Abstract
I first came across the work of Juan Tubert-Oklander while researching the contributions of Enrique Pichon-Riviere to group psychoanalysis. I was immediately impressed, not only by the breadth of Tubert-Oklander’s knowledge of the subject of group psychotherapy but by his incisive and clear renderings of the concepts of the at times obscure, playful, and complex Pichon-Riviere. Tubert-Oklander is an author who is as much an educator as a deep analytical thinker. Since discovering his work, I have seen references to his papers here and there throughout the contemporary literature, as well as several of his articles in major English-language psychoanalytic journals. In these he deals mostly with the subjects of groups, relationality, and the analytic field.
Tubert-Oklander is an Argentinian analyst, a member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association who lives in Mexico City. There he is a training and supervising analyst at the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association, as well as a group analyst and a member of the Group-Analytic Society. Mauricio Beuchot Puente, his coauthor and long-time colleague, is a philosopher born in Coahuila, Mexico, trained in philosophy and theology with a specialty in hermeneutics and psychoanalytic epistemology. In all of these subjects, Beuchot Puente has published extensively, and his interlocutors over the years have included Paul Ricoeur, Karl-Otto Apel, and Jean Grondin, to name a few. It is to Beuchot Puente that the concept of an analogical hermeneutics can be credited, though the idea can be traced back to Aristotle. In this short and rewarding book, he and Tubert-Oklander bring analogical hermeneutics to a psychoanalysis that they see as in desperate need of epistemological grounding.
To the reader, however, the authors are Mauricio, the philosopher, and Juan, the psychoanalyst. As they explain in the opening pages, the encounter between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis is inseparable from the encounter between the two human beings who write about it. The authors argue that psychoanalysis and hermeneutics can remain true to form only if they accept a level of personalization that, in the eyes of some, is attained at the cost of scientificity. For psychoanalysis, understanding the multiple meanings of a work is inseparable from consideration of who the author is, in terms not only of his conscious intentions but also of his unconscious ones (pp. 7–8). Equally, hermeneutics requires making explicit the intentions, interests, assumptions, and prejudices of the interpreter, as well as the circumstances under which he interprets, so that readers can draw their own conclusions as to the validity of an interpretation (p. 8). In line with the authors’ commitment to the inseparability of context, authorship, and text in determining meaning, they want us to know who they are, and in the introduction we are given relevant details about their personal lives and how they began this project. Their subjectivities have a bearing on what we are about to read.
Ciencia Mestiza—which translates to Mestizo Science—is divided into seven short chapters, the last slightly different in emphasis from the preceding six. Chapter 7 deals with symbolism and contains an accessible discussion of symbols and icons, made all the more rich by the illustrative use of Federico Garcia Lorca and other cultural references (Poe, Macbeth, the names of Mexican subway stations). It suffers only from a lack of any reference to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, surprising in view of psychoanalysts’ contemporary revisiting of symbol-formation in relation to the hot topic of representation, where Peirce is quickly becoming a mandatory antecedent. The first six chapters, however, stay consistent with the book’s central thrust of describing how psychoanalysis has always been a mestizo science. For the authors, psychoanalysis is as much a product of crossover and intermingling between theoretical currents, such as naturalism and humanism, as the identities of its founder and exponents have been forged and enriched by the cross-fertilization of cultural and geographical differences and diversities.
Each chapter manages to retain the feeling of being self-contained while building on the previous one. Chapter 1 is written by the philosopher and follows the introduction, written by the psychoanalyst. This is the format throughout most of the book, the authors taking turns writing chapters, with the exception of chapters 5 and 6, both by Beuchot Puente. Because the authors share the same thesis, the combined texts of this book feel like a tag-team effort, a genuine meeting of minds and joint project where the main difference lies in who decides to take authorship for a given chapter. It seems, to me at least, that their knowledge of each other’s fields is complete enough for the book to speak in one voice and be reviewed as if it were by a single author.
The book’s goal is to demonstrate how for psychoanalysis, and for Freud specifically, hermeneutics has always been the implicit epistemological model. The emphasis here is on the word implicit, as for Freud an equivocal model of the mind was not always his conscious intention. According to the authors, the fact that Freud’s clinical method relied on the interpretation of “conscious, surface manifestations” in order to reach something underneath, “unconscious,” already qualified psychoanalysis as essentially hermeneutic. The argument over what type of hermeneutics specifically (analogical for the authors) is developed throughout the book, but to start with, they explain how for Freud (and Breuer) hysterical conversion neurosis was in effect a failure of symbolization by the mind. The mind fails to adequately symbolize (interpret—Freud uses words like “transcribe” and “translate”) its illness, and a bodily symptom symbolizing the underlying conflict results. This symbol is in effect a translation of this unconscious conflict. Psychoanalytic activity and cure rests on the ability to retranslate, reinterpret the symptom, in the form of words—new symbols. Thus, not only is the psychoanalytic clinical method a hermeneutic method, but, according to the authors, the mind as conceived by psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic mind, with words its currency.
Much of the book takes the reader into different moments in Freud’s thinking, from his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) to his later writings, where univocality coexists with equivocality, in ways that can only be understood as reflecting the oscillation between these two states of (Freud’s) mind. As is explained at many points throughout the book, univocality assumes one interpretation for each text, whereas equivocality assumes the existence of an infinite number of possible interpretations for a given text, leaving it to personal taste and convenience to decide which is best. The world, as such, exists in between these polarities, as do the minds that are within it and think about it, such as Freud’s mind, and the mind of psychoanalysis. In the study of hermeneutics, we are on familiar ground: how does one differentiate the author from the text? In the world of cultural studies, this resonates with the polarities of modernism versus postmodernism. However, like those cultural theorists who do not separate modernism neatly from postmodernism, and see one as the underside of the other, the authors view psychoanalysis and the world it inhabits and interprets as existing in the crux between what is essentially factual and what is infinitely interpreted.
The authors make a case for an analogical hermeneutics for psychoanalysis. By analogical they mean something like a synthetic tension between two ways of approaching the world, that is, the text or the meaning of a patient’s inner world. The first way corresponds to the univocal hermeneutics that presumes one correct interpretation beneath the surface of a text, as well as many incorrect ones. A phone directory is an example of this. What is written in the text corresponds to a reality in which a person exists under that name, with that address and phone number. However, if one shifts the context within which the phone directory exists, say as a door stopper, or perhaps considers the mere existence of a phone directory today given the current state of technology, one may draw different, equally valid conclusions about what a phone directory is, from how it works to how it is put together. This second way corresponds to an equivocal hermeneutics that assumes all texts are polysemic. The authors, however, are weary of nihilism and do not want to take psychoanalysis down the road of sterile relativity (even if this is a bit of a caricature of postmodernism). An analogical hermeneutics, hence, looks for a dynamic equilibrium between the two poles. Where univocality emphasizes identity (unity, sameness, 1:1 correspondence) and equivocality difference (instability, fragmentation, nihilism), analogy looks for difference in identity and identity in difference. For the authors, the only truth to which an analogical perspective (and therefore psychoanalysis) can have access is the truth of similarity, which allows for degrees of truthfulness to emerge from the contrast between the same and the different. Similarity is not equivalent to sameness, and difference is key to forging out something closer to true. Partial and relative, this truth is nevertheless solid enough to allow the interpreter and the interpretive community to continue thinking and working in and on the world.
As the central thesis of the book evolves, the authors analyze the essential contradiction in Freud’s mind about the nature of his psychoanalysis. The Project, a text referred to off and on throughout the book, is an example of two texts in one, a form of splitting characteristic of Freud’s mind and epistemic in all his works. The Project attempts a natural, positivist, neurophysiological science, but, lacking the rigor of the scientific method, it is written in the style of someone who could only be thinking of his subject matter excitedly and metaphorically. I agree with what the authors are saying, and I like it, especially when they describe Freud’s psychoanalysis as requiring something between imagining and dreaming in dynamic tension with scientific rigor (p. 71). But I don’t know if I could defend it having read the authors’ arguments. At times the reasoning seems circular. For example: “There are two texts in the famous Project, one apparent and superficial, that tries to be empirical, scientistic, naturalist, and positivist; and another, profound and subjacent, really capturing the necessity to be open to that other epistemology of a hermeneutic character, given the properties of the psychological phenomenon being studied” (p. 46; translation mine).
As I understand it, this means that since the object is in essence a hermeneutic object, then the method that studies it, as well as the theory that understands it, must also be hermeneutic. In fact, there are several moments in the book where the hermeneutic status of psychoanalysis is simply asserted, rather than being explicated taking counterarguments into account. Doing the latter could have strengthened the authors’ position, and its absence may well be the greatest flaw of this book. Within the hermeneutic movement in psychoanalysis many contemporary exponents are to be found, Spence and Schafer the most well-known. But none of them are mentioned in the book, an omission that to me weighs it down, giving it an old-fashioned feel rather than the cutting-edge feeling that an analogical hermeneutics promises. Lesser known Latin American analysts are mentioned as doing analytic theorizing with analogical hermeneutics, but mostly in passing and with no explanation of how their work justifies their proposed epistemology. The reader has to rely mainly on their authority. Similarly, when discussing the dual nature of the psychoanalytic object and method, as well as of the currents running through Freud’s mind, the authors, in an interesting discussion, talk about Freud’s “working” versus “affirmed” epistemologies. In the former, Freud’s method is interpretive-empathic, divorced from the principles of his affirmed scientific empiricism. Although not the same things, Sandler’s implicit versus explicit theories hypothesis is similar and well-known enough to warrant mention, particularly if the authors’ analogical approach is to be applied to their specific view of psychoanalysis in relation to what is already out there in the field.
The authors are at their strongest when they stress the dual nature of the analytic enterprise. For instance, the fact that the mind, as well as the patient’s discourse, inhabits two states, the manifest and the latent, each with unique properties and operating under different principles, ensures that the insights obtained can never have an absolute or final status. For example, the authors claim that the so-called “empirical base” that is the manifest content cannot be used as a starting point for the testing of an interpretive hypothesis because the relationship between manifest and latent is neither direct nor transparent. Only the pragmatic, empirical nature of the analytic encounter itself, therefore, can provide a context for which a truer interpretation can be distinguished from one that is not-as-true or incorrect. Here the analyst studies the effects of the interpretation on the analytic process. (Again, references to the work of contemporary authors like Ferro, who proposes a hermeneutics of the field, and Faimberg who have made similar observations would have enriched the authors’ ideas.) But even here, analytic interpretation can only reach a level of truthfulness according to how the data observed are organized using analytic theory—an interpreter who is not an analyst or belongs to a different analytic school would not take the same meaning from the clinical interaction.
What Tubert-Oklander and Beuchot Puente propose should be of interest to analysts who think in terms of dialectics, and are weary of how the excesses of both positivism and relativism obscure the nature of the clinical encounter. A psychoanalysis with an analogical hermeneutics as its epistemological backbone is a measured approach to the analytic object and practice. It is worth quoting the authors at length on this point: An analogical hermeneutics can help us overcome the pretensions of univocal hermeneutics applied to psychoanalysis, which requires a scientistic and still dogmatic approach to the cases it confronts, as well as overcome the discouragement resulting from an equivocal hermeneutics applied to psychoanalysis, which leaves “too open” (to meaning) the relation with the patient, in a way that leaves uncertain the effects and results of the analysis. A proportional perspective, that of analogical hermeneutics, will give psychoanalysis enough opening to attend to the singularity of each case, while at the same time maintaining the seriousness and rigor necessary to follow the theory both closely and in broad strokes [p. 137; translation mine].
We can see in this statement the extent to which equilibrium and proportionality are at the center of Mestizo Science. The authors argue convincingly that both qualities were integral to Freud’s thinking. To my mind, this is one of the most valuable contributions of the book: to think of psychoanalysis as a model for thinking that never quite captures the object but that finds validity in the engagement with that object, in the truthfulness of thinking rather than of the thought itself.