Steven H. Cooper - Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

OBJECTS of HOPE

Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

STEVEN H. COOPER

OBJECTS OF HOPE

A S EACH ANALYSIS BEGINS, I am aware of feeling a kind of ubiquitous, dense, textured conflict. The conflict is between possibility and limitation, what we will and will not be able to achieve. On one hand, I enjoy the sense of uncertainty about what will happen between the two of us. I know that neither of us can know the kinds of things that we will learn together. At the same time, there is also a sense of anticipation about what will happen and what we will learn together. In this mode, I think about what the patient wants to happen, what he is afraid will happen, what I hope will occur, what I am afraid will occur. This process and the conflicts about our different hopes are always present for me. As the analytic process proceeds, I think, more actively, about the limits of what we will do together. The tension between psychic possibility and limitation is a framework that constantly informs the analytic process for me; it is this framework that I probe in this book.

The tension I refer to is not static; it is different for each patient with whom I work. In addition to feeling excitement about things being uncharted, I sometimes wish a cartographer could come in and map things out, for I know that I am partly afraid of the processafraid of the hard work, the intimacy, and the sense of uncertainty. I am reassured by my experience that we will become immersed in a process of trying to understand that is one of the most compelling things I have ever done. While I am suspicious of my urges to know in advance where we might go, I have also learned that, at least for me, imposing structure and expectation is intrinsic to the work. I think of this need for structure, in part, as informing me about my fantasies about what will happen; these fantasies are usually generative and not something simply to regret or avoid. Yet these fantasies and formulations also relate to what Bion (1977) referred to as the analysts overvalued ideas (formulations and organizing ideas about what is being expressed), which are intrinsic to the nature of hope and formulation within the analytic process. Some aspects of formulation creatively organize and some tend to constrict meaning. The urge to promote freedom of feeling and creative thought and fantasy for both participants and the countervailing need to organize through constraint describe a portion of the analytic process not unlike what each of us does in relation to our inner life. Dominant metaphors constrict, just as they may in certain ways organize and expand. In the strict sense, a dominant metaphor is always partly defensive in this way.

As analysis proceeds, I am aware of this process in a very different way. The more I do analysis, the more I try to make explicit my thinking about what has and what has not happened at certain junctures because dyadic process and reality can, in some ways, distract us from thinking about the goals of psychoanalytic work. This imposition of my thinking runs counter to Bions (1977) maxim that the analyst should be without memory and desire. On the contrary, as much as the analyst should try to fight expectations, these expectations are inevitable and there is no way around them. The work can be so involving that it is too easy to forget or deny the passage of time (see Hoffman, 1996, 1998; see also ). The timelessness of the unconscious has a magnetic pull for those of us who become analysts and many of us who become analytic patients. It fuels the process, but it can also conspire to make us lose focus about the goals of analytic work. I call this quandary, the conspiratorial timeless unconscious to refer to the ways in which the most compelling part of the process, its opportunity for freedom of expression and learning, can also conspire to deny the passage of limits and time.

Everything that we do together in analysis issues from the sense of emerging hopes and our various forms of reluctance, denial, and enactment of these hopes. In this chapter and the chapter that follows I begin to explore the nature of hope in the psychoanalytic process and, more explicitly, the tensions between hope and possibility.

JEFFREY: THE LOCATION AND RELOCATION OF DYADIC HOPE, POSSIBILITY, AND LIMITATION

Jeffrey was a patient in his early 50s who had been in one previous psychotherapy and two analyses when I began working with him. Each analysis had involved a chiefly negative paternal transference, one toward a female analyst and the other toward a male analyst. Jeffrey had always valued his analysts efforts to help him understand his feelings of anger and disappointment toward his father and his analysts, though he never felt that he had become more able to trust someone in an intimate relationship as a result of his analytic work. Both his wives, before asking for divorce, told him that he was too distant for them to feel really cared for.

Jeffreys father was extremely self-involved with his work, extramarital affairs, drinking, and mountain climbing, all of which took him away from his family. When his father was around he was often critical of Jeffrey for not being a good-enough athlete and being too interested in reading and games, especially chess. Theirs was a match made in hell. Jeffreys mother was passive and anxious about the approval of her husband. She could be very admiring and supportive of Jeffrey when her husband was not around (which was a considerable amount of time), but things changed radically when he was aroundat these times, she became more distant and preoccupied with the approval of her husband.

I had the sense that in both his previous analysts there had been some way in which the transference was viewed primarily in terms of its historical antecedents, as an experience of a negative relationship with his father. Yet there was no sense, at least as Jeffrey conveyed it, that the analysts had taken up the transference as a way to unconsciously, once again, create distance in his current relationship with his analyst. From early on I wondered if he felt that this distance was something he needed to maintain in order to protect himself from the deep sense of being inadequate and criticized by his father. I also wondered if it created an effect of distancing or irritation in the other person with whom he was engaged in a relationship. Jeffreys compromises were not working well for him.

As he began analysis with me, Jeffrey felt anxious that he would be criticized for what he felt and thought and that I wanted him to be as I wished him to be, more than who he really was. Jeffrey said that this was quite like the feelings he had experienced in the transference toward his previous analysts and that nothing much seemed to happen over the course of these analyses. Neither of us was surprised that he would begin with this set of feelings. By his own report, Jeffrey had never felt challenged by his analysts. Additionally, both analyses had seemed foreclosed or interrupted by his wives requests for a divorce. He had been bereft, confused, and hurt and his analyses had focused on helping him to regain his equilibrium. In each case, he left analysis after recovering from his loss, despite his analysts encouragement that there might be a great deal more work that they might do together.