Abstract
When invited to review a highly praiseworthy book, the obvious and economical thing to do is simply praise it. Warren Poland’s Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis is a work of psychoanalytic vitality, depth of thought, and humanity expressed with subtlety and clarity.
Its very title tells a tale in its hint of paradox. Paradoxes raise questions and stimulate thought. Inevitably analysts must come to know and understand sympathetically the most intimate details of trauma in their patients’ libidinal and aggressive lives, from childhood to maturity, in order to help them resolve their symptoms and blossom in their lives, all the while keeping separate the stream of their own sexual and aggressive needs and wants for satisfaction elsewhere. Intimacy and separateness are fundamental determinants of adequate psychoanalytic work. When they fail, so does analysis. They are also the stuff of life and tragedy. The tragic flaw of Shakespeare’s King Lear is his inability to tolerate Cordelia’s youthful sexual love for another man. Given the repetition of fixated sexual love and aggression in the maternal, paternal, and sibling transference relations of the analytic situation, an obligation is placed on the analyst to avoid Lear’s flaw of appearing to give while unconsciously seeking to possess. This potentially tragic paradox in life and psychoanalysis is explored by Poland from diverse perspectives. If intimacy is required, how is separateness possible? If separateness is required, how is intimacy possible? If both are required by psychoanalysis, is not our profession even more seriously impossible than Freud intended to say when he compared it with teaching and governing? Does not psychoanalysis impose logically contradictory and psychologically conflicting demands on us?
To the tasks imposed by this core issue in psychoanalysis, Poland brings a revealing humanistic attitude. The titles of the sections and chapters convey a playful irony—as in “Opening Conclusions.” It is an irony that banishes mediocre sincerity from the thoughtful consideration of a series of central issues in clinical psychoanalysis and in life, as in “Endings in Poetry, Psychoanalysis, and Life.” And there is the rueful humanism of psychoanalysis in the chapters “Ephemera: Unfinished Thoughts on Endings and Death” and “Slouching towards Mortality: Thoughts on Time and Death” that allows for humane reflection on the fate we all must eventually share, whatever lives we have managed to live. Readers will each have their own associations to the image of “slouching.” For me it suggests Poland’s reluctant acceptance of the inevitability of death, no matter how much unwanted, without the confused, somewhat shabby hopefulness of the despair in Waiting for Godot. Instead, this is an authentic expression of an attitude of psychoanalytic humanism to the ending of one’s lease on life. Poland plays paradoxically with death in his affirmation that the humorous deriding of death is implicitly an acknowledgment of its inevitability and, hence, its undeniability. This attitude exemplifies Poland’s psychoanalytic sympathy for the dilemma of the human condition of being driven to preserve one’s life even while being destined to death and the use of humor in attempting to resolve the unresolvable.
Psychoanalysis is paradoxical: to deny is to affirm; to affirm is to deny. Paradox in language describes and corresponds with conflict in the psyche. Only Hegel or Marx and their adherents (among them some psychoanalysts) can delude themselves into thinking that history and nature are intrinsically, dialectically contradictory. And despite a certain intellectual pleasure in paradoxes in Poland’s writing about psychic conflict, there is not to be found even a trace in his work of a fallacious “Hegelian shift” from language to psychic life. On the contrary, he explicitly rejects any Hegelian exaltation of contradiction (p. 89). It is language that can be paradoxical; it is psychic reality that can be conflictual.
The word paradox has three meanings: (1) an assertion that is contrary to received opinion or expectation; (2) an assertion that is apparently contradictory, though actually true; and (3) an assertion that is self-contradictory and therefore false and absurd. It can surely be said that psychoanalysis is one of the most paradoxical of bodies of knowledge, in the first sense, because it is held by not a few humanists that the foundational idea of psychoanalysis suffers from being self-contradictory in the third sense. Self-consciousness, they argue, makes the idea that there are unconscious thought processes at work in the human mind self-contradictory, since to think is to be conscious of thinking, as in the Cartesian cogito. Descartes was the father of the European tradition of philosophical rationalism, as Locke was of empiricism. Their epistemological disagreements were extensive except for their shared view that psychic activity cannot occur without being conscious.
Psychoanalysis, if not perennially then for a very long time, will qualify for being thought paradoxical in the first and third senses. Even Freud (1923) advanced the argument that affects must be conscious in a paper in which he hypothesized that guilt can be unconscious when one experiences being unwell instead of feeling guilty. But in special ways the descriptive language of psychoanalysis is paradoxical in the second sense: its apparent contradictions are actually truths, as Poland frequently explores and illuminates. We analysts are separate from, independent of, and unacquainted with the strangers who become our patients and who are no less separate from, independent of, and unacquainted with their analysts. The only basic difference is that in order for patients to know themselves well enough to live as well as they can, it is necessary that they know us only sufficiently to be found trustworthy enough to hear them in their free associations, to accept their transferences, and to interpret them in a way that enables them to hear themselves and, thereby, undergo beneficial changes in the process of becoming better acquainted with, not the analyst or even their ideas about the analyst, but with themselves. The resulting functional improvements in their instinctual and ego life do not simply belong to the patients; these changes have become who and what they are because they have become, with the help of analysis, what they could have been had their life and circumstances been better than they were. All this while, the analyst has been able to tolerate being for them, what he or she is not, the loved and hated objects of the traumatic experiences that had set in motion the formation of their symptoms and inhibitions. As I understand him, Poland proposes that analytic therapy has two requirements: the first is the analyst’s capacity for making sound interpretations of associations and transferences; the second is a capacity for informed witnessing of the pain of the memories and of the mourning required by the processes of change. Those precesses result in the patient’s no longer needing to seek even disguised satisfactions of fixated or regressed wishes, which have been exchanged for adult satisfactions. Poland reminds us that without sound interpretations empathy is obtuse and that without empathic witnessing knowledge is barren at best and cruel at worst. Intrinsic to the medium of these psychoanalytic messages between patient and analyst is the apparent paradox of being in the patient’s experience what the analyst is not and cannot be if the work is to go forward—the apparent paradox of transference frustration that Poland so eloquently articulates.
This being so, as Nancy Chodorow notes in her preface to this book, Poland rejects at a stroke any idea of the co-creation of the patient’s history or even being. To this can be added his rejection of the solipsistic relativity and subjectivist epistemological ideas that have gained currency among analysts. It appears to me that Poland’s psychoanalytic thinking is premised on both pragmatic and correspondence criteria of truth: pragmatic, because the truth or falsity of interpretations can be known by whether or not they bring improvements in the patient’s functioning, and correspondence, by observing how well they tally with the repressed memories of the patient when they appear. Implicit in Poland’s working idea of truth we find summarized William James’s equation of correspondence and pragmatism (1907): “a statement is useful because it is true” is another way of saying “a statement is true because it is useful.”
But where is the paradox here unless it is of the contradictory kind “found” by Grünbaum (1984) in Freud’s tally argument or by Fonagy in his critique of the reliability or need of recovered repressed memories? Poland finds both critiques unsound—in the case of Grünbaum by implication, and of Fonagy (1999) explicitly. Poland’s succinct conception of the analyst-patient relationship—“two-person separate”—has at least a whiff of paradox. The hyphenated “two-person” affirms relationship, even a suggestion of something unitary, though certainly not fusional or identical, while the adjective “separate” would appear to indicate the absence of a significant relationship, as in two persons with “minds of their own” or two persons who “experience things differently.” This antinomy is apparent also in Poland’s strong affirmation of the “otherness” of patients; “the patient as a unique other” asserts the ontological independence of the being of patients while at the same time analyst and patient have many things in common, mentally as well as physically, that seem inconsistent with the patient’s being a “unique other” to the analyst.
The beauty of paradoxical ideas is their stimulation of thinking to some purpose about complex realities. So let me accept Poland’s invitation to thought by briefly exploring the oedipus complex against the background of the “two-person separate” paradox. If nature is what happens for the most part (Aristotle), we can say that in all likelihood both patient and analyst have or have had oedipus complexes. They are quite deeply and significantly similar in having experienced incest wishes in childhood. In this respect, they are similar. They are each no less likely to have developed ambivalent feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex and anxiety about retribution for the aggression of their ambivalence and the possessiveness of their incestuous love. We are referred to this commonality by the hyphen in “two-person.” But even in these likenesses that sustain the hyphen in the abstract description and the recognition of similarity in the clinical relationship, of feeling at home with something with which the analyst has struggled on his own and in his analysis, separation enters when there is a gender difference between analyst and patient. For a male analyst to
It is with this familiarity that Poland asks us to comprehend in all of its dissimilarities the patient’s oedipus complex: the familiarity is with the analyst’s oedipus complex and not the patient’s. The patient has different objects for incest feelings, for ambivalence, anxiety, and the identifications that result in the nature and extent of the resolution of the complex. Even the genetic determinants, while qualitatively similar, may vary quantitatively and can never be identical in one fundamental respect. Independently of questions of recollection, the analyst’s oedipal experience is his or hers while—and here we come upon a more fundamental similarity that guarantees “strangerness” and separation—the patient’s oedipal experience too is his or hers. Each person, patient or analyst, must live his or her oedipus complex in his or her own way in relations with parents and siblings or their substitutes. And it is the oedipus complex of the patient that the analyst must be able to identify, know, and understand, as it happened in the life of the patient—with the antecedent experiences that made their contribution to it and the subsequent experiences in which it exercised its continuing influence in disguised demands for satisfaction—now, in analysis, finding its way into associations and transferences. It is this separation that makes the interdependent part of the analytic relation work and that allows the patient to leave the analysis with changes that are his or her own. It is also what allows objectivity into the hyphenated part of the analytic work. It is the reason for the analyst’s being responsible for the work of sustaining the third function in the hyphenated patient-analyst relationship. Poland’s insightful “two-person separate” formula for the analytic relationship is a paradox of the second kind—an apparent contradiction that states a truth.
I do not think that Poland’s formulation needs any support from Heidegger’s obscure idea that human individuals are “being-in-the-world” or that “freedom is existential.” If these notions mean anything, they imply that causality does not apply to psychic life and that there is no such thing as unconscious psychic determinism. The same is true of the no less abstract intellectual enthusiasms of Emmanuel Levinas and, more generally, of the antiscientific speculations of phenomenological or hermeneutic philosophy. Poland’s formulations are quite well enough grounded in facts of human nature uncovered by clinical psychoanalysis and his own humanistic decency and honesty not to have to rely on obscure philosophical abstractions.
Poland raises the epistemological question posed by academic postmodernist and current U.S. alt-right thinking in a charming reflection on Twelfth Night. Does the play have an identity and nature of its own when the play is experienced differently by different people? This was the question posed by Protagoras to Plato about a much less charming and simpler object—a bed. Plato’s answer to Protagoras is that the impressions of the bed from different positions are different but the bed remains the same. They are perspectives on the bed caused by the finitude of our sense experience. The same answer about the identity and nature of Twelfth Night is implied by Poland on several grounds, of which I will mention one: the patient as stranger to be known. The characters of Twelfth Night are, in the same sense, “strangers to be known” requiring observation, affective responsiveness, and thought. In recognizing that patients are themselves, each with their own life and problems to be progressively known in and through the functional changes brought about by the analysis, Poland implies with Plato that Twelfth Night, like a patient who remains him- or herself even in the changes brought about by analysis, does not fracture into many plays in the different productions and experiences of it (some of which are better than others), despite its being more vulnerable to misrepresentation and insensitivity than the perspectives on a physical artifact like a bed.
Perspectives may be stable even while illusional, as is, for example, our experience of the earth’s daily rotation on its axis as the rotation of the sun about the earth, even when we know the reality. The play remains a comedy, a love story that turns out happily, by means of an accidental correction of a mistaken gender identity caused by a sister making herself appear like her brother for self-protection, because she thinks he was lost in the shipwreck from which she had herself only narrowly escaped. His appearance in the last act unravels the dilemma of the sister, who has fallen in love with the local duke, who is in love with the local heiress, who has been spurning the duke but falls in love with the duke’s emissary, when she—dressed as her brother—is sent to woo the heiress on the duke’s behalf, only to have the heiress fall in love with his emissary. When finally the brother appears, he is taken by the heiress to be the male-appearing sister, and to his astonishment at his good fortune contracts marriage with him. When the duke discovers that his male emissary is a beautiful young woman feigning to be a man, he is happy to propose marriage to a charming woman who, unlike the heiress, loves him. Any production of the play, or any experience of it, that fails to follow this plot is simply mistaken about it. The play is what it is and does not break apart into the multiple, diverse experiences it provides. Anyone whose character does not allow the pleasure of a willing suspension of disbelief in Shakespeare’s play with gender in the plot’s cross-dressing is unable to experience the play as it is. Prominent among this group of readers is to be found the otherwise great early Shakespearean critic Samuel Johnson. The same is true, as Poland ingeniously and gently reminds us, of the childhood, latency, youthful, mature, and declining stages of our sexual libido and its changing influence on our experience of the romance of the play. His bemused but deeply serious reflections on the concluding speech of Feste, the clown, evoke Jaques’s stages-of-life speech in As You Like It. These latency, adolescent, adult, middle-age, and elderly stage-appropriate perspectives on the characters and plot of the play will yield somewhat different experiences of Shakespeare’s play, but, like Plato’s bed, it remains the same. That there are differences in experience of one and the same thing does not create a different play any more than our experience of the sun’s rotation makes the solar system Ptolemaic. Poland’s concluding insightful appreciation of Shakespeare’s psychological genius (p. 155) inspires us to wonder if the Malvolio subplot might be, among other things, a dramatic means contrived by Shakespeare to caricature in Malvolio, unconsciously but understandingly, the narcissistic grandiosity of the remnants or memories of the oedipal rivalry and sexual ambition of childhood, and to punish them in order to allow the idealized comic romance of the main plot to be fully but also darkly and more knowingly celebrated.
Poland’s humanistic learning rewards the reader with beautifully apt literary references but, even more important, with his own insightful metaphors and descriptions of psychoanalysis both in theoretical work and in the clinic. The core of this psychoanalytic humanity is a respect by the analyst for both himself as a separate person (see, e.g., pp. 23, 55) and for his patients as no less separate persons with lives of their own in need of analytic help (see, e.g., pp. 22, 74). This respect for the stranger in patients, and for the intrusive unfamiliar in oneself aroused by the relationship with a patient, invests the analyst’s function as a third observer of the analyst-patient relation with an important ethical dimension of self-criticism, implicit in Poland’s clinical reflections, as well as in his struggle to adequately conceptualize the clinical function of witnessing. They are also at work as premises in his reflections, reminiscent of Bacon’s “idols,” on the influence of narcissism in the psychoanalytic theorizing that has turned useful new ideas into the ideologically exaggerated, contesting “radical theories” of pluralism (see the chapter “Problems in Pluralism,” pp. 89–99). Poland is critical of “radical theories” not because he is a polemicist but because he is an integrative, questioning thinker. Respect for the stranger in other and self are at work in Poland’s two major scientific-empiricist premises. First, although much stands in the way of gaining an objective understanding of patients, it can be done, in no small part because of the knowledge psychoanalysis has thus far gathered concerning the causes of the obstacles to understanding self and other. Second, competent clinical observations can be used to preserve, correct, and add to the body of knowledge that is psychoanalysis. For example, both premises are at work in his clinical critique of Freud’s view of the universality of penis envy in women and castration anxiety in the fear of passivity toward another male in men (p. 110). Poland’s correction is implicitly akin to the Aristotelian definition of “natural”; he describes both phenomena as predictable and explicable when occurring, but not inevitable, which they would have to be in order to be universal.
This review, you have possibly noticed, will for some analysts itself seem paradoxical. I claim, on the one hand, that Poland places psychoanalysis among the humanities on account of its approach to its subject—the psychic life of individuals—and, on the other, that he considers it an empirical science because of its clinical benefits.