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Chapter

The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s “good enough” experiences of repetition

Chapter

The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s “good enough” experiences of repetition

DOI link for The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s “good enough” experiences of repetition

The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s “good enough” experiences of repetition book

The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s “good enough” experiences of repetition

DOI link for The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s “good enough” experiences of repetition

The melancholic errand of psychoanalysis: Exploring the analyst’s “good enough” experiences of repetition book

BySteven Cooper
BookThe Analyst's Experience of the Depressive Position

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Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2016
Imprint Routledge
Pages 15
eBook ISBN 9781315730615

ABSTRACT

A familiar feeling comes up in the supervision groups I’ve participated in over the years (both as listener and presenter) and with supervisees when they talk to me about fairly well developed analyses. It features a feeling of compassion and appreciation for their analysands, the bearing of repetition combined with a sense of mild frustration about the wish that change might occur more easily. Repetition is bedrock. It marks the crime scene if you will-the place where

something happened to the patient and he or she figured out something to do about it. The patient is trying to mitigate pain while often inflicting a new version on the self. Repetition is the stratagem for coping with and covering up what is raw and unintegrated. It’s where something had to be cauterized. It is how we try to solve the problem by staying the same. Repetition sometimes simultaneously marks and obscures the patient’s and analyst’s dissociation. It is the scene for patient and analyst where they are able to be the least imaginative and most imaginative in how they work together. How do we as an analyst find a position in between the capacity to bear what we experience as repetitive and a willingness and non-complacency to see something new when it’s there to see? As you all know, Freud saw in his grandson Ernst’s little game of dis-

appearance and return, the symbolic representation of the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction, for in this game Ernst found a way to allow his mother to leave without protesting. In managing the distress he experienced in his mother’s absences, he turned passive into active and symbolically took revenge on his mother for leaving him: “All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.” Freud saw in the game of tossing away the reel, a symbolized mother, and then bringing it back, a situation (abandonment) that was clearly unpleasant but was repeated over and over again, similar to many neurotic behaviors. Using this observation, Freud (1920) provided insight into the nature of the repetition compulsion and behaviors motivated by something “beyond the pleasure principle.” In this chapter I take up a few matters related to the analyst’s experiences of

working with repetition, especially some forms of our countertransference resistance as well as its rich pleasures. How do we understand its varieties of interpersonal meaning such as the patient’s unconscious probes to see how the

analyst withstands particular kinds of wishes and needs; tests to see whether we succumb to unconsciously proscribed role responsive inducements? In the fortda game in analysis, there is a patient with a tendency toward repetition, repetition that brooks no nonsense, and a very human and limited analyst trying to make sense of repetition, bear it, and see if a slightly different personal narrative of experience and conflict might emerge. As analysts, we have long been focused on the importance of helping to

develop our patients’ capacity to mourn in the analytic process and to accept conflict and incompleteness, hallmarks of the depressive position. It is a curious matter that we have had relatively less to say in our ongoing work (apart from termination) about the analyst’s experience of repetition, and its accompanying challenges of patience and potential disappointment, in the analytic situation. Along these lines, I hope that the issues that I discuss raise several interesting questions related to educating analysts. As supervisors and teachers, how much do we teach analysts in training about the importance of bearing repetition without instilling in them passivity or resignation? Radical change in psychoanalysis is subtle. One obstacle for the analyst to accepting disappointment in relation to

repetition includes the fear of blaming patients for not doing a good enough job, which is difficult to reconcile with the virtually axiomatic notion that the patient is indeed doing the best that he or she can, given his psychological adaptation. I have also wondered if there is an important dynamic operating in the his-

tory of technique, a kind of resistance to our experience of the depressive position in which we have a somewhat disavowed or even dissociative relationship to the necessary repetition and thus slowness in psychoanalysis. The patience setting the background for the analyst’s experience of repetition and resistance to bearing repetition required in our work and the ongoing limits to our understanding require that we constantly work toward a paradoxically lofty and modest analytic ego ideal best described by Samuel Beckett’s (1984) notion of trying, in an ongoing way, to “fail better.” I think that more or less as a field we’ve operated with the idea that a good

training analysis should help the analyst to work with a sense of limitation and incompleteness. However, an additional source of resistance is that, paradoxically, one important reason for having an analysis as an analyst not only involves working through conflicts but also the inevitability of not working through some conflicts. In other words, good analysis allows us to hold unsettling narratives related to how life will always be partly out of joint, even for the most psychologically privileged among us or the best analyzed. The stability and impenetrability of the mind is so much a part of what we

take for granted as analysts that we may not really allow ourselves to voice too much about the difficulties and trials related to the repetitive nature of analysis. Rosenfeld (1987, p189) was quite cogent about the tendency for many analyses to involve what he referred to as “endless repetition” and that it was important

for patients to experience the analyst’s acceptance that much repetition is inevitable. The analyst’s acceptance of the patient’s process being repeated in the form of transference-countertransference experiences in the analysis gives the patient resolve and augmented capacities to bear the usually unsettling narrative of his inner life. Schafer (2003) has also written poignantly about the many sources of resistance that the analyst encounters in being able to bear repetition. One source of resistance to bearing repetition may be based on the analyst’s

idealized versions of analysis or grandiose fantasies that analysis should be easier or more dramatically “successful.” Some analysts identify with patients’ wishes that things could shift more easily. Others may be prone to identifying with patients’ wishes to externalize responsibility for conflict and suffering. Another form of resistance to bearing repetition may involve the analyst’s doubts about his own goodness such as persistent self-criticism (e.g. Schafer, 2003). There are also experiences of repetition that can actually be very gratifying,

appreciated or libidinized in any number of possible directions in the transference and countertransference. Some may be enjoyed while others may interfere with our capacity to bear repletion and to explore it’s meaning. The effort expended by both patients and analysts to help patients bear psychic pain is often as much a source of enormous warmth and comfort as it is uncomfortable for the patient. One could characterize it as a kind of partnership in bearing the existential realities of the patient’s repetitive, continuous personhood as well as the analyst’s personhood with her patient. It is often a place where the patient’s sense of ironic engagement with their own inner life is on view and it is heartening when we see resignation toward repetition moves toward ironic engagement. For example, a brilliant man who has a deeply atheistic belief system has realized with increasing play through our work that in my words to him, he is repetitively and zealously committed to a religious belief that he is destructive to women and that any woman who knows him more deeply will discover this (despite women finding him charming and appealing). Consider another patient and me enjoying a look everyday as she leaves the office that might be translated as “this is what we do. This is who I am and who you are with me.” After all, the analytic couple is a kind of couple and part of intimacy involves

two people helping each other to bear the continuing ways that each is stuck as a person, trying to change and also unable to change. However, it can also become anxiety-producing as it is lost or as it becomes over-stimulating. We know how much patients are interested in the vicissitudes of the analyst’s capacity to absorb the patient’s experience and their attunement to how we feel about what is repetitive is often a matter of the patient’s concern or even vigilance. Something that hasn’t been emphasized in our literature is how much repetition itself becomes a safe enough dyadic psychic home base where analysts receive unconscious “no trespass messages.” No play allowed here. Cooper (2010a) in an examination of the “grandiosity of self-loathing”

referred to how many times patients’ and analysts’ self-reproach occurs in the

context of unconsciously grandiose expectations. The analyst’s self-recrimination about the limitations of analytic work sometimes rests on the unconsciously heroic expectations about what can be achieved. Particularly for less experienced analysts, these heroic or grandiose expectations may have less to do with characterologic grandiosity than with his or her relatively more earnest hopes about the impact of analytic work. Analysts each have conscious and unconscious fantasies about analysis and

how analysis will go or, put another way, therapeutic action. These fantasies relate to the analyst’s capacity to bear and understand repetition. This fantasy is operating at times and at times being levied against the patient’s and the analyst’s actual behavior, performance. Smith (2004) referred to embedded fantasies of idealized patients that we as analysts carry and that influence our listening. Cooper (2010b) discussed the ways in which analysts often have consciously and unconsciously held anticipatory fantasies about how sessions will go as well, which are probably related to both idealized and dreaded fantasies of the patient and the analysis. While I view these fantasies as potentially both a hindrance to the progress of

analytic work just as they can also help us to understand built-in negative countertransference, they involve the analyst’s difficulty in working toward and within the depressive position. Sometimes these fantasies can be persecutory in blaming either the patient or analyst for not living up to idealized fantasies about the patient or the ideals that the analyst holds. It is sobering that these aren’t only possibilities but occur at different times in many analyses and the question is to what extent they interfere or how they interfere with the analyst’s work. These types of fantasies and disappointed expectations include many other patterns such as idealization or envy of the patient, overriding attraction and manic flight, and eroticism cloaking aggression. It is sometimes a problem of analytic hubris or defensively earnest intentions on the part of the analyst to believe that they will not accompany analytic work. As an analyst I believe, consciously, that everything that I offer is incomplete.

However, some of our internal representations as competent and our conscious wishes to feel competent may create blank spaces in bearing disappointment, incompleteness and particularly repetition. While many analysts such as Rosenfeld (1987) and Schafer (2003) have emphasized the analyst’s capacity to bear repetition without blaming oneself as analyst or his patient, this is easier said than done. In order to illustrate some of this struggle, I turn to describe a phase of

analytic treatment early in the second year of analysis with Kate-work in which a great deal of repetition was at play. Kate’s constricted and limited form of expressiveness felt unusually frustrating and gratifying in certain ways, operating as a kind of manic defense for us in the face of repetition. Not only are the analyst’s experiences of disappointment and limitation quite real in analytic work, but sometimes subtle manic defenses in both patient and analysis cause us to focus on limitation or even encourage it in ways that unconsciously

titrate engagement and the risks of analyzing new forms of expression of transference. Kate’s background featured significant trauma and there are particular kinds

of disappointment that the analyst often has to accept in terms of the limits of exploration and understanding in relation to trauma. His or her aim is one of trying to help the patient to best integrate disappointment; but often there are more sharp limits to working through processes in relation to certain kinds of trauma (e.g., Green, 2005, 2011). The analyst also needs to distinguish his or her acceptance of the limits of working through from premature resignation as analytic work progresses. Perhaps we could think of a kind of good enough disappointment in all analyses as including the existential realities of limitation of character of both patient and analyst in the best analyses. Please keep in mind the following distinction: Our idea of what it is to be a

good analyst is to understand repetitions and to help the patient to relinquish them. Our feeling of being a good analyst is significantly linked to repeating with the patient, creating through our unconscious role-responsiveness a kind of background synchrony or union, regardless of the content of what we are enacting. By synchrony or union I mean the analyst’s receptivity to the patient, to her affect, projections, projection identification, fantasies, needs and wishes. As we try to show our patient how she is repeating, patient and analyst experience elements of aloneness, an aloneness that results from trying to give up or modify the pull toward the safety that repetition provides. This safety is not only internally regulated by an individual but is also dyadically arranged as places of retreat between patient and analyst.

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