Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“I proposed that surviving destruction was exactly what the slave could not do for the master who did not recognize his subjectivity. This must have led by association to Story of O and thence to the insight that one whose subjectivity is not realized cannot return the recognition of subject to subject, so that the master is never satisfied”“Their perspective included always seeing things through the double lens of what is and what potentially could be as well as the continual negotiation of reality in our alternative culture and the reality outside.”“The value of giving everyone the power to transform the conditions of their own lives, to create that agency together with others, was in our family life paradoxically inseparable from the sense of trauma and persecution that came with McCarthyism. Both sides inspired me to look for a different perspective on the social struggles of my generation: one that was more psychologically introspective and emotionally in touch yet preserving the values of rejecting social conformity and oppression”“Infant capacities for social engagement and differentiation far outstripped the kinds of primitive ego actions Freud attributed to earliest life, for example, hostility to the impingement of the outside world”“So now it was actually possible to show how early mutual impact occurs in microanalysis, how active babies engage with mothers in a form of mutual recognition and intersubjectivity—”“The question of what would make it possible for a parent, an adult of either sex, to give that kind of attention and devotion guided my first research question, What did mothers need to be able to do this?”“By embedding this tension between mother and baby within psychoanalytic theory and an understanding of complementary dynamics the effort was to make mutual recognition into a container for something much more complex, indeed the origin of so many later dilemmas of intersubjectivity: negotiating the sticky compromises and paradoxes of a dyad in which there is mutuality but asymmetry, identity of needs but conflict of needs, deep attunement but also difference. For my sensibility the profoundest inspiration of feminist theory was the search for a perspective that transcends the either=or of needs and unlocks the impasse that leads to domination—the Hegelian struggle to the death for recognition in which only one can live, the other must die—to show how there can be two subjects in one relationship, neither one subjugating the other, neither having to coerce or defend themselves from the other”“Tronick’s (1989) formulation seemed to me a dramatic conceptual breakthrough, confirming how we could see basic patterns of all interaction in infancy and confirming the unformulated knowledge behind the idea of mutual recognition as something that necessarily breaks down. The fact that mothers and infants benefit from the process of recreating a state of mutual regulation after mismatching and dysregulation offers an entirely different perspective on what it means to be ‘‘good enough,’’ to grow, to heal. Mutual accommodation and correction become the name of the game, thus giving the lie to the burdensome and arrogant idea of the analyst’s interpretive truth, correct technique”“In addition to the primary intersubjectivity of attunement, state-sharing, what I would now call the rhythmic third (Aron, 2006; Benjamin, 2011), my original sense of how the analyst was recognized was primarily in terms of ‘‘survival of the object,’’ the analyst as a subject who truly exists outside the patient’s control, can take care of herself and need not be vigilantly managed or minded by the patient. I distinguished between the patient recognizing our outsideness, being a subject who acts independently and above all responsibly, from being a person, a defined fleshed-out subjectivity, which could be overstimulating or frightening.”“Focusing on the role of shared states, affect regulation, and joint dissociation allowed a perspective on how to use enactments and to flesh out the insight that at some level mutual knowing is both unavoidable and desirable.”-sharing of states“which started by asking why women seemed preoccupied with the language of autonomy rather than desire, why unlike men self-assertion appeared not to be equated with being the subject who says (like the rapprochement boy), ‘‘I want that!’’ It seemed that for boys, homoerotic identificatory love formed the sense of oneself as subject of desire. But this identificatory love requires recognition in return, the father who says, ‘‘I can see myself in you, recognize your desire as my desire.’’ What happened to girls? Did they miss this personally or was it simply not culturally available?”“The rejection of this need for identificatory love in girls also poisons the well of desire and subjectivity and leads to a submissive form of ideal love in both women and men, both clinically (read some old cases and see how much the opportunity to recognize identificatory love was missed!) and in and out of the transference.”“Knowing, recognition, finding ways to identify and share feeling without shame ... all of these allow us to step into a world of others in which bodies meet and are ‘‘carriers’’ of emotion”