Roy Schafer - Insight and Interpretation

I regard this book as a continuation of my efforts to supplement the invaluable contributions to the lives of human beings initiated by Freud and carried forward by generations of dedicated psychoanalysts after him, and I submit it to my readers with the hope that their participation in this tradition will benefit from my further reflections, proposals, and reports of clinical work.

The essays that follow cluster around what I consider to be the central themes of my writings on clinical, theoretical, and applied psychoanalysis: insight and interpretation. No aspect of insight and interpretation is given. Analytic material is complex, and inferences from it are often uncertain. Psychoanalysis is a process of construing meaning and constructing influential ways of telling it to others. In the instance of analysands, these are others who are ambivalent both about being understood in ways that makes them conscious of what they have repudiated and about acting on this understanding to undertake change. In each case, analysts learn as they go along what each analysand can hear and use creatively for adaptive purposes. Analysts are also obligated to do what they can to meet the standard of accomplishing their task impartially, that is, in a manner that is not dominated by their own conflicts and values but rather regulated by the systematic analytic approach to which they have committed themselves and the meanings that that approach leads them to infer and interpret.

Therefore, considered in its entirety, clinical analytic listening is not what might be called natural or commonsense listening, though it does partake of that, too. No form of listening warrants the simple designation natural, for while it might seem and feel entirely atheoretical and based on self-evident truths, it is never free from the influence of unformulated methods of making sense, each with theoretical implications of its own and all of it dominated by a jumble of preconceptions and values. Put a number of natural listeners together, and each of them will hear things in a more or less different way. In court, apparently unbiased witnesses dont tell the same story.

In Part I, Insights and Its Vicissitudes, I take up conceptual and technical problems that analysts encounter as they try to understand and communicate with their analysands and colleagues; these problems center on how to select, organize, retain, recall, and retell their analytic understanding of the material on which they have been working. Many colleagues with whom the analyst is communicating are likely to be more or less differently oriented theoretically or, even within the same school of thought, somewhat differently oriented clinically, and so they are likely to respond ambivalently, if not dismissively, to the insights being formulated. For example, in recent years much controversy has developed over the question of how to conceptualize the interaction of the two participants in the analytic process. It is now generally agreed that, inevitably, personal factors influence the analysts point of view on what is encountered or evoked as well as what should be encountered or evoked, such as certain specific manifestations of sex and aggression in the transference. However, many of the propositions concerning countertransference and intersubjectivity that have been put forward in this connection have been based on incompatible theoretical systems and technical approaches. Among other things, these variations feature somewhat different ideas of objectivity, evidence, and truth. As a result, the possibility of productive debate is severely limited. Therefore, it should occasion no surprise that, as yet, no consensus has been reached. Debate continues as to the nature, extent, and weight to be given to the influence that personal issues specific to the analyst exert on the analytic process. Also continuously debated is how best to deal with that influence, a case in point being arguments that are advanced in favor of the analysts more or less selectively disclosing personal feelings about the analysand to him or her.

Owing to the great influence of differing presuppositions about the human mind and human relationships, it is unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached on issues of technique. I will note these theoretical and clinical controversies throughout this book. I will devote special attention to some of them in Chapter 5, Intimate Neutrality, and, taking them as a group, I have had them constantly in mind in developing my concluding chapter, Knowing Another Person Psychoanalytically.