Commentary On Civitarese

Phenomenology

Providing both pleasure and surprise, Civitarese explores the roots of psychoanalytic intersubjectivity discourse in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, founding father of phenomenology whose students include not only giants like Martin Heidegger (1927), Emmanuel Lévinas (1963; Lévinas, Cohen, and Smith, 1998), and Edith Stein (1989), but philosophers and psychoanalysts to this day. Recognizing the complexity of Husserl’s attempts over many years to theorize intersubjectivity, subjectivity, and their relation, Civitarese has studied not only Husserl’s published works, often leaning toward “weak” intersubjectivity, but also the Nachlass, as found in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität (Husserl and Kern 1973). He finds, in work unavailable in English and difficult to access in German, an unannounced progression from the early work on empathy to considering prereflective community as the condition for the possibility of both subjectivity and empathy. Civitarese believes that in the “original meaning of intersubjectivity, as handed down by Husserl and later developed by Merleau-Ponty, the binary opposition between subject and intersubjectivity is dissolved and transformed into a dialectical relationship” (p. 853).

“Dialectical,” he tells us, means co-implicatory, that is, that two terms cannot be defined except in terms of the other. Like many contemporary thinkers, he rejects or bypasses the Platonic meaning of dialectics as dialogue (Gadamer 1980), as well as its Hegelian sense: generating opposites from each other on the way to a greater whole (Reason or Spirit, Geist), always evolving in the Hegelian dialectic. Because, for me at least, both of these classical meanings lurk in the word, I am more than uneasy with the casual use of “dialectic” and “dialectical” in contemporary psychoanalysis, as if the word has no history. Even Merleau-Ponty, whom Civitarese cites as an important influence, uses this term in complex and variable ways (Pollard 2016). Defining his debt to Hegel, Merleau-Ponty wrote that “the sense of things must emerge from their own dynamism, and cannot be measured by some alien, pre-defined, static ‘reason’” (1964, p. 63). But there is more, strangely unmentioned in Pollard’s extensive account. Only a few years after Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945), he published Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), in which he traced the Marxist dialectic as it devolved into tyranny, forcing him to renounce both his earlier communist hopes and his collaboration with Sartre.

But let us return to Husserl, in whose work Civitarese finds both his “dialectical” view of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and, I am guessing, the inspiration—or at least family resemblance—in Husserl’s epoché for Bion’s suspension of memory, desire, and understanding. The account of Husserl’s work, unusual and serious for a psychoanalytic article, includes his early work on temporality and empathy, as well as the later Nachlass, making it clear that Husserl thought and rethought intersubjectivity throughout his life. In the unpublished works, according to Civitarese, “Husserl theorizes this dark, original, primordial common ground of subjectivity. . . . in terms of the deepest level of feeling, of transcendental intersubjective community, and of original, prerational, prevoluntary, and pre-egological continuity” (p. 861). He rightly notes that Husserl’s studies of temporality seem to have led him to intersubjectivity: “An original temporality would not be typical of an already constituted subject but of a common and indistinct intersubjective area” (p. 859). In other words, the subject is born from intersubjectivity, not the other way around. No, we do not know why Husserl never published his work on intersubjectivity, but his later work may provide a clue.

Husserl’s last work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1935) provides crucial missing pieces to Civitarese’s account. I will mention two. (1) The long account of the mathematization of Western thinking, beginning with Galileo and Descartes, reducing human experience to geometrical and algebraic formulas, would have made it clear how allergic Husserl, father of phenomenology and intersubjectivity, would have been to the abstractions (grid, alpha and beta, and so on) beloved of Bion, Antonino Ferro, and Civitarese. Just such emphasis on abstract thinking, Husserl implies, had left him unsafe walking down the street in 1930s Freiburg and had excluded him from the library of the university where he had taught for so long. Civitarese refers vaguely to political differences between Husserl and Heidegger; the latter had enforced the anti-Semitic prohibitions at Freiburg University, and did not even attend the funeral of the man who had chosen him to succeed him in his philosophy chair. For the later Husserl, abstractions could be as deadly as they were for another student of both Husserl and Heidegger: Emmanuel Lévinas. (2) In The Crisis, we find the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), never mentioned by Civitarese. The lifeworld, a concept developed over many years, forms the backdrop of our experience—corporeal, temporal, social/relational. We interpret ourselves as subjects against this horizon, not as the isolated minds still perceptible in Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1931). Whatever minimal subjectivity we may be born with, it emerges within our lifeworlds into a more or less singular sense of self. My account here of Husserl’s late thinking abbreviates unforgivably, but his late thinking may start us toward alternatives to Civitarese’s schema of intersubjectivity.

One such alternative, the phenomenological intersubjectivity of Robert Stolorow, George Atwood, and Bernard Brandchaft (Atwood and Stolorow 2014; Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow 1997; Stolorow and Atwood 1992; Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandchaft 1994; Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood 1987; Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002). Stolorow and Atwood (2019), to which I also contributed, is probably the most Husserlian work in psychoanalysis over the past forty years, but goes missing here. (Civitarese explains that he intends a meta-critique, not a detailed discussion of the theories of others.) Referring at various stages of its development, to “intersubjective field,” “intersubjective systems theory,” or simply “psychoanalytic phenomenology,” this approach, as clinical sensibility, focuses (1) on the intersection of two or more worlds of experience, and (2) on prereflective “unconscious organizing principles,” that is, on the horizons underpinning and limiting both individual and shared experience. Recent directions have included psychological trauma (Stolorow 2007), psychosis (Atwood 2012), and radical ethics (Orange 2017).

Civitarese On Gradients Of Intersubjectivity

Classical psychoanalysis, characterized by “weak intersubjectivity,” we learn, treats the patient as an individual, a solitary Cartesian mind. In recent years the work of contemporary Freudians—a term Civitarese (2020) disdains as self-contradictory—often includes reference to the analyst’s influence on the psychoanalytic situation. Concepts like countertransference appear, but still refer to both patient and analyst as individuals. Less weak—I will refer to this group as moderates—we find relational psychoanalysis with its emphasis on mutual influence, including mutual recognition and empathic understanding. “We no longer have, except as a necessary background, the ‘fiction’ of two juxtaposed subjects in which some objective and detached observation of one by the other would be possible”; instead we are moving toward “an extremely dynamic relationship, made up of interweaving, co-being and co-implicating” (Civitarese 2020, p. 20). On the way, however, in the middle ground, we find clinical ideas like countertransference, projective identification, and enactment. Each of these Civitarese convincingly shows to belong to, and be derived from, Cartesian individualism. As a “post-Bionian,” he believes we must abandon all the vestiges of this old psychoanalytic thinking.

An intriguing sentence, to me at least, comes in his critique of the middle ground:

In practice, awareness of the inevitable and massive participation of the analyst in determining the “facts” of the analysis, in combination with the rhetoric of trauma, leads in many cases to the paradoxical result that the concept of intersubjectivity is used to justify a less hermeneutic and more humanistic (“psychotherapeutic”) approach to treatment [p. 874].

Several parts of this sentence puzzle me. What are the “facts” of an analysis? Does this refer to a narrative on which unbiased observers would agree? If I massively and inevitably participate, in what sense do I have access to “facts”? The scare quotes around “facts” suggests some skepticism, similar to that found in Wittgenstein (1969), about what a fact could be. Next, what does he mean by “the rhetoric of trauma”? On the same page he states categorically: “The fact is that real trauma is one thing while the story of trauma in the session is something else.” What is he saying? Does he mean that analysts who hold a middle ground on intersubjectivity cannot or do not make this distinction? Does he believe they do not seek, like all good hermeneuts, a shared sense of meaning even when facing and/or feeling traumatic shock and wounds? Is real trauma what gets me admitted to the trauma unit in the local hospital after a gunshot wound, and “the story of trauma” what I tell my analyst about what led me to miss analytic sessions? And does he believe hermeneutics and humanistic therapies are automatically opposed and mutually exclusive? Or that true psychoanalysis cannot be humanistic, finding the suffering human being in the center of its concerns? Is moderate intersubjectivity, according to his framework, too far from the abstractions the Bionian world seems to love? Later in the paper, he dismisses as simplistic those “commonsense” people who protest that history and trauma are important (p. 882). What if these are important only because the patient, and not just the analyst’s theory, carries their importance into the intersubjective field of the analysis? Let us see whether Civitarese’s psychoanalysis—“post-Bionian,” he calls it—answers some of the questions arising here.

Civitaresian Intersubjectivity

“The kind of intersubjectivity that interests us is . . . the original, deep, not (clearly) divisible, and ‘unsigned” dimension of necessary co-being on which the subjectivity of the conscious ego is based” (pp. 859–860). He redefines intersubjectivity “as a concept thinkable only in dialectical [co-implicatory] terms: in the original ego or pre-ego (Ur-Ich) lies the non-ego (Nicht-Ich) and vice versa” (p. 863). The subject is born from a preexisting community (p. 866), much as we find in Winnicott. On first reading, these words remind me of Hans Loewald’s rereading (1980) of Freud’s ego psychology, in which Ich emerges from an undifferentiated primal density, or from the mother-infant matrix. Primary process, held in full reverence, becomes the link to this original oneness and source of creativity. Let us see what Civitarese adds to this picture.

Husserl’s “transcendental intersubjectivity,” as Civitarese explains, presumes a primary connectivity or connection (Verbundenheit) full of pre- or proto-subjectivities in a temporality before time. The primordial oneness provides the condition for the possibility of the emergence of what we might call the human individual. “The ego begins to exist on the basis of the inscriptions it passively receives from the environment. . . . it is the result of a history that is above all biological but is then also a vessel of cultural heritage, a network of habits or patterns inscribed in the body” (p. 864). We become not a subject but “an intersubject, a collective subject endowed with its own life and its own character” (p. 864). Husserl, as translated and quoted by Civitarese, wrote that a layer of suprapersonal personality “flows through [the singular personalities], or rather comes out of them and passes through them as if they were the unity of a single person” (p. 865; Husserl 1973). Merleau-Ponty, we read, expanded and enriched this account with reversibility and intercorporeity, “the flesh.” Thus far we find an intersubjectivity that maps almost exactly onto that of Hans Loewald. The psychic begins to form from the proto-psychic field, from the primordial density. Much of the work of analysis consists in linking (a favorite Bionian term) the primary and secondary processes, both equally indispensable to a whole human life, though not equally primordial. So what more does a post-Bionian view add?

At birth the Bionian child has a “rudimentary consciousness [that] is not associated with an unconscious. All impressions of the self are of equal value: all are conscious” (Bion 1967, p. 309; quoted by Civitarese, pp. 867–868). How can Bion know this? No matter the concept of unconsciousness employed, I cannot imagine any contemporary infant researcher or theorist saying this. Further, it seems a complete rejection of what we have just learned from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, for whom something unconscious (the pre-I, the flesh) is the transcendental precondition for the emergence of the subject. Until this point, it had seemed that this original unconsciousness was the meaning of an intersubjective lifeworld. Have we now entered a world of logic and abstraction far from the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s experiential description and theorizing? It would be less surprising to hear that the prelinguistic may be the original form of unconsciousness.

“Only with the advent of language,” writes Civitarese, “can we really talk about the interweaving of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the proper human sense” (p. 868). Maybe he refers to evolutionary time rather than to infant development. But when does either begin? Perhaps he means that language permits the emergence of the subjective from the intersubjective field or community, linking subjective experience with language development. But contrariwise, if language is “the house of being” (Heidegger and Beaufret 1949), then language, intersubjectivity, and a subjective sense of selfhood would be coextensive. And what if language lacks such a clear before and after? If language is response to the other and the alien (Waldenfels 2007), creating the ethical subject (Lévinas 1974), it speaks the unspeakable, and leaves the origins unspoken, in reverence. Intersubjective space is curved upward, as Simon Critchley (Critchley and Bernasconi 2002) reminds us. The Other occupies the higher and earlier place, accusing me. My speaking always comes too late.

Interestingly enough, Civitarese objects, as do I, to the concepts of countertransference, projective identification, and enactment in theories he characterizes as moderately intersubjective. His precise objection seems to be that these ideas presume isolated subjects, mutually and symmetrically influencing each other. “Basically,” he writes, “the center of gravity of the analysis resides more in the interaction between two subjects than in the field they generate. . . . [This] leads in many cases to the paradoxical result that the concept of intersubjectivity is used to justify a less hermeneutic and more humanistic (‘psychotherapeutic’) approach to treatment” (p. 874). Until these last words, I fully agree. But I ask again, how is a hermeneutic psychoanalysis (Orange 2011) opposed to a humanistic/therapeutic one? Why does the dialogical (hermeneutic) search within, and emergent from, a shared field exclude care for the suffering person who entrusts himself/herself/themself to my care? An interpersonalist colleague in New York proclaimed a few years ago, “I care for my children. I do not care for my patients!” Clearly he subscribed to this post-Bionian dichotomy.

For me, any intersubjectivity worthy of the name not only invokes Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s analyses, not only reminds us of the interhuman in Martin Buber, but leads to a radically asymmetrical demand and response, constituting the moi as respondent to the demand or command of the Other:

that face facing me, in its expression—in its mortality—summons me, demands me, requires me: as if the invisible death faced by the face of the other—pure alterity, separate, somehow, from any whole—were “my business.” As if, unknown by the other whom already, in the nakedness of its face, it concerns, it “regarded me” before its confrontation with me, before being the death that stares me, myself, in the face. The death of the other man puts me on the spot, calls me into question, as if I, by my possible indifference, became the accomplice of that death, invisible to the other who is exposed to it; and as if, even before being condemned to it myself, I had to answer for that death of the other, and not leave the other alone to his deathly solitude. It is precisely in that recalling of me to my responsibility by the face that summons me, that demands me, that requires me—it is in that calling into question—that the other is my neighbor [Lévinas 1999, pp. 24–25].

Simon Critchley (2007) explains: “infinite responsibility to the other creates what Lévinas liked to call ‘the curvature of intersubjective space’ in which the other always occupies the high point. All theories of intersubjectivity that emphasize mutuality and reciprocity and dialectic—namely those of “les trois H”—Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—miss this radical asymmetry. . . . When I am within the relation, then other is not my equal, and my responsibility towards [the other] is infinite” (p. 60). Lisa Baraitser (2008) links this ethical turn to the maternal.

Does a conceptual space exist for this radical ethic of solidarity and response within a post-Bionian, “strong intersubjectivity” psychoanalysis? (p. 875). Civitarese writes that his field theory “is based on a radical social theory of how the mind is born; it focuses on the present relationship, that is, the here and now of the session, but not in the same way as relational models it adopts a definition of the unconscious that sees it as a psychic apparatus for symbolization. The key idea is that the purpose of therapy is to expand this function” (p. 875). We might initially think he means that the individual arises from the encounter with the other, what a radical ethic sees as the ethical constitution of subjectivity. We might imagine that he wants to dethrone the ego, and to situate the human in Husserl’s lifeworld. But constitution of the psychic apparatus (!), he tells us, results from expanding the function of symbolization in this psychic apparatus, the mathematical function in Bion. No wonder he has no use for a humanistic psychoanalysis. Computers can symbolize, and mentalize. What if expanding selfhood or individuality of the patient to include more sisters and brothers were an important “purpose of therapy”? What if the “now” were constituted by both past and future, not to be excluded, but to be inhabited by the ethical subject? What if the “mind is born” into the caste systems of privilege and untouchability described by Isabel Wilkerson (2020).

Civitarese advocates and illustrates “a technique that prioritizes observation of the symmetrical/intersubjective/unconscious plane of the relationship, and tries to resist the siren song of causal explanation” (p. 879). His critique of causal explanations resulting from simplistic notions of pastness and history makes sense to me. I do not, however, understand why he thinks symmetry and intersubjectivity to be equivalent. Symmetry does indeed belong to Kantian forms of social justice, including the racial justice Kant himself undermined (Bernasconi 2001). Symmetry also tends to characterize psychoanalytic mutual recognition theories (Benjamin 1990, 2004, 2018). But why can asymmetry not characterize some forms of intersubjectivity and unconsciousness, as I noted in Critchley? Much as we need equality in the ways that we value lives to ground an irreplaceable, grievable human person (Butler 2004), can we not hear Martin Buber (1999) reminding us that the teacher/student, therapist/patient, and rabbi/congregant relationships are asymmetrical, that, as Warren Poland (2000, 2018) writes, we work in the service of the patient? We do not try to fit the patient into some sort of grid. She is my fellow creature, to be met with reverence (Woodruff 2014). Treating the other as coming first, as one whose death matters more than mine does, does not imply abandoning the unconscious. Unconsciousness prevents me from being my other’s keeper and structures my conscious life. Where Civitarese proclaims “psychoanalysis is the art of asking and not of answering,” (p. 879), I recall Bernhard Waldenfels (1994, 2007; Waldenfels and Därmann 1998), whose phenomenology refers to Verantwortlichkeit, answerability. From the moment I pick up the phone when the patient first reaches out, I am answering. The other’s need asks me, and as Watzlawick liked to say (Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson 1968), I cannot not answer. To refuse to answer, even if one answers anyway, implies that the other has a lower status or none at all. Again, no wonder the post-Bionian objects to a humanistic psychoanalysis.

To conclude, I do not believe that anyone, among those I have been able to read, has yet presented a fully adequate theory of intersubjectivity for psychoanalytic use. Like Husserl, we remain beginners in philosophy. I do value the linking of Husserl’s epoché with discipline in psychoanalysis, as it highlights our assumptions and keeps us attentive to the things themselves, that is, to experience, yours, mine, and ours. An important contribution also links Freud and Husserl, both students of Brentano, in their efforts to illuminate what we do not want to know about ourselves, especially how much we take for granted. I am grateful to Giuseppe Civitarese for the opportunity to rethink psychoanalysis with him.