Paul Geltner - Emotional Communication: Countertransference analysis and the use of feeling in psychoanalytic technique

EMOTIONAL
COMMUNICATION

Countertransference analysis and the use of
feeling in psychoanalytic technique

Paul Geltner

First published 2013

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2013 Paul Geltner

The right of Paul Geltner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Geltner, Paul.

Emotional communication: countertransference analysis and the use of feeling in psychoanalytic technique/Paul Geltner.

p. cm.

1. Countertransference (Psychology) 2. Psychoanalysis.

3. Psychotherapist and patient. I. Title.

RC489.C68G45 2013

ISBN: 978-0-415-52516-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-52517-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-08128-0 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-136-17268-7 (epub)

Typeset in Garamond

by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Language and feelings: the two channels of human communication

Analysis is the talking cure, but the words only tell only half of the story. They communicate the particulars of the patients existence. They recount the events, detail the circumstances, and name the feelings that make up the patients life story. As the patient talks, she also stimulates feelings in the analyst that are beyond the scope of the patients words. Sometimes the words and the feelings tell the same story; sometimes they tell different stories, and other times they contradict each other altogether. Neither can be understood without the other. The analyst must listen to the patients words and experience the feelings to fully comprehend the full story of the patients life.

What happens when two people talk? They use spoken language, which often looks and feels as if it were a unitary process, but is, in fact, a densely interwoven amalgam of two distinct components: language and feelings. The language expresses information about the speakers thoughts symbolically and transmits these thoughts to the listener. The feelings express information about the speakers emotional state through non-symbolic dimensions of speech such as tone and the rhythm of the words. The language is a form of cognitive communication. The feelings are a form of emotional communication.

Until the 1980s, most psychoanalytic theory focused on the role of cognitive communication in the psychoanalytic relationship. However, there was a minority tradition within psychoanalysis that recognized the importance of emotional communication and held that both channels of communication play a role in psychoanalysis.

It has only been within the last two decades that most contemporary schools of analysis have shown an increasing interest in emotional communication both as a channel of understanding and as a vehicle of cure.

This book is about emotional communication in psychoanalysis as it is manifested in two important areas of the psychoanalytic relationship: countertransference and psychoanalytic technique.

Before we can delve into the role of emotional communication in psychoanalysis, we must look more closely at the role emotional communication plays in everyday life.

Cognitive and emotional communication

Cognitive communication is the channel of communication that makes use of the purely symbolic elements of language: a set of symbols (words) and rules for using them (grammar) that generate consensually agreed upon meanings. Many types of information including facts, observations, commands, opinions, requests, and questions can be expressed through cognitive communication. The speaker (or sender) expresses this information in bits, encoded in the symbols, and the listener (receiver) understands these symbols and experiences this understanding as thought. Cognitive communication is effective to the extent that both people share the same understanding of the meaning of the words and the grammar.

Emotional communication, on the other hand, is the channel of human communication in which one type of information information about the senders feeling (or emotional state) is conveyed to the receiver through the non-symbolic dimensions of spoken language such as tone, prosody, rhythm, and silence, as well as through facial expressions, posture, and non-symbolic gestures. When a person feels happy and conveys this state through emotional communication, the happiness is expressed through the brightness or lightness of tone and/or through her smile and the expression in her eyes. Conversely, when a person is angry, the anger is expressed through the harshness of her tone and/or through the narrowing of her eyebrows and tightness of her mouth and face. Emotional communication not only conveys information about the senders emotional state but also about her intentions, desires, or impulses. The senders expression of feeling stimulates feelings in the receiver. Whereas cognitive communication is experienced as thought, emotional communication is experienced as feeling.

Unlike cognitive communication, which is the distinctly human channel of communication, emotional communication is used by other mammals. It is also the first form of communication in human development, pre-dating the acquisition of language. After language has been acquired, emotional communication remains entwined with cognitive communication in spoken language. (This topic will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 2.)

Emotional communication is primarily goal-oriented or manipulative (Mithen 2006). Its function is to have a specific impact on the receiver. This can be seen clearly in the first emotional communication that all healthy human beings express at birth: the anaclitic cry the cry that signals distress in the context of physical and emotional dependency (MacLean 1990). The newborns cry not only signals the need for nurturance and attention, but its goal is also to elicit a specific cluster of feelings in the mother: sympathetic empathy with the newborn, which enables her to understand what she needs, and nurturing love that leads her to want to soothe her distress and satisfy her needs. Her feelings are a logical and predictable response to the infants cry, and they lead her to give the infant the specific cluster of the feelings she needs to experience in an interpersonal context in that moment the feeling that her needs are known and will be satisfied and the feeling that she is loved all of which are as crucial to her as the physical care the mother provides.