Inductive Thinking and Interpretation

The notion of considering the kind of thinking we use in our regular life is not-in any way- a common one. Still, it is very informative in some fields of epistemology like psychoanalysis. The reason is not obvious but important. The interpreting of dreams-like the  Irma dream- demonstrated that there is an unconscious process parallel to every conscious process. Since this is the case in all the work the analyst does, he has to think about the ‘implicit’ in every ‘explicit’ the patient delivers in his sessions (verbal and none verbal). Knowing about the process of thinking is imperative and not just gratuitous. Even so, that knowledge is vital in just knowing what to do with what we are dealing with: am I to wait for more to deduce from, or this is enough induce its meaning give an interpretation or even progress to make a reconstruction. What I am emphasizing here is that the analyst should know what is involved in his work to avoid the slackness that creeps in the analysis because of its repetitiveness and length.

In the Irma dream, Freud induced from the dream scene that in order to make the accusation of failure belong to all of ‘them’ he created the scene of the dream where his most likely critiques were doing ridiculous things. Interpreting a dream, a slip of the tongue or a symptom, and now we could add character formation, etc., needs deductive thinking to elicit from the details the main theme. However, if a patient is always few minutes late for his session we try to deduce (elicit) a meaning from that general or common behavior, i.e., find out what does this repetitive behavior is saying. In more related meaning to those two types of thinking we could say that we deduce from the details the general meaning, and from the general we induce the details of the general issue. Better, in analysis we are constantly using inductive and deductive thinking almost spontaneously, but we would do a better job if we knew if we have only enough to interpret or enough  to reconstruct. However, it could also be said: isn’t that what most people do normally in their daily life and without even being aware of thinking? Yes, people think and use induction and deduction without doing that consciously. But how much do we misunderstand, wrongly  understand, respond with the wrong adjective or adverb, and we get thing even worse by trying to correct ourselves without thinking of thinking.

We cannot or should not put ourselves- as psychoanalysts- in such a position of not knowing if deduction is required or there is a meaning that we should induce to give an interpretation? Our problem as analysts is that we have one tool to do our work: thinking and choosing the proper words to help the patients. Moreover, when we engage  ourselves in a general matter, we are still expected to be more thoughtful and accurate.

Our work as analysts, therapists or not, is to ‘interpret’. We are expected to understand matter of human nature more deeply. By definition a psychoanalyst interprets not explain, which means to derive from the given what is latent. I have to interrupt this line of thinking at this point to introduce a different but related issue. An interpretation has to be done within a context because-strange enough-it is the context that would make the interpretation meaningful. The Irma Dream, like all dreams, had a context that could be derived from the day residues. The context was talking-the day before the dream- about the unsuccessful work Freud with doing with Irma. Without the context of the psychic material the interpretation could be deductive or inductive and as a fact unrelated to what is analyzed. The strength of an analytic interpretation the kind of thinking that linked it to the context. Psychoanalysis is unique in understanding the human phenomena because any attempt at understanding is dependent onto how the context of the issue becomes the interpretation of the interpretation. I will go the example of the patient who comes late to her session. The context was creating a time gap between the patient before her-who was also a female- and herself, which eventually revealed a competitiveness of transference nature.

We need to keep in mind- all or most of the time- that interpretation is the dealing with the material that is delivered as free association. Construction is a different ‘ball game’. Construction is the kind of psychoanalytic work that is derived from transference. Transference is the psychic material that goes back actual interpersonal relationships in the history of the patient. Therefore, inductive and deductive thinking in dealing with transference take a slightly different place in the psychoanalytic work.

This would be a separate topic that when is done properly (I hope) it will get us to the doorstep of training.

 A Need for a Theory of Practice and a System of Training

In a recent posting of the IPA, a colleague (sorry to have lost his name) underlined a ‘serious’ problem that pertains to both practice and the theory of practice. He underlined the absence of interest in childhood in the contemporary theory of psychoanalysis. He also related that disappearance to the disappearance of the issue of the intrapsychic in the field of its practice. The two issues are fundamentally and inherently connected. If we haven’t forgotten, we psychoanalysts who were the first to refer psychopathology to fixations on unresolved conflicts in childhood. We were also the ones who stipulated that correcting those fixations comes through analyzing their transference to the analytic process. Add to that that as this is the case, and was always so, training in psychoanalysis was more than just learning: it was forming a psychoanalytic mind in the candidate.

My colleague hit the nail on the head, but the nail needs more hitting…. because analysts-hopefully-still want the do the good and real work of psychoanalysis. But there is a problem with that. Until the late sixties of the last century learning and training were possible because the field was expanding in terms literature and fields of practice (psychosomatics, borderline cases, etc.). But thinkers from outside the field, and thinkers from inside the field, in addition to the change in the kind of cases that sought treatment, the development in psychology and linguistics, all those dug deeper and more complex strata of the human subject. Instead of getting more ‘psychoanalytic’ we neglected the two pillars of our discipline: childhood and its fixations, and transference and the intrapsychic.

What happened, eventually, is that the practicing psychoanalysts closed the door behind themselves and kept regurgitating their knowledge, leaving the thinkers advance psychoanalysis toward wider horizons while their world remained limited if not even shrunk. This subject is of more complexity and further horizon than what I am equipped to dela with. But I can and wish to go back to two or three topics that I raised before that are related to the issue our colleague has raised: The difference between having a vocabulary of psychoanalysis without having its language, and the difference between a psychoanalysis founded on deductive thinking and another that is inductive in nature.

Practicing analysts and even training analysts might think that this topic is too far from their own realm of practice and work. It is not. If they are doing good work, they would be actually using the right approach without being aware of it. The old vocabulary we still use and teach candidates will gain more meaning than when we were taught it. The fact that we know more now about what we did 'unconsciously' for a long time obliges us to learn how to convey that elaboration of psychoanalysis to the new generation AND keep ourselves aware of what we should be doing in our practice.

I hope to write two posts, one Transference and Interpretation and one on Inductive Thinking and Interpretation. 

 Inductive Thinking in Psychoanalysis.

There is no obvious reason for psychoanalysts to reject or at least to dismiss non-clinical thought as irrelevant to psychoanalytic clinical work. Most, if not almost all my posts, that do ne relate directly to clinical practice or the application of psychoanalysis are frowned at. This is a prescription for unmanageable deterioration of our specialty. The reason is that Psychoanalysis itself was and still is not clinical discipline. It was originally a discovery that needed a theory to take its place epistemology. By mistake the theory needed did not come from thinkers but from practitioners. Yet, Freud and a few of his followers had the insight that Psychoanalysis is more than just a psychotherapy and tried their hands in trying to give it a theoretical foundation. The continued domination of the clinical picture of psychoanalysis delayed and distorted the efforts to give it its ‘theoretical’ structure.  Just to avoid a common misunderstanding: a theory of psychoanalysis does not interfere with whatever the clinician thinks of his work.

Psychoanalysis, like all other similar mental accomplishments, is either the product of inductive or deductive process of thinking. We can say- with reasonable agreement- that psychoanalysis was initiated by noticing two things. The first is the coexistence of two streams of thought of which one is not fully in the sphere of awareness or consciousness (Anna O). The second is the interpretation of dreams (the Irma dream). In both those initiating events Freud induced from what he observed the existence of a split in the familiar process of consciousness, and a dream is a scene that says something about the dreamer, which neither the patient nor the analyst could deduce from manifest dream but could educe a latent meaning from the patient’s associations about the dream. The Irma dream said many things about the day residues, but the interested dream said (unconsciously) a great deal about the dreamer-Sigmund Freud his anxieties, his thoughts about his colleagues, his sense of importance and being hungry for more: his Narcissism.

The difference between deductive thinking and inductive thing is the difference between psychoanalysis without a theory and with a theory, even psychoanalysis and the mere psychotherapeutic work. I will mention a case I used a couple of years ago in one of my previous postings on my personal blog.

The patient was the older of two sisters. She looked more like her father while the younger and prettier sister took after their very pretty mother. The analysis was going nowhere - for a lengthy period of time- as the patient was just reporting on the divided family structure and her mother’s bad treatment of her. I could say that I was also compliant to that type of resistance and was bust deducing some feature of masochistic pleasure in the patient’s complaining. In a moment of ‘inductive’ thinking I realized some sadistic sense of joy that her sister is deprived of the father’s love and attention. This was a deduction from the material but an inductive thought that was in the fabric of the family structure.

There was a pleasure in releasing myself from my deductive work and moving to the inductive analysis of my patient’s psychological stagnation in complaining. Again: deduction is finding the thread to trace to the main issue- induction is to discover what is missing to make sense of what is obvious, operational, but seems to be void of justification. This point is more important than just doing better psychoanalysis. The therapeutic objective of psychoanalytic therapy is to change the intrapsychic structure of the patient Not to improve his interpersonal way of relating to others. We cannot do that without inducing from the obvious what is missing in it. In this patient it was inducing her narcissistic relationship with the father and depriving her sister from that closeness to the father. I believe-as I found out- that changing that intrapsychic structure was therapeutic enough.    

Thus, true analytic work comes from the analyst’s ability to induce a meaning in his hourly deductive work. Just keep in mind the difference between interpretation and reconstruction. 

 Deduction and Induction in Psychoanalytic Thinking.

I was reading a book on the struggles of Einstein and free thinkers in his time in Europe with great details of the links he had with the physicists of his time. The book showed well the effect of his 'sudden unexpected genius' of the notion of relativity on the field of electromagnetism. Most of that part of the book was high above my mental capacity, but one trivial remark by the author Matthew Stanly about Einstein's way of thinking gripped more than my attention. He said that Einstein's intuition came from Inductive thinking and not from Deductive thinking. There is so much to say about the distinctiveness of each of these bipolarities, but the striking thing is that deductive thinking adds to a postulate what clarifies it while inductive thinking deduces from the postulate what explains it. 

This simple and clear distinction between the two poles of thinking shed a beam of light on psychoanalysis. Generally, we agree that the basic discovery of psychoanalysis came to Freud from interpreting dreams and discovering (uncovering)the primary and secondary processes. He inductively distinguished the difference between Instinct and Trieb, the duality of the subject in narcissism, even the Beyond the pleasure Principle, and most of his major and not so major discoveries came from inductive thinking.

I went back to the Standard Edition to remind myself of what was deductive and what was inductive in his work, and it was a totally new journey to psychoanalysis. This issue brought to my mind the points of disagreement I always had with analysis based on deductive work; especially with the birth of schools (even Lacanism). It also reminded me of some difficult supervisions of some candidates who insisted that discovering the unconscious is a deduction and they could not comprehend the notion that it should come from inducing it from the material. I must admit that I did not have that distinction clear in my mind as it is now after reading Stanly's book. 

I wish some young analysts would include the distinction between deductive analysis and inductive analysis and training faculties in the institutes give that distinction some serious attention

 

Understanding (Interpreting) With and Without a Context

Nothing but Nothing could be understood (interpreted) without a proper context. The context of 9\11 is that the USA is no longer as it was till then separate from the rest of the world –politically, socially, geographically – even psychologically. The most evident part of ending that previously accepted position by Americans is the changes that happened to the USA since then. Some of the changes were profound and foundational and some were and still are more loud but not of any serious nature. I am saying that as a trained psychoanalysts who is conditioned to find the ‘context’ of the changes in the patient's condition before reaching a proper interpretation of the patient’s claimed changes. This attitude is foundational in any work of interpretation in any field of epistemology. The difference between a good analyst and a not so good one it their abilities to finding the right context to use in understanding the meaning of the patient change.

The war in the Ukraine is a historical statement that requires interpretation, because of many features in it. So, thinkers have to chose the context this event has to be understood within. I have chosen the context of the end of the last empire in the history of social development. That war could be understood within the framework of the undeniable fact that Europe is the last front that still carries features of the old sociopolitical entities…… the Empires. Trying to maintain its military façade NATO backfired and resulted in the devastation of the Ukraine. To still think in terms of democracy and unilateral leadership, and in terms of communism (whish does no exist anymore) and capitalism is like psychoanalysis based on the libido theory.

We are few decades from Earth invading the Milkyway Galaxy. So please shed off the old fixation on They and US.

 Sociopolitical Background of the Ukraine Crisis.

A Psychoanalyst’s Point of View

Few weeks before the onset of the military action in the Ukraine I published several postings on issues that pertain to ‘group psychology’ like self-deception, hate, projection., etc. I was trying to use the psychoanalytic way of understanding matters, which could be initiated by ‘group psychologies too, to highlight the use of analytic thinking outside the Clinique. Soon after the start of the crisis in the Ukraine it became clear  that not only analysts, but an astonishing range of people-including politicians (active in the politics of Europe at this time) did not realize or understand the basic-background- of this crisis. The difficulty this lack of knowledge creates is making the ordinary citizen prone to being misled by politicians-intentionally or unintentionally- if they are ignorant as the case is in the Ukraine war. Politics and history of political crises were and still are of major interest to me since I was politically active in my youth, in my country Egypt.

Two years ago, I finished reading a very intelligent book on the history of the rise and fall of empires. It started with the Babylonian empire, ending with the Western, or the European  Empire, which is now an American extension of the vanished British Empire. The evolution of the human race, and the recent vanishing importance of distance and time in our Globe earth, facilitated the emergence of several centers of power in the world, after long centuries of the dominance of one or two empires at a time, at most. All that led to a major...major change in the concept of coexistence on ‘earth’. The Western or the European Empire, that owned the world by hock and crock and now with the USA as its extension exploited most of the world for six long centuries. After three wars of its own making in one century this empire destroyed itself while the rest of the world was constructing a worldwide concept of coexistence. The European Empire was created by the West occupied and established colonies all over the world, exploiting their wealth, fought among themselves, but uniting against the exploited colonies and helping each other in keeping the grip of domination.

After the two big wars Western Europe in Europe the west was looking for ideological thought to stay floating. The two wars made Europeans become politically more mature and improvise defined socio-political programs to be govern accordingly. The political parties-including the communist parties- created political democracy from those conflicting ideologies. Yet, one overriding idea (value) remained and protected democracy from being stifled by another Hitler, i.e., “reform and not change”. Western Europe -which is now named The European Union, is the modern and more civilized image of the old, outdated concept of an empire. The USA helped the old empire to get the time to rebuild and renew itself. Russia was not part of that movement on the road to the unity of Europe because it was building on its revolution in 1917 when WWII started. It was devastated by the WWII more than any other European country because they all had colonies that were lifesavers while Russia did not have any. Nevertheless, the West considered Russia a dangerous adversary (because of communism) and adopted with it the same attitude it took from Nitze Germany. They were not yet completely recovered from WWII to attack her, so they created NATO. It is a military face of a dying empire that could not surpass the Russian’s speed in recovering from the war.

NATO is the last breath in the dying Western Empire. I must explain why what is happening since the end of WWII is manifestation of the gradual death of this Empire. The death of empires is preceded by the birth of small political entities and the weakness of the central authority. Just to make it brief, the weakness and end of the great ruling families (the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs, etc.)  was the onset of the decline of the old Europe and the beginning of the last phase in that decline.  

The war in the Ukraine is one of the results of the decline and the falling of the Euro-American empire. After the Second World War; the Western European-American empire denied and avoided facing up to that three things: A. They are not anymore, the socio-cultural-moral power they were before for  several centuries, B. They do not have an enemy to hate and endeavor to crush, so they had to find one or create it.  C. Communism, after succeeding in getting both China and Russia out of their old decayed political states, has changed to become the basis of stronger and more advanced capitalist countries; it made social justice a fundamental component of governing whether it was conservative or liberal.

As was explained in previous postings, two senior employees (von Leyen and Stoltenberg) in the European Union, who were also a bad mix of ignorance and arrogance, took on themselves to revive a dying Western Empire and the disappearance of the need for NATO. NATO was created by a dozen countries to protect the European union from communist Russia. Russa is not a communist country anymore and it did not object to its precious allies to join NATO. So, creating from Russia an imaginary danger lets politicians play a game of public opinion that misleads the subjects of that empire. And that is what is happening now in sometimes vulgar ways.

The danger of communism does not exist anymore. The links between the West and Russia is evident and undeniable in the industrial integration between the two old enemies. Human mutual interests are not hampered anymore by political conflicts. Russia cannot be ignored as different from Western Europe in all aspects of life {do not foul yourselves with the notions of dictatorship. Russia once had a bad political politician named Yeltsin who was as comic as Trump is}. Therefore, the war in the Ukraine is understandable as a residue of the vanishing Western Empire and concepts like democracy, social values, our this and that, have to gradually and even better quickly  to disappear because we are already few steps inside a less narcissistic world and a more global meaning of world.

 

The Precipitating Factor in Psychoanalysis

    There are events that look as of no big significance, yet they are followed by major changes that eventually prove that those insignificant events were quite significant in a different way. This  is familiar both in individual cases as in political and social cases. They precipitate  change in unexpected way. Changes in those cases are understood only retroactively. They reveal that the sudden  is only so because change was taking unexpected and unnoticeable course.

    I will give two examples from my clinical practice which stand out  in my memory as exemplary to what the word precipitation suggests. To do that it is important to mention that after Lacan published his paper on the “Mirror Stage” the understanding of narcissism had to radically leave the Libido theory behind. I gradually and unintentionally (for a while) recognized a difference between the two types of patients'  associations that relate to who is talking to me. There was the I patient and the me patient. The I talks as the subject of the analysis, and whatever he mentioned came from that person who is lying on my couch, not someone talking to me about him: {She was nice and kind}. The me patient talked to me about himself as the object of the analysis {I felt that she is nice and kind}. The subtle difference is the difference between talking (I am), and talking- about (me says), which directly or indirectly told me about his me. 

    The first patient- Mr. P. was an I patient. At the time he was in analysis it was common to use the psychoanalytic stages of development (Oral, Anal, Phallic) as an additional element in the diagnosis of patients. Mr. P. was an anal character (person) where ‘everything in his life’ was tidy, and his religion (a middle eastern religion) was the only source of rules in his believes and life. One day on the train which he used daily to commute to work he had a dispute with another commuter that resulted in some physical struggle which was immediately stopped by the other passengers. Just using the diagnosis of anality for a second, I would say that: something undesirable skipped the psychological sphincter of Mr. P., and the tidy I had to deal with the untidy nature of !!!!!me. The event was not so aggravating, but it was a psychical straw that broke the back of Mr. P’s rigidity.  The change started with doubting everything about what he thought of himself  and evolved to reveal to him a "me" that was a secret he kept, particularly-since childhood- from his mother.  Analysis of the ‘me’ was the rout to sort of cure, which was limiting a milder anal character to himself and let others live outside his expectations.

The second case was of a typical Egyptian young woman (Twenty-two years old) who was expected to be a me person (the object of anything she talked about, to the degree of not having a speaking I at all (if there was one). She was expected to speak as middle class, well brought up daughter and future wife, and stop being argumentative and a person with an identity. She was expected to speak as upper class well brought up girl, and stop being argumentative. The mother who came with her for the first interview mentioned marriage and the suitability of her daughter for a good match since she is getting a little older than her relatives and friends. The daughter was obvious in her ’childishness’, which was- to me- an undeclared strong mutual dependency  between mother and daughter. So, it was a complicated me kind of patient: the me that mother does not approve of is the me that preserve the interdependency between the two. The me that the patient was keen to acquire and, able to be, was the one the upper class 'Dallo-a' (an Egyptian term of a spoiled brat) is not suppose to have. The analysis was stopped when the patient, after few weeks of getting worse, was not allowed to come to her sessions by orders from her mother. 

Unexpectedly, I got a call from  her brother few weeks later informing me that she was hospitalized for a couple of weeks and she and the rest of the family (except the mother) wanted her back in therapy. I found out that what precipitated her breakdown was her cousin and a friend getting engaged and were supposed to get married soon. He explained the decision to pursue therapy was that after several "bizarre" fights with her mother in which she mentioned things she became aware of in her therapy the mother thought that I am not good for her daughter. The patient became incoherent, and sleepless and had a tendency to be physically violent. Hospitalization was recommended. After two weeks she wanted to go back to therapy and -as the brother mentioned- she was much more mature and serious about her future than anyone even thought that she has ever considered those matters.  The precipitating factor  was seeing with her own eyes what her mother did not want her to see. What she saw was that she was the one who is the main person in any marriage arrangement even if it is a traditional marriage. The precipitating factor was maturity as a requirement for separating from mother's symbiotic attachment to her daughter.

The link between the precipitating factor and the sudden change is a gradual unconscious change to undesirable ways of life, or thinking. What this means is that the precipitating factor is merely a trigger of change that is already ready to be declared but is not. The important factor here for analysts is the gradual but consistent process of interpretation and avoiding the scattered interpretations that do not lead to a definable target. With Mr. P. the  definable target was gradually bring to focus rigidity as a me that is translated in dealing with others as an I. Interpretations only -interpretations- could reveal to the patient the distinction between I and me, because an interpretation shows the patient difference between what is said and what is meant. This point is seldom touched in training, because in the history of the unconscious we were trained to think of it to be hidden and not part of the obvious, while it is always there in front of our eyes and ears. It just has to be brought out of its embeddedness in the obvious.  as an example: Mr. P. was quite concerned and worried about his son's 'Lesse  Fair' attitude regarding spending (twenty dollars a week). I intercepted his concerns as what about the future. This shift in emphasis brough about his anxieties about his son's idealization of him and his anal restrictions. In other words, interpretation is making the implicit explicit and that kind of change would eventually lead to the a precipitating factor of change.  

Interpretation leads to creating a gap between I and me. This gap is where the work of precipitating the cure takes place. When Mr. P. realized that there is an me that he is denying its existence this awareness released several other restrictions he was imposing on himself, like religion and its rituals. 

There is more say at this juncture but I wand to write about is how this model of understanding is also applicable to sociopolitical phenomena. I home to write something about it.