The Metaphysics of Glue


The "Monument to the Third International" by Vladimir Tatlin (The Art Book by Phaidon Press Limited, 1994). The "third-thing" construction is a proposition that reaches back to Plato and can be traced through Aristotle and Augustine, Aquinas and Descartes, to the subsequent metaphysics appearent in the psychology of Buber’s (1970) between, to Winnicott’s (1951) transitional space, to Thomas Ogden’s (1994) third subject, and the host of other metaphysical third things that all have in common the implication that there exist two occurrent entities requiring a bridge to glue them together.
 
 
 
 

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.

Until Einstein, physics operated under the assumption that there was something called aether that existed between particles of matter. Einstein put an end to the idea for a while, but it was resurface in post-Einsteinian physics with theories of non-local connections like the super-strings. These theories suggested (as Jung had) that everything is connected to everything else in some way that we don’t quite understand (hence, Jung’s theory of synchronicity -- a large part of which was worked out with theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and which subsequently influenced the work of Pauli’s friend Werner Heisenberg).

In thinking about the interactive field, this same "something-between" is often imagined as an energy field of some sort emerging between or around or within the subject/object dyad. As Schwartz-Salant (1989) suggested, "A crucial issue is the locus of these elusive energy fields; the inability to locate them within our normal space-time perception leads to the recovery of the ancient concept of the subtle body." [italics mine] (p. 6) Schwartz-Salant was referring to the general inability to locate these "elusive energy fields" (a description exhibiting from the onset an a priori, materialistic assumption about the nature of intersubjectivity as energy fields) within (more allusions to the metaphysics of container-space) either a subject or an object (more allusions to Cartesian spatial analogies). Since Schwartz-Salant could not locate the spatial position of the occurrence he, like Jung, called into service the "third-thing" proposition of antiquity. Thus, he described the "Subtle-Body" as a kind of energy field between participants in dialogue, as a quasi-physicalistic thing, "...akin to what was known in Newton’s day as the aether..."

This is one example of the "third-thing" proposition that reaches back to Plato and can be traced through Aristotle and Augustine, Aquinas and Descartes, to the subsequent metaphysics appearent in the psychology of Buber’s (1970) between, to Winnicott’s (1951) transitional space, to Thomas Ogden’s (1994) third subject, and the host of other metaphysical third things that all have in common the implication that there exist two occurrent entities requiring a bridge.

To present the antiquarian aroma of this metaphysics of third things, we might turn to a brief selection from GRS Mead’s 1919 edition of The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in the Western Tradition entitled "Spirit-Body." Mead was a Gnostic scholar who published at the turn of the end of the 19th Century, translating various Neoplatonic and Egyptian texts into English. In Thrice Greatest Hermes (1906), Pistis Sophia, Orpheus, and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, he strings together several of the lost esoteric traditions of Classical Athens and Alexandria. In "The Doctrine...", he reveals that there is and has always been an esoteric tradition in the West concerning the "subtle body," and equates much of this to the Orphic doctrine of "soul."

The language used by Mead, decidedly metaphystical, may cause one to ask the legitimate question of what this has to do with the practice of modern psychology. The answer, however, will become clearer as one delves further into the  mytho-poetic schools of psychology (including the schools of post-Jungian thought) that make overt use of medieval terminology like soul, spirit, archetype, subtle-body, anima, anima mundi, and so on. Other links may not be so obvious. Modern science has gone to great pains to distance itself from what it thinks of as its "superstitious past." But the modern scientific venture is no less subject to the paradigm of dualism than is mytho-poetic psychology. Accordingly;

"The interpretation of Being by science is no less Platonic than that espoused by the Mytho-Poetic view.  Its  interpretation of man as a perceiving-thinking animal with a mechanical body is a direct inheritance from the Greeks" (Barrett, 1964).

Consistent with western psychological literature are the reigning ideas adopted by Freud in the 19th century, largely molded from Wundt’s British empiricism. It is important here to touch upon the history, or story of psychology’s current fantasy in order to ground it adequately. It is important, then to look briefly at the spirit in which Wundt had established the first experimental psychological laboratory in the 1870’s. In his view, mental life consisted of elementary ideas or experiences combined by the laws of association into more complex ones, analogous to the way in which in physics atoms cluster together into molecules of greater and greater complexity." (Barrett, 1964, p.54) Wundt’s idea here was a direct extension of the generally accepted understanding of mind as built up from sense perceptions, promulgated by John Lock (1632-1704).

An important point can be made by stating that with all the changes that occurred through the advent of modernism (from Descartes forward), and with all the ensuing contrasts between the ancient and modern worlds wrought by modern science’s efforts to distance itself from the "superstitious," what did not change was the archaic mind/body paradigm formulated by the Greeks. True to form, Locke’s theory introduced what he called the "primary" and "secondary" qualities of reality. Primary qualities--solidity, extension, shape, mobility-- belonged to bodies, and so were considered objectively real. Secondary qualities -- color, sound, taste, and the rest, did not belong to the world of bodies outside us; they were subjective effects produced in our minds by the primary qualities in bodies. This, then, was the generally accepted ontological view of Being informing Wundt’s (and Freud’s) interpretation of psyche.

This philosophical backdrop frames all of the theoretical proclivities of modern psychology. But nowhere are they more pronounced than in the theoretical constructs involving the notion of projection (specifically: transference, countertransference, and  projective identification ) housing our interpretations of clinical intersubjectivity:

"The dogma of transference and projective identification swirl round intrapsychic themes of projection. Transference is an "as-if" experience to the one who projects. In this, you as the projector may feel "as if" I am the source of your projections. As someone’s highly polarized feelings somehow find their way around your ego’s need to deny them, the story goes, they transfer themselves to me, for example. Perhaps you feel angry with me when your anger’s true home lies buried in your connection to someone else. Your anger, denied, splits off, weaves round me as a surrogate image.

The fantasy of countertransference is thought to reciprocate this process. I experience my reactions to your projections onto me, rising up from within my deeply intrapsychic vulnerabilities, and I then project these onto you. My response to your anger triggers some unconscious experience in me. I react, I defend . . . .  "You hate me!" "You resist me!" "You are picking on me." "There must be something wrong with you!" (Staples, 1996, p.25).

 The traditional psychoanalytic interpretation of intersubjective space was challenged by Melanie Klein’s theory of Projective Identification, which was not welcomed by Freud. Basically, Klein’s proposal complicated the neat Cartesian of subject/object separation by suggesting one could actually (as opposed to figuratively) place the intrapsychic content of one person  inside another. "Quite often," writes Mario Jacoby (1984), "feelings, emotions, thoughts or intuitions pop up in me which are in the patient’s mind and which he may express at that very moment. I am always amazed at these synchronistic or ‘quasi-telepathic’ incidents" (p. 39). And again, from Michael Fordham (1978): ". . . . [through] aspects of the patient’s psyche that pass unconsciously from the patient to the analyst, the analyst is able to identify and experience the patient’s psychic contents" (p. 38), and again from Nathan Schwartz-Salant (1982), ". . . . there is no doubt that ‘psychic infection’ is real; what is going on in one person can immigrate into another" (p. 131).

Certainly Freud’s language will differ from Mead’s, but the notion that humans are divided up into substances like "soul" and "spirit" and "body" will not. In these selections on The Spirit-body, Mead presents a short study to consider briefly the theory of the subtle body of the soul. He describes the human embodiment of the soul, as set forth by the Platonic philosophers. Mead’s words are still cogent:

In this short study I propose to consider briefly, and in its inferior aspect only, the theory of the subtle body of the soul, or man's psychical embodiment, as set forth by the philosophers of the Later Platonic school in the generally accepted narrow sense of the name, and by their more immediate predecessors and followers.

In the beginnings the soul was apparently believed to be air, and air breath, and breath spirit, and spirit and soul one - just simply air, and pass on to those who thought far otherwise, laying it down as a fundamental dogma that the human soul was a rational reality or activity, an intelligible life, an immaterial essence, and not body or an embodiment or element of any kind.

Sometimes it was referred to as the subtle or light vehicle of the soul, to distinguish it from the gross, dense, solid or earthy body, which was often called the 'shell', or shell-like body or surround, in reminiscence of the famous phrase of Plato in the Phaedrus (250c.): 'We are imprisoned in the body like an oyster in its shell.’

The soul proper, on the contrary, is thought of as utterly incorporeal. Psychic life is classified according to its manifestations in body, but is not itself body.

The 'mixture' of the dense body is a union and a blend of the four elements; and from this blend and union a certain "vapour" rises, which is enveloped by the soul, but circulates within the body. It is the medium between the soul and the gross body, and so is said to partake of the nature of both. The exposition is set forth, perhaps unavoidably, in spatial terms and material imagery.

Both the spirit and the body, it is to be noted, are in the soul, and not the soul in the spirit. Plotinus holds that all souls must be separable from bodies, with the sole exception of the universal soul from the universal body; for all bodies are in flux and perishable, except the one body of all, in its totality, which is eternal...

Every soul is incorporeal; that whereas the rational soul alone is separable from every body, and on this account is not subject to death, the irrational is separable from the physical body, but inseparable from the spirit - that is, the spirituous body - which persists for a certain time after its departure from the gross body... (pp. 33-55)

 It is important to point especially to the implications of Mead’s continued reference to the word "in" and how it is being used throughout these passages. In both Freudian and Jungian accounts of psychic phenomena, the word "in" is used to refer to intrapsychic content, which means some-thing "inside" the psyche, as if the psyche were inside the individual like "chalk in a box." This is pure metaphysics. Accounts of "outer" are thought of as being projections, one way or another, as in Kantian metaphysics (for instance, see von Franz (1974), Number and Time). The idea of projection, as generally used, is Cartesian/Kantian metaphysics in which an intrapsychic content is thrown out of some inner location onto some outer location.

Thomas Ogden (1994) attempts to trace in some detail the vicissitudes of the experience of being simultaneously within and outside of the intersubjectivity of the analyst-analysand, which is referred to as "the analytic third." This third subjectivity, the intersubjective analytic third (Green's [1975] "analytic object"), is a product of a unique dialectic generated by/between the separate subjectivities of analyst and analysand within the analytic setting (Ogden, 1994).

In his book Subjects of Analysis, Ogden writes about a session with a patient with whom he had been working for several years. As he listens to his patient, his mind begins to wander. Instead of fighting this back, he lets it run. He notices that he is drawn to looking at an envelope on the table next to his chair. He begins to think about the way he had been using the envelope to jot down phone numbers and notes to himself, reflecting upon this fact, although the envelope had been in plain view for over a week, he had not noticed several vertical lines in its lower right hand corner until that moment in the session. This is all going on while the patient is talking, and could easily have been pushed away in favor of "paying attention" to the specific content of the patient’s story.

As Ogden (1994) noticed the lines on the envelope, he began to notice as well a strong feeling of disappointment. "I realized," he wrote:

I was feeling suspicious about the genuineness of the intimacy that the letter had seemed to convey. My fleeting fantasy that the letter had been part of a bulk mailing reflected a feeling that I had been duped. I felt that I had been naive and gullible, ready to believe that I was being entrusted with a special secret. (p. 66) As the account proceed, Ogden begins to notice that the feelings he was experiencing during his attention shifts were somehow guiding his understanding of his patient’s situation. He began to see how listening to his own seemingly spontaneous and disconnected feelings were informing his interpretations of his client. Too easily dismissed as non-objective data by those of us who struggle to distance ourselves from ourselves to gain "objective" position outside ourselves, Ogden’s experience was somewhat analogous to understanding one’s feeling into the remembering of a forgotten name. One may "know" the name one is looking for isn’t Pam or Jill, for example, but one may sense the name exists somehow "in" the specific feeling one has. These thoughts and feelings, as well as the sensations associated with these fantasies, brought to mind (and body) something that the patient had said to me months earlier, but had not mentioned subsequently. He had told me that he felt closest to me not when I said things that seemed right, but when I made mistakes, when I got things wrong. It had taken me these months to understand in a fuller way what he had meant when he had said this to me. At this point in the session I began to be able to describe for myself the feelings of desperateness that I had been feeling in my own and the patient's frantic search for something human and personal in our work together. I also began to feel I understood something of the panic, despair, and anger associated with the experience of colliding again and again with something that appears to be human but feels mechanical and impersonal. (Ogden, 1994, p.70) It is important to note at this point that Ogden’s interpretation of his experience is essentially cartesian. Framed by the "Object Relations" school of psychology, the traditional subject/object metaphysics is supplanted by a theoretical "third" thing required to bridge its own subject/object split. To this point Ogden wrote: I believe that a major dimension of the analyst's psychological life in the consulting room with the patient takes the form of reverie concerning the ordinary, everyday details of his own life (that are often of great narcissistic importance to him). I have attempted to demonstrate in this clinical discussion that these reveries are not simply reflections of inattentiveness, narcissistic self-involvement, unresolved emotional conflict, and the like. Rather, this psychological activity represents symbolic and protosymbolic (sensation-based) forms given to the unarticulated (and often not yet felt) experience of the analysand as they are taking form in the intersubjectivity of the analytic pair (i.e., in the analytic third). (1994, p.83) Two observations about the passage just quoted stand out. First, Ogden has done absolutely nothing to rethink the basic metaphysics that have been talked about. What he is doing in "checking in" with his own internal object formations which, in Neo-Freudian lingo, is something of his own making (an introject caused by his perception of the external world). It might look like he is doing something new and exciting, but the fact is that he is simply moving away from the object pole of the subject/object split, over to the subject pole. And this leads me to the second observation concerning the idea of a "third" thing mentioned in the introduction.

The entire history of our metaphysics consists of our being tossed from one side to the other of the subject/object split that originated in Greece. First the attempt to prove to (in metaphysical language) that "reality" is subjective. This is relativism or idealism. By saying, with Jung, that reality is a projection of the inner state, is in effect relativising reality to the subjective perceptions of the world. Berkeley’s famous question; "If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one to hear it, does it really make a sound?" represents the height of humanist, idealist thinking that relativizes the world to the perceiving subject. Eventually, this idea breaks down. It simply cannot be supported theoretically or experientially. So we are tossed to the other side of the boat, producing all manner of "objectivist" arguments that end up making each of us just one more object among all the other objects in the world. The current science has taken this road, as has philosophy several times over the centuries, and it really doesn’t go much further than the subjectivist arguments. One way out of this bouncing back and forth is the introduction of some "third" element as a kind of bridge between subject and object. And so, we have all manner of third-things inserted into our metaphysics, beginning with the Orphic doctrine of soul designed to bridge the gap between matter (body) and spirit. The contention with respect to Ogden’s "Third Subject" is that it is one more manifestation of a virtual parade of third things. These third things seem designed specifically to heal the split in our broken metaphysical way of relating to the world. History has been one of struggling desperately to hang onto the metaphysics of Greece, for reasons that are beyond my work here. In this last section on Freud, we will see how Meissner (1987) rejects the notion that Projective Identification describes anything other than the same old introjection/projection schematic of interaction:

The shift from the analysis of separate mechanisms (projection, introjection) to the concept of projective identification tended to compound these separately interactive components into a single complex conceptualization that was originally cast in terms of the operation of fantasy systems...

It may help for purposes of discussion, at least to the extent of providing a visible target, for me to state my own conclusions based on this extensive review of the literature on projective identification and my own clinical experience. I can summarize my present view in the following points:

There is a legitimate place for the term projective identification, but its scope is quite limited. I advocate a return to the original sense of the term as proposed by Melanie Klein. She intended it to describe an intrapsychic mechanism that occurs as part of a psychotic process, in which the self or some part of the self is projected into the object and in which the self becomes identified with the object so modified. Since the process remains intrapsychic, it would presumably be more accurate to speak here of projection into the object representation. (pp. 41-42)

 Meissner is stating explicitly that he wants to follow the traditional view of object representation described earlier. He is trying to make the case that Melanie Klein didn’t ‘really’ mean what Bion and Hartman have extrapolated from her work. Meissner (1987) continues: An important distinction that needs to be kept in the foreground of any discussion of projective identification is the distinction between a one-body context and a two-or-more-body context. There is a radical difference in projective identification as it occurs in the two contexts. In the one-body context, both the projection and the identification take place in one mind: the projection takes place in relation to the subject's own object representation, and the ensuing identification takes place entirely as an intrapsychic event. In the two-or-more-body context, the projection takes place in one mind while the identification(s) take place in other minds. Because of the correlative nature of the processes involved, I prefer to regard the internalizations in question as introjections.

Such correlative and interlocking projections and introjections occur in any transference-countertransference situation, as we have noted. They occur also in group situations. But in whatever context, there are separate processes taking place in different heads. Any attempt to extend the usage from the one-body context to the more-than-one-body context can only sow the seeds of confusion and obfuscation.

A further point should be made in this regard. Some authors attempt to distinguish projection and projective identification on the basis that the latter carries with it a propensity to draw the object of the projection into a position of responding to the implicit demand of the projection and in complementary fashion internalizing the projective elements. This distinction strikes me as spurious. Such complementary pulls are at work in all projections occurring in an interpersonal context; no inherently different mechanism is involved. There is only the difference that the projection is operating in an interpersonal field and within that field has its inevitable consequences, one of which is to create emotional pressures to draw the object into compliance with the projection and to reinforce it. In these interpersonal contexts, it seems simpler and more correct to speak of patterns of projection and introjection. The term projective identification obscures more than it reveals. (pp. 42-44)

 The theory of projective identification is still controversial. Then as now, it confuses the Cartesian terms (inner and outer) assuming the separation between the "organism" and its environment as two wholly separate things. Projective identification complicated this diagram by suggesting one can place the intrapsychic content of one person inside another via some sort of interactive field -- but precisely "what" kind of field might that be? In practice, projection is not always fully differentiated from projective identification (Sandler, 1987). For those who do buy into the idea of projective identification as a placing into another psyche, however, a whole new world of possibilities and problems seems to materialize. Christopher Bollas (1987), echoing Neo-Freudians like Thomas Ogden and D.W. Winnicott, would later describe becoming "situationally ill" in response to his client, enabling him to enter directly into the world of the patient: "...each analyst working with, rather than against, the counter-transference must be prepared on occasion to become situationally ill . . . Indeed, in order to facilitate the analysand’s cure, the analyst will often have occasion to treat his own situational illness first . . . To be sure, in treating myself I am also attending to the patient, for my own disturbance in some way reflects the patient’s transference." (Bollas, 1987, p. 204) Or again, from Jungian Mario Jacoby (1984), "feelings, emotions, thoughts or intuitions pop up in me which are in the patient’s mind and which he may express at that very moment. I am always amazed at these synchronistic or ‘quasi-telepathic’ incidents." (p. 39)

And again, from Michael Fordham (1978); ". . . . [through] aspects of the patient’s psyche that pass unconsciously from the patient to the analyst, the analyst . . . .  is able to identify and experience the patient’s psychic contents." (p. 38)

And again, from Nathan Schwartz-Salant (1982), ". . . . there is no doubt that ‘psychic infection’ is real; what is going on in one person can immigrate into another."     (p.131)
 
 

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Michael Staples