Mark Winborn's Blog, page 15
November 21, 2012
Daniel Stern - The ‘Pre-Narrative Envelope’: An Alternative View of ‘Unconscious Phantasy’ in Infancy
"This work grows out of a continuing effort to understand the nature of the infant's representational world and, in particular, to imagine how this world is created. Such a creation within the infant's mind would be easier to envision if we had a ‘basic unit’ of subjective, psychic experience of psychodynamic relevance to work with. Such a unit would serve as the building block for constructing the representational world. In psychoanalysis, the ‘basic unit’ of psychic experience is the ‘unconscious phantasy’. This article proposes the ‘pre-narrative envelope’ as an alternative way to view such a basic unit, especially its origin in early infancy.
Why is an alternative view needed, and what directions might it take? The point of reference for the concept of an ‘unconscious phantasy’ is contained in Freud's earlier views of a ‘primal phantasy’ (1916-17) and in the Kleinian view of an ‘unconscious phantasy (Isaacs, 1948). In these conceptions, ‘unconscious phantasies’ are inherited scenarios containing an object, aim and goal.
These scenarios are innate correlates or the psychic content of drive, and exist independently of experience, which only gives them local colour. Stated in that way, this is the clearest, most robust and radical psychoanalytic position on ‘unconscious phantasy’. It is the reference point of which all other positions are modifications. Even though a majority of psychoanalysts may not hold to this position in its pure form, their views are necessarily defined against this point of reference.
The desire to modify this reference point has been strong historically and remains so. The reasons for this are evident. First, the notion of a mental scenario that is inherited is hard to envision or explain. Second, many wish to give interactions with the environment a greater role in the formation of the ‘unconscious phantasy’. And thirdly, if the ‘unconscious phantasy’ is an inherited mental structure, there is little work of mental construction left for our enormous capacities, and the subject of thinking and representing in that case is of little interest, at least as concerns the formation of the basic unit of psychic experience. To be sure, in the traditional psychoanalytic view, ego processes play a crucial and necessary role in bringing the unconscious phantasy into psychic life. Nonetheless, the basic form of the unconscious phantasy is already established for the ego to work upon. Thus, ‘thinking’ and ‘representing’, as ego functions, are allocated a role in the transposition but not the creation of the basic form of the phantasy.
In spite of this interest in modifying the ‘reference position’, it is difficult to do so within the psychoanalytic framework. If one wishes to give a greater formative role to environmental interactions, and to ‘thinking’ and ‘representing’ which construct the mental landscape from these interactions, at least two things are needed. First, one would need a theory of ‘thinking’. However, psychoanalysis has never developed a real and independent theory of ‘thinking’. (Bion is a possible but partial and problematic exception. His work will not be discussed here. ‘Thoughts’ have remained the offspring and handmaidens of drives. In a sense, the pre-formed phantasy takes the place of the creational function of ‘thinking’. That is why psychoanalysis has been so concerned with the dialectic between absence and presence in the emergence of ‘thought’, instead of being interested in the role of ‘thought’ in creating the prior dialectic between non-existence and existence (existence containing both presence and absence).
Secondly, one would need a greater interest in, and a more elaborated perspective on the nature of observable interactions. Psychoanalysis, with its centre of gravity firmly in the intrapsychic, has been unable to do this. (There are of course some grand but individualistic exceptions such as Winnicott.)
Without a theory of ‘thinking’ or a systematic approach to interaction, the possibilities are limited for modification within a strict, traditional psychoanalytic frame. It is with this in mind that I will borrow some concepts of ‘thinking’ from cognitive science, and some infant observational approaches to interaction, and apply them to the psychoanalytic notion of drive. The result is an alternative view of the ‘unconscious phantasy’ which I will call a ‘pre-narrative envelope’ for reasons that will become clear.
Since the major thrust of this article is progressively to assemble the concept of a ‘pre-narrative envelope’ and demonstrate how it can further our understanding of infantile subjective experience, the acquisition of representational worlds, and of ‘thinking’ in infancy, I will summarize here the main features of this unit so the reader will have a clearer picture of where we are headed.
1. The unit must be clinically useful, potentially, and must be appropriate from a developmental perspective.
2. The backbone of the unit is the desire/motive with its goal-directedness. This is an expectable directrix of any psychodynamic unit and of all motivation-centred units of experience. It is certainly at the core of Freud's notions of drive, unconscious phantasy and the purposive ideas (representations-buts). It is interesting in this connection that Darwin in his notebooks muses that motives are the basic unit of the universe in that they are the functional units of evolution.1 From a different perspective, students of narrative structure have found motives and goal-orientation to be crucial narrative aspects (see below). Similarly students of affects (Scherer, 1986; Steiner-Krause, 1992), of motor action (von Cranach et al., 1982), of cybernetics (Céllerier, 1992), of ethology and others, all place goal-directedness at the core of their explanatory concepts.
Goal-directedness alone, however, is not sufficient to make such a unit ‘psychoanalytic’ or psychodynamic. Drives imply a psychic component, a structure of thought, e.g. unconscious phantasies, wishes and desires. I am not leaving these out. They will reappear below - but as indirect products of drive.
The scope of motivations and goals encompassed here is largely that developed by Sandler (1985), and Sandler and Sandler (1992), in which the goals of desires/motives include external and internal states of object-relatedness, affect states, and states of self-esteem and safety, as well as physiological need-satisfaction and consumatory acts in general.
The goal-directed unit of the motive/desire is indeed our ‘basic unit’ for understanding (parsing (découper), explaining and predicting) human behaviour. At the level of comprehending human behaviour psychodynamically or in terms of folk psychologies this unit is not reducible (Bruner, 1990; Dennett, 1978; Whiten, 1991). It is the basic unit and starting point for a subjective phenomenology underlying any clinical science of the mind.
3. The ‘pre-narrative envelope’ is a subjective experience that unfolds in time. It has a temporal structure that provides part of its coherence and meaning. This unit is like a musical phrase that loses its sense when cut up further and like a musical phrase moves, with an inevitability, to an end-state. A temporal dimension is not explicitly present in the concept of an ‘unconscious phantasy’ as it is for the ‘pre-narrative envelope’.
4. The ‘pre-narrative envelope’ has a coherence and meaning by virtue of its narrative-like structure which includes a dramatic line and the basic elements of a proto-plot, such as agent, action, goal, object, context.
5. It is a ‘pre-narrative’ unit because it arises before the emergence of language or narrative-producing abilities, but conforms to most of the structures essential to narrative. It is the unit from which narrative will emerge, transposed.
6. This unit is subject to revision sur-le-coup, après-coup and as transposed into a true narrative communication without losing its basic form.
7. The ‘pre-narrative envelope’ is not an innate structure, or the ego's discovery of such; rather, it results from the infant's own mental construction. This construction emerges from the infant's subjective experience with drives being enacted in an interpersonal context. It is an ‘emergent property’ of mind as currently conceived in the cognitive sciences (Céllerier, 1992; Churchland, 1984; Dennett, 1991; Edelman, 1990; Rummelhart and McClelland, 1986; Maturana and Varela, 1979).
The cognitive-science view of ‘thinking’1, borrowed and applied to the psychoanalytic question, ‘What is an unconscious phantasy in early infancy?’, can be summarized briefly below. In this view, the mind appears to process, in parallel and in partial independence, a large number of simultaneous mental happenings. During an experience, instinctual urgings, visual images, affect shifts, sensations, motor actions, ideas, states of arousal, language, place and space, time, etc., are all processed simultaneously in parallel throughout all ‘centres’ in the mind as well as in specialized ones devoted to processing each (‘Parallel Distributed Processing’ (PDP)). The parallel processing of each element is carried out with lower-level, local, mental operations which are never translatable into subjective experience. These mental processes are operationally unconscious."
(pp. 291-295)
—————————————
1 It is not agreed upon nor clear what ‘thinking’ is. I will use the term in quotes to mean different mental operations and processes, some of which would be better called ‘pre-thinking’ - whatever that may be.
Daniel N. Stern (1992). The ‘Pre-Narrative Envelope’: An Alternative View of ‘Unconscious Phantasy’ in Infancy. Bul. Anna Freud Centre, Vol. 15, pp. 291-318
Why is an alternative view needed, and what directions might it take? The point of reference for the concept of an ‘unconscious phantasy’ is contained in Freud's earlier views of a ‘primal phantasy’ (1916-17) and in the Kleinian view of an ‘unconscious phantasy (Isaacs, 1948). In these conceptions, ‘unconscious phantasies’ are inherited scenarios containing an object, aim and goal.
These scenarios are innate correlates or the psychic content of drive, and exist independently of experience, which only gives them local colour. Stated in that way, this is the clearest, most robust and radical psychoanalytic position on ‘unconscious phantasy’. It is the reference point of which all other positions are modifications. Even though a majority of psychoanalysts may not hold to this position in its pure form, their views are necessarily defined against this point of reference.
The desire to modify this reference point has been strong historically and remains so. The reasons for this are evident. First, the notion of a mental scenario that is inherited is hard to envision or explain. Second, many wish to give interactions with the environment a greater role in the formation of the ‘unconscious phantasy’. And thirdly, if the ‘unconscious phantasy’ is an inherited mental structure, there is little work of mental construction left for our enormous capacities, and the subject of thinking and representing in that case is of little interest, at least as concerns the formation of the basic unit of psychic experience. To be sure, in the traditional psychoanalytic view, ego processes play a crucial and necessary role in bringing the unconscious phantasy into psychic life. Nonetheless, the basic form of the unconscious phantasy is already established for the ego to work upon. Thus, ‘thinking’ and ‘representing’, as ego functions, are allocated a role in the transposition but not the creation of the basic form of the phantasy.
In spite of this interest in modifying the ‘reference position’, it is difficult to do so within the psychoanalytic framework. If one wishes to give a greater formative role to environmental interactions, and to ‘thinking’ and ‘representing’ which construct the mental landscape from these interactions, at least two things are needed. First, one would need a theory of ‘thinking’. However, psychoanalysis has never developed a real and independent theory of ‘thinking’. (Bion is a possible but partial and problematic exception. His work will not be discussed here. ‘Thoughts’ have remained the offspring and handmaidens of drives. In a sense, the pre-formed phantasy takes the place of the creational function of ‘thinking’. That is why psychoanalysis has been so concerned with the dialectic between absence and presence in the emergence of ‘thought’, instead of being interested in the role of ‘thought’ in creating the prior dialectic between non-existence and existence (existence containing both presence and absence).
Secondly, one would need a greater interest in, and a more elaborated perspective on the nature of observable interactions. Psychoanalysis, with its centre of gravity firmly in the intrapsychic, has been unable to do this. (There are of course some grand but individualistic exceptions such as Winnicott.)
Without a theory of ‘thinking’ or a systematic approach to interaction, the possibilities are limited for modification within a strict, traditional psychoanalytic frame. It is with this in mind that I will borrow some concepts of ‘thinking’ from cognitive science, and some infant observational approaches to interaction, and apply them to the psychoanalytic notion of drive. The result is an alternative view of the ‘unconscious phantasy’ which I will call a ‘pre-narrative envelope’ for reasons that will become clear.
Since the major thrust of this article is progressively to assemble the concept of a ‘pre-narrative envelope’ and demonstrate how it can further our understanding of infantile subjective experience, the acquisition of representational worlds, and of ‘thinking’ in infancy, I will summarize here the main features of this unit so the reader will have a clearer picture of where we are headed.
1. The unit must be clinically useful, potentially, and must be appropriate from a developmental perspective.
2. The backbone of the unit is the desire/motive with its goal-directedness. This is an expectable directrix of any psychodynamic unit and of all motivation-centred units of experience. It is certainly at the core of Freud's notions of drive, unconscious phantasy and the purposive ideas (representations-buts). It is interesting in this connection that Darwin in his notebooks muses that motives are the basic unit of the universe in that they are the functional units of evolution.1 From a different perspective, students of narrative structure have found motives and goal-orientation to be crucial narrative aspects (see below). Similarly students of affects (Scherer, 1986; Steiner-Krause, 1992), of motor action (von Cranach et al., 1982), of cybernetics (Céllerier, 1992), of ethology and others, all place goal-directedness at the core of their explanatory concepts.
Goal-directedness alone, however, is not sufficient to make such a unit ‘psychoanalytic’ or psychodynamic. Drives imply a psychic component, a structure of thought, e.g. unconscious phantasies, wishes and desires. I am not leaving these out. They will reappear below - but as indirect products of drive.
The scope of motivations and goals encompassed here is largely that developed by Sandler (1985), and Sandler and Sandler (1992), in which the goals of desires/motives include external and internal states of object-relatedness, affect states, and states of self-esteem and safety, as well as physiological need-satisfaction and consumatory acts in general.
The goal-directed unit of the motive/desire is indeed our ‘basic unit’ for understanding (parsing (découper), explaining and predicting) human behaviour. At the level of comprehending human behaviour psychodynamically or in terms of folk psychologies this unit is not reducible (Bruner, 1990; Dennett, 1978; Whiten, 1991). It is the basic unit and starting point for a subjective phenomenology underlying any clinical science of the mind.
3. The ‘pre-narrative envelope’ is a subjective experience that unfolds in time. It has a temporal structure that provides part of its coherence and meaning. This unit is like a musical phrase that loses its sense when cut up further and like a musical phrase moves, with an inevitability, to an end-state. A temporal dimension is not explicitly present in the concept of an ‘unconscious phantasy’ as it is for the ‘pre-narrative envelope’.
4. The ‘pre-narrative envelope’ has a coherence and meaning by virtue of its narrative-like structure which includes a dramatic line and the basic elements of a proto-plot, such as agent, action, goal, object, context.
5. It is a ‘pre-narrative’ unit because it arises before the emergence of language or narrative-producing abilities, but conforms to most of the structures essential to narrative. It is the unit from which narrative will emerge, transposed.
6. This unit is subject to revision sur-le-coup, après-coup and as transposed into a true narrative communication without losing its basic form.
7. The ‘pre-narrative envelope’ is not an innate structure, or the ego's discovery of such; rather, it results from the infant's own mental construction. This construction emerges from the infant's subjective experience with drives being enacted in an interpersonal context. It is an ‘emergent property’ of mind as currently conceived in the cognitive sciences (Céllerier, 1992; Churchland, 1984; Dennett, 1991; Edelman, 1990; Rummelhart and McClelland, 1986; Maturana and Varela, 1979).
The cognitive-science view of ‘thinking’1, borrowed and applied to the psychoanalytic question, ‘What is an unconscious phantasy in early infancy?’, can be summarized briefly below. In this view, the mind appears to process, in parallel and in partial independence, a large number of simultaneous mental happenings. During an experience, instinctual urgings, visual images, affect shifts, sensations, motor actions, ideas, states of arousal, language, place and space, time, etc., are all processed simultaneously in parallel throughout all ‘centres’ in the mind as well as in specialized ones devoted to processing each (‘Parallel Distributed Processing’ (PDP)). The parallel processing of each element is carried out with lower-level, local, mental operations which are never translatable into subjective experience. These mental processes are operationally unconscious."
(pp. 291-295)
—————————————
1 It is not agreed upon nor clear what ‘thinking’ is. I will use the term in quotes to mean different mental operations and processes, some of which would be better called ‘pre-thinking’ - whatever that may be.
Daniel N. Stern (1992). The ‘Pre-Narrative Envelope’: An Alternative View of ‘Unconscious Phantasy’ in Infancy. Bul. Anna Freud Centre, Vol. 15, pp. 291-318
Passing of Daniel Stern - Nov 18, 2012 - Announcement from Columbia Psychoanalytic Center
The Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research mourn the passing of our esteemed colleague Daniel Stern, M.D. Dr. Stern was an internationally recognized leader and major contributor to the field of developmental psychology. His pioneering work on early affective mother-child was one of his leading activities. He has edited and authored many important books and articles in the field, among them Interpersonal World of the Infant, First Relationship and Motherhood Constellation. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family. Those who knew him remember his intelligence, his warmth, his commitment and his friendship.
Eric R. Marcus, MD, Director, Columbia University Center
Eric R. Marcus, MD, Director, Columbia University Center
November 14, 2012
Jane Bunster - Flexibility in Treating the Difficult to Reach Patient
Editors Note: In this passage, Bunster summarizes her treatment of a patient whose psyche was organized around an autistic core. Bunster emphasizes the flexibility she needed to maintain in her analytic activity - moving back and forth between relatedness/ containing while also consistently interpreting what was happening in the analytic dyad.
"First, I tried to use what could be considered as ‘maternal reverie’, where I did my best to get in tune with her so that any deintegrative moves she might have made towards me were met with good-enough understanding and response. I thought in terms of the infantile transference. What she was furiously defending against was the pain of the loss of the mother/breast, which, in turn, she saw as attacking, retaliatory, and unforgiving. Any interpretation I might make needed two parts: first, the direct content and, then, analysis of the defence she used to prevent the interpretation/food being taken in and digested.
This was particularly apparent at times of holiday breaks and weekends. The sessions became more quiet and silent. Any feelings of loss had to be denied. If she denied my existence, no loss need be experienced and so she wiped me out of her mind, in the way she experienced I was doing to her whenever we separated from each other. Although she realized intellectually how cut off she was, she could make no link between thought and feelings.
My task was to try to stay patiently with her disconnectedness and annihilation and gradually make sense of it, always remembering that, underneath the withholdingness and locked-in-ness which may manifest itself as obstinacy, omnipotence, and manipulation, lay very great anxiety and perhaps fear of falling to bits.
In confronting and experiencing such primitive archetypal material, flexibility of approach seems essential. I have tried to show how useful the concept and the process of projective identification are in helping such a cut-off patient get more in touch with her feelings, thus modifying the intense conflicted areas and ameliorating the terror. If I can talk and make sense of these feelings, confidence can be gained that unconscious impulses need not be overwhelmingly destructive and imagination may then flow more freely." (pp. 43-44)
Jane Bunster (1993). The Patient Difficult to Reach: Omnipotence, projective identification and the primary self. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 38, pp. 37-44
"First, I tried to use what could be considered as ‘maternal reverie’, where I did my best to get in tune with her so that any deintegrative moves she might have made towards me were met with good-enough understanding and response. I thought in terms of the infantile transference. What she was furiously defending against was the pain of the loss of the mother/breast, which, in turn, she saw as attacking, retaliatory, and unforgiving. Any interpretation I might make needed two parts: first, the direct content and, then, analysis of the defence she used to prevent the interpretation/food being taken in and digested.
This was particularly apparent at times of holiday breaks and weekends. The sessions became more quiet and silent. Any feelings of loss had to be denied. If she denied my existence, no loss need be experienced and so she wiped me out of her mind, in the way she experienced I was doing to her whenever we separated from each other. Although she realized intellectually how cut off she was, she could make no link between thought and feelings.
My task was to try to stay patiently with her disconnectedness and annihilation and gradually make sense of it, always remembering that, underneath the withholdingness and locked-in-ness which may manifest itself as obstinacy, omnipotence, and manipulation, lay very great anxiety and perhaps fear of falling to bits.
In confronting and experiencing such primitive archetypal material, flexibility of approach seems essential. I have tried to show how useful the concept and the process of projective identification are in helping such a cut-off patient get more in touch with her feelings, thus modifying the intense conflicted areas and ameliorating the terror. If I can talk and make sense of these feelings, confidence can be gained that unconscious impulses need not be overwhelmingly destructive and imagination may then flow more freely." (pp. 43-44)
Jane Bunster (1993). The Patient Difficult to Reach: Omnipotence, projective identification and the primary self. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 38, pp. 37-44
October 25, 2012
Michael Eigen - Soft and Hard Qualities
"Soft" and "hard" are universal expressive qualities that inform all our experience. We sense their interplay in the margin of our awareness throughout our lifetime. Their varying dissociations and interpenetrations color and texture our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and actions. They permeate objects of concern at every level of our existence and are subtly woven into the atmosphere of subjectivity as such. Without them our psychophysical existence would be more bland and dimensionless.
This theme is given a distilled representation in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, the Tai-chi-tu. But even this most coherent symbol of polarity-in-unity is too geometric to do justice to the subtle, interpenetrating flow of these qualities in moment-to-moment living. To be sure, hard and soft often do set each other off. They may oppose or complement each other in rather clearly distinguishable ways: viz., the erect penis and adaptable vagina, hard-headedness/soft-heartedness (or vice-versa), and the like. But even (especially?) in sexual intercourse it becomes most difficult to know clearly where the softness and where the hardness, as they melt into and permeate one another, ineffably fluid. The rock gradually dissolves in the water, but the water can no longer be described simply as "soft."
The qualities "soft" and "hard" are virtually omnipresent building blocks of personality. At each moment of development the self senses both itself, its capacities, functions, and objects in terms of soft and hard resonances. Its organizational capacities are partly steered by an implicit awareness of the soft-hard contours of sensed mental and physical realities. Blocks and distortions in the perception of these qualities and their shifting emotional meanings both reflect and perpetuate developmental deficiencies. Many individuals often are relatively insensitive to or misinterpret these vital cues of psychic movement.
The therapeutic task of helping patients to "experience their experience" is aided by the therapist's sensitivity to the incessant and complex interplay of soft and hard currents in mental life. These currents may act as moment-to-moment cues of psychic possibilities, which often go unheard or unheeded. Most patients tend to run roughshod over them or distort their meanings in accord with persistent, rigid patterns. Individuals are usually filled with too much anxiety noise to truly feel and value the subtle expressive forces which ever form part of the background of existence. Occasionally patients make inflated use of background qualities and turn what could be "news of difference" into chronic, narcissistic shields. The creative recognition of the flow of softness-hardness qualities also may threaten areas of affective flattening built up as protection against dangers associated with psychic fertility.
In the present paper I record some aspects of the struggle involved in keeping oneself open to fresh perceptions of the meaning and use of softness-hardness cues in personal development. I focus on the appearance of softness-hardness qualities in dream life and how these qualities reflect actual or potential shifts in self-feeling. The patients involved often tended to disregard or ward off experiencing the genuinely new nuances of self-feeling to which their dreams might give rise. It was largely up to the therapist to sustain the integrity of the dreamer's attempt to create perspectives outside well-worn destructive circles or stereotypes—until the patient could increasingly own this function. The meaning-making processes described here do not claim to be the only or "right" ones. Any number of possible avenues might have led to development. What is perhaps most important is the personal faith and investment in meaning creation itself, a communal process in which we stimulate each other's appetites for meaning and creative shifts in self-feeling." (pp. 267-268)
Michael Eigen (1980). A Note on Soft and Hard Qualities. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 40, pp. 267-271.
This theme is given a distilled representation in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, the Tai-chi-tu. But even this most coherent symbol of polarity-in-unity is too geometric to do justice to the subtle, interpenetrating flow of these qualities in moment-to-moment living. To be sure, hard and soft often do set each other off. They may oppose or complement each other in rather clearly distinguishable ways: viz., the erect penis and adaptable vagina, hard-headedness/soft-heartedness (or vice-versa), and the like. But even (especially?) in sexual intercourse it becomes most difficult to know clearly where the softness and where the hardness, as they melt into and permeate one another, ineffably fluid. The rock gradually dissolves in the water, but the water can no longer be described simply as "soft."
The qualities "soft" and "hard" are virtually omnipresent building blocks of personality. At each moment of development the self senses both itself, its capacities, functions, and objects in terms of soft and hard resonances. Its organizational capacities are partly steered by an implicit awareness of the soft-hard contours of sensed mental and physical realities. Blocks and distortions in the perception of these qualities and their shifting emotional meanings both reflect and perpetuate developmental deficiencies. Many individuals often are relatively insensitive to or misinterpret these vital cues of psychic movement.
The therapeutic task of helping patients to "experience their experience" is aided by the therapist's sensitivity to the incessant and complex interplay of soft and hard currents in mental life. These currents may act as moment-to-moment cues of psychic possibilities, which often go unheard or unheeded. Most patients tend to run roughshod over them or distort their meanings in accord with persistent, rigid patterns. Individuals are usually filled with too much anxiety noise to truly feel and value the subtle expressive forces which ever form part of the background of existence. Occasionally patients make inflated use of background qualities and turn what could be "news of difference" into chronic, narcissistic shields. The creative recognition of the flow of softness-hardness qualities also may threaten areas of affective flattening built up as protection against dangers associated with psychic fertility.
In the present paper I record some aspects of the struggle involved in keeping oneself open to fresh perceptions of the meaning and use of softness-hardness cues in personal development. I focus on the appearance of softness-hardness qualities in dream life and how these qualities reflect actual or potential shifts in self-feeling. The patients involved often tended to disregard or ward off experiencing the genuinely new nuances of self-feeling to which their dreams might give rise. It was largely up to the therapist to sustain the integrity of the dreamer's attempt to create perspectives outside well-worn destructive circles or stereotypes—until the patient could increasingly own this function. The meaning-making processes described here do not claim to be the only or "right" ones. Any number of possible avenues might have led to development. What is perhaps most important is the personal faith and investment in meaning creation itself, a communal process in which we stimulate each other's appetites for meaning and creative shifts in self-feeling." (pp. 267-268)
Michael Eigen (1980). A Note on Soft and Hard Qualities. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 40, pp. 267-271.
October 15, 2012
Anna Bravesmith - Supervision and Imagination
"The role of imagination in supervision is central and imaginative activity in both supervisee and supervisor discovers the unconscious layers of the analytic work which cannot be known consciously at the outset. The supervisor needs to be open to playful reverie and fully able to associate freely to material that the supervisee brings. In this paper the main argument is that imagination itself is essential but that, to borrow a metaphor from engineering, reasonable deduction acts as a fulcrum for the pivotal actions of the imagination. The argument is elaborated to differentiate two kinds of activity which might be thought of as use and misuse of imagination. These two kinds of internal activity have been further differentiated and described as ‘imagination’ and ‘the imaginary’ by Colman (2006, p. 22); he says:
imaginary fantasies lack the substance and depth of real imagination [using] fantasy as a way of defending against all those aspects of reality concerned with absence and loss.
Without the fulcrum of reason and reality checking defensive and misleading fantasies can arise in the supervisor and embroil both participants in the supervision in a fantasy world. This is like a lever with no fixed point which then becomes dysfunctional. In contrast grounded imaginative activity is an incredibly subtle and versatile tool.
The deeply integrative potential of supervision emphasized by Searles (1955), Perry (2003), McGlashan (2003) and others rests largely on the maintenance of a mutual relationship in which closeness and distance are both accepted as complementary and equally valuable attributes. In closeness the supervisor comes alongside the supervisee and has an emotional and imaginative experience which, at some level, is analogous to what is happening in the therapeutic work. With distance the supervisor is able to evaluate, reflect and constructively criticize or ‘break the enchantment’ (Schaverien 2003) of over identification between analyst and patient. This evaluative function is often emphasized in organizations where supervisors take a monitoring role with close links to management and its structures. Indeed the word ‘supervision’, for most people outside the field of psychotherapy, is still associated with its historical roots as a term for the overseeing of work on the factory floor and a simple fixed hierarchical relationship. In analytic circles the word has been expanded to include what Gediman and Wolkenfield called the ‘complex multidirectional network’ (1980, p. 236) of influences between patient/therapist/supervisor, with dynamic shifts in distance and closeness. The supervisor's surrender to imagination also necessitates a temporary lowering of ego function as she/he has to allow stray associations and sensations to enter consciousness without censorship. This momentarily changes the hierarchical model in favour of greater mutuality and shared experience. The supervisor at times has to relinquish the bastion of the ego in the same way that this has to happen in the analyst in an analysis.
The term supervision has been universally adopted and is unlikely to be replaced by any other term but Perry (2003, p. 190) says:
The term ‘subvision’ may be more evocative since both supervisor and supervisee are concerned with what happens beneath surface consciousness. ‘Prismatic vision’ seems to me to be an even better name for the process.
He explains that prismatic vision is the process whereby material is brought to the consultation like undifferentiated white light which gains its visibility and colour when seen through the supervisory prism, or process.
The role of imagination in supervision is closely related to this idea of giving colour to experience which may be initially undifferentiated, white or grey. However imagination can be mercurial, shifting in its value so that it may sometimes appear as the ‘deceiving elf’ of fancy as in Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) quoted above. This can happen when the supervisor and supervisee are enraptured in a joint fantasy which they forget to analyse and instead retreat into, thereby ignoring their subjectivity and the emergence of a third position. As Zinkin (1996, p. 247) states:
supervision is actually a shared fantasy… it works best if both remain aware that what they are jointly imagining is not true. Both can profit enormously … there is teaching and learning to be found in this joint imaginative venture.
My interpretation of Zinkin's contentious remark is that the imagination generates working hypotheses in supervision which can be negated, altered, extended as we go along but that if we are attached to defending their ‘truth’ at any stage we are probably in a defensive state of mind. He goes further by saying that this can be a folie á deux where both supervisor and supervisee collude.
In exploring the role of imagination in supervision I will examine the differentiation between defensive and creative imaginative functions with particular reference to my work as a training supervisor for an analytic psychotherapy organization. This is linked with the use of a Jungian perspective which I have found particularly useful in the practice of supervision because the Jungian understanding of the ego-self relationship is congruent with openness to parallel process phenomena. The emergence of feelings, images, thoughts and atmospheres which derive from the patient in direct experience in supervision is most commonly called parallel process and is the factor which transforms supervision from a dyadic activity into a triadic one. In reality it often constellates as multi-layered, including the mirroring of dynamics in more than three relationships.
The Jungian conceptualization of an internal mutually rewarding communication between ego and self provides a frame for the techniques I describe in supervision. These are essentially the same as those used in analysis but need to be harnessed differently in order to avoid simply becoming analysis of the supervisee. The techniques are harnessed and the supervisor even ‘blinkered’ to achieve a focus only on the track ahead—that is the further understanding of the supervisee's work with a patient and excludes the analysis of other wider aspects of his/her personality, no matter how tempting it may be to go down that path. For example when supervising a supervisee who appears to be detached from his/her patient the supervisor may feel that this reflects an incapacity to connect with others on an emotional level. This may be a difficulty which is observable in the work with more than one patient over years, thus suggesting that the block lies within the supervisee's personality and is possibly part of a schizoid pattern. The temptation might be to interpret the defensive nature of the supervisee's pattern going deeper into its origins, relating it to the transference to the supervisor and to archetypal complexes. However this would erode the boundary between supervision and analysis and compromise the supervision. The supervisee would probably feel intruded into and any concurrent analysis going on elsewhere could be compromised. This situation can be an unconscious acting out of the supervisor's rivalry with the supervisee's analyst or simply an over-entanglement with the supervisee." (pp. 101-103)
Anna Bravesmith (2008). Supervision and Imagination. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 101-117
imaginary fantasies lack the substance and depth of real imagination [using] fantasy as a way of defending against all those aspects of reality concerned with absence and loss.
Without the fulcrum of reason and reality checking defensive and misleading fantasies can arise in the supervisor and embroil both participants in the supervision in a fantasy world. This is like a lever with no fixed point which then becomes dysfunctional. In contrast grounded imaginative activity is an incredibly subtle and versatile tool.
The deeply integrative potential of supervision emphasized by Searles (1955), Perry (2003), McGlashan (2003) and others rests largely on the maintenance of a mutual relationship in which closeness and distance are both accepted as complementary and equally valuable attributes. In closeness the supervisor comes alongside the supervisee and has an emotional and imaginative experience which, at some level, is analogous to what is happening in the therapeutic work. With distance the supervisor is able to evaluate, reflect and constructively criticize or ‘break the enchantment’ (Schaverien 2003) of over identification between analyst and patient. This evaluative function is often emphasized in organizations where supervisors take a monitoring role with close links to management and its structures. Indeed the word ‘supervision’, for most people outside the field of psychotherapy, is still associated with its historical roots as a term for the overseeing of work on the factory floor and a simple fixed hierarchical relationship. In analytic circles the word has been expanded to include what Gediman and Wolkenfield called the ‘complex multidirectional network’ (1980, p. 236) of influences between patient/therapist/supervisor, with dynamic shifts in distance and closeness. The supervisor's surrender to imagination also necessitates a temporary lowering of ego function as she/he has to allow stray associations and sensations to enter consciousness without censorship. This momentarily changes the hierarchical model in favour of greater mutuality and shared experience. The supervisor at times has to relinquish the bastion of the ego in the same way that this has to happen in the analyst in an analysis.
The term supervision has been universally adopted and is unlikely to be replaced by any other term but Perry (2003, p. 190) says:
The term ‘subvision’ may be more evocative since both supervisor and supervisee are concerned with what happens beneath surface consciousness. ‘Prismatic vision’ seems to me to be an even better name for the process.
He explains that prismatic vision is the process whereby material is brought to the consultation like undifferentiated white light which gains its visibility and colour when seen through the supervisory prism, or process.
The role of imagination in supervision is closely related to this idea of giving colour to experience which may be initially undifferentiated, white or grey. However imagination can be mercurial, shifting in its value so that it may sometimes appear as the ‘deceiving elf’ of fancy as in Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) quoted above. This can happen when the supervisor and supervisee are enraptured in a joint fantasy which they forget to analyse and instead retreat into, thereby ignoring their subjectivity and the emergence of a third position. As Zinkin (1996, p. 247) states:
supervision is actually a shared fantasy… it works best if both remain aware that what they are jointly imagining is not true. Both can profit enormously … there is teaching and learning to be found in this joint imaginative venture.
My interpretation of Zinkin's contentious remark is that the imagination generates working hypotheses in supervision which can be negated, altered, extended as we go along but that if we are attached to defending their ‘truth’ at any stage we are probably in a defensive state of mind. He goes further by saying that this can be a folie á deux where both supervisor and supervisee collude.
In exploring the role of imagination in supervision I will examine the differentiation between defensive and creative imaginative functions with particular reference to my work as a training supervisor for an analytic psychotherapy organization. This is linked with the use of a Jungian perspective which I have found particularly useful in the practice of supervision because the Jungian understanding of the ego-self relationship is congruent with openness to parallel process phenomena. The emergence of feelings, images, thoughts and atmospheres which derive from the patient in direct experience in supervision is most commonly called parallel process and is the factor which transforms supervision from a dyadic activity into a triadic one. In reality it often constellates as multi-layered, including the mirroring of dynamics in more than three relationships.
The Jungian conceptualization of an internal mutually rewarding communication between ego and self provides a frame for the techniques I describe in supervision. These are essentially the same as those used in analysis but need to be harnessed differently in order to avoid simply becoming analysis of the supervisee. The techniques are harnessed and the supervisor even ‘blinkered’ to achieve a focus only on the track ahead—that is the further understanding of the supervisee's work with a patient and excludes the analysis of other wider aspects of his/her personality, no matter how tempting it may be to go down that path. For example when supervising a supervisee who appears to be detached from his/her patient the supervisor may feel that this reflects an incapacity to connect with others on an emotional level. This may be a difficulty which is observable in the work with more than one patient over years, thus suggesting that the block lies within the supervisee's personality and is possibly part of a schizoid pattern. The temptation might be to interpret the defensive nature of the supervisee's pattern going deeper into its origins, relating it to the transference to the supervisor and to archetypal complexes. However this would erode the boundary between supervision and analysis and compromise the supervision. The supervisee would probably feel intruded into and any concurrent analysis going on elsewhere could be compromised. This situation can be an unconscious acting out of the supervisor's rivalry with the supervisee's analyst or simply an over-entanglement with the supervisee." (pp. 101-103)
Anna Bravesmith (2008). Supervision and Imagination. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 101-117
Anna Bravesmith - Supvision and Imagination
"The role of imagination in supervision is central and imaginative activity in both supervisee and supervisor discovers the unconscious layers of the analytic work which cannot be known consciously at the outset. The supervisor needs to be open to playful reverie and fully able to associate freely to material that the supervisee brings. In this paper the main argument is that imagination itself is essential but that, to borrow a metaphor from engineering, reasonable deduction acts as a fulcrum for the pivotal actions of the imagination. The argument is elaborated to differentiate two kinds of activity which might be thought of as use and misuse of imagination. These two kinds of internal activity have been further differentiated and described as ‘imagination’ and ‘the imaginary’ by Colman (2006, p. 22); he says:
imaginary fantasies lack the substance and depth of real imagination [using] fantasy as a way of defending against all those aspects of reality concerned with absence and loss.
Without the fulcrum of reason and reality checking defensive and misleading fantasies can arise in the supervisor and embroil both participants in the supervision in a fantasy world. This is like a lever with no fixed point which then becomes dysfunctional. In contrast grounded imaginative activity is an incredibly subtle and versatile tool.
The deeply integrative potential of supervision emphasized by Searles (1955), Perry (2003), McGlashan (2003) and others rests largely on the maintenance of a mutual relationship in which closeness and distance are both accepted as complementary and equally valuable attributes. In closeness the supervisor comes alongside the supervisee and has an emotional and imaginative experience which, at some level, is analogous to what is happening in the therapeutic work. With distance the supervisor is able to evaluate, reflect and constructively criticize or ‘break the enchantment’ (Schaverien 2003) of over identification between analyst and patient. This evaluative function is often emphasized in organizations where supervisors take a monitoring role with close links to management and its structures. Indeed the word ‘supervision’, for most people outside the field of psychotherapy, is still associated with its historical roots as a term for the overseeing of work on the factory floor and a simple fixed hierarchical relationship. In analytic circles the word has been expanded to include what Gediman and Wolkenfield called the ‘complex multidirectional network’ (1980, p. 236) of influences between patient/therapist/supervisor, with dynamic shifts in distance and closeness. The supervisor's surrender to imagination also necessitates a temporary lowering of ego function as she/he has to allow stray associations and sensations to enter consciousness without censorship. This momentarily changes the hierarchical model in favour of greater mutuality and shared experience. The supervisor at times has to relinquish the bastion of the ego in the same way that this has to happen in the analyst in an analysis.
The term supervision has been universally adopted and is unlikely to be replaced by any other term but Perry (2003, p. 190) says:
The term ‘subvision’ may be more evocative since both supervisor and supervisee are concerned with what happens beneath surface consciousness. ‘Prismatic vision’ seems to me to be an even better name for the process.
He explains that prismatic vision is the process whereby material is brought to the consultation like undifferentiated white light which gains its visibility and colour when seen through the supervisory prism, or process.
The role of imagination in supervision is closely related to this idea of giving colour to experience which may be initially undifferentiated, white or grey. However imagination can be mercurial, shifting in its value so that it may sometimes appear as the ‘deceiving elf’ of fancy as in Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) quoted above. This can happen when the supervisor and supervisee are enraptured in a joint fantasy which they forget to analyse and instead retreat into, thereby ignoring their subjectivity and the emergence of a third position. As Zinkin (1996, p. 247) states:
supervision is actually a shared fantasy… it works best if both remain aware that what they are jointly imagining is not true. Both can profit enormously … there is teaching and learning to be found in this joint imaginative venture.
My interpretation of Zinkin's contentious remark is that the imagination generates working hypotheses in supervision which can be negated, altered, extended as we go along but that if we are attached to defending their ‘truth’ at any stage we are probably in a defensive state of mind. He goes further by saying that this can be a folie á deux where both supervisor and supervisee collude.
In exploring the role of imagination in supervision I will examine the differentiation between defensive and creative imaginative functions with particular reference to my work as a training supervisor for an analytic psychotherapy organization. This is linked with the use of a Jungian perspective which I have found particularly useful in the practice of supervision because the Jungian understanding of the ego-self relationship is congruent with openness to parallel process phenomena. The emergence of feelings, images, thoughts and atmospheres which derive from the patient in direct experience in supervision is most commonly called parallel process and is the factor which transforms supervision from a dyadic activity into a triadic one. In reality it often constellates as multi-layered, including the mirroring of dynamics in more than three relationships.
The Jungian conceptualization of an internal mutually rewarding communication between ego and self provides a frame for the techniques I describe in supervision. These are essentially the same as those used in analysis but need to be harnessed differently in order to avoid simply becoming analysis of the supervisee. The techniques are harnessed and the supervisor even ‘blinkered’ to achieve a focus only on the track ahead—that is the further understanding of the supervisee's work with a patient and excludes the analysis of other wider aspects of his/her personality, no matter how tempting it may be to go down that path. For example when supervising a supervisee who appears to be detached from his/her patient the supervisor may feel that this reflects an incapacity to connect with others on an emotional level. This may be a difficulty which is observable in the work with more than one patient over years, thus suggesting that the block lies within the supervisee's personality and is possibly part of a schizoid pattern. The temptation might be to interpret the defensive nature of the supervisee's pattern going deeper into its origins, relating it to the transference to the supervisor and to archetypal complexes. However this would erode the boundary between supervision and analysis and compromise the supervision. The supervisee would probably feel intruded into and any concurrent analysis going on elsewhere could be compromised. This situation can be an unconscious acting out of the supervisor's rivalry with the supervisee's analyst or simply an over-entanglement with the supervisee." (pp. 101-103)
Anna Bravesmith (2008). Supervision and Imagination. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 101-117
imaginary fantasies lack the substance and depth of real imagination [using] fantasy as a way of defending against all those aspects of reality concerned with absence and loss.
Without the fulcrum of reason and reality checking defensive and misleading fantasies can arise in the supervisor and embroil both participants in the supervision in a fantasy world. This is like a lever with no fixed point which then becomes dysfunctional. In contrast grounded imaginative activity is an incredibly subtle and versatile tool.
The deeply integrative potential of supervision emphasized by Searles (1955), Perry (2003), McGlashan (2003) and others rests largely on the maintenance of a mutual relationship in which closeness and distance are both accepted as complementary and equally valuable attributes. In closeness the supervisor comes alongside the supervisee and has an emotional and imaginative experience which, at some level, is analogous to what is happening in the therapeutic work. With distance the supervisor is able to evaluate, reflect and constructively criticize or ‘break the enchantment’ (Schaverien 2003) of over identification between analyst and patient. This evaluative function is often emphasized in organizations where supervisors take a monitoring role with close links to management and its structures. Indeed the word ‘supervision’, for most people outside the field of psychotherapy, is still associated with its historical roots as a term for the overseeing of work on the factory floor and a simple fixed hierarchical relationship. In analytic circles the word has been expanded to include what Gediman and Wolkenfield called the ‘complex multidirectional network’ (1980, p. 236) of influences between patient/therapist/supervisor, with dynamic shifts in distance and closeness. The supervisor's surrender to imagination also necessitates a temporary lowering of ego function as she/he has to allow stray associations and sensations to enter consciousness without censorship. This momentarily changes the hierarchical model in favour of greater mutuality and shared experience. The supervisor at times has to relinquish the bastion of the ego in the same way that this has to happen in the analyst in an analysis.
The term supervision has been universally adopted and is unlikely to be replaced by any other term but Perry (2003, p. 190) says:
The term ‘subvision’ may be more evocative since both supervisor and supervisee are concerned with what happens beneath surface consciousness. ‘Prismatic vision’ seems to me to be an even better name for the process.
He explains that prismatic vision is the process whereby material is brought to the consultation like undifferentiated white light which gains its visibility and colour when seen through the supervisory prism, or process.
The role of imagination in supervision is closely related to this idea of giving colour to experience which may be initially undifferentiated, white or grey. However imagination can be mercurial, shifting in its value so that it may sometimes appear as the ‘deceiving elf’ of fancy as in Keats's ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) quoted above. This can happen when the supervisor and supervisee are enraptured in a joint fantasy which they forget to analyse and instead retreat into, thereby ignoring their subjectivity and the emergence of a third position. As Zinkin (1996, p. 247) states:
supervision is actually a shared fantasy… it works best if both remain aware that what they are jointly imagining is not true. Both can profit enormously … there is teaching and learning to be found in this joint imaginative venture.
My interpretation of Zinkin's contentious remark is that the imagination generates working hypotheses in supervision which can be negated, altered, extended as we go along but that if we are attached to defending their ‘truth’ at any stage we are probably in a defensive state of mind. He goes further by saying that this can be a folie á deux where both supervisor and supervisee collude.
In exploring the role of imagination in supervision I will examine the differentiation between defensive and creative imaginative functions with particular reference to my work as a training supervisor for an analytic psychotherapy organization. This is linked with the use of a Jungian perspective which I have found particularly useful in the practice of supervision because the Jungian understanding of the ego-self relationship is congruent with openness to parallel process phenomena. The emergence of feelings, images, thoughts and atmospheres which derive from the patient in direct experience in supervision is most commonly called parallel process and is the factor which transforms supervision from a dyadic activity into a triadic one. In reality it often constellates as multi-layered, including the mirroring of dynamics in more than three relationships.
The Jungian conceptualization of an internal mutually rewarding communication between ego and self provides a frame for the techniques I describe in supervision. These are essentially the same as those used in analysis but need to be harnessed differently in order to avoid simply becoming analysis of the supervisee. The techniques are harnessed and the supervisor even ‘blinkered’ to achieve a focus only on the track ahead—that is the further understanding of the supervisee's work with a patient and excludes the analysis of other wider aspects of his/her personality, no matter how tempting it may be to go down that path. For example when supervising a supervisee who appears to be detached from his/her patient the supervisor may feel that this reflects an incapacity to connect with others on an emotional level. This may be a difficulty which is observable in the work with more than one patient over years, thus suggesting that the block lies within the supervisee's personality and is possibly part of a schizoid pattern. The temptation might be to interpret the defensive nature of the supervisee's pattern going deeper into its origins, relating it to the transference to the supervisor and to archetypal complexes. However this would erode the boundary between supervision and analysis and compromise the supervision. The supervisee would probably feel intruded into and any concurrent analysis going on elsewhere could be compromised. This situation can be an unconscious acting out of the supervisor's rivalry with the supervisee's analyst or simply an over-entanglement with the supervisee." (pp. 101-103)
Anna Bravesmith (2008). Supervision and Imagination. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 101-117
October 8, 2012
Richard Reichbart - The Concept of Screen Memories: An Historical Review
"The general sense of a "screen memory" today is of a memory characterized by a clear and heightened sense of reality, focused on a seemingly innocuous event that screens from memory a contiguous or associated traumatic event. This screen memory is generally considered to be unchanged and of long standing; because of its seemingly innocuous nature, its retention is often something of a mystery to its possessor. Indeed, this is a kind of screen memory, but as will become clear it is not the only one that Freud identified or that was elaborated by later commentators. Freud was very much fascinated by screen memories, in a way we do not appear to be today. Modern case presentations, for example, would not generally be formulated using what Freud wrote in 1914: "Not only some but all of what is essential in childhood has been retained in these [screen] memories. It is simply a question of knowing how to extract it out of them by analysis. They represent the forgotten years of childhood as adequately as the manifest content of a dream represents the dream-thoughts" (Freud 1914, p. 148).
Sixty-six years later, Greenacre (1980) wrote that the "functions and significance of screen memories still seem of marginal importance to many analysts" (p.40). In fact, discussions about the "screening" function of memories have tended to generalize to such an extent, often introducing new terms (see, e.g., Lewin 1946; Greenson 1958; Reider 1953; Blum 1994, p. 28), that even the particular characteristics of a screen memory, such as its brightness and immediacy, its intactness throughout most of a treatment, and its lengthy imperviousness to analysis, have been lost.
There are probably a number of reasons that screen memory has come into disfavor as a concept worth exploration in contemporary work. Two come to mind. The first is that screen memory is sometimes considered an antiquated and dusty concept, involved solely in reconstruction of the patient's past, a relic of the old archaeological model of psychoanalysis that Freud initially favored. In other words, a screen memory is not seen as alive and crucial in the here and now of the transference interactions of a treatment or in the establishment of object relations. And it is true that despite Freud's fascination with screen memory, at no point did he specifically discuss its importance to the transference. Many decades later, Mahon and Battin (1981; Mahon and Battin-Mahon 1983) did make masterful observations about the role of the screen memory in the transference, but by comparing this memory to a container whose contents flow into the transference only when the power of the memory begins to break up as treatment progresses, they failed to convey the sense of overwhelming power that a screen memory can exert on the transference from the very beginning of treatment. On the other hand, it appears to have escaped notice by subsequent commentators that in one brief and passing reference Freud made an incisive observation about the importance of screen memory in establishing a person's object choice, which I elaborate on below. Indeed, his examples of screen memory can be interpreted as embodying this concept. In what follows I will emphasize this aspect of screen memories, as well as the importance of screen memories to object relations in general.
Freud's fascination with screen memories first appeared in print in 1899, prior to the appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams, in a paper that in a letter to Fliess he said he liked immensely (Masson 1985, p. 351). Here he formally coined the term screen memory and described the characteristics of the phenomenon, using as an example a disguised memory of his own from his adolescence, as well as examples from a paper published by V. and C. Henri in 1897. He stated that a screen memory is a "compromise": "What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself—in this respect the resistance gets its way; what is recorded is another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one." Screen memories are like "shams": "they are not made of gold themselves but have lain beside something that is made of gold" (1899, p. 307). Very unlike other childhood memories, a screen memory has an hallucinatory quality; it is what he referred to as "ultra-clear." Diagnostically, Freud did not go beyond contending somewhat tentatively,as had the Henris, that screen memories occur frequently in the childhood memory of "neurotics."
As his thoughts advanced, Freud stated more emphatically how significant screen memories are to psychoanalysis. In 1914 his publications suggested that his thinking had advanced considerably. Not only did he make the remark I have cited about a screen memory containing all of what is essential in childhood; he also published the Wolf Man case, in which screen memories played a prominent role. In 1920, Freud added an intriguing footnote to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). There he compared a screen memory developmentally to a fetish: "behind the first recollection of the fetish's appearance there lies a submerged and forgotten phase of sexual development. The ‘fetish,’ like the screen-memory, represents this phase and is thus a remnant and precipitate of it" (pp. 154-155).Further Elaborations
Writing after Freud, a number of commentators elaborated on the concept of the screen memory. In 1929 Glover clearly stated that a screen memory is not necessarily a memory of an inconsequential event that stands in for a traumatic one. Rather, a traumatic event can act as a screen (and a very convincing one) to a greater trauma (see Good 1998). The example Glover provided was of a patient who was circumcised in a particularly insensitive manner when he was between three and a half and four years of age, an event of which he had no memory. But he did remember in detail an incident that took place on the same day. He had been visiting in the house of the doctor, a family friend of the mother's, who performed the circumcision later that day, and had burned his hand on a hot stove. He recalled the occasion of the accident, its cause, the stove, the dressings, and so on in extraordinary detail, but amnesia for the circumcision itself was complete (Glover 1929).
In 1927 Fenichel used an economic model: a screen memory develops as a "safety valve" (p. 113) in consequence of the pressure of repressed material rising toward consciousness. The conscious recall of the screen memory represents a "partial discharge" (p. 113), so that the pressure is then diminished and repression becomes possible. Fenichel also observed that when the ego struggles with a troubling perception, which it attempts to repress, it develops a "hunger for screen-experiences" (p. 114). In effect, the ego searches for screen experiences and is "economically eased when it finds them" (p. 114). He emphasized that a screen memory often has attached to it a command to remember, an "injunction to note" (p. 116). That is, the individual remembers that at the time of the event represented in the screen memory, he felt an inner injunction, which Fenichel characterized as "Pay attention! You must remember this scene as long as you live!" (p. 114; see also Fenichel 1929). To elaborate on Fenichel, what could equally be stated is that there is an unconscious injunction that is exactly the opposite and of comparable force. It is "Forget, forget as long as you live" the underlying trauma that the screen memory replaces. This internalized vow is what makes the screen memory so impervious to analysis.
Probably no commentator after Freud attempted to characterize screen memories more than Greenacre. Over and over, she emphasized that screen memories are unlike other memories or dreams: "Screen memories are especially helpful, but are often disregarded by students and some analysts who have tried unprofitably to treat them as though they were dreams. Because they are less fluid than dreams and more firmly organized in their defensive function, immediate free association cannot be demanded" (Greenacre 1981, pp. 42-43). Elaborating on what Glover suggested, she contended that there are two forms of screen memory, the one indicated by Freud, in which the memory is apparently of something inconsequential and attended by a special visual "brightness," and another, in which there is a "stubborn persistence but without brightness, and in which the content appears factually disturbing and very little elaborated" (Greenacre 1949, p. 74). She contended that screen memories exist on a continuum, running the gamut from those in which a seemingly inconsequential incident is brightly illuminated and remembered to those in which "really traumatic events may be seized upon as representations of the earliest anxious fantasies or experiences of the child and may be used variously as justification, verification or gratification" (p. 76). This type of screen memory, characterized by persistence rather than triviality and brightness, tends to remain factual and isolated. It is "stubbornly resistant to analysis" (p. 77) and often will not yield to analysis until the end of treatment. (As will be seen, however, the data in this case appear to contradict Greenacre's comment about the lack of brightness attributable to screen memories involving traumatic events.) In and of itself, Greenacre remarked, the screen memory can become symbolic of reality testing for a patient, in which "reality [is used] to cover reality" (p.83).
Greenacre (1949) attempted to explain what accounts for the power of a screen memory, suggesting among other things that the stage of superego development at the time of the event for which the screen memory is substituted has a decisive influence because the superego determines the extent and intensity of the need to deny and contributes to the sense of "actual watchfulness in the screen memory" (p. 76). She hypothesized that the degree of sadomasochistic character structure also plays a role: the more sadomasochistic the character, the more likely it is that the screen memory will involve really traumatic events, and that the memory will be symbolically used to characterize Fate and to justify a sadomasochistic posture toward the world. (She did not explain why this should be; further on, I will attempt to do so.) After Greenacre, the most important contribution has been that of the Mahons, who emphasized the importance of the screen memory to the ongoing psychoanalytic process, and who stated that dissipation of the power of the screen memory is a signal that the terminal phase of psychoanalysis has begun." (pp. 457-461)
Richard Reichbart (2008). Screen Memory: Its Importance to Object Relations and Transference. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 56:455-481
Sixty-six years later, Greenacre (1980) wrote that the "functions and significance of screen memories still seem of marginal importance to many analysts" (p.40). In fact, discussions about the "screening" function of memories have tended to generalize to such an extent, often introducing new terms (see, e.g., Lewin 1946; Greenson 1958; Reider 1953; Blum 1994, p. 28), that even the particular characteristics of a screen memory, such as its brightness and immediacy, its intactness throughout most of a treatment, and its lengthy imperviousness to analysis, have been lost.
There are probably a number of reasons that screen memory has come into disfavor as a concept worth exploration in contemporary work. Two come to mind. The first is that screen memory is sometimes considered an antiquated and dusty concept, involved solely in reconstruction of the patient's past, a relic of the old archaeological model of psychoanalysis that Freud initially favored. In other words, a screen memory is not seen as alive and crucial in the here and now of the transference interactions of a treatment or in the establishment of object relations. And it is true that despite Freud's fascination with screen memory, at no point did he specifically discuss its importance to the transference. Many decades later, Mahon and Battin (1981; Mahon and Battin-Mahon 1983) did make masterful observations about the role of the screen memory in the transference, but by comparing this memory to a container whose contents flow into the transference only when the power of the memory begins to break up as treatment progresses, they failed to convey the sense of overwhelming power that a screen memory can exert on the transference from the very beginning of treatment. On the other hand, it appears to have escaped notice by subsequent commentators that in one brief and passing reference Freud made an incisive observation about the importance of screen memory in establishing a person's object choice, which I elaborate on below. Indeed, his examples of screen memory can be interpreted as embodying this concept. In what follows I will emphasize this aspect of screen memories, as well as the importance of screen memories to object relations in general.
Freud's fascination with screen memories first appeared in print in 1899, prior to the appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams, in a paper that in a letter to Fliess he said he liked immensely (Masson 1985, p. 351). Here he formally coined the term screen memory and described the characteristics of the phenomenon, using as an example a disguised memory of his own from his adolescence, as well as examples from a paper published by V. and C. Henri in 1897. He stated that a screen memory is a "compromise": "What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself—in this respect the resistance gets its way; what is recorded is another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one." Screen memories are like "shams": "they are not made of gold themselves but have lain beside something that is made of gold" (1899, p. 307). Very unlike other childhood memories, a screen memory has an hallucinatory quality; it is what he referred to as "ultra-clear." Diagnostically, Freud did not go beyond contending somewhat tentatively,as had the Henris, that screen memories occur frequently in the childhood memory of "neurotics."
As his thoughts advanced, Freud stated more emphatically how significant screen memories are to psychoanalysis. In 1914 his publications suggested that his thinking had advanced considerably. Not only did he make the remark I have cited about a screen memory containing all of what is essential in childhood; he also published the Wolf Man case, in which screen memories played a prominent role. In 1920, Freud added an intriguing footnote to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). There he compared a screen memory developmentally to a fetish: "behind the first recollection of the fetish's appearance there lies a submerged and forgotten phase of sexual development. The ‘fetish,’ like the screen-memory, represents this phase and is thus a remnant and precipitate of it" (pp. 154-155).Further Elaborations
Writing after Freud, a number of commentators elaborated on the concept of the screen memory. In 1929 Glover clearly stated that a screen memory is not necessarily a memory of an inconsequential event that stands in for a traumatic one. Rather, a traumatic event can act as a screen (and a very convincing one) to a greater trauma (see Good 1998). The example Glover provided was of a patient who was circumcised in a particularly insensitive manner when he was between three and a half and four years of age, an event of which he had no memory. But he did remember in detail an incident that took place on the same day. He had been visiting in the house of the doctor, a family friend of the mother's, who performed the circumcision later that day, and had burned his hand on a hot stove. He recalled the occasion of the accident, its cause, the stove, the dressings, and so on in extraordinary detail, but amnesia for the circumcision itself was complete (Glover 1929).
In 1927 Fenichel used an economic model: a screen memory develops as a "safety valve" (p. 113) in consequence of the pressure of repressed material rising toward consciousness. The conscious recall of the screen memory represents a "partial discharge" (p. 113), so that the pressure is then diminished and repression becomes possible. Fenichel also observed that when the ego struggles with a troubling perception, which it attempts to repress, it develops a "hunger for screen-experiences" (p. 114). In effect, the ego searches for screen experiences and is "economically eased when it finds them" (p. 114). He emphasized that a screen memory often has attached to it a command to remember, an "injunction to note" (p. 116). That is, the individual remembers that at the time of the event represented in the screen memory, he felt an inner injunction, which Fenichel characterized as "Pay attention! You must remember this scene as long as you live!" (p. 114; see also Fenichel 1929). To elaborate on Fenichel, what could equally be stated is that there is an unconscious injunction that is exactly the opposite and of comparable force. It is "Forget, forget as long as you live" the underlying trauma that the screen memory replaces. This internalized vow is what makes the screen memory so impervious to analysis.
Probably no commentator after Freud attempted to characterize screen memories more than Greenacre. Over and over, she emphasized that screen memories are unlike other memories or dreams: "Screen memories are especially helpful, but are often disregarded by students and some analysts who have tried unprofitably to treat them as though they were dreams. Because they are less fluid than dreams and more firmly organized in their defensive function, immediate free association cannot be demanded" (Greenacre 1981, pp. 42-43). Elaborating on what Glover suggested, she contended that there are two forms of screen memory, the one indicated by Freud, in which the memory is apparently of something inconsequential and attended by a special visual "brightness," and another, in which there is a "stubborn persistence but without brightness, and in which the content appears factually disturbing and very little elaborated" (Greenacre 1949, p. 74). She contended that screen memories exist on a continuum, running the gamut from those in which a seemingly inconsequential incident is brightly illuminated and remembered to those in which "really traumatic events may be seized upon as representations of the earliest anxious fantasies or experiences of the child and may be used variously as justification, verification or gratification" (p. 76). This type of screen memory, characterized by persistence rather than triviality and brightness, tends to remain factual and isolated. It is "stubbornly resistant to analysis" (p. 77) and often will not yield to analysis until the end of treatment. (As will be seen, however, the data in this case appear to contradict Greenacre's comment about the lack of brightness attributable to screen memories involving traumatic events.) In and of itself, Greenacre remarked, the screen memory can become symbolic of reality testing for a patient, in which "reality [is used] to cover reality" (p.83).
Greenacre (1949) attempted to explain what accounts for the power of a screen memory, suggesting among other things that the stage of superego development at the time of the event for which the screen memory is substituted has a decisive influence because the superego determines the extent and intensity of the need to deny and contributes to the sense of "actual watchfulness in the screen memory" (p. 76). She hypothesized that the degree of sadomasochistic character structure also plays a role: the more sadomasochistic the character, the more likely it is that the screen memory will involve really traumatic events, and that the memory will be symbolically used to characterize Fate and to justify a sadomasochistic posture toward the world. (She did not explain why this should be; further on, I will attempt to do so.) After Greenacre, the most important contribution has been that of the Mahons, who emphasized the importance of the screen memory to the ongoing psychoanalytic process, and who stated that dissipation of the power of the screen memory is a signal that the terminal phase of psychoanalysis has begun." (pp. 457-461)
Richard Reichbart (2008). Screen Memory: Its Importance to Object Relations and Transference. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 56:455-481
September 30, 2012
C.G. Jung on Archetypes and Adaptation
"Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure - indeed they are its psychic aspect. They represent, on the one hand, a very strong instinctive conservatism, while on the other hand they are the most effective means conceivable of instinctive adaptation. They are thus, essentially, the cthonic portion of the psyche...that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature."
C.G. Jung (1921) Psychological Types, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 6, par. 684, Princeton, NJ: Bollingen - Princeton University Press
C.G. Jung (1921) Psychological Types, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 6, par. 684, Princeton, NJ: Bollingen - Princeton University Press
September 22, 2012
Jonathan Shedler - Distinquishing Characteristics of Psychodynamic Psychotherapies
Excerpted from Jonathan Shedler (2010) The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, American Psychologist, Vol. 65, No. 2, pp. 98–109
Seven features reliably distinguished psychodynamic therapy from other therapies, as determined by empirical examination of actual session recordings and transcripts (note that the features listed below concern process and technique only, not underlying principles that inform these techniques; for a discussion of concepts and principles, see Gabbard, 2004; McWilliams, 2004; Shedler, 2006a):
1. Focus on affect and expression of emotion. Psychodynamic therapy encourages exploration and discussion of the full range of a patient’s emotions. The therapist helps the patient describe and put words to feelings, including contradictory feelings, feelings that are troubling or threatening, and feelings that the patient may not initially be able to recognize or acknowledge (this stands in contrast to a cognitive focus, where the greater emphasis is on thoughts and beliefs; Blagys & Hilsenroth, 2002; Burum & Goldfried, 2007). There is also a recognition that intellectual insight is not the same as emotional insight, which resonates at a deep level and leads to change (this is one reason why many intelligent and psychologically minded people can explain the reasons for their difficulties, yet their understanding does not help them overcome those difficulties).
2. Exploration of attempts to avoid distressing thoughts and feelings . People do a great many things, knowingly and unknowingly, to avoid aspects of experience that are troubling. This avoidance (in theoretical terms, defense and resistance) may take coarse forms, such as missing sessions, arriving late, or being evasive. It may take subtle forms that are difficult to recognize in ordinary social discourse, such as subtle shifts of topic when certain ideas arise, focusing on incidental aspects of an experience rather than on what is psychologically meaningful, attending to facts and events to the exclusion of affect, focusing on external circumstances rather than one’s own role in shaping events, and so on. Psychodynamic therapists actively focus on and explore avoidances.
3. Identification of recurring themes and patterns. Psychodynamic therapists work to identify and explore recurring themes and patterns in patients’ thoughts, feelings, self-concept, relationships, and life experiences. In some cases, a patient may be acutely aware of recurring patterns that are painful or self-defeating but feel unable to escape them (e.g., a man who repeatedly finds himself drawn to romantic partners who are emotionally unavailable; a woman who regularly sabotages herself when success is at hand). In other cases, the patient may be unaware of the patterns until the therapist helps him or her recognize and understand them.
4. Discussion of past experience (developmental focus). Related to the identification of recurring themes and patterns is the recognition that past experience, especially early experiences of attachment figures, affects our relation to, and experience of, the present. Psychodynamic therapists explore early experiences, the relation between past and present, and the ways in which the past tends to “live on” in the present. The focus is not on the past for its own sake, but rather on how the past sheds light on current psychological difficulties. The goal is to help patients free themselves from the bonds of past experience in order to live more fully in the present.
5. Focus on interpersonal relations. Psychodynamic therapy places heavy emphasis on patients’ relationships and interpersonal experience (in theoretical terms, object relations and attachment). Both adaptive and nonadaptive aspects of personality and self-concept are forged in the context of attachment relationships, and psychological difficulties often arise when problematic interpersonal patterns interfere with a person’s ability to meet emotional needs.
6. Focus on the therapy relationship. The relationship between therapist and patient is itself an important interpersonal relationship, one that can become deeply meaningful and emotionally charged. To the extent that there are repetitive themes in a person’s relationships and manner of interacting, these themes tend to emerge in some form in the therapy relationship. For example, a person prone to distrust others may view the therapist with suspicion; a person who fears disapproval, rejection, or abandonment may fear rejection by the therapist, whether knowingly or unknowingly; a person who struggles with anger and hostility may struggle with anger toward the therapist; and so on (these are relatively crude examples; the repetition of interpersonal themes in the therapy relationshipis often more complex and subtle than these examples suggest). The recurrence of interpersonal themes in the therapy relationship (in theoretical terms, transference and countertransference) provides a unique opportunity to explore and rework them in vivo. The goal is greater flexibility in interpersonal relationships and an enhanced capacity to meet interpersonal needs.
7. Exploration of fantasy life . In contrast to other therapies in which the therapist may actively structure sessions or follow a predetermined agenda, psychodynamic therapy encourages patients to speak freely about whatever is on their minds. When patients do this (and most patients require considerable help from the therapist before they can truly speak freely), their thoughts naturally range over many areas of mental life, including desires, fears, fantasies, dreams, and daydreams (which in many cases the patient has not previously attempted to put into words). All of this material is a rich source of information about how the person views self and others, interprets and makes sense of experience, avoids aspects of experience, or interferes with a potential capacity to find greater enjoyment and meaning in life.
The last sentence hints at a larger goal that is implicit in all of the others: The goals of psychodynamic therapy include, but extend beyond, symptom remission. Successful treatment should not only relieve symptoms (i.e., get rid of something) but also foster the positive presence of psychological capacities and resources. Depending on the person and the circumstances, these might include the capacity to have more fulfilling relationships, make more effective use of one’s talents and abilities, maintain a realistically based sense of self-esteem, tolerate a wider range of affect, have more satisfying sexual experiences, understand self and others in more nuanced and sophisticated ways, and face life’s challenges with greater freedom and flexibility. Such ends are pursued through a process of self-reflection, self-exploration, and self-discovery that takes place in the context of a safe and deeply authentic relationship between therapist and patient.
Seven features reliably distinguished psychodynamic therapy from other therapies, as determined by empirical examination of actual session recordings and transcripts (note that the features listed below concern process and technique only, not underlying principles that inform these techniques; for a discussion of concepts and principles, see Gabbard, 2004; McWilliams, 2004; Shedler, 2006a):
1. Focus on affect and expression of emotion. Psychodynamic therapy encourages exploration and discussion of the full range of a patient’s emotions. The therapist helps the patient describe and put words to feelings, including contradictory feelings, feelings that are troubling or threatening, and feelings that the patient may not initially be able to recognize or acknowledge (this stands in contrast to a cognitive focus, where the greater emphasis is on thoughts and beliefs; Blagys & Hilsenroth, 2002; Burum & Goldfried, 2007). There is also a recognition that intellectual insight is not the same as emotional insight, which resonates at a deep level and leads to change (this is one reason why many intelligent and psychologically minded people can explain the reasons for their difficulties, yet their understanding does not help them overcome those difficulties).
2. Exploration of attempts to avoid distressing thoughts and feelings . People do a great many things, knowingly and unknowingly, to avoid aspects of experience that are troubling. This avoidance (in theoretical terms, defense and resistance) may take coarse forms, such as missing sessions, arriving late, or being evasive. It may take subtle forms that are difficult to recognize in ordinary social discourse, such as subtle shifts of topic when certain ideas arise, focusing on incidental aspects of an experience rather than on what is psychologically meaningful, attending to facts and events to the exclusion of affect, focusing on external circumstances rather than one’s own role in shaping events, and so on. Psychodynamic therapists actively focus on and explore avoidances.
3. Identification of recurring themes and patterns. Psychodynamic therapists work to identify and explore recurring themes and patterns in patients’ thoughts, feelings, self-concept, relationships, and life experiences. In some cases, a patient may be acutely aware of recurring patterns that are painful or self-defeating but feel unable to escape them (e.g., a man who repeatedly finds himself drawn to romantic partners who are emotionally unavailable; a woman who regularly sabotages herself when success is at hand). In other cases, the patient may be unaware of the patterns until the therapist helps him or her recognize and understand them.
4. Discussion of past experience (developmental focus). Related to the identification of recurring themes and patterns is the recognition that past experience, especially early experiences of attachment figures, affects our relation to, and experience of, the present. Psychodynamic therapists explore early experiences, the relation between past and present, and the ways in which the past tends to “live on” in the present. The focus is not on the past for its own sake, but rather on how the past sheds light on current psychological difficulties. The goal is to help patients free themselves from the bonds of past experience in order to live more fully in the present.
5. Focus on interpersonal relations. Psychodynamic therapy places heavy emphasis on patients’ relationships and interpersonal experience (in theoretical terms, object relations and attachment). Both adaptive and nonadaptive aspects of personality and self-concept are forged in the context of attachment relationships, and psychological difficulties often arise when problematic interpersonal patterns interfere with a person’s ability to meet emotional needs.
6. Focus on the therapy relationship. The relationship between therapist and patient is itself an important interpersonal relationship, one that can become deeply meaningful and emotionally charged. To the extent that there are repetitive themes in a person’s relationships and manner of interacting, these themes tend to emerge in some form in the therapy relationship. For example, a person prone to distrust others may view the therapist with suspicion; a person who fears disapproval, rejection, or abandonment may fear rejection by the therapist, whether knowingly or unknowingly; a person who struggles with anger and hostility may struggle with anger toward the therapist; and so on (these are relatively crude examples; the repetition of interpersonal themes in the therapy relationshipis often more complex and subtle than these examples suggest). The recurrence of interpersonal themes in the therapy relationship (in theoretical terms, transference and countertransference) provides a unique opportunity to explore and rework them in vivo. The goal is greater flexibility in interpersonal relationships and an enhanced capacity to meet interpersonal needs.
7. Exploration of fantasy life . In contrast to other therapies in which the therapist may actively structure sessions or follow a predetermined agenda, psychodynamic therapy encourages patients to speak freely about whatever is on their minds. When patients do this (and most patients require considerable help from the therapist before they can truly speak freely), their thoughts naturally range over many areas of mental life, including desires, fears, fantasies, dreams, and daydreams (which in many cases the patient has not previously attempted to put into words). All of this material is a rich source of information about how the person views self and others, interprets and makes sense of experience, avoids aspects of experience, or interferes with a potential capacity to find greater enjoyment and meaning in life.
The last sentence hints at a larger goal that is implicit in all of the others: The goals of psychodynamic therapy include, but extend beyond, symptom remission. Successful treatment should not only relieve symptoms (i.e., get rid of something) but also foster the positive presence of psychological capacities and resources. Depending on the person and the circumstances, these might include the capacity to have more fulfilling relationships, make more effective use of one’s talents and abilities, maintain a realistically based sense of self-esteem, tolerate a wider range of affect, have more satisfying sexual experiences, understand self and others in more nuanced and sophisticated ways, and face life’s challenges with greater freedom and flexibility. Such ends are pursued through a process of self-reflection, self-exploration, and self-discovery that takes place in the context of a safe and deeply authentic relationship between therapist and patient.
September 20, 2012
Jonathan Shedler - Robust Empirical Support for Psychodynamic Treatment
Abstract: "Empirical evidence supports the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy. Effect sizes for psychodynamic therapy are as large as those reported for other therapies that have been actively promoted as "empirically supported" and "evidence based." In addition, patients who receive psychodynamic therapy maintain therapeutic gains and appear to continue to improve after treatment ends. Finally, nonpsychodynamic therapies may be effective in part because the more skilled practitioners utilize techniques that have long been central to psychodynamic theory and practice. The perception that psychodynamic approaches lack empirical support does not accord with available scientific evidence and may reflect selective dissemination of research findings." (p. 98)
Discussion: "One intent of this article was to provide an overview of some basic principles of psychodynamic therapy for readers who have not been exposed to them or who have not heard them presented by a contemporary practitioner who takes them seriously and uses them clinically. Another was to show that psychodynamic treatments have considerable empirical support. The empirical literature on psychodynamic treatments does, however, have important limitations. First, the number of randomized controlled trials for other forms of psychotherapy, notably CBT, is considerably larger than that for psychodynamic therapy, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Many of these trials—specifically, the newer and better-designed trials—are more methodologically rigorous (although some of the newest psychodynamic randomized controlled trials, e.g., that of Clarkin et al., 2007, also meet the highest standards of methodological rigor). In too many cases, characteristics of patient samples have been too loosely specified, treatment methods have been inadequately specified and monitored, and control conditions have not been optimal (e.g., using wait-list controls or "treatment as usual" rather than active alternative treatments—a limitation that applies to research on empirically supported therapies more generally). These and other limitations of the psychodynamic research literature must be addressed by future research. My intent is not to compare treatments or literatures but to review the existing empirical evidence supporting psychodynamic treatments and therapy processes, which is often underappreciated.
In writing this article, I could not help being struck by a number of ironies. One is that academicians who dismiss psychodynamic approaches, sometimes in vehement tones, often do so in the name of science. Some advocate a science of psychology grounded exclusively in the experimental method. Yet the same experimental method yields findings that support both psychodynamic concepts (e.g., Westen, 1998) and treatments. In light of the accumulation of empirical findings, blanket assertions that psychodynamic approaches lack scientific support (e.g., Barlow & Durand, 2005; Crews, 1996; Kihlstrom, 1999) are no longer defensible. Presentations that equate psychoanalysis with dated concepts that last held currency in the psychoanalytic community in the early 20th century are similarly misleading; they are at best uninformed and at worst disingenuous.
A second irony is that relatively few clinical practitioners, including psychodynamic practitioners, are familiar with the research reviewed in this article. Many psychodynamic clinicians and educators seem ill-prepared to respond to challenges from evidence-oriented colleagues, students, utilization reviewers, or policymakers, despite the accumulation of high-quality empirical evidence supporting psychodynamic concepts and treatments. Just as antipsychoanalytic sentiment may have impeded dissemination of this research in academic circles, distrust of academic research methods may have impeded dissemination in psychoanalytic circles (see Bornstein, 2001). Such attitudes are changing, but they cannot change quickly enough. Researchers also share responsibility for this state of affairs (Shedler, 2006b). Many investigators take for granted that clinical practitioners are the intended consumers of clinical research (e.g., Task Force on Promotion
and Dissemination of Psychological Procedures, 1995), but many of the psychotherapy outcome studies and meta-analyses reviewed for this article are clearly not written for practitioners. On the contrary, they are densely complex and technical and often seem written primarily for other psychotherapy researchers—a case of one hand writing for the other. As an experienced research methodologist and psychometrician, I must admit that deciphering some of these articles required hours of study and more than a few consultations with colleagues who conduct and publish outcome research. I am unsure how the average knowledgeable clinical practitioner could navigate the thicket of specialized statistical methods, clinically unrepresentative samples, investigator allegiance effects, inconsistent methods of reporting results, and inconsistent findings across multiple outcome variables of uncertain clinical relevance. If clinical practitioners are indeed the intended "consumers" of psychotherapy research, then psychotherapy research needs to be more consumer relevant (Westen, Novotny, & Thompson-Brenner, 2005).
With the caveats noted above, the available evidence indicates that effect sizes for psychodynamic therapies are as large as those reported for other treatments that have been actively promoted as "empirically supported" and "evidence based." It indicates that the (often unacknowledged) "active ingredients" of other therapies include techniques and processes that have long been core, centrally defining features of psychodynamic treatment. Finally, the evidence indicates that the benefits of psychodynamic treatment are lasting and not just transitory and appear to extend well beyond symptom remission. For many people, psychodynamic therapy may foster inner resources and capacities that allow richer, freer, and more fulfilling lives." (pp. 106-107)
Jonathan Shedler (2010) The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, American Psychologist, Vol. 65, No. 2, pp. 98–109
Discussion: "One intent of this article was to provide an overview of some basic principles of psychodynamic therapy for readers who have not been exposed to them or who have not heard them presented by a contemporary practitioner who takes them seriously and uses them clinically. Another was to show that psychodynamic treatments have considerable empirical support. The empirical literature on psychodynamic treatments does, however, have important limitations. First, the number of randomized controlled trials for other forms of psychotherapy, notably CBT, is considerably larger than that for psychodynamic therapy, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Many of these trials—specifically, the newer and better-designed trials—are more methodologically rigorous (although some of the newest psychodynamic randomized controlled trials, e.g., that of Clarkin et al., 2007, also meet the highest standards of methodological rigor). In too many cases, characteristics of patient samples have been too loosely specified, treatment methods have been inadequately specified and monitored, and control conditions have not been optimal (e.g., using wait-list controls or "treatment as usual" rather than active alternative treatments—a limitation that applies to research on empirically supported therapies more generally). These and other limitations of the psychodynamic research literature must be addressed by future research. My intent is not to compare treatments or literatures but to review the existing empirical evidence supporting psychodynamic treatments and therapy processes, which is often underappreciated.
In writing this article, I could not help being struck by a number of ironies. One is that academicians who dismiss psychodynamic approaches, sometimes in vehement tones, often do so in the name of science. Some advocate a science of psychology grounded exclusively in the experimental method. Yet the same experimental method yields findings that support both psychodynamic concepts (e.g., Westen, 1998) and treatments. In light of the accumulation of empirical findings, blanket assertions that psychodynamic approaches lack scientific support (e.g., Barlow & Durand, 2005; Crews, 1996; Kihlstrom, 1999) are no longer defensible. Presentations that equate psychoanalysis with dated concepts that last held currency in the psychoanalytic community in the early 20th century are similarly misleading; they are at best uninformed and at worst disingenuous.
A second irony is that relatively few clinical practitioners, including psychodynamic practitioners, are familiar with the research reviewed in this article. Many psychodynamic clinicians and educators seem ill-prepared to respond to challenges from evidence-oriented colleagues, students, utilization reviewers, or policymakers, despite the accumulation of high-quality empirical evidence supporting psychodynamic concepts and treatments. Just as antipsychoanalytic sentiment may have impeded dissemination of this research in academic circles, distrust of academic research methods may have impeded dissemination in psychoanalytic circles (see Bornstein, 2001). Such attitudes are changing, but they cannot change quickly enough. Researchers also share responsibility for this state of affairs (Shedler, 2006b). Many investigators take for granted that clinical practitioners are the intended consumers of clinical research (e.g., Task Force on Promotion
and Dissemination of Psychological Procedures, 1995), but many of the psychotherapy outcome studies and meta-analyses reviewed for this article are clearly not written for practitioners. On the contrary, they are densely complex and technical and often seem written primarily for other psychotherapy researchers—a case of one hand writing for the other. As an experienced research methodologist and psychometrician, I must admit that deciphering some of these articles required hours of study and more than a few consultations with colleagues who conduct and publish outcome research. I am unsure how the average knowledgeable clinical practitioner could navigate the thicket of specialized statistical methods, clinically unrepresentative samples, investigator allegiance effects, inconsistent methods of reporting results, and inconsistent findings across multiple outcome variables of uncertain clinical relevance. If clinical practitioners are indeed the intended "consumers" of psychotherapy research, then psychotherapy research needs to be more consumer relevant (Westen, Novotny, & Thompson-Brenner, 2005).
With the caveats noted above, the available evidence indicates that effect sizes for psychodynamic therapies are as large as those reported for other treatments that have been actively promoted as "empirically supported" and "evidence based." It indicates that the (often unacknowledged) "active ingredients" of other therapies include techniques and processes that have long been core, centrally defining features of psychodynamic treatment. Finally, the evidence indicates that the benefits of psychodynamic treatment are lasting and not just transitory and appear to extend well beyond symptom remission. For many people, psychodynamic therapy may foster inner resources and capacities that allow richer, freer, and more fulfilling lives." (pp. 106-107)
Jonathan Shedler (2010) The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, American Psychologist, Vol. 65, No. 2, pp. 98–109
