Reflections on the Experience of Self - Understanding

The notion of insight is at one and the same time central to psychoanalysis and to the self-understanding that is part of everyday life. Through clinical material and critical engagement with contemporary philosophical work on self-knowledge, this paper clarifies one crucial aspect of this key notion. Self-understanding of the sort we have in mind, while of course involving cognitive elements, is not sufficiently accounted for by cognition about one’s affects, motivations, or other aspects of the psyche, nor by the simple conjunction of such cognition with felt affect, motivational urges, etc. Nor is it best modeled in terms of internal self-observation. Rather, it is the product of an ongoing process of the unfolding articulation of one's psychic life. The notion of experience is important here in three ways. First, lived experience is that out of which the self-understanding arises. Second, this self-understanding is a development and articulation of these aspects of our inner lives; it is a part of that same lived perspective. And third, this understanding in turn shapes one's experience of one's inner world: as it is attained, one's experience of oneself thereby changes. Central here is the emphasis upon an unfolding, developmental process involving the ability to speak from one’s subjective perspective while experiencing one’s subjective perspective as the perspective that it is. ! With the advent of psychoanalysis, Freud brought to our attention not only new knowledge but, and of course this is part of this new knowledge, an awareness of the extraordinary extent of our resistance to self-knowledge. In fact the whole of psychoanalysis could be described as an extended essay on the nature, extent and intractableness of human resistance. And the result of overcoming this resistance would be different from merely knowing more facts about oneself. As Freud puts it : ! ‘If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger’. (Wild Analysis (1910 p224). ! Overcoming resistance is not a matter of providing new information but a project of helping the patient come to know himself in a different way. The aim of analysis thus centres much more on self-knowledge or self-understanding as a particular sort of function and process, rather than as the mere accumulation of facts. 1 ! ! 1 ! The difference at issue here can be seen by considering an example from Wollheim (1993, p.107) in 1 his response to Grunbäum's critique of psychoanalysis. Wollheim asks us to imagine that a man after leaving his session talks with someone else (perhaps a relative) and learns of a forgotten or unknown aspect of his past. In the following session he recounts this episode to his analyst. Can we say he has recovered a memory? Clearly he now knows the fact and can repeat it in the session. But this is not the kind of self-knowledge that is psychoanalytically central. The same point holds if we imagine the patient simply believing a reconstruction offered by the analyst. Crucial, here, is the different status of that which is remembered as purely fact, or one might even say dead fact or effigy, which has little therapeutic effect, and that which emerges as a living entity in the room. The latter creates the conditions for understanding of a different kind. It is the form this understanding takes, and the way it is reached, that has proved to be vital both in terms of the conviction that it brings for both analyst and analysand and in terms of the difference it can make for the analysand’s on-going functioning. If it is a mini-lecture then it is merely the accumulation of facts, but where this knowledge comes into being through the analysand’s experientially-based understanding of a real piece of archaic psychic life lived through in the present, then this is a different matter. Our aim in this paper is to attain an understanding of this difference, an understanding rooted in clinical experience and elaborated in relation to contemporary philosophical work on selfknowledge. There is wide agreement that the psychoanalytic process aims at psychic change through the acquisition of insight, but it is no easy matter to articulate precisely what the relevant form of insight amounts to. As we will argue, selfunderstanding of the sort we have in mind, while of course involving cognitive elements, is not sufficiently accounted for by cognition about one’s affects, motivations, or other aspects of the psyche, nor by the simple conjunction of such cognition with felt affect, motivational urges, etc. Rather, such self-understanding is the product of an ongoing process of the unfolding articulation of one's psychic life, experiencing from the first-person position one’s subjective perspective as the perspective that it is. 2 ! Background Assumptions Our aspiration is to provide an approach to our topic that can gain wide agreement. Since our basic theoretical assumptions are widely though not universally shared, those with a wide variety of more particular theoretical commitments may be able to accept our overall approach. (Our clinical vignettes inevitably presuppose disputed commitments in clinical theory, but we take these to be ancillary to the points we wish to draw from them for the purposes of our project here.) ! A framing assumption of our discussion is that truthfulness to psychic reality is centrally important in the analytic process. On this conception, conviction derives from the patient’s understanding of an aspect of his psychic life, unavailable as recollection but nevertheless rooted in his lived awareness of his repetition in the transference. This is a conviction that has a basis in reality – psychic reality rather than material reality, but reality nevertheless. ! ! 2 ! This paper takes it origin from a discussion between an analyst, David Bell, and philosopher, Adam 2 Leite, of a paper by David Bell (Bell 2012), material from which is incorporated into this paper. Both authors share the view that there is no distinction to be made at an epistemological level between the kind of self-understanding that psychoanalysis aims to provide and a kind of self-understanding that is central to everyday life, although of course psychoanalysis provides a very special context for the acquisition of this kind of understanding. As a result of this collaboration we recognised that the claims being made as regards the acquisition of self-understanding have implications that are of both psychoanalytic and philosophical import. This paper is therefore an attempt to show the value of this kind of collaboration. We will assume a conception of transference, then, less as an enactment of the past and more as a living phenomenon where the patient’s anxieties, conflicts, and wishes are brought into the analysis. This conception is now widely shared. As Busch has put it ‘every aspect of psychic phenomena is brought into the room with the analyst, and this is articulated within the here and now of the session’ (Busch 2010, p29). 3 The resulting enriched, deeper and more subtle understanding of the ways in which the analyst may be drawn into enactment needs to be distinguished from idealisation of such enactments, where a virtue is made of necessity. Working in this way, one strives for neutrality, whilst recognising that this is an aspiration which can never be fully realised. ! The commitment to truthfulness within the analysis is not a commitment to omnipotent assertions of truth, but to the difficult and uncertain struggle to know as much as we can whilst recognising the limits that will always constrain us, what the philosopher Susan Hack calls ‘the ragged untidy process of groping for and sometimes grasping something of how the world is’ (Haack 1999). This approach is thus in contrast to a more relativistic approach where the idea of truth is regarded as pure illusion, there being only different perspectives none of which has any more weight than another, or a kind of pragmatism where ‘what is true is what works’ – views which are arguably logically incoherent. As Thomas Nagel has argued, the fact that there is ‘no view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986), that is no uncontaminated perspective, does not release us from the struggle to get things as right as we can. 4 Constructions and reconstructions, then, though narratives, are not ‘just ‘narratives’. Moreover, we are all both subjects and objects of experience, embedded in causal structures that we cannot control. Meaning and cause interpenetrate our life, are constitutive of what we are as persons, and we are compelled to live in a world in 5 which there is always a view from inside and a view from outside. These facts ineluctably shape the struggle for truthful analytic understanding. The tension between the subjective and the objective is not one that can be transcended, and the capacity to live within that tension that is one of Freud’s great legacies. ! 3 ! Klein writes: 3! ‘For many years—and this is up to a point still true today—transference was understood in terms of direct references to the analyst in the patient's material. My conception of transference as rooted in the earliest stages of development and in deep layers of the unconscious is much wider and entails a technique by which from the whole material presented the unconscious elements of the transference are deduced. For instance, reports of patients about their everyday life, relations, and activities not only give an insight into the functioning of the ego, but also reveal—if we explore their unconscious content —the defences against the anxieties stirred up in the transference situation. For the patient is bound to deal with conflicts and anxieties re-experienced towards the analyst by the same methods he used in the past. That is to say, he turns away from the analyst as he attempted to turn away from his primal objects; he tries to split the relation to him, keeping him either as a good or as a bad figure; he deflects some of the feelings and attitudes experienced towards the analyst on to other people in his current life, and this is part of 'acting out’ (Klein 1952, p.436) . ! This is issue is explored in detail in relation to psychoanalysis in particular in (Bell 2009) 4 ! ‘This double aspect of human life, corresponds to the twin threads of causality and signification 5 which are intertwined in reconstruction, the one thread representing man's natural history and the other his reflectiveness.’ (Friedmann 1983 p191). ! We begin, then, with a discussion of clinical material to help identify the particular phenomenon we mean to illuminate and the role the analyst and the activity of construction may play in helping to bring it about. ! Understanding Lost ! Crucial aspects of self-understanding can be brought into focus by considering the ways in which self-understanding can be obscured or lost. Here, an increasing understanding of the complexities of the phenomena and the subtle differentiations in their character has been an important trajectory of research. There has been a major development of the capacity to become sensitive to the psychic moves and transformations that take place in any session, so that situations that appear to be similar can be differentiated from each other, for example distinguishing real insight from pseudo-insight, the latter being a manifestation of resistance. Here, the 6 analysand’s relation to the content of the interpretation – the psychic processes in which it is caught up – is of fundamental importance. ! Mr T., a patient of a marked manic disposition, developed some real understanding of himself in a Friday session, related to his intense sensitivity to feelings of exclusion and the way his life is dominated by this preoccupation, a moving and poignant moment for him and his analyst. On the following Monday he repeated the content of the interpretation, elaborating on it somewhat, but it soon emerged that this ‘understanding’ now had a completely different status. The analyst felt uninvolved, more like an audience, and remained silent. As the session continued the patient described his enjoyable weekend. He had met various friends and had been helpful to them. But the more the session went on, the clearer it became that the understanding he had been giving his friends was almost identical to that which he had reached in the Friday session. In other words what started out as insight and integration accompanied by awareness of dependence upon an object and imminent separation from it, had been transformed. It was he who was now the owner of the understanding, rather than being a person selfconsciously living out a preoccupation with feelings of exclusion. That is, he had projectively identified himself with an omnipotent analyst, locating in his friends that aspect of himself which needed help and understanding. Although the words suggested the insight derived from the work of Friday, they now functioned in a completely different way. So, an understanding of the material presented on the Monday needed to take into consideration this change in atmosphere, particularly the sense that it is the analyst who is now the excluded party, an audience to the patient's happy weekend. ! ! 4 ! The work of Betty Joseph has been the major influence here (see for example Joseph 1981, 1983, 6 1985). In her paper ‘Towards the experiencing of psychic pain ‘ (Joseph 1981) she makes a distinction “between ‘knowing about’ and ‘becoming’ ” (p. 95), which is very closely related to the distinction to which we will be calling attention. To offer Friday’s construction in this context would be to say something true, something that captures part of Mr. T’s psychic reality and to which he might well assent. But the interpretation would make little sense, not only because in such a situation the interpretation would be unhelpful, but because in failing to take the full measure of the atmosphere, it would not be correct. For while the words describe the content of an insight which he attained on Friday, they now carry a very different meaning when he utters them: they have come to serve his resistance to selfunderstanding rather than to express self-understanding. The self-characterization he formulated on Friday had a trajectory, was caught up in larger psychic movements and processes, and as a result the insight was lost. He is no longer in touch with his feelings of exclusion and need. ! On certain ways of thinking about the mental, ways perhaps more common in disciplines other than psychoanalysis, it would be tempting to explain this as a cognitive failing: the analysand had arrived at a well-grounded general belief about the significance feelings of exclusion have for him, but for defensive reasons he became unable to see how it applied to specific instances in his life. But while this may be what happens in certain cases, this conceptualization distorts cases such as the present one. As a result of the process of projective identification over the weekend, the patient’s restatement of Friday’s interpretation now expresses his resistance, not self-understanding even at a general level, insofar as what is expressed is identification with the analyst rather than that part of himself which is needy, dependent, and fearful of exclusion. It is not helpful to think that one cognitive state has remained constant throughout the period. What has remained constant is a form of words, but it has come to represent or express something entirely different than it did on the Friday. This is a particular instance of the general point that what a person is expressing at any given moment, and whether it is a manifestation of real selfunderstanding, depends upon the larger context. ! Just as moments of self-understanding can develop into pseudo-understanding in a process of resistance, so too a patient’s understanding of himself in one session can quickly be put at the service of other needs. The patient discussed above, for instance, could quickly move from real understanding to the use of this understanding to serve his grandiosity, the motivation here being largely unconscious. This is well illustrated in the following dream. ! I am on a hill. I come down and see the council tenants have nice gardens. I ask one of the council tenants to show me how to plant a garden, and he does so. ! This was an extraordinary dream and was quite moving. He has come down from on high to ordinary life and from that position, was now able to ask for help without feeling humiliated. Further, he asks help from those who in ordinary life he treats with contempt, dreading being seen in their proximity, as this would cause the contempt he feels for them to spread to him. !