The Doing of Being With


If you shout at me and I conclude that, "You are shouting at me because you are projecting your bad mother onto me and are really yelling at her," I leave the phenomenon (the shout) in pursuit of explanation. Why do this? It only makes the image into a thing for me to control by exercising my power to name. "Sometimes the name of an object," wrote Rene Magritte, "takes the place of an image . . . A word can take the place of an object in reality" (Foucault, 1983)
 
 

There are three absolute rules for working with the Psyche.
                       .......unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.
                                                                    (A paraphrase of Cousineau, 1994, p. XXVIII )
 

Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.
 
 

Transference and its permutations form the theoretical backbone of many psychologies. But theory aside, the real question is about "meeting" another person. What does one do? What does one say? How should one think about what is happening? Surely, the answer is not synonymous with the rules and procedures of a modern science, or the harsh timbre of some clinical technology. In psychology at least, does one possess anything one has not experienced with one’s heart and lungs? Surely the disembodied flights of Cartesian sensibilities that know the words but not the substance of the thing, could not possibly account for an adequate way of meeting (Jung, 1959j). Instead, the meeting of another must bubble up through the effervescent process of "coming to know" not only with the mind, but with the stomach, and the knees, and the teeth. This is a physical act of doing, as with a making with one’s hands. Theory is one thing, but one’s clinical methodology, if it is to embody the meeting, should be like the "making with one’s hands." And, as Hillman points out, you have to be careful where you put your hands . . . .  for they are the places where the soul comes out (Bly, Hillman & Meade, 1990).

In my own search for away of doing psychotherapy I have been guided by the conviction that the real power to interact with the structure of human life does not reside in some partial function of the psyche. Instead, only that function that can be in actual contact with the Self possesses this magic (Binswanger, 1963).

We spiral round these points of connotative substance revealed through the abstractions of our fantasies. As felt places, our doing psychology proceeds from the ambiguities and distinctions found peppering our theoretical orientations. When a client acts thus-and-so, I react, I am affected, I respond. Meaning flows out from my theoretical bearings. But, were I to look only at theory I would miss the fact that

. . . what lies beyond the various schools of theory and of training, however, is something we all recognize when we are obliged to refer a close friend or relative for treatment . . . [when] we abandon our technological rules and ask instead . . . to what extent will there be the possibility of meeting between these two beings--the mutual encounter which Buber calls the I-Thou relation? It is here that our prescriptive powers fail us and we must fall back on an older wisdom as we imagine the kind of relationship we hope for. (Farber, 1991 Volume XII, p. 588-589) How then might one go about thinking an ontological alternative to the kind of subject/object partitioning our western psychologies present to us? Perhaps called for more than anything else is a science that grants primacy to the reflective over the intentional. The act of experiencing takes priority over the thing experienced or the person having the experience. I make "mine" what I am separated from by space or time, by distraction or "diversion," or because of some culpable forgetfulness . . . I am lost, "led astray" among objects and separated from the center of my existence, just as I am separated from others and as an enemy is separated from all men. Whatever the secret of this "diaspora," of this separation, it signifies that I do not at first possess what I am. The truth that Fichte called the thetic judgment posits itself in a desert wherein I am absent to myself." (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 45) Whatever technology emerges to achieve this must cradle a notion of meeting and intimacy. And only through such dialogue associated with an experience in which you, my partner, allow yourself to think my thoughts, and I become yours, reveals this. For only in that locale of intimacy can dialogue prove itself truly a two-sided affair. Only there, beyond the confines of Cartesian entrapments, can dialogue grow out of a moment where neither of us can lay claim to the thought as our own exclusive creation (Ogden, 1994).

This is no easy Golden Fleece to snatch. Most attempts to reformulate psychoanalysis in these terms have failed. Gestalt had roots in phenomenology (Van De Riet, Korb & Gorrell, 1935), but it often harbored Kantian themes of representation, and embraced a physicalistic model. Its interest steered toward locating truth inside the world of natural sciences. By searching out physics, where it cannot be found, it missed the ineffable clue to the mystery of the human soul. The work of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Rollo May, and Irvin Yalom all recognized consciousness as first intending an other it does not at first know itself intending (Ricoeur, 1970). Bnswanger was at home outside the physical sciences. He demanded a presuppositionless discipline in which the investigator could apprehend the experience of the patient. Like Hillman, his approach intended to allow imaginal phenomena to speak for themselves (Binswanger, 1963).

The principle features of a phenomenological alternative, it seems to me, would begin by defining the shape of consciousness as always directed toward something other than itself. In this, one finds both distinctions and the correlation’s between the object and the subject that knows the object. Within this, one can distinguish between that which is experienced and the way in which it is experienced. The subject and the object of experience are then reflectively yoked to their underlying reciprocality as a relational syzygy.

Next, one suspends the so-called natural attitude (see Note-3.1):

Consider an everyday experience such as seeing a tree. In having this experience one "naturally" assumes that the tree one sees exists, that it belongs to a world that is independent of one’s perceptual experience of it . . . But [by suspending this natural attitude] one suspends judgment about this assumption. . . (Hammond et al, 1991) One grants legitimacy to phenomena, ignoring that which thinking has decided in advance about its favored conclusions. "Thus, all so-called ‘images,’ ‘representations,’ ‘ideas,’ ‘phenomena,’ ‘sense data,’ etc., are objects for consciousness, not contents in consciousness" (Sartre, 1957, p. 21). "Representational theories of knowledge," wrote Williams and Kirkpatrick in their introduction to The Transcendence of the Ego "violate our sense of life. When we see a mountain, or imagine one, it is a mountain we are seeing or imagining, not our idea of a mountain" (p. 22).

This requires more than the simple stating of the self-evident (Selbstverstandlichkeit). The ego always thinks it knows the being-there of the world, it always thinks it knows itself. The phenomenological alternative could only humiliate this knowledge of the ego’s, historical texts compiling the infrastructure of our ego’s way of "knowing" becoming no more sacred than anything else. We would no longer grant credence to those realities understood in the form of images. Instead, we would honor those realities understood to be images (Sontag, 1973, p. 153). In other words, we would treat the image not as a latent representation of something else more "real." We would treat the image as a viable phenomena in its own right.

This position avoids treating phenomena as if they were products of subjective realities located somewhere inside a perceiver, or an objective reality located somewhere outside the perceiver. It avoids limiting phenomena to the realm of visual representation, and never locates the essence or meaning of the phenomenon outside itself. It focuses on the structure of experience rather than its content.

I mean to search for that which the phenomenon is, that which defines the phenomenon, the idea of the phenomenon, the nature of the phenomenon, the function of the phenomenon, the phenomenon’s program (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 38). A viable alternative to the Cartesian schematic would nurture this technique of description and avoid the transition to explanation. If you shout at me and I conclude that, "You are shouting at me because you are projecting your bad mother onto me and are really yelling at her," I leave the phenomenon (the shout) in pursuit of explanation. Why do this? It only makes the image into a thing for me to control by exercising my power to name. "Sometimes the name of an object," wrote Rene Magritte, "takes the place of an image . . . A word can take the place of an object in reality" (Foucault, 1983). It robs the life from that which presents itself to consciousness. By describing the shout or its effects in a manner such as, "When you shout at me, I feel frightened and I want to run the other direction," the essence of the image is normalized to the image. Similarly, attempting to distinguish your intrapsychic content from mine becomes nonsensical. The real issue is one of procedure. There may  be no reliable way of distinguishing your intrapsychic content from mine. The categories themselves are questionable. How then to proceed?

One might ask if we are not a little hard on transference? How can I deny the existence of phenomena that seem to belong to me and me alone, that have nothing to do with you? And how can I deny that these phenomena do from time to time manage to project themselves out into the world? But first we must acknowledge the experience. The experience cannot be argued away. The distinctions between that which is yours and that which is mine can. This should be extended to encompass arguments about what is intrapsychic and what is not (the same argument), or what is truth and what is not, or what is history and what is not. All of these categories belong to the natural attitude. The very image of something being intrapsychic implies container space --something inside. Transference gets caught up with this spatial analogy, the point often being made that transference represents a block to real relationship because the "other" cannot be seen through the cloud of transferred intrapsychic content. But I suggest that to definitively distinguish what is transference (in other words, content that is transferred) from what is not is a dangerous pastime. We might do well to drop the argument about what is or is not transference, and proceed as if everything that presences is at least reciprocal, as a "Great wind of emptyness blowing toward an object" (Sartre, 1957, p. 22).. Thus, when someone tells you a story you might normally consider historical, you admit that you have no way of knowing that this history is some objective thing that exists apart from your relationship in the moment. Maybe it is, and maybe it is not. We could proceed as if this history was being reciprocally revealed in the moment with, rather than in spite of, your being there.

Still, with this in mind the pursuit of images should not terminate with description alone. Images sometimes call for explanation. Description should then help to formulate the basis for such explanation, making semantic connections among related meanings. We are not trying to avoid judgment or explanation per se, we are trying to avoid those preconceived judgments and explanations having nothing to do with the image itself. The problem then becomes one of how to know when one should leave the strictly descriptive mode for that of explanation.

These four characteristics define the core of Phenomenology’s methodological displacement of consciousness. One might refer to this as the phenomenological attitude, comparable to Jung’s symbolic attitude. It formulates what, in Paul Ricoeur’s words;

. . . turns phenomenology directly toward psychoanalysis, prior to any elaboration of a particular theme . . . [beginning] with a methodological displacement that already affords some understanding of that displacement or offcentering of meaning with respect to consciousness. (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 376) Delineating this alternative, Roger Brooke makes several important points concerning Jung’s view of the unconscious: The unconscious he observes in Jung’s writing, is not a psychic locality situated vertically within the person, with no immediate access to the outside world (Brooke, 1991, p. 128). It is an incarnate intentionality situated directly within a populated world of language, history, perception, and culture (p. 128). The Psyche then surrounds us as the world in which we primordially dwell (Jung, 1959i, p. 3-41). As an embodied intentionality, the unconscious is immediately present in interpersonal relationships and is in principle directly available to the experience of an observer (Brooke, 1991, p. 128-129). However, the unconscious is not unconscious of itself, as Jung put it, but is an ambiguous consciousness lacking self-reflection (p. 129). The unconscious is one’s present and future at least as much as one’s past (p. 129; Jung, 1959g, p. 127-241), calling for both revelation and appropriation as an absent presence, a voice heard but not understood (Brooke, 1991, p. 129).

Phenomenology asserted in response that the object given to consciousness is the essence of the object experienced empirically, attacking Kant’s idea by arguing that he had limited all experience to that of the empirical, assuming that everyone’s mind had the same categorical filters (Lemay & Pitts, 1994). Husserl insisted on the irreducibility of essences to subjective processes. For Hussurl, the phenomenon given to consciousness was what Kant referred to as the thing-in-itself (See for instance; Hammond, Howarth & Keat, 1994; Stewart & Mickunas, 1990).

The unconscious is a world with a face which, even when given within the things of the world rather than between them, is bound by the contingently given rather than the factically real (p. 129-130). The unconscious demands of this given a reflective consideration (p. 130; Jung, 1959l, p. 3-105). This reflection appropriates that which has effectively been lost, and which now must be regained through a process of making one’s own what was separated by space or time, distraction or diversion, or perhaps by merely forgetting. This we call "taking back projections."

It signifies that the initial situation from which reflection precedes is forgetfulness. I am lost, led astray among objects and separated from the center of my existence. I may be separated from others as an enemy. Whatever the secret of this separation, it signifies that I do not at first possess what I am . . . that I am absent to myself. (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 45) To ground one’s psychology here, in these features, in this philosophy that views man as ek-sistent (See Appendix: Note-5) into the open region within which a relation of subject to object exists, is essentially to understanding human relatedness. No doubt, we will need this kind of understanding in a world where, as Otto Rank perceived, the psychotherapist may become a "new artist-type such as has not existed since ancient Greece" (Rank, 1959, p. 272-273). If psychotherapy is to live with itself in this inflated vision, it must deal with these remnants of Descartes that haunts our view of self and other. As Jung (1966, p. 82) wrote . . . "achieve wholeness only through the Soul and the Soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a you" (Jung 1966, p. 82).
 

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Michael Staples