Ron Spielman: Comparative Perspectives on the Unconscious in Clinical Work
Ron Spielman: Comparative Perspectives on the Unconscious in Clinical Work
Congress Report
Comparative Perspectives on the Unconscious in Clinical Work – Panel
Report by Ron Spielman
Chair: Ron Spielman (Australia). Presenters: Fred Busch (USA), Susana Garcia Vazquez (Uruguay), Michael Feldman (UK)
Each panellist presented their own approaches to ‘dealing with’ manifestations of the dynamic unconscious, supported by their theoretical ideas.
Fred Busch, the first presenter, introduced his ideas with a very brief clinical vignette and then developed his theme of the nature of what he called ‘action-language’. Busch said this was a very primitive form of communication – direct from the unconscious. Its origins are in earliest infant development and it manifests as words becoming more like concrete acts. Busch referred to Freud’s description of the repetition compulsion as ‘the compulsion to repeat in action’ – and speculated that Freud deliberately added this otherwise redundant phrase because of its particular significance for him.
Busch, both in his presentation and in the later discussions, showed his original contributions to the work with analysands whose ‘thinking’ is more closely connected to unconscious feeling states than to true symbolic thinking. Although he has chosen the term ‘action-language’ for his concept, it is not to be equated with Roy Shafer’s use of the same phrase to call for a ‘verb based’ psychoanalytic terminology rather than the ‘abstract noun based’ language we are more likely to use with each other.
Busch illustrated his reliance on his countertransference experiences in attempting to understand the manifestations of this primitive form of communication within each session: how is an analysand using their words, tone and phrasing of sentences?
Susana Garcia Vazquez, began by saying that ‘the poet knows of the impossibility of language to convey exact experiences’, and that ‘the unconscious is founded: it is the other who marks the subject in bloom with love or hate; with what he/she knows or ignores’. She then went on to describe material from two clinical relationships which illustrated the intensity of involvement by both parties in the analytic relationship. One patient was seen to have a neurotic organization with clear oedipal problems, the second one was much more ‘acting out’ and uncontained within the sessions themselves. Enactments within the sessions were understood to represent ‘passionate actualizations’ of deeply unconscious issues to do with the transference experience of the analysand.
Garcia Vazquez described a heterogeneous unconscious, with different types of traces and representations, some under primary repression and others under secondary repression. They have different repressed forms of expression during the analysis that require different clinical work. For instance, acts or somatic sufferings can be seen as signs that need a psychic space where the guide to work them out is the analysis of the analyst’s countertransference.
The third presenter, Michael Feldman, gave a detailed account of excerpts from a series of sessions showing his close ‘tracking’ of the patient’s material with his own thoughts and feelings – and a close ‘monitoring’ of the analysand’s responses to the interpretations offered.
Feldman’s experience in the sessions presented was of being deprived of any sense of competence or satisfaction, feeling irritation, confusion and helplessness. Interestingly, the analysand noticed that the analyst seemed unwell in one early morning session and this appeared to confirm in the analysand’s mind that the earlier unconscious phantasies of being undermining and frustrating had been actually damaging to the analyst.
Feldman’s presentation emphasized that when these kinds of experiences in the analysand can be put into words, some of these negative manifestations in the analytic relationship can be mitigated and the analysand’s experience of his own mind can become more coherent.
A lively interaction between the panellists served to further draw out some ‘convergences and divergences’ in each of their ways of thinking about and working with the manifestations of the unconscious.
Despite evident theoretical ‘differences’, each presenter appeared to rely upon bed-rock concepts of the importance of narcissistic issues to do with difference and separation embedded in a context of oedipal relationships with parents. Garcia Vazquez identified herself as among the post-Freudian group of analysts, Feldman is clearly within the modern Kleinian tradition. Busch has his roots in a Freudian training, but he has ‘moved’ toward encompassing identifiably Kleinian concepts – in developing his own concepts as represented in what he terms ‘action-language’.
A longer version of this report will appear in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
