Abstract
David Liberman, a highly esteemed Argentinean analyst and pioneer of South American psychoanalysis, worked and published extensively throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He was best known within his circle in the River Plate group, which included his teacher and analyst Enrique Pichon-Riviere and colleagues Marie Langer, León Grinberg, and Willy and Madeleine Baranger. The fertility of this group is by now legendary, and the influence of this intellectual and cultural milieu on Liberman’s thinking is evident in Communication in Session: The Contributions of David Liberman to Psychoanalysis.
The book is an interesting, yet challenging, read. As has been noted by many who knew and worked with him, including the authors, Eduardo Issaharoff and Benzión Winograd, Liberman’s ouevre is not as widely referenced outside of South America as it should be, in part because of the work’s difficulty. Hence this book, which for the authors is an homage to a man they consider one of their psychoanalytic masters, is also an attempt at demystifying his ideas by applying them to contemporary problems.
For this, Issaharoff and Winograd divide their book into two parts, each very different. In the first they attempt an exegesis of their understanding of Liberman’s contributions, while laying out its methodological, clinical, theoretical, and diagnostic implications. In the second part, by contrast, they present a carefully selected collection of previously published articles by South American analysts, including but not limited to the authors and Liberman himself. All but one of these papers appear to have been presented publicly to psychoanalytic audiences and include discussion with such prominent interlocutors as Willy Baranger, Janine Puget, and Gregorio Klimovsky. As the first part is devoted largely to the authors’ synthesis of Liberman’s work, I will devote most of my review to it, admitting at the outset that I will not be able to do justice to Issaharoff and Winograd’s considerable efforts. For the second part, I will relate my impressions of the tone and style of the different voices discussing Liberman’s work, as well as some observations on the work as a whole.
Broadly, Issaharoff and Winograd’s aim is to show how the methodology and constructs devised by Liberman four decades ago can be used to think through contemporary psychoanalytic issues, the most often mentioned being the proliferation of schools of psychoanalytic thought. Given the hypercomplexity of Liberman’s thought, the authors have their work cut out for them. As they explain, Liberman’s central hypothesis seeks to bind psychic phenomena to language. For him, this means connecting the work of Melanie Klein, Fenichel, and Abraham with that of de Saussure and, later, Chomsky. Liberman, as they note, was a man of wide interests and voracious intellectual and cultural appetite, which in part explains his psychoanalytic eclecticism. He had a great admiration for psychoanalytic theories, though not necessarily “systems,” which too often are closed to fresh influences. Within psychoanalysis, he found libido theory and the theory of narcissism useful inasmuch as they articulate operationalizable models of psychopathology around the notion of fixation points. He used Klein’s depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions in a relational way, absorbing from Pichon-Riviere the idea that the intrapsychic is actualized in the intersubjective encounter of the session. But, as will be explained below, Liberman’s penchant for theories was not limited to psychoanalysis but extended to “neighboring” theories and disciplines (p. 135) such as linguistics and the related field of semiotics, whose theories he termed “auxiliary” (p. 123).
Issaharoff and Winograd outline four major periods in the development of Liberman’s thought. In the 1950s, he was preoccupied with the interrelation between psychopathology and specificity of treatment. During this period he wrote in particular about the schizoid personality and the therapist’s need to adjust his analytic posture vis-à-vis the patient’s unique relational characteristics. In the 1960s, Liberman’s interest in communications theory from the Palo Alto school, in particular Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson’s work, began to take off. During this period his work was characterized by the introduction of the communicational model used to graph change and describe the clinical field, viewed as including and connected to the relational aspects of the subject’s history. In the 1970s, he updated his studies of semiology and linguistics to include Jacobson, Morris, Prieto, and Chomsky. During this phase we find Liberman’s attempt to link Chomsky’s generative grammar to research on the development and function of language and the clinical psychoanalytic process. To judge from this book, this was the most productive stage in Liberman’s career, resulting in the three volumes of Lingüística, interacción comunicativa y proceso psicoanalítico (Linguistics, Communicative Interaction, and Psychoanalytic Process) and Lenguaje y técnica psicoanálitica (Language and Psychoanalytic Technique).
When discussing this phase of Liberman’s work, the authors accept that his application of diverse instrumental models to the clinical process necessitated certain generalizations to bridge the gaps between clinical and theoretical hypotheses couched in disparate languages that complicated and at times obscured their interrelation. But the authors would seem to consider this a necessary evil rather than a tension to be resolved. In fact, they make clear that Liberman’s use of linguistic theory was meant to clarify, rather than complicate, a theorizing of the analytic process—to strip it down to its basic and operationalizable bones. However, this part of their analysis is not as clearly articulated as I would have liked, and indeed the connection between psychoanalysis and semiotics, undoubtedly the most controvertible part of Liberman’s legacy, remained foggy for me after many readings. I simply was not convinced that the natural interconnectedness that Liberman saw between semiotics and psychoanalysis—for him two sister sciences approaching the same object of study from different angles—was not in fact artificial and forced, analogical at best.
During Liberman’s fourth period, from 1980 to 1983, the year of his death, he was dedicated, along with other colleagues, to the study of psychosomatics and the connections between semiology and child analysis.
Issaharoff and Winograd note that Liberman’s clinical perspective was indebted to that of Pichon-Riviere, who had a great impact on him not only as his training analyst but as a teacher. The reader easily perceives that Liberman’s work, like that of many in his milieu, was steeped in intersubjectivity. Indeed, one of the surprises in this book is the contemporary feel of the analyst’s clinical posture, probably as a result of a combination of the updating in recent years of South American field theories by Italian and other European analysts and the fact that Liberman and others in South America were ahead of the game regarding intersubjectivity and psychoanalysis. Liberman was interested in how the subject registers perceptions in what he calls perceptual strategies, akin to ego functions, that are largely unconscious. Accordingly, he expands the concept of the unconscious to include not only representations but also these perceptual strategies, themselves always linked to the intersubjective exchange. In studying how the subject registers perceptions, Liberman came to understand external reality, “the reality of the world” (p. 41; translations mine throughout) as embedded in the relational structure, and learned clinically how this registration occurs as represented in relationships with others. But here Liberman adds observation of the patient’s body, its movements, mannerisms, mimicry, prosody—all observed “empirically” with the aim of building a relevant semantic referential structure. Liberman the jazz musician—the music is another of his passions—is never far from the clinical hour.
Liberman takes full advantage of Freud’s mandate to conduct research through analysis. For him empiricism is equivalent to coherence theory, piecing together plausible interpretations from a semiotic model constructed with unique patients during the clinical encounter. Strictly speaking, for Liberman the word empirical applies to research conducted in the hour, within the interaction of the analytic couple. Research conducted outside the session is no longer empirical in the same sense, removed as it is from the interaction, though it is an important second source of data concerning the unconscious intersubjective processes outside the awareness of the two participants, important for training purposes and model building. We see from this “methodological strategy” (p. 41) what I consider (having read this book) one of Liberman’s finest qualities as a thinker and practitioner: his “operationalist” or “instrumentalist” approach in regard to theoretical terms across diverse writings, analysts, and traditions, allowing for articulation and possible points of synthesis within schools. This was Liberman’s hope: a federation of psychoanalytic schools of thought as opposed to a unified theory. As intimated earlier, the downside of this is the need for generalizations that have to be conceded. The upside is that he makes the theories work in the service of a fuller understanding of the patient and a deepening of the clinical encounter. Both of these are alluded to by Willy Baranger in his discussion in the opening section of Part II (pp. 132–134).
Delving into semiotics again, we learn how Liberman would scan the subject’s discourse for signs of change, progressive or regressive. Neither verbal nor nonverbal material was privileged; rather, he assumed that each subject possesses different combinations in his functioning. He held two types of operational hypothesis: (1) a correspondence hypothesis, which links psychoanalytic theory with “signs” (indicios), observable markers in the discourse; and (2) a coherence hypothesis describing the relationship between the signs and the deep structure that produces them. Here again we see the ubiquity of intersubjectivity in Liberman’s thinking. He conceives of the analyst-patient pair as forming “packages of singular matrices” (p. 43), where each matrix, and the symbols and signs formed within them, are the result of a creative process between the two participants.
In contrast to the traditional view of analyzing (the historical narrative dimension of the patient’s discourse), what was relevant for Liberman was the uncovering of the structure of the patient’s discourse, the revelation of how it is built through the decoding of the signs, as the expression of the unconscious structure (the deep structure) of the psychic apparatus. He used Freud’s telephone metaphor as a model for the analyst’s listening with his receptor organ turned toward the patient’s unconscious as a decoder. The frame has generic and specific factors—specific to the patient but generic enough to allow analytic work that can delimit the experiences contained within this frame. Other aspects that delimit the analytic experience are “the analytic situation” (p. 89), referring to the historical-existential moment in which the participants find themselves, which influences much of their functioning, and the analytic dialogue, including the conscious and unconscious messages emitted and received between the two participants.
One of the final topics taken up in Part I is Liberman’s view of transference. The authors make the interesting observation that by now this concept may apply to a group of phenomena theorized differently by different schools of thought, no longer referring to a strictly and commonly held idea. Liberman’s usage attempts to approximate a “shared nucleus” between the schools and is surmised as an emotional phenomenon that should be located in the intersubjective relational space (between two people), as it implies a particular type of influence of the subject’s internal structure over certain intersubjective relationships. This influence is heavily determined by historical affective frustrations in infancy. Up to this point, write the authors, Liberman is presenting a conceptual skeleton of the transference concept that can be shared by different schools.
About Part II of the book, I will be brief. As I have said, it consists of a series of papers and presentations given, it appears, to a small group of analysts and at times epistemologists (e.g., Klimovsky) who debate the finer points of what, to my mind, develops into an extremely complex theory. Lively, often esoteric, highly sophisticated questions and disagreements arise. Equal sophistication, mostly in linguistics, is required of the psychoanalytic reader. I confess that I often felt transported, unprepared, back to my high school language class. The unfortunate saturation of highly technical language like “syntactic structures” and “degree of imbrication” often left me feeling adrift, far from the shores of a full-blooded description of the psychoanalytic process.
This is to no fault of the authors, however, and the debates included in the book’s second half, like those in the first, betoken a herculean attempt to flesh out the nuances of highly sophisticated—perhaps overly so—hypotheses framed by a deep and passionate thinker who strove to bridge the gap between theory and practice and get straight to the nuts and bolts of the analytic encounter, taking as many roads as might get him there.