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Structural Metaphor: an Exploration of the Subjective Experience of Psycho-Analytic Essence

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Structural Metaphor: an Exploration of the Subjective Experience of Psycho-Analytic Essence STRUCTURAL METAPHOR: AN EXPLORATION OF THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHO-ANALYTIC ESSENCE by Christina Elizabeth Whyte-Earnshaw A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Christina Elizabeth Whyte-Earnshaw (2010) STRUCTURAL METAPHOR: AN EXPLORATION OF THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHO-ANALYTIC ESSENCE Doctor of Philosophy (2010) Christina Elizabeth Whyte-Earnshaw Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology University of Toronto Abstract In this study the subjective experience of psycho-analytic essence is approached through an examination of conscious and unconscious representations of self-in-work (Dreyfus, 1991). The study begins with an heuristic identified as the psycho-analytic moment, a transitory self-state arising in the course of conducting a psycho-analysis and felt to correspond to occasions of right, expert, good or exemplary therapeutic practice. The study advances to an examination of the lived experience of clinical psycho-analysis through a set of structured and unstructured interviews with two psycho-analysts. The study’s general approach incorporates a revised version of Goethe’s delicate empiricism as adapted by Hoffman (1989). The methods for interviewing participants and for analyzing transcripts were designed to access unconscious communications regarding subjective experience. Interview procedures combined phenomenological and free-associative narrative techniques: Procedures for transcript analysis were developed from literary studies, psycholinguistics, psycho-analysis and grounded theory. ii The analysis of participants’ utterance led to the hypothesis that an unconscious configuration of inference and memory gives shape to the subjective experience of composite elements of psycho- analytic practice. This hypothesized coherence of unconscious memory and process structures is identified as a structural metaphor. The structural metaphor is posited to underwrite the verisimilitude of lived experience, personal idiom and aesthetic within the clinical encounter. Thus, the structural metaphor is hypothesized to shape not only the psycho-analyst’s representations of his or her way of being-in-work and linguistic deportment within the interview setting, but to also shape the subjective experience of psycho-analytic practice. Thus reconsidered, the psycho-analytic moment is viewed as an existential moment in the ongoing phenomenology of lived experience, occasioned by a convergence of unconscious identity and experience within the clinical field. This existential moment is taken to be indicative of the presence of something essential about self, work or self-in-work, as a result of a set of psychological, affective and visceral factors that arise in this moment of convergence. However, the psycho- analytic moment is assigned little epistemic value in identifying properties of psycho-analysis as a discipline or a practice, instead reflecting the structural metaphor that underlies the experience of that practice. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of Contents iv Chapter One: Introduction Ways of Remembering: The Experience of Essence in Psycho-analytic Practice 1 The psycho-analytic moment 3 The psycho-analytic moment and essence 6 Approach 8 Chapter Two: Developing a Method Method of Preparation 10 Orientation 10 Epistemology: Questioning knowing 11 Critical realism 18 Validity, subjectivity and inference to the best explanation 21 Inference to the loveliest explanation 21 Psycho-analysis 22 Psycho-analysis as science 24 Psychic reality and the subjective realm 29 A psycho-analytic model of human nature 30 Rethinking the unconscious 38 Unconscious communication 38 Goethe’s Phenomenology: A Delicate Empiricism 40 Goethe’s Essence 42 Chapter Three: Delicate Empiricism – The Interviews Interview Procedures 46 Finding participants 46 The research relationship 48 The research participation agreement 52 The First Interview: Phenomenological Narrative in a Set Situation 52 The set situation 55 Step One: Impression – Open Coding – Transcription of the First Interview 57 Impression 57 Sensibility to sense 59 iv Open coding 64 Emergent soft substantive categories 68 Soft substantive categories and the unconscious 69 Theoretical sensitivities and expert knowledge 71 Interest 74 The initiating question and test passing 77 The Second Interview: The Free Associative Narrative Interview 78 Free association 79 The psycho-social defended subject 80 The Kleinian mind and defenses 83 Narrative 84 Narrative in clinical practice 87 Chapter Four: Delicate Empiricism – The Analysis of the Written Text General Principles of Analysis 90 A Layered Analysis 94 The tally test 96 Dr. Ashe: Analysis 102 Feedback of the soft substantive category and failure by tally 102 Step Two: Exact Description – Earth 106 Close reading 106 Close reading of the first interview 108 The first question 109 The final question 112 Intrusion and the case illustration 117 Intruding and being intruded upon 120 Step Three: Imaginative Cognition – Water 122 Dynamics 123 Psycholinguistics 127 Linguistic anomaly as growth 128 Affect 129 Mentalese and wordless thought 129 Spontaneity 133 Countertransference and disclosure 138 Excitement and Mutuality 146 Step Four: Modeling and Gesture – Air 148 Form 148 Relationship episodes 150 Discourse moves and intention 151 v Equilibrium, psychic pain and form 152 Mutuality 163 Constraint 165 Specialness 167 Colleagues and theory 172 The Second Interview 176 Intrusion and related themes 177 Psychological safety and mutuality 186 Analytic anonymity 190 Attribution and the other 192 Breaches in mutuality 200 Memory and conflict 203 Mutuality and merger 210 Step Five: Intuitive Judgment – Fire 215 Theory of existence 215 Writing 217 Structural metaphor 217 The metaphoric function 219 Structural metaphor – shared skin 221 Shared skin and loss 225 Dr. Wyeth: A Combined Analysis – Impression to Metaphor 229 Emergent soft substantive category 231 Water and structure mother and father 238 Structure and work 242 Containment and contemplation – a synthesis of identifications 248 Structural metaphor – tethered boat 251 Chapter Five: Reflections Reflection 258 The structural metaphor 260 The psycho-analytic moment – essence and subjectivity 261 Implications for practice 262 Notes on method 263 The structural metaphor and loss 265 Language, revealing and dissembling – thought and alienation 266 References 270 End Notes 292 vi Appendices Appendix I Letter to prospective participants 294 Appendix II Participant release agreement 296 Appendix II (a) Letter of Intent 297 Appendix III Interview one – the prepared questions 298 Appendix IV Letter to participants enclosed with transcripts 300 vii Structural Metaphor Chapter One: Introduction Though these reasonings concerning human nature seem abstract and of difficult comprehension, this affords no presumption of their falsehood. … And whatever pains these researchers may cost us, we may think ourselves sufficiently rewarded, not only in point of profit but of pleasure, if, by that means, we can make any addition to our stock of knowledge in subjects of such unspeakable importance. Hume 1748, quoted in Wilson, 2001, p. ix Ways of Remembering: The Experience of Essence in Psycho-analytic Practice In Remembering, repeating and working through (1914a), Freud develops his earlier distinction between conscious and unconscious memory (Freud, 1894; Bueuer & Freud, 1895) into a seminal formulation, the repetition compulsion. Following a familiar binary structure, conscious remembering in language is set against unconscious remembering as repetition in action, found most particularly in conversion symptoms or acting out. This is a distinction which is critical to an understanding of the dynamics of mind found in classical psycho-analysis and the concepts that are central to this model: conflict, repression, defence, primary and secondary process, as well as to an appreciation of the therapeutic power of insight and interpretation in psycho-analytic treatment. Psycho-analysis began with the discovery that unconscious memory of traumatic events was pathogenic and that bringing such memories into conscious awareness, releasing affect and linking both of these to personal meaning was therapeutic. Freud famously argued that hysteria was a disease of reminiscence (Freud, 1892; Breuer & Freud, 1895) meaning, by this, that it was purely psychological in nature and did not arise from physiological factors as had been previously held. That unconscious memory might serve an adaptive function is, however, implied in Freud’s consideration of the place of identification in the formation of the super-ego (1917a; 1923) and is developed further by later psycho-analytic thinkers. 1 Structural Metaphor 2 In Some considerations on repetition and repetition compulsion (2000a), Hans Loewald re- conceptualized the adaptive potential of repetition as a creative reactivation of unconscious memories in the achievement of higher levels of psychic organization. For Loewald, this can be observed within the conditions created by the transference relationship in a psycho-analysis, in the dialectic between the unconscious and a preconscious that he has re-conceptualized as a secondary memory system. Based on findings of active unconscious planning and testing for relational safety within the psycho-analytic encounter,
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