Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“I might see Winnicott’s thinking as containing competing, contradictory strains, some in favor of maternal subjectivity and others idealizing primary maternal preoccupation. These contradictions have bequeathed to us a clinical tension that we continue to debate strenuously (as Mitchell, 1997, makes clear discussing Slochower) between the need to submerge ourselves in the patient’s experience and the importance of providing an experience of otherness.”“There is an important distinction in my mind between the interpersonal and the intersubjective. As Mitchell says, there is no necessary contradiction between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic, they can be seen as two dimensions of the same process by which mind interacts with the outside. But I used the intersubjective perspective to add something different. It was not meant as a synonym that simply avoids the unpopular connotations of “interpersonal.” It signifies something internal as well as between persons. The tension between recognizing the other and wanting the self to be absolute (omnipotence) is, to my mind, an internal conf lict inherent in the psyche; it exists independent of any given interaction— even in the most favorable conditions. It is not interpersonally generated but is, rather, a psychic structure that conditions the interpersonal. The problem of whether or not we are able to recognize the other person as outside, not the sum of, our projections or the mere object of need, and still feel recognized by her or him, is defining for intersubjectivity.”-Yes“Expressing our felt subjectivity—what might be denoted by authenticity—is important, but it may not be the chief method whereby a patient comes to recognize our existence as a different other. That recognition might actually first come about through gradual appreciation of our self-restrained empathy, which distinguishes us from the patient’s internal objects.”-love this point; you can gain subjectivity and trust through being available and restrained as the position (therapist) requires“For long stretches of analysis, recognition may appear to be a one-way street, except that we are moved by our deep conscious and unconscious identification with the patient we aim to recognize. I appreciate Mitchell’s concise elucidation of the way in which recognition and identification can alternately contradict or reinforce each other. Identification can work as a self-alienating relationship to one’s ideal, or it can work as a two-way street in which we recognize aspects of our ideal in someone who recognizes our potential to fulfill the ideal. Because of this ambitendency it is difficult to tease out the difference between idealization in the service of owning one’s ideals in an agentic way and idealization that is projective and self-alienating.”“My aim in taking up the contrast between Lacanian and object relations feminism was to throw light on this process—not only to synthesize these differing positions, but to ask what might be revealed by juxtaposing their differing takes on femininity. To oversimplify, one theory sees femininity and masculinity arising from opposing stances toward maternal identification, the other from the differing relation to father and phallus. I asked, how do we explain the contradiction in Freud’s idea that a girl is passive but her mother is active and that hence identification with mother is not a basis for femininity? My answer was that the boy’s oedipal solution involves splitting the experience of the mother–baby dyad, assigning all the active, controlling elements to masculinity and father, all the passive baby elements to femininity and the daughter position. What appears as femininity, in Freud’s sense, is this split-off passivity, which includes being a container for the active partner. Thus object relations feminists, especially Chodorow (1978), are correct in their argument that girls identify with their mothers and that boys, in disidentifying, try to reverse the power relation with their mothers. But Lacanians are correct in recognizing that what we know as femininity has a content apart from motherhood and is constituted through a peculiar relationship to the father—or, as I see it, to the mind of the oedipal boy that remains in the father and is writ large in patriarchal culture— a relationship embraced by girls in the effort to separate from the mother. In this sense, even the positions that are reassembled in postoedipal multiplicity continue to bear the stamp of historically transmitted patriarchal relations.”“When we work on this fault line [of traumatic repetition] simple recognition is no longer possible, and the effort to remain good, caring and empathic will only exacerbate the dilemma.”“Intersubjective relations cannot, of course, be free of destruction. But intersubjective space does not refer to all intersubjective relations; it refers to something more specific, derivative of Winnicott’s term, potential space. It can also be understood in contrast to breakdown, which takes the form of the split complementarity: the relationship of doer–done to, in which it appears possible only to submit to or resist the demand of the other. Complementary power relations collapse the space of communication and internal mental ref lection that make it possible to identify with the other’s position without losing one’s own and so eventually to analyze the interaction. Intersubjective space might work to contain destruction, but frequently—and this is what makes destruction destructive—it collapses in the face of destruction, leaving us in the complementary world of internal objects (if you are strong, I must be weak). Surviving destruction means, in effect, restoring or creating such space.”“I might want to agree that “the self invariably loses itself in the Other who secures that self’s existence,” yet I would have to object that one can be lost only in one’s own ideal or persecutory object, not the real Other. Since, after all, the real Other, who transforms us, whom we need and depend on, is known as Other only to the extent that we do not lose ourselves in her but maintain a sense of differentiation. She is Other only to the extent that we accept our dependency and do not try to escape it by incorporating or repudiating her”-Yes, she can only remain Other through this separation“We can thus retain Britton’s (1988) idea that acceptance of the parents’ (of whatever sex) independent relation means that the child, instead of being located in two discrete dyads, can move from being observed by a third in the relation with the other to acting as a third, observing the other’s relation to a second other. This notion of the third can be detached from any given gender or sexual constellation.”“As this analysis suggests, my main purpose in understanding thirdness is to expand on the normative ideal of recognition, which Butler correctly identifies as central to my work. However, I believe that this idea of the third also has value in thinking about gender. Reaching the dyadic place of thirdness, in which symbolic relations are possible, is a prerequisite for transcending rigid gender binaries in triadic relations. Moving from the defensive use of repudiation to tolerance of overinclusiveness allows the postoedipal use of symbols to bridge multiple and contradictory identifications (Bassin, 1998) in configuations of desire”’-this has so many implications for methodology, I love it