Curative Speech

Tangiers and Casablanca

One, perhaps fanciful, way I have found to address these distinct but interdependent aspects of speech and language comes from Homi Bhabha (1994). In The Location of Culture he worked out two—let’s call them metaphoric spaces, or temporalities. Tangiers and Casablanca he named them, and I want us to think about the action of speech in analysis, the idiom of analysis, to use Judith Butler’s terms, our place of work and speech, as occurring always in and between and around these two sites—Tangiers and Casablanca, both carriers of melancholy and loss.

“Tangiers” refers to a wonderful passage from Roland Barthes (1975) in which he remembers sitting, sleepy, in a bar in Tangiers. In reverie and in retrospect he remembers the sounds: “the stereophonic music, conversations, chairs, glasses, Arabic, French. . . . Through me passed words, syntagms, bits of formulae and no sentence formed, as though that were the law of such a language. This speech was at once very cultural and very savage, ¹ was above lexical, sporadic: it set up in me, through its apparent flow, a definitive discontinuity. It was what was outside the sentence” [p. 49; Harris 2009, p. 16].

These terms—sites of meaning, addresses, locations, temporalities—are designed to do lots of intellectual labor. This is a way of thinking about the functions of an analytic idiom, of a particular linguistic style or stance, or of forms of clinical speech and clinical listening.

Tangiers stands for our receptivity to the sensuous embodied aspects of speech and communication. Tangiers penetrates and infuses aspects of transference and countertransference, with the inevitable misreadings and miscomprehensions as well as spot-on links and resonance (blind spots and bright spots, as Goldberger [1993] has described this phenomenon). Analytic action—listening, speaking, doing, waiting—is always very cultural and very savage. In speech conducted in the spirit of Tangiers, change arises on the edge of power and freedom. The steps forward in the use and motility of these kinds of speech acts occurs in what the Barangers (2008) term “a bipersonal field.” Tangiers evokes otherness, pleasure, nostalgia, and the unrepresentable. The language practices of Tangiers arise in reverie, where the boundaries inside and outside are less firm, where there is doubling and splitting, a dreamscape, a body scape. Barthes termed his method “writing aloud,” and in this he speaks to the way we, as analysts, speak and are spoken. Our activities and modes of being carry and convey experiences that require, use, and go beyond and outside the structure of language. Perhaps analysis, which so depends on language, often has its effects when it operates “outside the sentence.”

The other geographic/temporal location for Homi Bhabha is Casablanca, and here he means the film, not the city, so we are in cultural and psychic space/time. Bhabha (1994) says that “‘Play it, Sam’ is perhaps the Western world’s most celebrated demand for repetition” (p. 264).

You must remember this:

A kiss is still a kiss

A sigh is still a sigh

The fundamental rules apply

As time goes by.

Casablanca sets us in a world of nostalgia, Nachträglichkeit, reverberation, rhythms, orderliness, reliability. A kiss is still a kiss. The song pulls us into lawful unfolding, how it should be. Desire and bondage. What I love about Casablanca is its commitment to precision, to orderliness, to the power of the symbolic to carry and summarize. And we should note that it is about manifold time lines. Time is moving and time is forever reverberating. Some of the most salient and mutative moments in treatments might be those that, in the dyad or the individual, interweave the habitation in Tangiers with the ordering effects of Casablanca, a notion developed by Sabina Spielrein (1922, 1923), who always thought of language as containing both pleasure and reality.

There are many ways to parse Tangiers and Casablanca: primary and secondary process, pragmatics and semantics, reverie and reflection, body and mind. I want to propose that we need such an integrated approach to language in order to speak of language or speech as a site of cure.

Clinical Example 1

A child analyst reports a playful verbal interchange between a mother and her three-year-old son. The boy is practicing various forms of the word “Mama,” and the child and mother bat these words back and forth, switching genders, switching positions and generations, playing with sounds and semantics. The following is excerpted from the analyst’s report:

[The boy] was physically a healthy, cheerful child, quite happily spoilt by his mother. She usually called him ‘Moonya’, or even more lovingly ‘Moonitchka’. . . . The name of one’s first love-object—‘Mama’ or ‘Mamotchka’—is . . . an endearment . . . [that] educated women use . . . only with children. . . . [A mother] will say, ‘Come here, Mamotchka, do this for me.’ She feels herself . . . so much a part of her child that she makes no distinction between herself and him. . . . [A]t the same time the boy, owing partly to similar feelings, always uses male terms of endearment to his mother. It is impossible not to recognize in this aspects of irony; “You too have to be manly.” For a long time, [he] chiefly called his mother either ‘the grey hare’ or the ‘devil-lad’. Both are characters from . . . Russian stories [read to him at bedtime by his mother]. ‘The grey hare’ is a small timid animal. . . . ‘The devil–lad’ in contrast . . . has a fully independent and sly personality. . . . [The boy] finally united these two contrasting characters of his mother in a new endearment of her, namely ‘the old rogue’ [Spielrein 1914, in Wharton 2001, pp. 202–203].

At one point the boy calls his mother “you bad marmoset,” and the analyst notes that subsequent to this the child developed a phobia of monkeys (pp. 203–204).

The analyst is Sabina Spielrein and the year is 1914. Spielrein is immersed in early Freudian theory, but she is immersed also in the beginnings of the developmental ideas of Piaget and Claparède. In the early 1920s she undertakes a didactic analysis of Piaget and publishes a paper on stages of language and thinking given at the IPA Congress in The Hague in 1922, several years before Piaget’s book with an almost identical title and strongly overlapping ideas and focus. Speaking and thinking are intermingled, and both are intermingled also with magic and with motility. Her example allows me to introduce the idea that when we think of language or speech curing, it is perhaps as much what the patient says as what the analyst says and always what the speech carries as action as well as meaning. This is a complex and contentious aspect of the role of language in psychoanalysis. In a certain way, historically, the method of psychoanalysis has stood on, indeed required and depended on, the firm unbridgeable divide between speech and action. Yet the more we explore the experience (relational and individual) of speaking, the more uncertain that sharp divide becomes.

Spielrein develops her ideas about speech and language more fully in a paper published in 1922, “The Origin of the Child’s Words Mama and Papa: Some Observations on the Different Stages in Language Development.” There, most singularly and originally, Spielrein locates speaking in orality, in babbling, and in nursing: the use of the mouth and lips for pleasure and for contact. She comes to a view of language as simultaneously a place for the pleasure principle and for the reality principle. In her model, speech moves from autistic (speech for its own sake, for internal psychic work) to magical (speech for play) to symbolic forms and functions. Speech is a carrier of bodily life, contact, and containing. A Bionian before Bion, Spielrein gives us a view of an emerging function of speaking as containment, a function linked to pleasure, communication, and play. Sound bites are built into sequence. Beta into alpha. But, most important, speech conjures up pleasure (and of course also pain, danger, hunger, and deprivation). Through speech we inhabit the world of the body and the psychic and somatic pleasures, pains, and terrors that emerge from bodies and from bodies in contact.

What makes these affective states, these pleasures, and these bodily elements in language mutative? There seem to me to be many possibilities, including affective ties between the analytic or the parent-child couple. But following Winnicott, one might think of the opening of potential space, the ludic elements of play and expansion of being, what Goldberg (2012), drawing on Winnicott, describes as “cultivation of a transitional sense of self—a sense of self that, through the development of a personal aesthetics of being-in-the-world (which rests on qualities of mobility, contingence, and creative apperception of the world) is capable of navigating the complexity of an impinging world while retaining links to the body and the unconscious.” This function is more than Ferenczi’s vision of psychoanalysis as a cure by love, but it is linked to relatedness. ² Goldberg is speaking Bion-talk, where link may be carried in speech, in action, in play, in dream, or in relational experience. It is important to stress here that when Bion (1962, 1970) describes linking and thinking he is speaking of function rather than structure. So in thinking about speech, in particular the pragmatics of language, language in use, we are taking account of the function of speech in use (social and internal). Here I am mindful of Spielrein’s insistence that language sits at the intersection of pleasure and reality.

Clinical Example 2

I start with one of the most memorable events for me in my own analysis. My analyst did not speak very much but was, on this particular day, illustrating something about screen memories and told an anecdote about a child remembering a time of being traumatically away from her family. He was trying to talk to me about how in trauma an agonizing, continuing series of events is remembered as if the trauma happened all at once. I do not remember one word he said, and I have only the vaguest sense of the idea he was conveying. What I carry within me still, though, is the cadence of his voice, the feeling of being told a bedtime story, the comfort and regulating feel of speech sounds and the pattern of a story. Illustrating a screen memory by evoking and thus creating one. This is speech in the domain of Tangiers, conjuring a world outside the sentence, but expanding the mental space of the listener.

Clinical Example 3

My other approach to speech moves in the opposite direction, toward distance and symbolization, the utility and fit between forms of language and performance. I think of performance as a property of transference. In this way of thinking, language is theatrical or performative, but this is not to doubt its authenticity, its feeling of realness or affective power, but rather to stress the “as-if ” quality, the experience of distance and reflection in the experience. Both ways of thinking of language encompass unconscious life, but differently.

Regarding the aesthetic, performative, symbolic elements, I quote the Barangers talking about the various properties or qualities of the “field” in the analytic situation: “It could be said that every event in the analytic field is experienced in the ‘as if’ category. It is essential for the analytic procedure that each thing or event in the field be at the same time something else” (Baranger and Baranger 2008, p. 799). This is the essential element of ambiguity the Barangers posit at the heart of analytic work. Speech acts are deeply suited, indeed essential, to this process, since speaking comes to have inherent aspects of “aboutness” (intentionality along with a signal that what is meant is both present and absent—doubled, in other words). This doubleness, this “aboutness,” but also this “as-if-ness” of speaking creates a site of expansion and potential growth or potential space.

Speech has some particular properties that add to the complex multiple placements of identity in analytic work. Speech production and speech perception operate in deeply entrained processes. It is not hard to see how the confusion of tongues—who speaks, who listens—can be potent and enigmatic in clinical conversations. This is the brilliance of Ferenczi’s title (1932) and his exposition of child trauma: the experience of traumatic intrusion may be overridden by the adult’s mystifications or their guilt and anxiety. Who is who, who did what to whom, remain inextricably muddled.

These properties of speech—its symbolic and semantic features, its doubling of speaking and listening—thus have both traumatic and transformative potentials. These properties are aspects of what makes identity shifts and speaker/listener interminglings so acute and also illuminating about psychic process. These conditions make language/speech a productive site for transformation. But this potential for transformation can be exploited or stymied. Words can shut down exploration or open it. A word can take us (patient and/or analyst) where we did not expect to go, or it can slam the door. I will come back to this point in a later clinical example.

In this regard, I have been attentive to the fluctuations and activities of pronouns, which have a particular neutral, unspecified signification. Pronouns can switch places: I—you. They can mark gender—he and she—and so unsettle self and other. This property allows a lot of mental imagination and psychic labor, often requires intricate unpacking, and can reveal potent unconscious forces.

In the treatment of a transgender man, I am usually comfortable thinking of and speaking to the patient as “he.” The patient is a highly intelligent and creative person, articulate and often particularly playful and imaginative with language. He is married to a woman, and at this moment in the analysis the couple are planning a baby, which his wife will carry. As we work on this pending event, difficult material about the body emerges. Questions of materiality, maternity, paternity, and reproduction surface.

Unexpectedly, in a supervision group in which I am talking about the case, I suddenly and inexplicably shift and refer to the patient as “she.” I am startled, and so is the group. What has happened? I had been presenting material in which the patient and I have been exploring questions of embodiment, issues both the patient and I had thought of as more or less resolved. A number of details about the couple’s sexual life emerge and perhaps have made both the patient and me uneasy. But is the anxiety also between me and the group? How is the intertwining of my process and the group’s reflecting or channeling the patient’s anxiety about his body and its limits? Are the couple in some stress about the meaning of a pregnancy and the origin of eggs and sperm? And surely this must be co-constructed in the clinical dyad, as well as the larger supervisory group. This anxiety, a phenomenon that many infertile and adopting parents struggle with, comes up in the treatment of trans patients in ways and for reasons that may remain unconscious in the analyst. My point would be that the suddenly shifting pronoun has caught some unconscious material flowing through the system—group, analyst, and analysand. It becomes a signifier not just about gender or position but also about the body’s meanings.

I find this attunement to the stability of pronouns and to the anxieties around them (for all figures in the system: family, analysand, analyst, consultants) useful in many situations. The feelings and meanings circulating around the use of pronouns, of signification, carry unconscious force whose origins and meanings remain to be unpacked. Litowitz (2007) has explored the psychic and intersubjective processes that always underlie pronoun use. In her account of the function of pronouns in clinical conversation, she points to the intersubjective features of language, the inevitable and inalienable intermingling of self and other in speaking. One speaks; one is spoken. Complex features of identification are carried in any dialogue: “we can do lots of things with the communicational resources at our disposal; and usually we are doing more than one at the same time” (Litowitz 2007, p. 1141).

I think this fluidity of speaking, crossing and moving across speakers, is an important aspect of speech’s mutative powers. This is much of what Ogden (2012) writes about in his essays on psychoanalytic reading. The reader as the writer. The permission and space that speech and language give for links to and expansions of our experience of ourselves and others, ourselves as others.

Clinical Example 4

My patient Helen comes to treatment in late middle age—elderly, she feels and says, after a lifetime of treatment. She feels not real, not alive, not a person. It’s not a feeling actually, she amends her comment. It is simply the truth. She is not a person, only a simulacrum, living a performed life. Initially there was almost no temporally extending narrative. This and then this and then this. Memories, fragments, out of sequence, uncertain where or when. Mostly I ask, When was that? Where did you live, how old were you in this memory? Slowly we build a narrative and what emerges is a very horrifying story of life with a probably psychotic mother caught up in various food cults, fasts, and diets, who subjected her otherwise neglected daughter to regimens of food restriction and, by the age of four or five, to extreme fasts. A memory pops up one day. Helen is walking to school and, seeing some pigeons eating bread, thinks, “Would that be clean enough to eat?” and then takes some bread from the street and eats it. This is narrated virtually without affect.

Her mother became involved with a cultish figure doing some dietary and fasting regimen, and so another key memory for Helen involves being with her mother at the cult leader’s headquarters as the mother undertakes a long fast and slips deeper and deeper into madness. Helen remembers that she herself was ordered to fast for eight days. She realizes over time that she remembers nothing after day three. She remembers thinking, “There is no way to get anyone to feed me. I give up. There is no point.” One day in listening to these scenes and the surrounding trauma of being in the cult, I think, “This is a middle-class Jewish family with a mother and daughter starving in upstate New York. It is 1941.” I say this wonderingly to Helen, and she tells me how often seeing pictures of people in concentration camps as a girl left her feeling terrified. But there is little commentary or explanation for why all this is happening beyond a mother determined to drive poison out of her and her child’s bodies. When we talk about Helen’s current life and begin to speak with any animation or meaning about a writing project or some other creative project she has embarked on, she breaks off, saying, “What’s the point? It’s too late. Nothing can happen.” We are in the cult again. The fast is ongoing. She is powerless to get food and so is powerless to command anything. Agency has failed.

These ritualized sentences—What’s the point? Why bother?—came to seem to me a place where Tangiers and Casablanca become entangled. There is a haunting repetition of the experience of Helen in the midst of the numbing, terrifying fast. She remembers nothing beyond day three, when she senses, as she sinks into the lethargic certainty that there is nothing to be done, What’s the point? And so gradually, as the sentence carries the wordless affects and the frightening summarizing thought, we tie this feeling to the moments, repeating over a lifetime, where she gives up again and again. It is several years into treatment before she says: “I think that I have never recovered from that eight-day fast. I have never gotten over that experience.” She makes the interpretation, and it emerges out of the accrual of narrative, the settling of a time line, repetition, traumatic repetition into which she sinks again and again, now with an analyst who is mostly being with her, accompanying her, as Robert Grossmark (2012) and Bruce Reis (2009) have been writing about.

A pattern emerges. We work productively, investigating what she feels, when she is angry, when she is sad, but often she breaks off with “What’s the point?” which I link to the moment of despair in the fast. But food dominates everything in her life. If we come too close to pain or to love and caring, she stops and tells me, “I am thinking of soup.” Lentil soup. She found a food shop across from my office, and now when things get difficult in a session, she points to the street. “I am thinking of soup.” In her imagination, she leaves and sits to eat that satisfying warm bowl of lentils. Very slowly and unevenly, she begins to be less in the grip of food regimens and to be able to consider through her body whether she is hungry. We talk about food. She tells me a lot of what she eats, what restaurants she and her husband go to. If I have been away traveling or at a meeting, she wants to know whether the food was good. She tells me lists of food she likes or fears to eat. We conjure food in language and stories. Verbal feasts and banquets. But when something she or I say makes Helen anxious, she points to my wall and the street beyond. “I am thinking of soup,” she says. “Yes,” I say, “those Polish guys at the News Café make lentil soup.” The pleasure and relief of food is carried in speech. For Helen, for whom only the prospect of food, and food near at hand and accessible, can really be calming, this is significant. I think of this as Tangiers, but I see that it also leads to Casablanca.

Something begins to knit a narrative, a time line, even to a woman in late middle age who is also still eight years old. Tangiers, the experience outside the sentence, comes to be speakable within a narrative structure. In the evocative words of Barthes, “This speech was at once very cultural and very savage.”

The other mutative aspect of language for Helen is her writing, a practice she began several decades ago in which she has produced plays and stories, all with a dark and comic edge. I read them and say, truthfully, how much I like the dark humor. There is a reverie-like piece about a woman fearful of being pushed onto the subway tracks that concludes with the woman pushing someone else toward an oncoming train. Language here is a site of pleasure and danger, used creatively in opening potential space. After writing, it is easier for her to talk about anger, including anger at me, though a flight to soup usually follows such comments. Yet, amid the anxious retreats, Helen and I share the affective pleasures of transgressive thought.

I am aware that I have not mentioned the analyst’s use of interpretation. I have a strong resistance to the melodramatic way we write about the effects and action of interpretation. Too many of our stories follow the same arc. After an impasse, a brilliant sentence goes like a heat-seeking missile into some structural knot in the analysand and something disequilibrates, reshapes, transforms. I don’t doubt that this happens. I like it when I can feel that I am doing something like that myself, but I am suspicious about what actually is happening. By contrast, here I have wanted to suggest the mutative properties of the more journeyman, everyday features of speech and listening. Stories, menus, lists, stories, playing along. For a long time in this treatment, establishing reliable continuous words/feeds seemed crucial. And when change appeared, it did in an odd moment of a shift in vocabulary.

Change, when it occurs and stabilizes, is often, perhaps always, to some extent unpredictable. Helen lived continuously with the experience of her “badness.” This was not negotiable between us. No one wanted her. Everyone in her family as she was growing up said she was bad, ugly, stupid. How could they all be wrong? They must be right. Siblings, parents, relatives all agreed. Their word, “bad,” was law.

Helen and I were living in the world Ferenczi (1929) conjured in his paper on the unwanted child, the child who, as he suggests, dies easily and willingly. And so on the day when Helen said reflectively, even quizzically, that she was “unlucky” to have been born into her family, I was shocked. Her phrasing was unpredictably emergent; as so often happens, a shift I had been listening for years to hear arrived without warning. I have no idea whether this comes from listening or from speaking (in either of us).

Imagining the analytic stance as constituted somewhere between and within Tangiers and Casablanca is probably where I would place interpretation. Speaking from the position of a relational approach, which I see as a kind of field theory, I believe we are never outside transference, never outside relational matrices of many interlocking types. An interpretation can be an act of melodrama, a moment where something breaks the surface of consciousness, like a fish leaping from the water. Interpretation can be a signal of action elsewhere, or a sign that finally the analyst has understood something the patient has already figured out. Interpretation can also be, quite simply and classically, a moment of potent raw impact upon the analysand. Is it transformative, dominating, joining, or accompanying? All of the above of, course. One practices then in a strange state of tension between active and passive. One’s idiom or way of being and speaking in analysis is both a vehicle for unconscious force and a crafting of containment of those forces. One speaks and is spoken. There are always multiple interlocutors in any speech act, addressing parts of our selves, our internal worlds, and each other. Interpretation is a fellow traveler in a very complex array of practices.

Clinical Example 5

Zach is usually and habitually ten minutes late for his session, for reasons we have discussed at length. Yet despite much discussion, this precise ten-minute late start persists. One day (and why on this day?) Zach arrives early. After only a few minutes of waiting, he comes and scratches at the door to my office. As he said later, with bitter emphasis, “like a dog,” and I did think at the time, Is that a child or an animal? Zach and I have a lot of dog history, or, more accurately, history of talk of dogs. There are two stories I have told him, at different points in the treatment, elements of which often appear in the clinical material. First is a story about a rescue dog I had had. It’s a story of a damaged dog with a hard mouth, who could never learn to just hold something softly. He bit too hard, particularly in response to gentleness or concern. Zach felt identified: a dog with a hard mouth.

The second dog story is about a dog whisperer who had been engaged by a family to train a big dog who had unexpectedly begun to bite and growl at the children. At a training session with everyone in the family standing by, the trainer makes an unexpected move. Suddenly, as the dog snarls, the trainer deftly throws his keychain, hitting the dog on the nose. The dog startles and then shakes his head, that very stereotypical dog action that seems to reset the system. Someone in the family bursts into tears, but there is an instant and permanent transformation in the dog. This is the transformation that Zach longs for and fears, and the image of the thrown keychain enters our analytic narrative often.

I have both these stories in mind when, opening the door to my consulting room to let the previous patient leave, I see Zach crouched before me. He looks horrified and flooded with shame. He flees down the hallway, grim and red-faced. After I compose myself and walk down the hallway, he stands up and starts to walk toward me. He trips, and a cup of pea soup he has been carrying rains down upon the hallway rug. Processing these events takes days. He begins in a state of shame and a desperate need to convey to me that this is all innocent love. I don’t listen very long to this, his tale of desperation, longing, neediness that is so terrible. Perhaps this is a point to think of clinical choices, missteps by the analyst. I do believe all Zach says to be true, but I go for the aggression, the wish to spoil the previous patient’s session, my piece of mind, our rug. The meaning we have constructed to Zach’s lateness is that as the second-born of identical twin boys he arrives ten minutes late. On this rare day of timeliness he could upstage the twin, steal time from the mother. Zach responds to all my suggestions with fury. Do I not understand that the pea soup was breast milk and that he was desperate to get into the room and drink it? We battle on. All those meanings are true but . . . In my mind, Zach’s envy and murderousness now dominate. It is, he says the hardest week he has ever had, but by the end of the week, using the couch (which he cannot always tolerate), he begins to be able to think and examine envy and the wish both to steal and to spoil. It is such a striking move that gifts given (his session, my time and attention) when stolen become spoiled for everyone. But I am mindful that my sadism is engaged here as well.

Zach seems calmer. I feel more confident of our work on his destructiveness, but really it seems simply to have moved to other venues. As I worked with Zach on this enactment and its meaning, I stubbornly (and yet also unconsciously) took up residence in Casablanca. Though even there I discover there are different sectors, different neighborhoods. I can see, then and retrospectively, that I am living more in a Kleinian universe with this man than a Winnicottian one. Finding seems impossible. And perhaps actually I am not really properly looking at the field. I am living in the one-person side of town, where I feel that it is Zach who puts everything at risk. Working on his wish to destroy anything he depends on and loves, we make some headway. Then there is vacation and, on my return, a new story, which begins with a declaration of innocence. He had a terrible weekend with some friends, all couples, and with children. He began to feel lonely, unmanned, an oedipal child shut out from the bedroom, rageful. He flees back to the city. Then, to his surprise, he meets a young woman, lovely, artistic, all the things he likes. They begin to spend time together, something sexual is stirring, and then, he says, something bad happened. He is very ashamed in the room with me, previewing the story with the wish not to be here talking/confessing and waiting for judgment. He threw ice water on the young woman and was amazed she was upset. “Roll that tape back,” I say to him, shocked myself, as though the ice water had been thrown on me. Which, one might say, it had been. But when he tried to process more closely, minute by minute, much was hazy. Maybe he had had some inkling of a rivalry with a man he is very competitive with. Maybe it was just too delicious a moment. Then?? And then ice water thrown across her chest. She is injured and upset (ashamed). There is only a partial repair.

Has Zach also dashed his own hopes, his own excitement? Has he defended against envy by projecting shame into her? He cannot really imagine her mind as different from his. And, indeed, he cannot be very clear even about his own mind. Working with this material felt like walking through land mines. I was the destroyer of sex, of hope, of thought. I was the purveyor of shame, he the recipient. Did I miss a moment of sadism as object finding (Ghent 1990)? Does the disregulating, agonizing experience of shame derail too much inside our room and outside? Despite the extremes of action in both the spilled soup / breast milk and the ice water episodes, I seem unable to contact that lively embodied part of action and the mutative potential of these pragmatic communications, whether they are animated by love or hate or both.

Yes, my countertransference. In retrospect, I felt that I had hidden behind my bastion of omnipotence and knowing, leaving Zach to bear shame and envy. Even if useful, it was fueled by something bitter in me. I realized only later that the week I had held the reins so tight, thrown the keychain, and tried to reset the system came just a week after Ruth Stein’s death. I realized retrospectively that I had definitely had the thought, during the week of angry sessions with Zach, of Ruth’s deep fight to live a productive life and Zach’s determination to throw everything away, a phenomenon not foreign to me. Any empathic identification with Zach was blown away.

Retrospectively, I feel that a rich opportunity to integrate primary and secondary process, in Zach and in me, was spoiled by something that had closed down in me. Tangiers and Casablanca had been evacuated. Aboutness, “as-if-ness,” had collapsed for me with Zach. This collapse, which destroys any potential for speech to be transformative in the ways I have been outlining, can be repaired. In Bleger’s terms (1967), perhaps, one must reestablish the setting, noting that here the setting will include the rules (implicit and explicit) of what mutative action in speech can consist of, processes I have shorthanded as speaking and listening from Casablanca and Tangiers.

Conclusion

I have come to feel that the title of this panel, “How Does Talking Cure?” is problematic. For me, the title separates talk and language too much from speech practices, from persons, from embodiment, and from relatedness. Lacanian and relational psychoanalysis have at least one common ancestor, a shared piece of DNA, if you like. It is the triadic semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce, who sees meaning as transpersonal, linking the sign, the object signified, and the interpretant (i.e., the sign or meaning evoked in the listener). ³ Think of the Barangers’ concept of deposit, depository, and deposited. Words bind persons, fields, unconsciousnesses.

The Barangers (2008), following Pichon Riviere, refer to change as a spiral function, a dialectical movement that often without conscious understanding opens mental freedom. That space opens and closes, waxes and wanes, spirals in a dialectical movement. This is how change arises and slowly consolidates. One may notice, as the Barangers suggest, points of urgency, clinical moments that benefit from a “second look,” but the mutative action remains obscure and often outside awareness. Language may be the container of a change process, not its engine. For my patient Helen, where experience and memory comes into awareness in chunks and slices and disjointed shards of experience, there is a process of moving from isolated bits to a story, a summary, a sentence that has made beta into alpha, brought Tangiers to Casablanca. Something is settled in her narrative that hitherto had been utterly fragmented and mostly lost to awareness. It is where the spiral lands in equilibrium. An experience is stabilized in order to be relaunched and reworked at ever spiraling levels of consciousness. Language is more medium and container than instrument.

I am also aware that I have kept a contradiction unresolved and perhaps underexamined. I am treating speech as a body-based, unconsciously emergent process/function. Within a relational perspective, this is always a two- or multibodied experience, and so language is not fully safe. It is very cultural and very savage. I have also spoken of language as performative, carrying “as-if-ness.” I think this tension is the point of maximal danger and safety with regard to boundary problems between analyst and analysand. Considering both these aspects of speech and language, we can appreciate the islands of safety and containment (of the analyst) that the notion of “as-if ness” offers. This is not about you. It is about something else. It is about signification not action. Yet so many elements of modern work on language dissolve, or at the very least put in question, the sharp divide of speech and action. We depend on this divide and yet it (and therefore we ourselves) remain irreducibly unreliable.

This leads me finally to my ideas about self-care and analytic identity. We cure with contaminated tools. Our work works precisely because of our wounds. Philoctetes, the archer, was able to aim perfectly only when his wound festered and leaked its poison. Toxic leaks tied to exquisitely precise targeted archery: in this very old myth we might see our modern dilemma as analysts. The cure and the disease are so intermingled in a process that always holds uncertainty.