoanalysts choose their work based on “the object relations of infancy” and because of its reparative nature (Money-Kyrle, 1956), which seems rather Kleinian. Her assertion that transference operates all through our lives, influencing every relationship, is why I believe we need to apply what we can learn in the clinic to the world beyond; what the IPA’s podcast characterises as psychoanalysis “off the couch”. It requires a longer essay to do justice to the great psychosocial themes of race, ethnicity, religious marginalisation, sexual identity and fluidity, as well as social constructs around ‘normality’, disability and social class, but I have demonstrated the power of the unconscious, and how something once perceived as an impediment, is now a critical therapeutic tool.

References:

Balint, A & Balint, M. (1939) On transference and countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 20.  pp.225-230

Bion, W.R. (1959) Attacks on Linking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, pp. 308-15

Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Bion, W.R. (1965) Transformations: Change from Learning to Growth. London: Heinemann.

Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation New York: Basic Books

Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: FAB

Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience London: Karnac

Brenman Pick, I. (1985). Working Through in the Countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, pp.157-166

Carpy, D.V., (1989). Tolerating the countertransference: A mutative process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis70, pp. 227-241.

Feldman, M (1997) Projective identification: the analyst’s involvement International Journal of Psycho-Analysis78, pp.287-294.

Feldman, M. (2009). Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process: Selected Papers of Michael Feldman Hove, East Sussex. Routledge.

Freud, A (1937) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Freud, S (1893) The Psychotherapy of Hysteria. In: SE2 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud pp. 253-305

Freud, S (1905) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In: SE7 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

Freud, S (1910) The future prospects of psychoanalytic therapy. In: SE11 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

Freud, S (1912) The Dynamics of Transference. In: SE12 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud pp. 97-108.

Freud, S (1914) Remembering, Repeating and Working Through. In: SE12 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud pp. 145-156

Frosh, S. (2012). A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hamer, F. (2006) Racism as a Transference State Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75(1) pp. 197-214

Heimann, P (1950) On Countertransference International Journal of Psychoanalysis 31.  pp. 81-84 

Hinshelwood, R. (1999) Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80.  pp. 797-818 

Joseph, B. (1985). Transference: The Total Situation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 66.  pp.447-454

Joseph, B (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph London: Routledge

Klein, M. (1946) Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (3).

Klein, M (1952). The Origins of Transference. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Klein, M (1957). Envy and Gratitude. In: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. (1967) The Language of Psychoanalysis London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Lemma, A. (2016) Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Money-Kyrle, R.E. (1956) Normal Counter-Transference and Some of its Deviations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 37 (3) pp. 360-66

Ogden, T (1982) Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique New York: Jason Aronson

Ogden, T (1994) The analytic third: working with intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75.  pp. 3-19

Racker, H. (1948) The Countertransference Neurosis. In: Transference and Countertransference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Racker, H (1953) The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference. In: Transference and Countertransference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Rosenfeld, (1971) Contribution to the psychopathology of psychotic states. In: E. Spillius (ed.) (1988) Melanie Klein Today: vol 1, Mainly Theory. London: Routledge.

Rosenfeld, H. (1987) Listening and Interpretation. Therapeutic and Anti-therapeutic Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of psychotic, borderline and neurotic patients London: Tavistock Publications.

Sandler, J., Dare, C., and Holder, A. (1973) The Patient and the Analyst London: Maresfield Library

Segal, H. (1964) Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein New York: Basic Books.

Segal, H (1981) The Work of Hanna Segal New York: Jason Aronson

Timimi, S (1996) Race and Colour in Internal and External Reality. British Journal of Psychotherapy 13(2) pp. 183-192

Tuckett, D (1997) Mutual Enactment in the psychoanalytic situation. In: The Perverse Transference and Other Matters: Essays in Honor of R. Horacio Etchegoyen.

Winnicott, D.W (1947) Hate in the countertransference In: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis London: Hogarth Press Ltd

Winnicott, D. W. (1960) Countertransference. In: The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Winnicott, D.W (1963) Psychotherapy of Character Disorders. In: The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

White, J. (2006) Motivational echoes: Transference and countertransference in contemporary theory. In: Generation – Preoccupations & Conflicts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Hove: Routledge

You talking to me? True and False Selves.

The skill of an actor in being able to persuade the audience that they are someone else is one of the things I most admire. And yet, we all act, some more than others. The trope of the comedian making people laugh through his depression, is another way we might think about presenting an altered self. We act to disguise, or often, to protect something of ourselves. I have often prepared myself for social or for professional occasions by assuming a mask. I look back nearly seven years after leaving my City career, and I wonder how much of what I displayed was the “real me”. In other words, how much was character and how much the actor?

When I was a little younger I often found myself commentating, in my head, on my life. I looked at myself from some other perspective and described myself, my actions and my thoughts like a novelist writing about somebody else. I was looking at myself as a character. Not all of this is healthy. I had split something off from myself and I was losing touch with my core.

Professional roles sometimes require an adoption of a false self. It can be unhealthy. The most extreme professional examples are well-known in the literature of organisational or business psychology. Most oft-quoted is that of the air crew staff on long-haul flights. The need to maintain a smiling, reassuring and welcoming face and attitude, in the face of often rude, demeaning, sexual comments and attitudes, from sometimes over-refreshed, occasionally inebriated customers, leads to something called cognitive dissonance, when all the exterior signals have to confound what is happening to someone’s inner thoughts and feelings. It is exhausting and is an accelerator to burnout and breakdown.

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Paediatrician turned psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott wrote a very fine paper about the True Self. I have read it a number of times. At times it can be dense, but at others it seems very clear to me, and it also describes a phenomenon that I recognise in myself. Given that he notes that it is a defence – in more Freudian terms it is a means of protecting the ego – I wanted to understand it better. The False Self is often a high functioning identity and appears to be someone with few issues to observers, but the inability to be ‘whole’ generates huge psychic strain.

The great novelists and dramatists understood this. Seeking one’s identity is a familiar plotline. Oliver Twist is forced to adapt and adopt different personae, but the point of Dickens’s story is that his true self triumphs. Why? Because of love. More interesting are the dilemmas that trouble characters who become slaves to their false selves. I think that is why Mad Men’s ‘Don Draper’ aka Dick Whitman, was so compelling. The true self cannot be lost, however submerged it becomes. In a slightly different storyline, we watch Breaking Bad’s ‘Walter White’ become a slave to his ‘Heisenberg’ self, and it contrasts with Draper, who instantly reinvents himself, whereas White suffers as he shifts selves.

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In the brilliant film ‘American Fiction’, the protagonist, Monk, adopts a writing identity to appeal to the publishing industry. He intends it to parody what is being published and bought, but becomes dizzied by the success of what he produces and then the need to be faithful to his false identity. His false self literally overwhelms his true self. It tortures him. The author, Percival Everett, of the novel on which the film is based, ‘Erasure’, has just written a new novel, based on the world seen through the eyes of Huckleberry Finn’s companion, Jim. It too, is about protecting a True Self.

Jim becomes James, is well-read and familiar with philosophy, and is an extreme example of the phenomenon of ‘code switching’. In reality, code switching is unfunny. It is a conscious defence adopted to protect someone from being attacked for their true identity, invariably linked to ethnicity. It is quite usual for all of us in social or professional fields to want to present our best selves, or a version of our self that we think will be most attractive to the company we are keeping. I do not think of this as deceit, or malign, but a wish to be accommodating and engaging. That comes from a positive intent, whereas code switching is a linguistic attempt to fit in with a dominant culture and avoid negative attention and hostility. One might concede that this is negative selection.

It was listening to Everett on a recent “Private Passions’ interview with Michael Berkeley on Radio 3, and reading a review of his latest book in this month’s LRB, that made me revisit Winnicott, and also to think about how much, or little of my True Self, I reveal. Winnicott begins, by acknowledging that the concept of a true self appears “in certain religions and philosophical systems”. If a false self exists, he asks how it arises, what its function is, why does it often become exaggerated, do people exist without a false self, and if so why, and finally what could be named a True Self.

He compliments Freud’s early work dividing the self into that “powered by the instincts”, which I take to mean the id, and “a part that is turned outwards and is related to the world”, which I think means the ego. In his opening clinical example, he writes about a middle-aged woman who had a very successful False Self. It is not clear what he means here by “successful”, but it made me think about a number of former colleagues and clients during my City career.

This woman, despite and also because of her “successful False Self”, “had the feeling all her life that she had not started to exist”. When I read that I thought of my internal commentary on this character called Ian Burns. He writes that “she had always been looking for a means of getting to her True Self”. I admire the work of a former JP Morgan employee called Lucy, who left the industry to teach yoga, breath work and to expand her own self-development and now helps other young professionals to escape the cage they have built for themselves, sometimes unknowingly, and to seek their True Self. (At least that is how I interpret the brilliant work she does). Look her up.

Winnicott continues, by noting that he found himself analysing someone who he thought of as her “Caretaker Self”. This was the self that understood the loss of something true and core and had at least taken her to analysis, and slowly became able to hand over “its function to the analyst”. It was the evolution of the case that allowed Winnicott to understand that a False Self is defensive, designed “to hide and protect the True Self”.

Back to my experiences of life in the City, it is important to appreciate that a False Self can often be a high functioning individual. Outward appearances are of a ‘success’. Something however, let us call it a ‘Whole Self’, is lacking and professional and personal relationships begin to fail. Winnicott thinks these are extreme cases – the ‘True Self’ is hidden.

In less extreme examples, the False Self defends the True Self, but the True Self is “acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life”. He describes it as a clinical illness “as an organisation with a positive aim”. Recovery, or perhaps development would be a better word, comes from the False Self finding the conditions to allow the True Self to come into its own. Failure can lead to suicide because it “is the destruction of the Total Self in avoidance of the annihilation of the True Self”.

Nonetheless, the False Self can sustain and not necessarily seek destruction and annihilation. What does it look like in this apparently healthy manifestation? It is “represented by the whole organisation of the polite and mannered social attitude”, which is what I believe I saw frequently amongst my erstwhile colleagues and clients. Winnicott also highlights how intellectual individuals have a tendency for the “mind to become the location of the False Self”, developing a “dissociation between intellectual activity and psychosomatic existence”. I believe this is relevant to my burnout experience in 2012.

When I look back to the self I was at the time, I now believe that my error that precipitated my career crisis was a form of self-sabotage initiated by my unconscious. I was enjoying a period of professional success and status, but in his paper Winnicott refers to “the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels ‘phoney’ the more he or she is successful”. Such individuals “destroy themselves in one way or another, instead of fulfilling promise…”

So, where does the False Self come from? What is it defending? Right at the beginning of life, Winnicott refers to an “unintegrated” infant, yet to distinguish between itself and an Object, and so working with what he calls the “environment mother”. Anything, gestures that the infant makes ‘spontaneously’, are the True Self, but if the mother fails to meet the omnipotence of the infant repeatedly, the infant can only note the substitution of the mother’s gesture and comply with it. This is the foundation of a False Self.

Ask yourself if you have a tendency towards being compliant? “The True Self does not become a living reality except as a result of the mother’s repeated success in meeting the infant’s spontaneous gesture or sensory hallucination.” Instead, the infant builds a set of false relationships “so that the child may grow to be just like mother, nurse, aunt, brother, or whoever at the time dominates the scene”. The False Self’s compliance with environmental demands hides the True Self. Compliance often develops into skilled imitation.

A True Self allows for reality, but the “existence of a False Self results in feeling unreal or a sense of futility”. When does it appear? “The True Self appears as soon as there is any mental organisation of the individual at all, and it means little more than the summation of sensori-motor aliveness”. He cites an example of a woman who felt that the first fifty years of her life had been “wasted” and sought a sense of “aliveness”. She was not in touch with her core, her essence. When I used to commentate on myself, I did not know what I was doing, but now I think that I might have been observing something that was not truly alive.

Winnicott believed there were degrees of False Self application, from “the healthy, polite aspect of the self” to the more damaged and damaging, “truly split-off compliant False Self”. It is this that is mistaken for the “whole child”, or the ‘real’ adult. He thought that it led to “a poverty of cultural living”, which leads to a lack of appreciation of a cultural life and instead, “extreme restlessness, and inability to concentrate”.

In the final analysis, one asks of both oneself and of others “Who are you?” The greatest privilege is being seen, and accepted for who we are. It’s love – the sort that a parent has for a child – and what an adult seeks in a partner. Showing our true selves means being vulnerable like the neonate, it means accepting dependence, and it is of course, very uncomfortable, which is why there is a psychic need to defend it from any sort of attack or what Winnicott called “impingement”.

The fictional characters I have highlighted all find themselves becoming detached from the person they believe themselves to be. They also feel that revealing their True Self would have awful consequences. I understand the point about annihilation and suicide that Winnicott made. Not being a “phoney” is much more difficult than it can seem. For couples, when one partner has not been able to be honest and fears revealing a whole self, it leads to despair and a sad void where something is sensed but cannot be discussed or understood. My own analysis is, to reference another psychoanalyst, Wilfried Bion, introducing me to myself and recognising the years of defensive self-deception.

On Transference and Countertransference

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“It is only by analysing the transference situation to its depth that we are able to discover the past both in its realistic and phantastic aspects”. (Klein, 1952). In this essay, I shall attempt to define the psychoanalytic terms transference and countertransference. I shall begin with definitions and Freud’s discovery of transference, and go on to explain how the idea of transference and its utility in the analytic process has changed with time. Change came with later psychoanalysts, but the most profound impact may have been that of Melanie Klein, and so I consider her work, and the impact of theories based on projection and projective identification. I then attempt to review what transference is when it is in the clinic, referencing several post-Freudian analysts. Before discussing what countertransference is, I consider the term negative transference, in order to distinguish it from countertransference. I go on to think about transference in the analytic session, how it works, and also to reference the importance of erotic transference. I consider if transference is used outside the clinic given that psychoanalysis is not just a form of therapy. Lastly, I make a few short conclusions.

How does one define transference, which I regard as fundamental to the analytic process? Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) give one of the best definitions, in my opinion: “A process of actualisation of unconscious wishes. Transference uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with these objects. Its context par excellence is the analytic situation. In the transference, infantile prototypes re-emerge and are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy.” Transference, whilst unconscious can be brought into consciousness and enacted. Many analysts believe that how the analysand reacts to the frame i.e. the fixed timing and location of the session, is a form of transference. Lateness is interpreted as a punishing anger, and early arrival as something revealing anxiety. Transference might come into a session as (attempted) manipulation or as a provocation. Frosh (2012, p.192) cites Spillius et al (2011) in considering how transference became central to psychoanalysis from its early beginnings. It now seems to be much more about externalising unconscious fantasy, informed by the past and developed in the relationship in the analytic sessions, whereas Freud held that it was a displacement of an unconscious idea from a person in the analysand’s past, on to the analyst in the room. Having originally thought transference interfered with the work of analysis, he came to see value in the analysand’s feelings, believing that they had value as a means of understanding a neurosis. In his 1914 paper “Remembering, repeating and working-through” he explored how primitive emotions could have free expression and become useful for self-exploration.

The origin or discovery of transference is attributed to Freud. However, in 1917, in letters to first Sandor Ferenczi, and then to Karl Abraham, he draws their attentions to the work of Georg Groddeck, with whom he had just started corresponding and who may be regarded as the first ‘wild analyst’. Groddeck eventually stayed outside of the psychoanalytical organisations, but was famous for his work on somatic and psychosomatic illnesses. Groddeck had emphasised the importance of transference, particularly negative transference, which I explore later in this essay, which had impressed Freud. Freud originally thought of transference as an obstruction and that it inhibited a patient from free associating. Transference was discovered by Freud, when thinking of the difficulties that caused Breuer to stop seeing his patient, known as ‘Anna O’. Breuer was worried by the unconscious emotional charge in the room, as it was erotic. It complicated the work. It was a little later that Freud himself came to understand its efficacy, as a tool for ‘working through’. The analysand brings buried feelings and thoughts from past relationships and ‘transfers’ them to the analyst.

Freud identified its more positive influence (1905, p.116) as part of what became known as the ‘Dora case’. He wrote of “new editions of the impulses and phantasies” which was about how feelings were transferred into the room when they properly belonged elsewhere. Freud came to see himself as the recipient of ‘transferred feelings’; things that were unresolved from past relationships and a window into the unconscious of the analysand. Although ‘Dora’ ended her therapy with him, and he came to see it as a ‘failed case’, it is one of the landmark moments in the development of psychoanalysis. He thought if analysands could be helped to identify what was being transferred, especially how patterns of past maladaptive relationships tended to repeat, then they could be helped to moderate the impacts. Freud went on to note that it was the most difficult, as well as the most important, part of analytic technique. In 1914, he was writing that the analytic setting was a playground where the repetitions could take place and in his 1915 paper, “Observations on transference love” he noted “there can be no doubt that the outbreak of a passionate demand for love is largely the work of resistance”.

A little after Freud, Strachey (1934) wrote about transference interpretation. Its weight and significance is conveyed by “that which the analyst most feared and most wished to avoid”. One of the reasons for the fears, are what is happening to the analyst. Money-Kyrle (1956) noted that “the analyst’s experience of the patient’s projections may be linked with the analyst’s own internal reactions to the material.” I develop this below when discussing projective identification and countertransference, which Money-Kyrle (ibid. p.361) called a “delicate receiving apparatus”. It was Fairbairn (1958) who best summarised the centrality of working with transference as part of the treatment: “psychoanalytic treatment resolves itself into a struggle on the part of the patient to press-gang his relationship with the analyst into a closed system of the inner world through the agency of transference” (my italics). The transference is of little use without acknowledgement, and more significantly, interpretation. Strachey understood it as a lengthy process, “modification of the patient’s super-ego is brought about in a series of innumerable small steps by the agency of mutative interpretations, which are effected by the analyst in virtue of his position as object of the patient’s id-impulses and as auxiliary super-ego.”

Around the time that Strachey was writing, Melanie Klein was developing her ideas and in 1946 produced the seminal paper on projective identification. She wrote, “projective identification involves projection in that it is an identifying of the object with split-off parts of the self. Projective identification has given an added dimension to what we understand by transference, in that transference need not now be regarded simply as a repetition of the past.”. Transference, from a clinical point of view was evolving. Sandler (1987) felt it gave an ‘added dimension’ to transference “in that transference need not now be regarded as a repetition of the past”. Arundale and Bellman (2011) wrote that the projection of “early infantile states of mind” are akin, clinically, to transference and countertransference in having both ‘communicative’ and ‘evacuative’ functions. Feldman (2009) described Klein’s formulation of projective identification as “an unconscious phantasy in which the patient expelled what were usually disturbing contents into another object”. He goes on to describe how the object is then transformed in the patient’s mind because it now contains the expelled material. He added that it was not just a “method of evacuation” but provides other comforts for the patient such as believing that they can possess or control the object. “The patient’s phantasies, expressed by gross or subtle, verbal or non-verbal means, may come to influence the analyst’s state of mind”. 

The modern and Kleinian work of analysis is to contain the projections, work them through until they can be handed back, ‘introjected into’ the analysand, in a tolerable form. Klein saw transference as feelings being remembered and used. Steiner (1993) described it thus “We have come to use countertransference to refer to the totality of the analyst’s reactions in his relationship with the patient. The recognition of the importance of projective identification in creating these reactions led naturally to the idea that counter-transference is an important source of information about the state of the mind of the patient.” However, he warns “self-deception and unconscious collusion with the patient to evade reality makes counter-transference unreliable without additional corroboration”. Brenman-Pick (1985) reminds us that “constant projecting by the patient into the analyst is the essence of analysis”. Feldman (2009) describes projective identification as using an ‘omnipotent phantasy’ to defend primitive anxieties. He also highlights Bion’s work on containment to note “the mother’s responses to normal or pathological varieties of projective identification, emphasised the mother’s crucial function of taking in and allowing herself to be affected by the infant’s projection of severe anxiety or distress”.

The analyst also has his or her own transference. One thing the analyst has to be aware of, and be able to analyse, is the possibility of an analysand working through an enactment, sometimes called an ‘actualisation’. This is when something unconscious affects the participants and the responses cannot be contained and become part of the behavioural responses. Often these can lead to damaging and inappropriate responses known as ‘boundary transgressions’. The analyst needs to isolate the analysand’s responses and to understand when they might be acting out something informed by past relationships. If done well and appropriately, it becomes something to discuss, to ‘work through’ and can be explored as part of the therapy. Auchincloss and Samberg (2014) describe it thus: “Enactment is a co-constructed verbal and/or behavioural experience during a psychoanalytic treatment in which a patient’s expression of a transference fantasy evokes a countertransference “action” in the analyst. Enactments are “symbolic interactions” … in that they carry unconscious meanings for both patient and analyst, unconsciously initiated by the patient and evoking unconscious compliance in the analyst.” What is happening is exemplified by Brenman-Pick (1985), describing the clinical temptation to be a maternal figure, “we may act out by becoming excessively sympathetic to the patient”.

In the clinic, it is often this relationship, with the primary carer, that is transferred, and the analyst that needs to do the maternal containing, usually because it had been absent in the past, through reasons of a mother being overwhelmed and neglectful. Brenman-Pick (1985) described a state of mind which sought another state of mind “just as a mouth seeks a breast as an inborn potential.” The analysand may make assumptions about the analyst’s personal life and therefore thoughts, even though she has no information on which to base such assumptions. The analyst uses these fantasies rather than dismiss them. Winnicott (1947) goes so far as to describe ‘exploiting’ the transference. An analyst might note how the analysand is prone to assume something about them especially if it feels judgmental. This may be because of a past where judgment, particularly if it was from a parent, has been common. An analyst can illustrate that the analysand is responding as if she was attacked, and yet there was no attack from what is likely to have been an open ended, perhaps ambiguous comment. It might manifest as a need to impress, perhaps by listing achievements, which might reveal an insecurity about not being respected, by a teacher or an employer. It might be a hastiness to agree with an interpretation, which is little more than speculation, but is transferred from avoiding conflict in other relationships, often a spouse.

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Arundale (2011) reflects on Feldman’s work in this area and writes “As he understands it, the historical objects from the patient’s past are alive in the present moment as internal objects, so that they are available as transference objects”, she goes on to add that when the transference relationship is understood and properly experienced it allows the past to become clearer and for internal objects to be modified. She credits Strachey (1934) with creating a template for psychic change for future generations of analytic schools by identifying “mutative transference interpretation”. In the work, the relationship with the analyst is a foundation; a template for how future relationships might be formed to break the patterns of the past. Ultimately the aim is to reach a Bion moment of significance, when the analysand can be introduced to his or herself. Frosh (2012, p.190) puts it very concisely “…the reality of the analyst’s behaviour. Why should the analyst’s silence be interpreted as hostile judgment rather than supportive listening? The answer here is ‘because of the transference’”. Sandler (1976) considered the manipulative element of the dyadic relationship and wrote that “in the transference…the patient attempts to prod the analyst into behaving in a particular way and unconsciously scans and adapts to his perception of the analyst’s reaction”. He writes about the analysand resisting the impulse to be aware of any “infantile relationship” that he/she might be trying to impose. Separately Sandler (1990 p. 869) wrote about how an analysand might try “to impose on the situation a role relationship with the analyst”, which is the enactment described above.

What to do with all this transferential material, though? Roth (2001) observes that the transference has different levels of interpretation in the clinic. At one level, it links what is happening in the clinic with the analysand’s past, but moves to a level linking events in the analysand’s life outside the clinic and on to interpreting unconscious phantasies about the analyst and the analysis. The deepest level is to “enact phantasy configurations”. Roth opens her paper referencing another analyst’s material about a dream, but what is being considered is transference. She goes on to use other clinical examples of her own, to consider the multiple ways a transference can be interpreted and what the clinician needs to be aware of. How to separate layers of material and how to identify working with transference on the countertransference. I write about countertransference in more detail below. Roth notes how she is reviewing “complex transference manifestations” as she attempts to maintain the analysand’s trust and interest, but to get her to understand the links between what she is saying and what it means, and how it is being brought into the clinic. She guides us through her work deeper, by transference interpretation level, past an aggressive projective identification to a level four enactment which is a kind of seduction scene. Her conclusions summarise the importance of transference, which I regard as the foundation of the analytic work; “our sense of conviction about our patient’s internal world comes ultimately from our understanding of the here-and-now transference relationship between us”.

What happens when the analysand is transferring something from a difficult past relationship, or needs to project aggressive, hostile and unwanted, intolerable feelings into the analyst? This is the realm of negative transference; hostile feelings that the analyst’s presence elicits in the analysand. Analysts often have to start their work by demonstrating a caring side to become a ‘good object’, so that there is trust. This is the ‘therapeutic alliance’, but most often the effective work is done when the analyst becomes the ‘bad object’, and can show the analysand that the clinic is a non-judgmental space, and that difficult feelings can be contained and worked through. Understanding a phenomenon such as negative transference and more importantly, appreciating its utility, was largely the work of Melanie Klein, who had developed the ‘good breast/bad breast’ understanding of infantile love and hate, and she noted that the analyst was often split by the analysand into a good figure and a bad one, often in the same session. The demand of the analyst is to contain the anger, to ‘work through it’ and to behave as the nurturing mother of early infancy, and once again, to not judge the person from whom the hostility has come. The gentlest of questions, the most ambiguous of references, the calmest of silences can all be interpreted as hostile by an analysand with a negative transference. In Klein’s 1952 paper she wrote “we can fully appreciate the interconnection between positive and negative transferences only if we explore the early interplay between love and hate, and the vicious circle of aggression, anxieties, feelings of guilt and increased aggression, as well as the various aspects of objects towards whom these conflicting emotions and anxieties are directed.” And “I became convinced that the analysis of the negative transference, which had received relatively little attention in psycho-analytic technique, is a precondition for analysing the deeper layers of the mind.”

There is something in the word ‘counter’ that suggests resistance and even an aggressive return, as in ‘counterpunch’. Negative connotations perhaps, so is it related to negative transference? No. Countertransference has more than one definition, but is not negative transference. It might be a psychic response to it, though. Laplanche and Pontilis (1973, p.92) define “the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand – especially to the analysand’s own transference”. Also, “some authors take the counter-transference to include everything in the analyst’s personality liable to affect the treatment, while others restrict it to those unconscious processes which are brought about in the analyst by the transference of the analysand.” This is difficult because if, as in some definitions, it is to be used as a tool in the analytic work, how can we deploy something that is unconscious? Nonetheless, prominent post-Freudians such as Winnicott (1947) thought it played a central role in the analytic work. He described it as “the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behaviour of the patient”. For Freud, it was the analyst’s transference, how she had been affected by what the analysand had brought to the session. He regarded it as the neurotic response of the analyst, not a good thing, and something to be resolved by more analysis for the analyst. Sandler (1976) notes that Freud saw it as impeding understanding, because it clouded the mind, which was the tool needed to do the work; an interference with the work of interpretation.

More lately, with a Kleinian influence, it has come to mean the specific response of an analyst to the analysand’s transference. It is about taking in the analysand’s projections and being able to contain them. The analyst, in this way, comes to feel what the analysand is feeling and her ability to absorb and reflect helps the analysand when the projections are passed back and reintrojected. The analysand starts to feel things are more manageable and to be able to master integration, shifting from paranoid-schizoid positions to a depressive one. The working out of transference and countertransference go on together as a relational event – the feelings in the analysand become the data to analyse, upon which interpretations and reflections can be based. The analysand will be looking for signs that what she has projected into the analyst is being contained and perhaps cared for, or alternatively what is happening, if it is causing some panic or discomfort. In this understanding of countertransference there is a view that it signals to the analyst what is happening in the analysand’s unconscious life; rather different to the Freudian sense that it was exclusively an issue for the analyst. So, it is both the analyst’s own transference and her response to the analysand’s transference. Not only does an analyst feel her own countertransference but must then productively and subsequently analyse it.

Heiman (1950) was the first analyst to consider the positive influence of countertransference, “an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious” – she describes it as the “patient’s creation” and that it is a part of the patient’s persona. Therefore, the analyst can use it as a guide to understanding the transference the analysand offers. She noted that the analyst has to sustain the feelings stirred within her, and not to let them go as the analysand does, but to “subordinate them to the analytic task” functioning as a “mirror reflection” to the analysand. Her definition was “all feelings which the analyst experiences towards his patient”. Her paper was the first to suggest that countertransference was ubiquitous. All feelings and everywhere makes it a complicated tool to use. To what extent is one dealing with the analysand’s material and to what extent might it be more about the analyst’s own past? Being able to engage, and yet analyse the situation with detachment, is a critical skill. Heimann wrote that the analyst “has to perceive the manifest and latent meaning of his patient’s words, the allusions and implications, the links to former sessions, the references to childhood situations behind the descriptions of current relationships”. She best summarised it as “in the comparison of feelings roused in himself with his patient’s associations and behaviour, the analyst possesses a most valuable means of checking whether he has understood or failed to understand his patient.” 

The post-Heimann approach continues to evolve and become more nuanced. Roth (2018) takes Heimann’s mid-twentieth century view as countertransference being something pathological, and something for the analyst to own for her own self-analysis, and shows how it moved into being accepted as a tool to help with an analysand’s development. How to utilise it has been subtly different in the techniques of many analysts and he cites Balint, Fairbairn, Tower and Winnicott. Nonetheless he emphasises Heimann’s view of it as a creation brought to her. What it meant was a shift from conventional analysis requiring the neutrality of the analyst, sometimes called ‘the blank screen’, to the analyst being actively involved in a process; a more dynamic therapeutic alliance, properly open to projection and introjection. To clarify this, he cites Money-Kyrle (1956) “as the patient speaks the analyst will, as it were, become introspectively identified with him and having understood him inside will re-project and interpret”. In Segal’s 1997 paper, “The use and abuse of countertransference”, however, there is a warning to emphasise the need of proper understanding. As Segal suggested, whilst it can be “the best of servants” it can also function as the worst of masters. One example might be ‘enactment’ – against which Freud had warned – as I highlighted above. Roys (2011, p.163) describes how the analyst shifts position back and forth between concordant (a sense of sharing the analysand’s experience) and complementary (when the transference has affected the analyst so that something is felt towards the analysand).

Freud’s early encounters with transference were noteworthy because of the erotic elements. Having explored the erotic transference as resistance, he wrote, “of the first kind (of resistance) are the patient’s endeavour to assure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the doctor’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover”. What he understood was the need to work with it, having initially seen it as nuisance. “To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be, not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one”. He thought it would be bringing repressed material into the conscious realm, but then ensuring it was repressed once more by a fearful patient, who would “feel only the humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it”. For clarity’s sake, “analytic technique requires of the physician that he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands”. He added that the patient would have “what all patients strive for in analysis – she would have succeeded in acting out”, which is probably the first reference to what I refer to above as ‘enactment’. Freud’s patients were, of course, predominantly women and usually treated for hysteria, hence the slightly unbalanced gendered views; modern clinical work is consistent with transference from male, female and non-binary individuals. As he noted, though, ‘transference-love’ must be worked through in the therapy “and traced back to its unconscious origins”. An analyst must be able to demonstrate distance from the transference love as Mann (1999, p.7) observed, “the erotic connects people at deeply unconscious levels, driving them into relationships at least at the level of fantasy”. He thought that closeness activates erotic material in the unconscious, but also that the greater the activation of erotic material in the unconscious, the closer the bond two people develop.

Before concluding this essay, it is important to ask, ‘does transference exist outside the clinic?’ Klein (1952) was clear, “in some form or other transference operates throughout life and influences all human relations”. I think it is helpful to imagine walking into a room of strangers at a party or a conference. Does one want to be seen and not heard, or to be acknowledged, heard and visible? What is happening? We are seeing around us a number of people as hostile, or as potential allies. This is informed by our past relationships and some form of transference is underway. Sandler, Dare and Holder (1973) observed that it enters all relationships and these (e.g. choice of spouse/employer) are often determined by some characteristic of the other person who (consciously or unconsciously) represents some attribute of an important figure of the past. It seems highly probable that it goes on at all times in our lives. Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick, suggests it is a form of transference that political leaders exploit to facilitate what the psychologists understand as ‘group processes’. Generations after generations this seems to be a constant, as we note today with the tragic manipulation of the Russian people.

This essay has discussed the psychoanalytic terms, transference and countertransference. It has described their origination and their development. It has asserted that they are fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis in the clinic, but also that they are ubiquitous and exist outside the clinic. It has considered how such an important concept continues to evolve as the theoretical baton gets handed on to each new post-Freudian generation, but has focused on what Melanie Klein and Object Relations Theory brought to developing Freud’s discovery, and how Paula Heimann was the critical developer of countertransference by seeing it as an important tool for the clinician. In conclusion, I suggest that psychoanalysis is only effective when the pillars of the clinical work, that are transference and countertransference, are properly understood and deployed.

References

Arundale, J. and Bellman, D.B. eds., 2018. Transference and countertransference: A unifying focus of psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Pick, I.B., 1985. Working through in the countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis66, pp.157-166.

Britton, R. and Steiner, J., 1994. Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalued idea? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis75, pp.1069-1078.

Carpy, D.V., 1989. Tolerating the countertransference: A mutative process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis70, pp.287-294.

Etchegoyen, L., 2010. The analyst’s response to the effects of the transference: On Lacan and Bion. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis91(2), pp.399-401.

Fairbairn, W.R.D., 1958. On the nature and aims of psycho-analytical treatment. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis39, pp.374-385.

Feldman, M., 2009. Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process. Routledge

Freud, S. (1917) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Karl Abraham, November 11, 1917. The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907-1925 52:361-362 

Freud, S. (1917) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, June 3, 1917. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919 26:211-212 

Freud, S., 1958. Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 145-156).

Freud, S., 1953. Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (1905 [1901]). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works (pp. 1-122).

Freud, S., 1955. Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909): Two Case Histories (‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’) (pp. 151-318).

Freud, S., 1958. Observations on transference-love (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis III). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 157-171).

Frosh, S., 2012. A brief introduction to psychoanalytic theory. Red Globe Press

Heimann, P., 1950. On counter-transference. International journal of psycho-analysis31, pp.81-84.

Heimann, P., 1960. Counter-transference. Part II. British Journal of Medical Psychology.

Katz-Bearnot, S.P., 2014. Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, edited by Elizabeth L. Auchincloss, MD, and Eslee Samberg, MD, Yale University Press, New. Psychodynamic Psychiatry42(4), pp.700-702

Klein, M., 1952. The origins of transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis33, pp.433-438.

Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J., 1967. The language of psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.

Money-Kyrle, R.E., 1956. Normal counter-transference and some of its deviations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis37, pp.360-366.

Roth, P (2001) Mapping the landscape International Journal of psychoanalysis 82 p.533-43

Roys, P., 2018. Two impulses to end an analysis: exploring the transference and countertransference. In Transference and Countertransference (pp. 157-179). Routledge.

Sandler, J., 1976. Countertransference and role-responsiveness. International Review of psycho-analysis3, pp.43-47.

Sandler, J. (1987) The Concept of projective Identification London: Routledge

Sandler, J., Dare, C., Holder, A. and Dreher, A.U., 2018. The patient and the analyst: The basis of the psychoanalytic process. Routledge.

Segal, H., 1977. Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy6, pp.31-37.

Spillius, E.B., Milton, J., Garvey, P., Couve, C. and Steiner, D., 2011. The new dictionary of Kleinian thought. Routledge.

Steiner, J., 1994. Patient‐centered and analyst‐centered interpretations: Some implications of containment and countertransference. Psychoanalytic inquiry14(3), pp.406-422.

Strachey, J., 1934. The nature of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Classics in psychoanalytic technique, pp.361-378.

Winnicott, D.W., 1994. Hate in the counter-transference. The Journal of psychotherapy practice and research3(4), p.348.

On: Politics and Psychoanalysis

Is psychoanalysis, as a body of knowledge, free of politics, and equally available to be drawn into any politics, or does it naturally lean towards a particular politics?

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I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics… The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa” – Eugene Ionesco

Ionesco was understanding something profound when he wrote that the human condition directs the social condition. In some perceptions of an ordered life there is an “idealogically enforced split” (Layton, Hollander and Gutwill, 2006) between the political order and personal life. In this paper, I attempt to argue that psychoanalysis is not free of politics, and moreover should not be, because none of our lives are free from politics. Our politics are core to us as manifestations of our drives. Modern day United States understands that ‘MAGA’ is an appeal to feelings, to the emotions, not the intellect, and yet, it was seduced by it. So, our politics are often the consequence of our feelings, rather than rationalisations. This essay has a Freudian drive theory foundation, although it resists the idea that somehow psychoanalysis represents anything finite. It demonstrates that the post-Freudian world has shown that there is still more we can learn psychoanalytically, just as man’s other scientific fields are not boundaried. If, as I maintain, we are driven by needs, desires and wants that are often irrational, we may seek satisfaction of our needs with political alliances. I consider whether psychoanalysis leans to any political preferences and later, also develop the theme of neutrality. I do not specifically conclude that it might ‘lean towards a particular politics’ because I think that requires the context of the era in which it is being contemplated, such as Communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Cold War United States, but I do think that from the intimacy of the earliest session of “the talking cure”, to today, psychoanalysis is about the particular drives inside the individual. No two individuals are alike, and so philosophically, it is hard to argue that psychoanalysis itself can somehow be co-opted, and therefore might ‘lean’ to a particular politics. Its ubiquity means it can be drawn into any politics, I suggest. 

In developing this argument, I think it is helpful to define a couple of the critical terms. First, what is psychoanalysis? In, and out of the clinic, it is a way of knowing things. The International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) defines it as a theory of the human mind as well as a therapy. It adds that it is also a research method and a means of viewing social and cultural phenomena, of which politics is one. The British Psychoanalytical Association (BPA) defines it as “a process of deep exploration of the unconscious psychic processes of the individual, within the relationship between the analyst and patient in the consulting room.” It is a ‘body of knowledge’ too, as elegantly asserted by Bell, (1999) and he writes, that it is as such, that it ought to be judged. For today’s adults in Britain, the polarisation of society, the manipulation of the collective psyche by modern media, the political attempt to sell a vision of exceptionalism and isolationism, the response to the coronavirus, anxiety and grief, and the decisions taken for us by our leaders, frequently dominate conscious thoughts. Layton, Hollander and Gutwill (2006) highlighted that “a traumatogenic environment is constituted when individual and group physical safety, social security and symbolic capacities are all simultaneously assaulted. Psychoanalysis, which is devoted to analysing what it means to people when their experience is traumatic and then rendered unnameable and unspeakable, can illuminate this phenomenon as it occurs in the relationship between the individual and society.”

Politics ought to be easier to define. It is derived from the Greek word, politika, and meant “affairs of the cities”. Today it is associated with group decision-making, with distribution of power between individuals and a wider distribution of resources and status. Samuels, (2003) noted that “political power is experienced psychologically; in family organisation, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the lives of individuals.” Today, it is the way people make, maintain and update the laws under which they live. That serves to define politics in the nation state, but politics operates at more personal levels too; in the workplace, the family and even in couples. Even in these more micro examples it is about power, and therefore about conflict and cooperation. It is sometimes conflict resolution. To politicise something is to make its contrast with an alternative, explicit. As psychoanalysis shows, through drive theory, people have needs that require satisfying. However, not all needs can be satisfied simultaneously. If we have conflicting needs and a scarcity of resources, we inevitably have politics. To suggest that psychoanalysis, or indeed any body of knowledge is free of politics, would be to make it unique.

This brings us to the response to the first part of the essay question – is psychoanalysis free of politics? I aim to show with some selected examples how the young science of psychoanalysis inevitably became political and then how the circumstances of its development coincided with its importance in understanding the politics of the societies in which it operated. In the second half of the essay I use the example of Marie Langer, to personify how psychoanalysis, or certainly a psychoanalytic life, is not free from politics. If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, with respective nods to the likes of Charcot, Janet and Breuer, then it is informative to think about Freud’s attitudes to politics. My assertion is that in his determination to preserve and to develop his discovery he was prepared to act politically. His splits with the likes of Jung, and with Adler, are both psychoanalytic splits, pushing away that which he could not tolerate, as well as political splits, maintaining a pure ideology. Jung accused Freud of treating his pupils like patients, and criticised him for not having been in analysis, other than self-analysis, whereas Jung had been analysed. There was some personal antipathy, Freud writing, “I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely. I shall lose nothing by it”, but the main differences appear to be theoretical, and I suggest, political.  Drive theory, the Oedipus Complex, castration complex had to hold sway – any dilution of Freudian principles might undermine his confidence in his own principles.

Another split was with Willhelm Reich. Reich was briefly a follower of Freud and was inducted into the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. He worked at the Vienna Polyclinic, established by Freud for less affluent patients. Reich offended some of his peers with his work on orgasms, and others with his socialist and Marxist politics. His publication of “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” in 1933, embarrassed Freud, who had wanted to keep politics and psychoanalysis apart. Reich had suggested that fascism was the political expression of patriarchal family structures, amongst other assertions. Freud encouraged him to leave for Berlin. I see this as a political action by Freud, ironic given it was a means of disguising the inevitable psychoanalytic and political connection. Reich had been bold enough to criticise Freud’s ‘death instinct’ hypothesis, when considering masochistic behaviours. Freud magnanimously advocated that Reich’s paper and view were published, but he was bothered that he himself interpreted Reich’s view of the death instinct as being a feature of the capitalist system. In 1934, ahead of a psychoanalytic conference in Lucerne, Reich learned that he had been expelled from the German Psychoanalytic Society. One might argue he is the best example of a political victim of psychoanalysis. He is not alone though. Decades later the IPA expelled Lacan. Politics lends itself to analysis. In democracies, the need to persuade a majority of the polity to vote one particular way means understanding the collective psyche is fundamental.

In 1913 Freud worked to oust Jung from his positions as president of the IPA and his various editorial positions. He had achieved this goal by the spring of 1914 and published the polemical History of the Psychoanalytic Movement in the summer. It is thought to be his reckoning with both Adler and Jung and is therefore, overtly political. Gay (1989), in his introduction to The Freud Reader makes clear that this paper, known to Freud’s cohort of friends and supporters as “the bomb”, was part of a campaign of “pointed acts of explanation and aggression” and that these were designed to rally his followers. It was from these beginnings that psychoanalysis “grew from a cluster of scientific ideas into a movement”. Freud had defined thoughts, political or otherwise, as a “trial run of action”, and I think this is among the most helpful phrases to support the idea that psychoanalysis is not free of politics, because in converting unconscious impulses and feelings to conscious thoughts we are preparing something actionable. All actions (and inactions too), have political consequences. Surely societies that turn on intellectuals are inimical to something like psychoanalysis? If so, should psychoanalysis effect a non-political stance, as part of a means of preservation? This would support a refutation for psychoanalysis not being free of politics. History, suggests otherwise, bringing up the question of neutrality.

Neutrality is fundamental to Freudian psychoanalytic technique. It is also fundamental to political strategies. How does neutrality work under the state-induced paranoia of a repressive regime? After the National Socialists came to power in Germany, many psychoanalysts, because they were Jews, left the country. The Nazis had two difficulties with psychoanalysis – it was perceived as a “Jewish science”, and if society was purged of minorities and a complete Aryanisation of the populace could be achieved, why would a master race need help for mental anxiety? Jews were ‘primitive’, hence the focus on sexual drives. A master race was above all of these manifest weaknesses. The Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, set up in 1920, was politically left wing in orientation as well as dominated by Jewish members. It is the perfect example of how psychoanalysis might be made to ‘lean’ politically, albeit ironically for Aryan ideals, to do so, it became psychoanalytically impure. To preserve psychoanalysis, Freud agreed to Felix Boehm and Carl Muller-Braunschweig opening negotiation with the Nazis, notwithstanding that his own books had been publicly burned.

Muller-Braunschweig was convinced psychoanalysis could ‘remodel’ people and be of service to the political leadership. Psychological health was a ‘duty’. When Goring became leader of the German psychotherapists, what became the Goring Institute in 1936, he might have had ‘leaning’ in mind when he said “we are called to educate children and adults in the right spirit”. Without concluding that psychoanalysis is, or should be malleable, it can be seen in the example of 1930s Germany, that it can be made to ‘lean’ towards a particular politics. Can it be made to lean in the opposite direction? After the Revolution in Russia in 1917, psychoanalysis briefly thrived. It had the support of leading figures like Trotsky, and had some state funding. That changed with the emergence of Stalin. Until about 1930, it benefited from the export of ideas from Vienna and many of its leading early exponents had studied with Freud, some with Jung. These included Sabina Spielrein, Nikolai Osipov and Vera and Otto Schmidt. Tatiana Rosental was responsible for establishing psychoanalysis in St Petersburg, whereas other early practitioners were Moscow-based. Tragically she took her own life in 1921. Others were leaving the country, but in 1922 the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was formed and the Detski Dom was opened. This was a school and children’s home, and a kind of laboratory. It predated the Nazis’ Aryanisation approach to psychoanalysis, but had a similar motive, in this case, to build a model Communist man. It was run by Vera Schmidt and attempted to harmonise Freudianism with Marxism. It was closed in the months after Lenin’s death in 1924.

Anna Freud, writing to Ernest Jones in 1933 had opined that “psychoanalysis has no part in politics”. She was writing about Reich, whom she thought her father had believed had “forced psychoanalysis to become political”. This, of course, is different from psychoanalysis being free from politics. This returns us to the concept of neutrality. It is axiomatic that in a Freudian analysis, where the patient is to free-associate, that the analyst does not reveal themself in terms of preferences, background, personal habits, circumstances or biases. That does not mean that one has no politics, merely that the analyst leaves them aside for the purposes of the work. One might argue, in a Freudian context, that they get repressed. However, Anna Freud’s own tussles with Melanie Klein are evidence of how politics associates itself with psychoanalysis at all times. This famously led to ‘The Controversial Discussions’ in 1943-4; a political tug of war between Freudians and Kleinians. Anna Freud’s position, and I think, her father’s are frequently linked to the idea of ‘neutrality’. This seems to support the idea that somehow politics can be left out of the consultation room, or of the conference hall. Klein herself might suggest it is a form of splitting. Indeed, her work on the paranoid-schizoid position is the foundation for the apolitical – political ideas are pushed into the ‘bad breast’. Nonetheless, Laubender (2017) suggests that Anna Freud’s papers on child analytical technique were heavily invested with the politics of the era. Anna Freud was focused on childhood dependence and the positon of authority. “Far from being removed from the socio-political order, Anna Freud’s clinical writings affirm that the psychoanalytic clinic is always already in conversation with the historical context in which it is embedded.”

Anna Freud was friends with social and educational reformers, and therefore familiar with political developments. One such example was Maria Montessori. Children’s education could be a site for freedom from historic oppression and oppressive hierarchies. Child analysis became a vehicle to challenge psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Laubender notes that the political turmoil of the 1930’s was inspiring Freud himself to write his own most political papers, notably Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and quotes Zaretsky, from his psychoanalysis history, Secrets of the Soul:  “In contrast to those that had propounded the classical liberal separation of public and private life, the thinkers of the 1930s recognized the unavoidably psychological and cultural character of modern politics, and thus the impossibility of separating the problems of democracy from those of personal autonomy, gender and sexuality, group identity, and the commodification of everyday life.” In a similar vein, Rose (1993) thought that the question of identity was the “central issue through which psychoanalysis enters the political field”.

We apply neutrality to politics and to analysis. Neutrality is never passive. It is an active position, designed to improve a situation for a longer-term benefit. It starts in the nursery, when an infant is projecting all its frustration and hatred upon the mother. The mother contains this projection and presents a neutral object. The importance of neutrality is that it allows for development. In his Observations on Transference Love, Freud wrote “our control over ourselves is not so complete that we may not one day go further than we intended…we ought not to give up the neutrality toward the patient, which we have acquired through keeping the counter-transference in check.” He added, “The more plainly the analyst lets it be seen that he is proof against every temptation, the more readily will he be able to extract from the situation its analytic content.” Can one be neutral despite a political orientation? Hanna Segal’s left wing politics did not affect her analytic contributions. However, she did feel that psychoanalysis had an active contribution to make. She was appalled by the governmental response to the threat of annihilation from nuclear attack. She co-ordinated meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society to address the collective denial of reality of nuclear attack. Bell (1999) explains that when she gave her paper ‘Silence is the real crime’ at the inaugural conference of the International Psychoanalysts for the Prevention of Nuclear War, she showed that denial and splitting led to destruction, paranoia and helplessness; a sort of collective psychic ailment. What would she have done if she was working with a patient who believed in the policy of deterrent?

Before I leave the argument that psychoanalysis is not free of politics, I want to examine what happens in the clinical setting, such as might have confronted Segal. How should an analyst respond to politics being brought into a session, and how should the analyst treat their own politics in the transference? Samuels (2003) authored a questionnaire, exploring what political issues came up in therapy, sent to fourteen professional organisations in seven different countries with over 2000 recipients. The worldwide response rank for what comes into the sessions is led by gender issues for women, followed by economic issues, violence in society, and fourth equal, national politics, gender issues for men, and race or ethnic issues. International politics came next. Recall that this was done in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. His survey of the therapists and analysts revealed that almost half (44%) preferred to keep politics out of the session. Obviously, that means that the majority engaged, many indicating that having an engagement with the external world is part of growing up, of individuation. One survey respondent wrote “We are political animals. Everything we are and do takes place within a political framework. It is impossible to divorce this from the inner world of either our patients or ourselves.” If analysands do not show any apparent concern over political issues eg governance of the pandemic response, climate policies, addressing social and economic inequality etc. does that have meaning? Layton, Hollander and Gutwill (2006) describe it as a defence; “the psychodynamics of terror and aggression and the unconscious defences employed to deny reality offers powerful insights into the microscopic unconscious way that ideaology is enacted and lived”. 

The final part of this essay is psychoanalysis’s availability to different types of politics and whether it naturally leans in a particular political direction. I use the example of Marie Langer, as the personification of political leaning. Psychoanalysis does not choose its subjects, or its politics. Whether we live in a socialist or communist era, it is chosen to explain, just as it was regarded by Nazis and the Bolsheviks as having a place. The question is whether or not an understanding of drive theory is more inclined to an association with the political right or left. Sports are often regarded as a socially acceptable way for people to expel and express their aggression. It is of interest to me, therefore, that politics is often described as ‘the great game’. I see politics as a means of handling drives in a socially acceptable way. Whether I support a blue team or a red team, in a sporting or a political contest is irrelevant, it is still how I relieve the psychic impulse. Either side of the Atlantic a kind of fundamentalist conservatism v liberalism appears to have evolved. Thinking about the idea that psychoanalysis might lend itself to one particular political direction, is wrapped up in projecting intolerance, othering, and repression on to the more conservative group and somehow elevating, idealising, the perceived more tolerant, progressive, empathic traits with liberalism. Oddly it is now the political right that has adopted a ‘freedom’ mantra, despite its general trend to be authoritarian and law setting. This seems to be evidence of both projection and introjection.

The probability of psychoanalysis’s particular politics leaning one way is largely

an accident of timing. It emerged at a time of radical politics, but the unconscious and politics already existed. Freud himself talks about how philosophers and poets got their first. Thinking about the unconscious is not the preserve of Freudians, however psychoanalysis, because of Freud’s breakthrough work and writing, emerges from its own developmental stages and latency right into a century of conflict and neuroses. Wars, pandemic, political ideologies – Communist or Fascist – and then the post-war, Cold War threat of annihilation, which might be analysed as the triumph of the death drive. Does it, should it ‘lean’? Roazen (2003) highlighted that the International Psychoanalytic Association prioritised the survival of analysis in the trying 1930’s era and was willing to compromise with the demands of right-wing regimes. I do not think that is evidence of ‘leaning’, but of a defensive pragmatism.

One of psychoanalysis’s greatest gifts has been the attempt to explain the emergence of fascism; what made Nazism so effective in colonising the unconscious? Another concept is ‘resistance’. Resistance to fascism is properly lauded, but it may have left the impression that as a body of knowledge, it is inclined to a harsher view of extreme right-wing politics than of extreme left wing. Today, it is sometimes described as ‘progressive’ but not in a complimentary way, but in the sneering way that is attached to the term ‘wokeism’. Another Ionesco quote seems apt: “Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together”. In Katz’s (2006) essay, she wonders if people are unable to connect present events with history and are being overwhelmed by ideology, which is designed to frighten us to a primitive psychic state. This is akin to the paranoid-schizoid state identified by Klein at the very start of life. I conclude that psychoanalysis adapts to the politics of its time, perhaps sometimes adopts them, but does not have an inherent bias.

One thing about exploring if psychoanalysis is free of politics is to think about the many people who claim to have no interest in politics, or to have rejected it. They think of themselves as apolitical. Yet, they neglect the politics in their personal lives. The Oedipal Complex is framed by power and the political, in my opinion. One example that fascinates me is a major psychoanalytic figure, who was very interested in politics in what might be regarded as the grand scale. Her politics were of ideology and of international breadth. Why this is of interest is that she attempted to leave the political behind, and yet it reappeared to dominate the latter decades of her life. That woman was Marie Langer. In the film Chasing the Revolution, she is portrayed as a political and psychoanalytic exemplar, seeking change in society, but also described as “having avoided politics for half her career”. She was a co-founder of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, but left it in protest against its unwillingness to abandon political neutrality when confronted with a repressive regime.

She had been Viennese born (1910) and trained, joined the Communist Party and just as shifting international politics had taken her from her home as a young woman, she subsequently had to leave the home she had made in Argentina, for her own safety, settling in Mexico. Communism took her to Spain to support the International Brigades fighting fascism. Escaping Spain took her to Uruguay just before Europe became a battleground again, and four years later to Argentina.

Argentina was ruled by Peron and by what seemed to her to be a familiar nationalistic fascist playbook. She therefore ‘dropped’ her politics, ostensibly to focus on analysis and maternity. However, her ‘repressed’ political identity manifested itself in a focus on women’s psychological difficulties. In the period of her life when she was devoted, as she seemed to see it, more to maternity than to politics, she was expressing her interpretation of neutrality. In so doing she offended feminists who thought her views of maternity and the family were ultra-conservative and suited the regime. Her ‘neutrality’ was simply a different expression of the political. By the beginning of the 1970’s she was ready to publicly denounce neutrality and to re-adopt a more active political stance aligned with her youthful ideological positions. She brought her international politics to the psychoanalytic world and presented a paper at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) that challenged its hierarchies and training methods. The IPA refused to publish it and she resigned. For me, Langer, who went on to get involved with politics in Mexico and Nicargaua, personifies the way that psychoanalysis is not free from politics. Just as the Kleinian baby comes into the world with love and hate, so psychoanalysis, always and everywhere is political.

In this essay, I have considered the politics of the era when considering if psychoanalysis is free from politics. I have given examples of highly politicised states like 1920’s Russia, and 1930’s Germany, and 1970’s Argentina as well as considering the Cold War period, to examine how politics intrudes on psychoanalysis. I have also considered how politics is part of the psychoanalysis field itself, by highlighting Freud’s splits with Jung and Adler, his appeasement of the pro-regime analysts in Germany, and his daughter’s political fight with Melanie Klein. Psychoanalysis is not free from politics in my view. I am less inclined to believe it naturally leans in one political direction or other, and think that it reflects its time and location rather than influences. I have considered the concept of neutrality, politically and psychoanalytically. I do think it is available to be drawn into a particular politics, including sexual politics and feminism. This, I believe, is one of its many great strengths.

References

A film about Marie Langer http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/documentaries/chasing-the-revolution-marie-langer-psychoanalysis-and-society/

Bell, D., 1999. Introduction: Psychoanalysis, a body of knowledge of mind and human culture. In Psychoanalysis and Culture (pp. 1-24). Routledge.

Freud, S., 1957. On narcissism: An introduction. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (pp. 67-102).

Freud, S., 2006. The Penguin Freud Reader. Penguin UK.

Gay, P. ed., 1995. The Freud reader (p. 400). London: Vintage.

Hobsbawm, E.J. and Cumming, M., 1995. Age of extremes: the short twentieth century, 1914-1991. London: Abacus.

Hollander, N.C., 2006. Psychoanalysis and the problem of the bystander in times of terror. Psychoanalysis, class and politics: Encounters in the clinical setting, pp.154-165.

Horney, K., 2013. The neurotic personality of our time. Routledge.

Katz, M., 2006. The beheading of America. Psychoanalysis, class and politics: Encounters in the clinical setting, p.141.

Layton, L., Hollander, N.C. and Gutwill, S. eds., 2006. Psychoanalysis, class and politics: Encounters in the clinical setting. Routledge.

Laubender, C., 2017. On Good Authority: Anna Freud and the Politics of Child Analysis. Psychoanalysis and History19(3), pp.297-322.

Marcuse, H., 1955. Eros and civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon.

Peltz, R., 2005. The manic society. Psychoanalytic Dialogues15(3), pp.347-366.

Perelberg, R.J., 2006. The controversial discussions and après‐coup. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis87(5), pp.1199-1220.

Roazen, P., 2001. The exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA. Contemporary Psychoanalysis37(1), pp.5-42.

Rose, J., 1993. Why war?: Psychoanalysis, politics and the return to Melanie Klein. John Wiley & Sons.

Samuels, A., 2003. (a) Working directly with political, social and cultural material in the therapy session (pp. 128-152). Routledge.

Weeks, J., 2017. Sex, politics and society: The regulation of sexuality since 1800. Routledge.

Who’s Zooming Who?

“Zoom” class

A little over a week ago a seminar leader at a British Psychoanalytic Association meeting that I was attending said, “we may have to go online, to Zoom our next meeting”. “Zoom?” I asked, perplexed. “It’s like Skype, only with better encryption”, she replied rather airily. “Oh”, I thought and kept it private that not only had I never heard of Zoom, but though I had heard of Skype, I was a Skype-virgin.

Within days my university was suggesting that next semester’s lectures and seminars would be online and would probably use Zoom. My own personal analysis sessions came to an end and after a couple of telephonic sessions over WhatsApp, were initiated over a Zoom connection from the start of this week. We have had three sessions. Two went well, but one was no good because she could not hear me, even though the video worked. I had changed nothing and I checked various mute and settings buttons but to no avail. This may be a precursor of a lockdown lifestyle. Where once I would have inconsiderately cursed, asked a younger, brighter colleague what to do, then called the anonymity of a ‘help desk’ at work; now I have to figure it out for myself. It may be a good thing.

I saw a wonderful twitter comment

Jenna Omeltschenko (@JenChenko) Tweeted:

Last week I didn’t even know what Zoom was and now I live here. I live in the Zoom”.

and I started to think about what it could do for me. I have one child in Manchester, but she is fortunate that she is sharing her living arrangement with the boyfriend. I share a flat with my eldest and we have been keeping ourselves grounded for a while now, because her boyfriend is unwell with the fever and coughing symptoms. No damage to our sanity yet. My son is not so fortunate. He went into early self isolation because his flatmate was coughing, although appears not to have been afflicted and has gone home to the US, subsequently. As a result he has not seen his girlfriend for several days and is now resigned to weeks, perhaps longer, alone.

I was worried about what that might mean for his mental wellbeing and so we started a regular daily call. We decided, as new Zoom users, to schedule our own meeting together so that he had some human face time. As it is, he and some former schoolfriends had used the ‘houseparty’ app to get their connection a little more ‘real’, and so, he has not been totally starved. However, we thought that a ‘family meeting’ might work and I asked his mother to join in. My eldest was busy working, and on her own conference call, but this afternoon we had a four-way video meeting via Zoom – and very enjoyable it was too. Given how technophobic both my ex and I tend to be, this represented a huge triumph and I could tell she was as chuffed that it all worked, as I was.

When I have my psychoanalysis sessions, my analyst and I greet each other cordially over the video screen, but then turn the cameras off and I start my free associating and she provides the occasional interpretation. However, the seminar I did with my fellow students at the BPA last week was very interactive; having multiple contributors is both a benefit and a distraction. I had not yet worked out how to display all the speakers at once on split screens and so, I was only seeing the individual speaker pop up in front of me each time. But I have cracked this now.

Given how psychoanalysis is a window into the darkened interior of our unconscious, this window on window on window structure had me thinking about all sorts of implications and insights. How would Freud have regarded it? What Zoom does, in that context, is gaze in on people’s interiors, psychically and literally. I gather that Zoom veterans put up some sort of virtual background to their screen so that they do not reveal the untidiness of their home, or the datedness of their decor! But how we react to the gaze of the camera and to seeing several contacts at once, including our own face is different to how we would be in a meeting in an office where we have little idea what our own expression is revealing. We reveal ourselves to ourself in a way we cannot in the physical world.

It will not be the only device or tool that becomes familiar to us in the current circumstances. We may find we cannot live without it, just as once we would never have felt we needed social media. In an unrelated event, a friend and ex-colleague messaged me today via Facebook. He had decided to make a weekly connection with his many friends for a sort of ‘check-in’. It is a very good idea. The busyness of our lives means we often feel we do not have time to interrupt others, and that they may not welcome it, but time is going to stretch now, and filling it with connection, and small gestures of kindness and sociability will be good for all parties.

Who's Zoomin' Who? - Wikipedia
Who’s Zooming Who – Aretha

Anyway, one of the keys to enjoying living is to keep being open to new experiences and to keep learning. Here’s to Zoom(ing). I shall be using a good deal more. Let me know if you have had a positive or a negative Zoom experience. I am going to “live in the Zoom”.

On reading “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

Alarmist or Informative?

This is long, but I think it is important. Please bear with me…

Readers of books often make outlandish claims for the book they have just finished and its author. Some have a vested interest in doing so. I am going to make such a claim. My only interest is to get more people talking about the book’s content and the extraordinary implications of some of its conclusions. In particular, I want my children to understand it, and for them and their Millennial and Gen Z friends to debate the issues with me. The book is Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Art of Surveillance Capitalism”. 

She describes commercial, social and political worlds that are colliding and colluding, and of which I know I have much to learn. I expect my children’s generation to continue to teach me, but also to be surprised by the sinister elements of the digital tools they love to utilise. My claim is that this is the most important and significant book published in this young century to date. Hyperbole? Maybe, but hopefully as many of my circle will read it as possible and be well placed to tell me why my claim is outlandish. 

Zuboff walks us from industrial capitalism to surveillance capitalism. Linking mass production at Ford with mass data harvesting at Google is fascinating. She is great for economic philosophers on the roles of Hayek and Friedman, and how the dominance of their theories facilitated surveillance capitalism. One can imagine, in another timeless universe, sat reading this book in a public space, and being watched by the sagacious duo Huxley and Orwell, who are smiling and nodding at the outcomes this book reveals and anticipates. 

Her conclusions are that surveillance capitalism is to be reckoned as a “profoundly antidemocratic social force.” That really interests me. Wherever one sits on the Brexit debate, the use of comments about the ‘value of our democracy’, ‘sovereignty’, or of ‘unelected representatives’ are likely to come up. If one takes Zuboff at her word we are looking at the wrong miscreants. Forget Cummings, unelected though he is; forget any antipathies one has to the heads of the European polity, and think about surveillance capitalists like Brin, Page, Nadella, Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Hanke, Schmidt et al. Then look at the corporate structures that this elite minority have created with special voting classes. Zero accountability. These seem to represent a contempt for corporate governance. This is rich resource for us all to debate. 

What do Pokemon Go, the Twin Towers atrocity and the ‘war on terror’, tweeting, the Brexit vote, Obama, this week’s news about facial recognition in King’s Cross and Canary Wharf and ‘gramming, have in common? They are inextricably linked by ‘surveillance capitalism’; the network effect of a post-industrial world. Forget ‘if you cannot identify the product, you are the product’ cleverness, this is much more sinister; commercial practices that are much more predatory. They eat at the very essence of individuality and autonomy. Zuboff asserts that we are demonstrating little awareness and concern for the erosion of free will. 

The premise is we search Google and it, in turn, searches us. Only facebook can rival it for the quality of its raw materials supply, something once contemptuously dismissed as ‘data exhaust’. Zuboff talks about the mining of ‘behavioural surplus’ and its value in predictive markets. To a Business Psychology student this is rich material. What the book goes on to say is that much of it is being used in a malign way, despite earliest aspirations of it being a benign service. Former colleagues of mine know my near-abhorrence for metrics, but only because metrics, in my opinion, were usually used to measure the wrong things. In the world of ‘surveillance capitalism’ they measure everything. They move to what Zuboff describes chillingly as ‘totality’. 

“you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know who you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about” – Google’s Eric Schmidt, quoted as far back as 2010.

And why do we do it? Why do we comply? Well, here is an example. This weekend was the 60thanniversary of the release of Miles Davis’s legendary “Kind of Blue” album. To celebrate, Nitin Sawhney, one of my musical heroes, posted a twitter piece with a video of him playing some opening chords. I ‘Iiked’ it, in the social media sense of liking, and I retweeted it, saying that Kind of BlueTest Match Special and The Sunday Times lay ahead for me that day, and was close to representing ‘peak contentment’. Nitin liked my retweet. And I liked my dopamine hit. And all of this is revealing lots of information about me that I would probably not give up to direct questioning. 

The more data, what Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism’s ‘extraction imperative’, the better the prediction products. She argues we are in a new phase of competitive intensity, moving beyond the rendition of all aspects of human experience into behavioural data to what she calls ‘economies of action’, which are the moves beyond tracking, capturing, analysing and predicting behaviour, to actively shape behaviour at source, which she calls ‘tuning, herding and conditioning’. The ‘like’ button is the greatest tool for extracting raw material for these businesses. I note that later in the book it is revealed that video comment, like my Sawhney tweet, is the most commented on, and shared, content on the web, with a multiplier of 6, compared with other posts, messages and tweets. 

“The rendition of human experience”. This was the core of the work done by Cambridge Analytica, which then led to targeted political ads that ‘tuned’ or manipulated people’s thinking processes. She is excellent on how it worked. It used 87m people’s facebook profiles to map them on to the Big 5 Personality traits, with some psychographic data and a few tweaks of its own. Then it “stirred the inner demons” as one of its former employees described it. Simply by showing voters that a friend had voted in a survey, or ultimately, an election, can increase the likelihood of somebody to vote. If you can find a single issue to drive an emotional response (“inner demon”) and then show an individual that they are part of a larger group of like-minded people, it will soon lead to group psychology taking over. People are more motivated to be part of something than operate alone, and group opinions tend to move toward poles, rather than to moderate the opinion one first held. Zuboff thinks that Cambridge Analytica’s claims were not the fantasy boasts of a publicity hungry CEO, but that funded by a billionaire, this organisation has ‘influenced’ at least fifteen elections worldwide. 

It is interesting how that knowledge affects one’s emotion, since emotional behaviour is what was first harvested to find the right targets. I read about this, having doubted that Cambridge Analytica could really have played a significant role in the Trump and Brexit outcomes, and I started to feel anger building. Yet, what became clear to me was that these techniques, which have clearly been much improved, began long before Trump, and Farage, or Cummings and co. The first adopter of the insights and the targeted campaigning was Obama. Now, I tend to see him in an altogether better light than Trump, so this was a little disconcerting. But I recall 2008 and the ‘hope’ messaging, and I remember being someone who thought he was a good candidate, not least because he had a youthful understanding of the potential of technology. He understood where the world might be going, and that had to be a virtue. Now I have to have a wry smile at my naivety of the time. 

But that is the point of this blog. I want people to read, understand and debate this. They may understand already, but I did not. I really need to understand the implications. Where is this sinister, and where is it what could be a perceived civic good? Is it sinister? Can it be good? An example of good might be the ‘nudge’ unit set up by the Cameron government, based on the work of Thaler and Sunstein. 

Ethical and moral dilemmas start to present themselves. One of the things about my adult life is a sense that as things have occurred I have persistently failed to recognise their significance. Perhaps we are all fated to do so, but I have a sense that, unlike me, many smart people appreciate historically significant events as they occur. I traded through the ‘crash of ‘87’ and I was running bank proprietary capital as the Global Financial Crisis took hold. I was pretty clueless in ’87 and I still remain bemused by CLOs and CDO’s squared, and tracking bank liquidity, despite reading several histories of the events of a decade ago. I worked in Research when the equity market started to obsess with new sophistication, which led to the shift from P/E and yield analyses, to EVA and CROCI and CFROI and any other acronym you could dream up. And I was in management and strategy as the regulatory environment (Mifid II) dramatically altered the prospects for the Equities industry. Unlike those times, I do not want this significant episode in history to pass me by without me doing a better job of gaining an understanding of what is underway.

This is not an attempt at a book review, but I will highlight the features of the book that I hope I will be debating with my family and friends in the coming weeks. The book looks at the way the largest organisations circumvent the law, at the inadequacy of privacy and monopoly regulations (fighting new battles with old weapons) and the sinister hold a few people have over our lives already. They own and reconfigure and sell the ‘Behavioural Surplus’. How these businesses operate, how they lobby to have access to data but somehow can frustrate individuals attempting to see their own data that is held, and what is shared with third parties and why, are things I want to see if people understand better than me.

Private human experience translated into data that can be traded in the marketplace. Personal and hitherto private features of our lives, are now raw materials for the surveillance capital firms, which is why they represent the newest form of capitalism, and the one that is best succeeding industrial capitalism. The products at the end of the manufacturing process are predictions of human behaviours. They have been created after a process of extraction. The more data, the more accurate the predictions. Therefore, these are economies of scale, of scope, of depth and of breadth. So far, so reasonable, but the next phase is behavioural modification and manipulation. This is what Zuboff calls ‘tuning’ and ‘herding’ to drive commercial or political outcomes that are sought. Insidious and unwelcome. Do we know it is happening? Can we stop it? How do we opt out? It began with subliminal messaging used by facebook for the 2012 Mid term elections. And it has become much more refined and comprehensive subsequently. 

The book looks at the work of Zuboff’s some-time Harvard professor, social psychologist, BF Skinner, who invented the term ‘operant conditioning’. She compares him with Alex Pentland, director of Human Dynamics Lab within MIT’s Media lab. He describes a world of ‘Social Physics’. This struck me as really sinister, but been underway for years. He sees society’s “stratification of the population” coded not by groups such as race, gender, income, occupation, but by behaviour patterns that produce behavioural subgroups, and new behaviour demographics that he claims can be 5-10 times more accurate than traditional approaches to predicting disease susceptibility, financial risk, political views and consumer preferences. Some of the material gets a bit ‘heavy’ here, but for those fearing or anticipating an Orwellian and threatening, oppressive world, these are pages worth reading.

“As we go about our lives, we leave behind virtual breadcrumbs – digital records of the people we call, the places we go, the things we eat and the products we buy. These breadcrumbs tell a more accurate story of our lives than anything we choose to reveal about ourselves” – Pentland, MIT

We are the pieces on the chess board, not the players, in this social structure, and that lack of autonomy is destructive. It began with Pokemon Go. I never engaged with it, and thought it was just a silly and pointless game, but it was incubated by Google and came from their mapping activities. It turns out it was a game that masked a social experiment. What became clear was that they could influence how people behaved in the ‘real world’ by giving them rewards and instructions in the digital world. Suddenly by putting a character in a specific location they could drive footfall to that location. That had huge value to retailers and restaurateurs in the area. Suddenly people found themselves outside a pizzeria in pursuit of a digital ‘win’. It drove an ‘offline’ purchase or behaviour. They had been manipulated without being aware of how. It spawned the ‘gamification’ of corporate and commercial behaviours. Think about all the incentive programmes and ratings and rankings with which you are now asked to engage.

Zuboff describes it as ‘life in the hive’, and disturbingly, a hive ‘with no exit’. The control of our lives has led some observers to reference totalitarianism. She rejects that, given that totalitarianism relies on violence and terror to achieve and sustain its aims. She uses her own nomenclature. She defines the system that drives surveillance capitalism as ‘instrumentarianism’. The book gets a little tougher going when comparing the two, and there is rather too much repetition for my liking, but it emphasises her view of the importance of what is being said, and her reasonable fear, that too few people appreciate what is happening and what the consequences might be. To that end, I found myself accepting the repetition rather than being frustrated by authorial padding. When it came to considering the implications of the Google City on the Toronto waterfront I was beginning to appreciate the threat to human independence of thought and deed. As I understand it this is all about taking away agency.

In the West, it is a threat from the private sector, although the degree to which the major players are in bed with the governments is very significant. Partly that is the consequence of 9/11, which had governments desperate for more effective ways to observe the citizenry and in some cases, predict behaviours (of terrorist threat and gatherings). In China, its populace at least understands it is under constant surveillance. But it is being used in alarming ways that might give indications of how we might be ‘tuned’ and ‘herded’, to use the Zuboff terms, in the future. I recall listening to an Economist podcast about China’s use of a social credit scoring system, which began with a 2015 pilot project. It is well covered in this book. 

The aim is to improve citizens’ behaviour. What the citizens do not know though is what contributes to their social credit score, but associating with the ‘wrong’ people can reduce your score, and it can be enhanced by spending time in the company of the ‘right’ people, or by paying the rent early. Both quality and quantity of friendships and associations are rated. The loss of agency is writ large in this system. Alibaba’s Ant Financial was part of the trial and its CEO was quoted as saying that the outcome “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction.” One wonders what the social credit scores would be of the islanders of Hong Kong right now, since one of the aims is to ‘pre-empt instability’. At a more modest level at home, think about telemetrics and car insurance in the west. Disturbing? The spy in the cab. 

Just this weekend three things have caught my eye regarding surveillance capitalism. It may be that I am more sensitive to these issues now, or it may just be that this is just everywhere – the packaging of data and depersonalisation of the public. First, there was a CNBC tweet regarding a piece on the AI Toyota Concept-i car. If you find it, note the advertising claims. It describes it as a “team between the driver and the car”. It has a ‘built-in personality’ called Yui. “The driver is in charge but Yui is built to know you, and keep you safe.” Zuboff comprehensively details the battle over ‘owning the dashboard’ and the partnerships between the surveillance capitalists and the traditional car assemblers. 

Second, a number of the points that Zuboff raises are covered in the weekend’s Sunday Times report on the ambitions for the flotation of the heavily loss-making business WeWork. It looks like a real estate/landlord/service business, but it claims it is a technology business that is, to quote the newspaper, “harvesting a trove of data from members, including tracking workers as they move around”. This data will (allegedly) help it design office layouts. Other uses of the data are not explicit. The privacy of the individual appears to be unconsidered. But the clever thing is that all along the companies that lead this new form of capitalism, and essentially, we are largely talking Microsoft, Google and facebook, can claim not to be selling our data, because what they sell is the data they have collated and inferred by feeding our data into their own machine learning capacities. In one interview of Zuboff that I have subsequently watched, she agreed that the analogy would be selling ‘the gold, not the ore’. 

And third, Manchester City FC is planning to trial facial recognition for ground admission. It is being suggested that the utility is entering the ground more quickly, a bit like a Disney queue-jumping process, only instead of paying cash for the privilege, you have paid in a process of depersonalisation, by yielding up ever more truths about your private self, sometimes unknowingly and certainly without formal consent. Facial recognition is particularly interesting to me since it is claimed it can reveal our emotions in ‘micro-expressions’ that we give away before we can compose our faces as we wish. 

As a prospective psychoanalyst this feels like a window into our unconscious. To understand this, it is worth seeing the Netflix television drama ‘Lie to Me’ starring Tim Roth, which is wholly based on the skill of observing facial micro expressions and other body language clues. If you have not seen it, you are in for quite a treat. There are global, universal facial expressions for things like disgust and anger. If the machines are going to learn our emotions whilst we struggle to reveal or recognise them consciously, even to ourselves, where could this all end? Presumably it would affect psychoanalysis. I wonder if it would ever be part of a new therapy format with cameras trained on the subject as he or she is prompted to ‘free associate’?

Being a parent has taught me that forced compliance is rarely successful when wanting one’s offspring to do something. I very much want to insist that my children read this book, as a warning, and also as a means to help me understand much of what it tells me about the world today. We are at the basement of philosophical principles ie. what is free will, and can we exercise it? How do I make them read it? Behavioural manipulation, anyone? 

On reflecting: How an introduction to psychoanalytic and jungian thinking changed me

Over the past year I have had the very great pleasure of participating in a course called Psychotherapy Today. At the end of the course there is a suggestion that one might write a ‘reflective essay’. For those planning to pursue training in the field, it is encouraged. As I am about to go on holiday, and hopefully, indulge in some thinking and reflecting time, I re-read my essay. I think it conveys just how exploring the mind and perspectives of the mind, can change one. I am profoundly grateful to have been a participant and it has helped me become clearer about what my Second Innings might entail.

Psychotherapy Today: Its significance to me: A Reflective Essay: 2000 words

A reflective essay on Psychotherapy Today. How should one reflect on something that has changed one and one’s perspectives over ten months? My dictionary tells me that reflective is not just about returning an image back from whence it came, but also ‘meditative’. I shall attempt to convey what the course’s significance was to me and reflect what came my way, but also to demonstrate what having meditated on the past several months has done for me. 

Unsurprisingly, I find myself yielding to feelings of sadness. One expects to have to mourn, and to process something, that provided a monthly sense of intellectual and psychic purpose. A small death, a little grieving. Also, profound gratitude. I developed strong feelings of unity with group members, admiration for Wayne Full as our first co-ordinator, and for Ruth Calland’s remarkable light touch facilitation of our group sessions.  I am grateful too, for the awareness that I now see the world with a refreshed vision, which has been a pleasant outcome.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom according to Aristotle. What the course allowed me to consider was that cognitive acts and emotional responses are different, and that one is attempting to think in terms of integration. This became a key theme for me. Speaking about things and not from them, will be common to the majority, and was certainly a truth for me. Now, I think I may be understanding my emotional language. I read a paper co-written by David Bell that referred to bringing psychic materials to consciousness, and it has been a developing sense of understanding of that process that has particularly affected me. 

I look back on the man who started the course in the summer of 2018. In the previous twelve months, I had got divorced and accepted a redundancy package. I found myself telling people that I was “considering psychotherapy training”, but the truth was that I did not really know what it was, or might entail. Inspired by Mike Brearley, who I knew through cricket contacts, I had applied to the Institute of Psychoanalysis’s summer school and its series of ‘Maudsley Lectures’. I had a sense that this might be preparation for clinical training, but the core truth was that I had joined the course with no real sense of where it might lead me. I was more interested in what I might learn about my relationship with myself, which was largely one of intense internalised criticism. I knew I wanted to reorient my relationships with others, and not just because of my fresh acquaintance with the divorce courts. 

As this is a reflection, and meditative, I have decided to review it in a chronological format, but as I sit here now in July 2019, I find my recall is directed to the Titian ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ image that lit up our first seminar, and the seminars that were focused on trauma, on defences, and on narcissism. Whenever we role played, I enjoyed it, and despite my misgivings, I got a particular joy from our work exploring the importance of play.

Our first seminar day in October asked ‘What is a Mind?’ and we had read Hart’s paper on Titian’s ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’. The image is arresting and visceral. It was new to me, but has not left me since. I became fascinated by the themes of exposing previously unexposed layers and of getting through to the rawness of an individual. We also read Margaret Arden’s paper exploring Freud’s interest in literature. At that time, I had found myself thinking, ‘have I found my tribe?’ And this seemed to be a confirmation. The relationships of the arts to psychoanalytic thinking has been one of the great discovered pleasures for me; a means of seeking and understanding meaning. My enthusiasm was fired. It did not diminish at any point in the ensuing months. 

The course moved on to ‘mapping the landscape’, and this helped us consider models of the mind. The case study familiarity had appeal for me. I had no strong sense then that I might want to train, but this was probably a moment when considering it more seriously began. There was therefore a natural segue for me when December introduced us to Observation. The wonderful film of the newborn and its mother predictably had me thinking about my own mother, but also about how my ex-wife and I had parented our three children. My sense of belonging was developing. The relevance of the Meredith-Owen paper (‘On revisiting the opening chapters of Memories, Dreams, Reflections’) has become very strong for me now that I am in my own analysis. It is a paper that invariably prompts a smile on my face as I read it. 

In January, we gave space for trauma and neuroscience. This was very affecting for me. In my professional career, I had witnessed a suicide, as a young investment banker threw himself to his death in our Canary Wharf building. I realised that I had not considered that event since probably no more than two or three days afterwards. It was repressed. Now it began to have an impact. Annie Pesskin’s seminar was amongst my favourites and I have since enjoyed reading her blog contributions. It was about the time that I began my own blogging, albeit about a wider range of subjects than psychoanalytic theory, but I am working through what my unconscious motivations might have been.

As a sometime asthmatic, and a childhood eczema sufferer I was excited to understand more about the psyche and soma and so February’s ‘body in mind, mind in body’ held my attention. Some of the seminar days proved quite gruelling, and I was aware that sometimes my attention drifted, but that this also had meaning.  No drifting in this month. The prevalence of language around thin and thick skins, and ‘second skins’ has always had meaning for me, without me ever truly understanding what that might be, and this was a very productive and fascinating period of the course. By now I was pursuing options to be in analysis.

It was therefore useful and pertinent that March should be about ‘diving deeper’, as I started to get a greater sense of the analyst/analysand relationship and what informs what, in the relationship. Now that we were over half way I began to understand just how effectively and cleverly the seminar days had been constructed, to move us on and to let us cope with more demanding and intensive material. This had me in a wonderfully receptive and curious minded mode for seminars on Defences. I found this the most satisfying of our monthly sessions, perhaps because it gave all of us some very personal insight. David Gardiner was thought provoking when thinking about defences, not merely as obstacles, but as guides. Intellectualisation and Omnipotence held particular interest for me.

By May, the first sense of endings loomed, not least because our exceptional course co-ordinator had to step down to handle some personal issues. His absence was felt keenly, and his departure prompted a lot of discussion on what impact it had on us all. We were looking at group dynamics at the time, which felt appropriate to dealing with a departing individual. I had the further fortunate coincidence that in my current Birkbeck Business Psychology studies I had just begun a module on Group Processes, and the pioneering work of Henri Tajfel, so this session had a powerful impact for me. 

I think we all found the ability to role play in the May seminar quite liberating, but also informative, in how it affected us. In my group, it had a more profound impact than I think most of us had anticipated. Thinking about race and alternative group classifications that inspire ‘othering’ was sobering. In the realm of psychoanalysis, it was interesting to think about how, these group associations have led to the phrase ‘unconscious biases’ being adopted as common parlance.

As course completion loomed we had a day on sex and sexuality. It proved to be the most challenging for our group. I was not alone in noting that at the end of it I felt as tired as I had done at any point in the course. All of us found exploring the many issues that came up very demanding, but I think many shared my impression that paedophilia absorbed a phenomenal mount of psychic energy. That said, it gave more impetus to the candour of views and experiences shared in our group sessions, which had become the thing to which I most looked forward, and from which I think I drew most satisfaction.

Our closing seminar was on narcissism. Alongside defences, this was the seminar day when I found the use of case studies most interesting and revelatory. The understanding we give to the phrase and meaning of ‘biting the hand that feeds’ was very powerful for me, and was some evidence, I thought of my developing sense of working with imagery and word choice.

And so, it ended. I know I am changed by the experience. I have a curiosity and an appetite to train. I have found myself an extraordinary group of new friends who are remarkable in their responses, in their intellects, and in our diversity. I have had few richer life experiences. I find myself thinking much more deeply about non-verbal communications than ever before, and I find deeper connections in visual art, in playwriting and in all the dialogues that I now have; much more so, I think than would ever have been possible without Psychotherapy Today. The idea of the huge submerged, unseen iceberg image of the unconscious is very much part of how I conduct my personal interactions now.

The course met its aims, for me. I feel I have had comprehensive introduction to psychoanalytic and Jungian psychotherapy. It has reordered my thinking – about society and politics and about the arts. It has stimulated my appetite for more learning. The 

reading demands were broad, but never overwhelming. My reading is constantly drawn to ideas of individuation and integration. Somehow, I feel much more alive. I think I have stirred my unconscious and it is changing me. 

For future joiners of the course, I would say that it is likely to make you want to be in your own analysis and that, for me, that has been a profound and wonderful, stimulating experience, although no analysand would suggest that any of it is an ‘easy’ experience, and quite often is very demanding. I have loved how it has made me reinterpret art and drama, my experiences of which all seem significantly richer. The candour of new friends has accelerated my friendship formation. I feel able to be much more ‘open’ with people I meet after such a generous ten months. 

It has deepened my sense of trust, just at a time when public levels of trust and our political discourse seem to be faced in quite another direction. I feel more able to handle ‘difficult’ conversation subjects, especially with my parents and my sibling. Other people seem to react differently to me too. Perhaps driven by unconscious signalling there are many of my long and short-term acquaintances who now seem to feel the desire to ‘unburden’ themselves to me. 

To repeat, the end of the course is triggering some senses of loss, but overwhelmingly, I feel a sense of gratitude. 

Authenticity, Viola at the RA, with a dash of Van Gogh and some psychoanalysis

Who am I?

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. – Rilke

It all began at the end of last week. One of my oldest and finest friends, and a some time Cambridge philosopher himself, asked me if I had listened to Radio 4’s “In Our Time” episode on ‘Authenticity’. Hosted, as ever, by Melvyn Bragg, it was a run through of ‘authenticity’ as seen by some of philosophy’s giants. Authenticity blends with ideas of the self, and my friend said the broadcast had made him think of me, and especially of the psychoanalysis work I had begun. By the end of the weekend, which had seen me take in two excellent RA exhibitions, one brooding film and a re-run of the Radio 4 podcast, plus some reading for my Psychoanalysis lecture on Monday, I had filled my head with a number of ideas. I felt, Rilke-like, commanded to write.

This above all; to thine own self be true – Polonius (Hamlet, Act 1, Sc. 3)

Polonius’s line in Hamlet is my favourite Shakespearian quote. I have never really thought much about why it feels so important to me. It may have something to do with the psychoanalytic need to know myself. I thought about it over this weekend. First, Bragg and his ‘In Our Time’ trio of experts. The show begins with the question whether we are born with authenticity, or whether authenticity is a construct we create for ourselves. It led to, if we can be truly true to our self, as Polonius recommends, at what point does authenticity end, and narcissism start? Barely ten minutes in, and Aristotle, Plato and Augustine had been mentioned, considered and parked. It is not just doing or saying the right thing, but knowing why you do or say them.

I wondered about how desirable authenticity truly is. This is a trite example, but, when I was managing sales teams in the City, I am quite sure that many members of those teams withheld their true opinion of my managerial skills and style. Inauthentic maybe, but I am sure that generally I welcomed the fact that I did not always know what they truly felt. Perhaps, especially in the professional and commercial worlds, there is merely a place for authenticity, rather than a need for its omnipresence. Augustine wanted to know if people were afraid of sinning, or afraid of burning. Motives can be defined by potential consequences, rather than a pure sense of doing the right thing. Altruism sometimes is motivated by how good it makes the altruistic man or woman feel about themselves. I wonder about my motives each year when I am working for Crisis in the Christmas period.

The first lecture I attended at the Institute of Psychoanalysis was given by Irma Brenman-Pick on ‘Authenticity in the psychoanalytic encounter’. I had not thought about it for a while, not least because she had been quite difficult to hear (she is in her eighties) and because the paper that accompanied it had been quite dense; at times impenetrable to me. But the Radio 4 podcast pushed it back to the forefront of my mind. It is excellent on the nature of transference and counter-transference. She is concerned with how an analyst gains the trust of the analysand. This is the nature of authenticity, or otherwise. She wrote “this raises a question for the analyst, connected with keeping our own emotions out. If we do so, in pursuit of so-called analytic neutrality, are we in danger of keeping out the love that mitigates the hatred, thus allowing the so-called pursuit of truth to be governed by hatred? What appears dispassionate may contain the murder of love and concern”

This is all a bit deep. I feel pretentious and self-indulgent, as I think and write about it. However, this is at the core of Second Innings. I think that the First Innings, at least for me, has been about doing the right thing with respect to my family ties. It has been an attempt to be a good son, a good brother, a good spouse and a good father. But, when each of us plays these roles, or mothers mothering, or sisters sistering, do we withhold what we truly feel? Do we value inauthenticity? By unselfishly accommodating others, is one being inauthentic? When we are parenting, we often choose to reveal limited versions of truths. We persuade ourselves this is for a child’s benefit. But are we really introducing deceit? And are we deceiving ourselves as much as our children? Is a Second Innings, an invitation to live more authentically? By now, the podcast had swept on through centuries of philosophical thought and paused for Kierkegaard on individualism and taken on input from Goethe, Kant, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre and Iris Murdoch.

Most people become quite afraid when each is expected to be a separate individual. Thus the matter turns and revolves upon itself. One moment a man is supposed to be arrogant, setting forth this view of the individual, and the next, when the individual is about to carry it out in practice, the idea is found to be much too big, too overwhelming for him. – Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard is good, albeit a little too focused on the the individual prioritising a relationship with God. Not really my bag. But I like this, “it still impresses people as prideful and overweening arrogance to speak of the separate individual, whereas this precisely is truly human: each and every one is an individual.” Sartre is useful for the concept of ‘owning one’s life’; of the responsibility to take control of one’s life, which is how I am now coming to see Second Innings. The podcast segues to psychoanalysis, with a brief mention of Freud, and more specifically to Winnicott, on his view of the true and the false self. I loved it all and thanked my friend for the recommendation. I pondered the new worlds I am discovering, including a true examination of my self.

I was not thinking about all of this when I entered the Royal Academy on Saturday to see Viola/Michelangelo, Birth Death Rebirth. One reviewer had said it was (in Michelangelo’s sketches case) “500 year old visions of eternal truths”. It was the exploration of self in the face of adversity and death. According to the walls at the RA, Viola’s work reflects ‘deep preoccupations with the nature of the human soul’. Here we go again, I thought, as I wandered in. The exhibition closed last weekend, so there is no point me recommending it, but it was amazing. I thought the sketches would be the highlight, and they are exquisite, but to my surprise it was the video installations of Viola’s work that really affected me.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Risen Christ
Michelangelo

Most affecting is the ‘Nantes Triptych’ – three screens alongside one another covering the journey from birth to death. The first shows a woman giving birth, and the last was film of the artist’s mother dying in a hospital bed. She is attached, umbilical-cord like, to hospital apparatus providing oxygen. These are shown opposite Michelangelo’s sculpture Taddei Tondo, which is said to represent the moment of the Madonna’s realisation of her infant’s mortality. Viola’s piece is over a quarter of a century old. Nonetheless it felt very contemporary, and not just because it was displayed to be ‘in dialogue’ with Michelangelo. Contemplating birth, mortality, psychoanalysis’s ‘death drive’ and how these pieces made me feel, I noted that before entering the display room one is greeted by a warning. That warning is about the nature of the content that is on display. What does it mean when the way we come into the world, and the inevitability of us leaving it, is something that we feel we need to be warned about seeing? Are we offended by the most natural things that happen to us? The nature of offence, and being offended, is strange.

The main backgrounds to Viola’s work are fire and water. Core elements. One installation is called ‘The Reflecting Pool’. It seems as though little is happening but one can see from the ripples that the surface has been periodically disturbed. Viola uses time like a painter would use a colour on a palette. The Reflecting Pool and the number of pieces that he has with naked figures submerged or emerging from water, (The Messenger is another) made me think a good deal about the realm of the Unconscious. His work provokes questions about form and representation. About reality. And again, back to conscious and unconscious communication. He suggests, as Freud believed, that the relationship between the two is iceberg like, with the biggest of the two being the unrevealed. This is attractive to me, perhaps because I like the justification for studying what I am now pleased to be learning.

Viola’s work is the first time that the RA has displayed video content. Brilliant, innovative, thought-provoking. I was turning lots over in my mind and was once again thinking about self and authenticity. In ‘Man Searching for Immortality, Woman Searching for Eternity’, he has two naked figures examine their bodies with a small torchlight. This is said to represent humanity’s engagement with self-analysis. Obviously that is definitely uppermost in my mind these days. Before I left the RA, I went to see its other major exhibition of the moment – the Renaissance Nude. It too is very impressive. To be feet away from da Vinci sketches of the body, specifically neck and shoulders, just moments after contemplating Michelangelo, is to have a greater sense of human potential, imagination and individualism. However, it made much less of an impression on me than the rooms I had just left. By contrast the patrons were much more impressed by the Renaissance Nude, if a c. 7:1 ratio of visitors to each exhibition is evidence.

Julian Schnabel painted Willem Dafoe portrait for Van Gogh ...

I walked back east and ended up at the Curzon Aldgate, where I watched ‘At Eternity’s Gate’. After a couple of days of contemplating self, authenticity, life and death and individualism, I found myself preoccupied with van Gogh’s creativity and highly individual means of expression. As the film portrays it, and Willem Dafoe is quite brilliant, this is a man driven to realise what is in himself. To give that vision to the people around him. He shows huge courage and integrity in valuing his ‘self’, but it is much the hardest path for him to follow. To me, and I was now preoccupied with the theme, he is at all times wrestling with portraying the authentic. It is about the way he sees the world.

The film is quite slow, and not helped by the ominous piano chords and overtones. However, Dafoe is hugely compelling. The viewer ‘knows’ about the way Van Gogh sees the world. Near the start is van Gogh’s arrival in Arles. There is a great scene, as he pulls off and then decides to paint an image of his battered boots. He tramps the local area and we are given the opportunity to see the landscape that we know will become now famous images, through the artist’s eyes. Eventually, the deranged and impoverished van Gogh is written to by the artist he most admires, Gaugin, who expresses that he now understand’s his friend’s inspiration and vision. By now, van Gogh accepts he may be mad. Severing an ear is hardly the action of the sane, but I wonder if he was not truly insane, but just very different. In the time he lived, being different, non-conformist, was easy to construe as a form of madness. Perhaps, his sense of colour and perspective was just something that seemed unreal to his peers, and he was persecuted for his authenticity. Perhaps he could communicate better with his unconscious than they could?

I left feeling sensitive to alternative perspectives, and to the mental anguish that comes from not being appreciated for trying to convey what one truly feels. I was also staggered by van Gogh’s productivity – he was just 37 when he died of gunshot wounds in 1890. I have written about ‘otherness’ before, and I thought about the way perspective is affected by a sense of ‘otherness’ (race, faith, Brexit, sexual minorities – these all seem important recurring themes currently). Psychoanalysis is about making conscious one’s unconscious thoughts. It is about releasing repressed thoughts and emotions. About finding a true self. It is about understanding the ego and the mechanisms of defence that lead us to maladaptive perspectives of the world around us. It is a body of mind and culture as well as a research activity and a treatment.

I am very drawn to mind and culture, and this weekend was a huge injection of important influences to me. Freud said “the poets and philosophers preceded me” and praised Shakespeare and Goethe, and Dostoevsky wrote about “the interiority of the mind”. So, I am back with Polonius, and understanding why his advice is so important to me. I do want to be true to mine own self. We all need to understand ourselves, in order to understand the world and the people around us. Truly knowing oneself requires authenticity. And being authentic is challenging. Eventually, whoever we are, and however we behave, we have to confront mortality, as Michelangelo was doing when he produced the sketches that I admired. We can only be our best self consciously. Unconsciously is for those who want to explore the underside of the iceberg, and not everyone does. For me, iron filings to a magnet, I am drawn. It is my Second Innings.