A Commentary on Robert
Stolorow (2011). From Mind to World, From Drive to Affectivity: A
Phenomenological–Contextualist Psychoanalytic Perspective. ATTACHMENT: New
Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, Vol. 5, March
2011: pp. 1–14. (La versión española de este comentario fue publicada el 12-12-12).
Carlos Rodríguez Sutil
One of the most
important features of the work done by Robert D. Stolorow and collaborators is
that it is a well philosophical informed work, in a great and courageous contrast
with the classical Freudian position (see Orange, 2010, 2011; Orange Atwood and
Stolorow, 1997; Stolorow, 2007, 2011; Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). Traditional
Freudian theory is pervaded by the Cartesian ‘myth of the isolated mind’.
Freud’s psychoanalysis expanded the Cartesian mind, the unextended ‘thinking
thing’, to include a vast unconscious realm. Intersubjective-systems theory
emphasizes that all such forms of unconsciousness are constituted in relational
contexts. Stolorow and his group took the experiential world of the individual
as its central theoretical construct. They shift from mind to world and from
mental contents to relational contexts, from the intrapsychic to the
intersubjective. Hence, for Stolorow and collaborators, the interplay between
transference and countertransference in psychoanalytic treatment is
characterized as an intersubjective process reflecting the mutual interaction
between the differently organized subjective worlds of patient and analyst. In
accordance with Cartesian thinking, one isolated mind, the analyst, is
postulated to make objective observations and interpretations of another
isolated mind, the patient. This philosophical dualism sectioned human
experience into cognitive and affective domains. Such artificial fracturing of
human subjectivity is no longer tenable in a post-Cartesian philosophical
world. Interpretation does not stand apart from the emotional relationship
between patient and analyst.
Their theory, the intersubjective-systems theory is a
contextual one – a phenomenological contextualism - in that it maintains that
the organizations of emotional experience take form, both developmentally and
in the psychoanalytic situation, in constitutive relational or intersubjective
contexts. Recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the
developmental system give rise to principles that unconsciously organize
subsequent emotional and relational experiences. The patient’s transference
experience is co-constituted by the patient’s prereflective organizing
principles and whatever is coming from the analyst that is being organized by
them. The psychological field formed by the interplay of the patient’s
transference and the analyst’s transference is an example of what they call an intersubjective
system. “Intersubjective” denotes neither a mode of experiencing nor a sharing
of experience, but the contextual precondition for having any experience at
all.
Cartesian mind, the
‘thinking thing’, is isolated from the world in which it dwells, just as the
world is deprived of all human significance or ‘worldhood’ (Heidegger, 1927).
Heidegger’s existential analytic unveils the basic structure of our being as a
rich contextual whole, in which human being is saturated with the world in
which we dwell, just as the world we inhabit is drenched in human meanings and
purposes. For Heidegger, Befindlichkeit – disclosive affectivity or
attunement – is a mode of being-in-the-world, profoundly embedded in
constitutive context. The young Ludwig Wittgenstein, at the time of his Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, (1917, 6.43) said on a similar vein: The world of
the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy (Die Welt des
Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Undglücklichen).
As Stolorow notes,
Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit
underscores the exquisite context dependence and context sensitivity of
emotional experience. I take the English definition of this German term from
Magda King (2001, pp. 55-56):
The existential concept of Befindlichkeit
cannot be adequately expressed by any single English word. The common German
phrase, Wie befinden Sie sich? means: How do you feel? How are you? Sich
befinden generally means how one is, how one feels. Important also is the
core of the word, sich finden, to find oneself. The whole expression may
be explained as follows: Da-sein is a priori so that his being manifests itself
to him by the way he feels; in feeling, he is brought to himself, he finds
himself. The ontic# manifestation of Befindlichkeit are familiar to
everyone as the moods and feelings that constantly “tune” Da-sein and “tune him
in” to other beings as a whole. To avoid to coin some clumsy expression for
Befindlichkeit, it is convenient to call it “attunement.”[1]
It is a central tenet of
intersubjective-systems theory that a shift in psychoanalytic thinking from the
motivational primacy of drive to the motivational primacy of affectivity moves
psychoanalysis towards a phenomenological contextualism. Unlike drives, which
originate deep within the interior of an isolated mind, affect — and Stolorow
explains “that is, subjective emotional experience”— is something that
from birth onward is regulated, or misregulated, within ongoing relational
systems. Emotional experience is inseparable from the intersubjective contexts
of attunement and malattunement in which it was felt. Traumatic affect states
can be grasped only in terms of the relational systems in which they are felt.
Psychological conflict develops when central affect states of the child cannot
be integrated because they evoke massive or consistent malattunement from
care-givers. Such unintegrated affect states become the source of lifelong
emotional conflict and vulnerability to traumatic states, because they are
experienced as threats both to the person’s established psychological
organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties. The child’s
emotional experience becomes progressively articulated through the validating
attunement of the early surround. It is the absence of adequate response to the
child’s painful emotional reactions on the part of the care-givers that renders
conflicts durable and, thus, a source of traumatic states and psychopathology.
When a child’s emotional
experiences are consistently not responded to or are actively rejected, the
child perceives that aspects of his or her affective life are intolerable to
the care-giver. These areas of the child’s emotional life must then be
sacrificed in order to safeguard the needed tie. This mechanism have been
described, among others, by Sandor Ferenczi (1932) as the confusion of
tongues between the adults and the child, Ronald Fairbairn (1943) as the moral
defence of the child, Michael Balint (1968) as the basic fault.
Repression keeps affect nameless.
The focus on affect and
its meanings contextualizes both transference and resistance, and the patient’s
resistance can be shown to fluctuate in concert with perceptions of the
analyst’s varying receptivity and attunement to the patient’s emotional
experience. In the language of intersubjective-systems theory, interpretative
expansion of the patient’s capacity for reflective awareness of old, repetitive
organizing principles occurs concomitantly with the affective impact and
meanings of ongoing relational experiences with the analyst. A clinical focus
on affective experience within the intersubjective field of an analysis
contextualizes the process of therapeutic change in multiple ways. Only with a
shift in the patient’s perception of his/her analyst from one in which
the analyst was potentially or secretly shaming to one in which he/she was
accepting and understanding could the patient’s emotional experience of her
traumatized states shift from an unnominated bodily form to an experience
that could be felt and named as terror.
“In shattering the tranquilizing
absolutisms of everyday life, emotional trauma plunges us into a form of what
Heidegger (1927) calls authentic (owned) being toward-death, wherein death and
loss are apprehended as distinctive possibilities that are constitutive of our
very existence, of our intelligibility to our selves in our futurity and finitude
– possibilities that are both certain and indefinite as to their ‘when’ and
that therefore always impend as constant threats. Stripped of its sheltering
illusions, the everyday world loses its significance, and the traumatized
person, as shown in my traumatized state at the conference, feels anxious and
uncanny, no longer safely at home in the everyday world”.
Notwithstanding the
kinship of Heidegger’s ideas with Descartes is shown in his reliance on the
powerlessness and vulnerability in the face of the death. The pervasiveness and
omnipresence of the death leads me to discover the unshakable certainty and
truth of my sum (see the moribundus sum in Piotr Hoffman, 1993). The
transcendence of death lies in the fact that we die alone. But in my opinion
there underlies a great mistake. It is not that each of us dies alone but, just
the opposite, the only truth is that death is the complete and absolute
loneliness. Then, the transcendence resides not in the individual, not even in
a figured beyond. The possible transcendence are the others, by the same token
as for Sartre the hell are the others.
Siblings in the same
darkness: ethical implications. Emotional trauma can gradually become
integrated when it finds a relational home in which it can be held.
I hardly dare to expose a criticism
of the definition of “affect” Stolorow offers to us: “that is, subjective
emotional experience”. This expression could be tainted of the Cartesian
isolated mind as long as it conveys the image of an internal original experience, independent
of the environment, identifiable trough a private language similar to that
which Wittgenstein (1953, 243) demonstrated is (logically) impossible. A
private language is that language used to describe those inner experiences
supposed to be inaccessible to others, that only I understand, which no-one
else can make sense of, that is, incapable of translation into an ordinary
language. Hence, I suggest it is more suitable to talk about the “emotional behaviour”, despite its
behavioural and positivistic resonances, taking note that by this expression I
mean a significant behaviour having place in a human relational context. Using
the words of Donna Orange (2010, p. 44): “… without community context, there is
no way to find out the meanings of the words”.
Balint, M. (1968). The basic fault: therapeutic aspects of regression. London:
Tavistock. (La falta básica. Aspectos terapéuticos de la regresión.
Barcelona: Paidós, 1993).
Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1943). The Repression and the
Return of the Bad Objects.(With Special Reference to the ‘War Neuroses’). British Journal of Medical Psychology, 19, 3-4, 327-341. La represión y el retorno
de los objetos malos. En Estudio Psicoanalítico de la Personalidad. Buenos
Aires: Hormé, 1978.
Ferenczi, S. (1933). The Confusion of Tongues Between
Adults and Children: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion. Sándor Ferenczi Number. M. Balint (Ed.)
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30: Whole No.4, 1949.
(Confusión de lengua entre los adultos y el niño. En Obras Completas, vol IV.
Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982).
José Gaos, 1951, Introducción a El
Ser y el Tiempo de Martin Heidegger. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (Trans.). New
York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Hoffman, P. (1993). Death, time, history: Division II
of Being and Time. In Charles Guignon, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press (Chapter 7).
King, M. (2001). A
Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Nueva York: University of New York
Press.
Orange D.M., Atwood G. y Stolorow R.(1997). Working Intersubjectively. Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice.
Hillsdale, N.J.: The Analytic Press.
Orange, D.M. (2010). Thinking for Clinicians. Philosophical Resources for Contemporary
Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies. Nueva York: Routledge.
Orange, D.M. (2011). The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice.
Nueva York: Routledge.
Stolorow, R.D.
(2007). Trauma and Human Existence.
Stolorow, R.D. (2011). From Mind to World, From Drive
to Affectivity: A Phenomenological–Contextualist Psychoanalytic Perspective.
ATTACHMENT: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, Vol.
5, March 2011: pp. 1–14.
Stolorow R.D. y Atwood G. (1992). Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological
Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic
Press. 1992. (Los contextos del ser. Las bases intersubjetivas de la vida psíquica.
Herder. Barcelona).
Wittgenstein, L. (1917). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Revised 4th edition by P.M.S. Hacker
and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009: The German text, with an
English translation. Edición bilingüe alemán‑español de Alfonso García
Suárez y Ulises Moulines "Investigaciones Filosóficas";
Barcelona: Crítica, 1988.
[1] José Gaos
(1951, p. 124) offered the Spanish version “encontrarse”, common in the
instances “encontrarse triste”, “encontrarse alegre”, etc.
