Listening, Interpreting,
Reconstructing.
B. What do we hear when we listen
It will not come as a surprise to
anyone if I said that we hear at least two things in what is said to us: what
is explicitly meant to be relayed (verbally, gesture, etc.), and something(s)
else implicit in what we get from the explicit. Both the explicit and the
implicit might rarely match but usually
they diverge. This is the nature of relating and communicating in humans
because we communicate “linguistically”, not instinctively. We do not always talk
but convey messages with other means, i.e.., we say more than what we meant to say,
or people elicit from what we say more than what we intended to convey. It will
also not be surprising to anyone who is
reading this posting- if- a psychoanalyst to say that most of the time people
who speak are not fully aware(unconscious) of all what they convey.
Psychoanalysts claim that they depend on that division to get
to the unconscious, because we learn in psychoanalysis that sometimes people
‘unconsciously’ imply, infer, give hints
to some things that they themselves are no aware of. I want to bring to
attention and also to opening for discussion and review, that the nature of the
link the unconscious creates with
consciousness, because it is a point of fundamental importance in the work of
the supervisor.
The difference between
what is conscious and what is unconscious is not determined by their content
but by the function they perform at a particular moment, both in regular
speech and in defined psychological events. What may well be unconscious regarding
an aggressive notion in a certain context could be the conscious motive that makes
it a gesture of love but in a different context. In better and more
psychoanalytic way: we can say that every conscious notion could and does
create its unconscious parallel, and visa- versa. Better, what I will later
define or refer to as the unconscious is always a product of something conscious. Strangely, what
is conscious is also product of unconscious issues. I mean by that the common idea that we psychoanalysts have
learned till the seventies and the eighties
(before Lacan and Kohut) is that there are two conditions called Cs
&Ucs. But now with what we know about the basis of those two conditions we should say that consciousness
creates its specific unconscious version, exactly as the unconsciousness engenders
a conscious reflection of itself. We can even say that Freud’s old topographic
metapsychology has advanced us to a point when the conscious/unconscious
duality exhausted its usefulness, and the typology of the Ego/Id with its
structural components threatened the integrity of the psychoanalytic theory as a
whole, and we should reconsider that fixed adage and get over it .
Psychoanalysis was
almost totally exhausted if it was not for Lacan who gave the unconscious its
structural meaning, and Kohut moving psychoanalysis from ego psychology to the
psychology of narcissism. Psychoanalysis was no longer a psychology of issues
and events but a psychology of structures and processes. What I mean and hope
to bring to attention is that psychoanalysis is no longer a theory ‘of things
psychological that are in dynamic interaction,’ but a theory of ‘the
psychological human subject’ or what is human in the psychical phenomena. The
unconscious is not consciousness denied recognition; the unconscious is a
structure embedded in language itself that defines the human subject. We cannot
talk to each other about the ‘whole thing’; we quietly talk about other things but
metaphorically and metonymically, i.e., unconsciously. Sometimes , the listener
makes sense of what we said and many times we discover that the listener reacted
to what is implied and not was said. At the same time when we speak it is I
that talk, not Me. Me is quite and just lives the moment.
We are now at a
point that tells us what we know about the unconscious could explain to us
what we do not understand about consciousness. The patient who started her
sessions with crying was consciously saying how in pain she was, but though she
did not say how her pain suits her well because it reflects a hidden
pleasure of being closer to her father, she indirectly mentioned it.
The
Supervisor’s Mission:
The supervisor- as a general rule- starts by
showing the candidate how he-the supervisor-listens to what the patient says to the candidate. At the same stage the
supervisor should be able to show the candidate the ‘missed obvious’ in the
patient’s speech if there is some. When this process is done well the candidate
will gradually, and without much input from the supervisor- appreciate
listening instead being eager to interpret. The common reason is that candidates
are eager to show off their knowledge of the theory. At those moments the
supervisor gets a chance to show the candidate that the vocabulary he is using
as “theory” is more of ‘listening to the theory’ and is distracted by that from
listening to the patient. Whether the patient was defending his narcissism by
identifying with the domineering mother or splitting his father’s goodness and
badness no material to explain (naming a process is embalming it).
Listening to a patient is to hear the silent
psychoanalytic theory he has about himself. That theory is unconsciously spelled out in several conscious
recalls: the candidate has to develop the skill to distinguish between the
patient’s theory of himself and the psychoanalytic theory itself. The same
patient who was crying at the beginning
of the session was not conscious that her complaint revealed something
about having her father for herself and depicting a whole family drama. Listening
to the patient and uncovering the unconscious parallel to the conscious
material is psychoanalysis. What is going to be interpreted for the purpose of
cure is the false interpretation has given to his theory of himself.
The supervisor shows
the candidate the missing parts in the rhetoric
of the patient, which finding them and putting them in the proper context of his personal life story brings the conscious
and its specific unconscious component together and the psychoanalytic rhetoric
of the patient would then be reconnected. The supervisor’s job is to show the candidate
that the conscious and the unconscious are like the two sides of the same coin
(they are two entities tied together and
are not separated by anything that is foreign to either of them. The old notion
that we analysts are dealing with disconnected issues and that we look for the unconscious
to explain the conscious does not put in focus the purpose of undergoing
analysis: what is curative in psychoanalyzing?!!
is is not anymore
valid. The Psyche is not a disjointed entity due to resistances and defense
mechanism; the psyche is the entity formed from the unity between Cs.& Ucs.
That formation requires the supervisor to show the candidate from the patient’s material the rearrangement of
past and present in the patient’s speech , the links made between the Cs. and
Ucs., parental misinformation and patient’s misunderstanding to one time
reconstruction will be made.
Interpretation is the
act of giving the meaningless issue a meaningful place in the main story of the
patient. Thus, interpretation is what the analyst grasps (candidate) using unconnected
and disconnected material to explain a central ides that seems to mean
something. The patient who started her sessions with crying and complaining
mentioned several times her disappointment in her father’s passivity and not making
the mother give her some more attention. Those complaints were not connected or
systematic but just casual complaints. I noted to the patient [aF1] that happened to mention a total
family situation that if we know more about, we could find out why she does not make the
complaining Passing over several useful analytic
interventions at that point brings us to an old false psychoanalytic meaning of
interpretation: interpretation is to get to a better (more general, etc.) meaning
of the material. In fact, and in
practice interpretation exposes a defense against more findings. In old psychoanalysis
interpretation was getting to the repressed reason for the issue at hand.
There is more to be said about
supervision but for purpose of not exceeding the average size of a posting I
would just add something that I rarely found mentioned in meetings of training
analysts-even in the bi-annual meetings
of the IPA. The supervisor should know the process that led him to his advice
and to explain his intervention in the context of the supervising work.
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