Of Two Minds by T.M. Luhrmann

Author:T.M. Luhrmann [Luhrmann, T. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79190-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

THE PSYCHOANALYST

When I began this work, I found a mentor in a gifted senior analyst, who told me, when I spoke to him about the pathways of young psychiatrists, that I should read Magister Ludi. What I’d told him, he said, reminded him of the selection process for the elite players of the fictional glass bead game at the novel’s center. He thought the novel would help me to understand the process of becoming a psychoanalyst.

Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) is Hermann Hesse’s most elaborate novel, possibly his best. It presents the putative history of Joseph Knecht (in German, “servant”), the legendary master of the glass bead game, and his rise to prominence. The game itself is never fully described, yet it becomes clear that it demands not only sophisticated intellectual skill but a kind of personal grace and purity that direct ambition will thwart. The hero “had no desire to dominate, took no pleasure in commanding; he desired the contemplative life far more than the active life, and would have been content to spend many years more, if not his whole life, as an obscure student, an inquiring and reverent pilgrim.”8 He becomes a powerful ruler of men. Most of Hesse’s novels have a sometimes irritatingly noble character who struggles against a plot of human pettiness, and Knecht is his fullest characterization.

This is an unusual way to describe what is, after all, a well-institutionalized profession, but it captures a quality that is often missed by those who look at psychoanalysis from the outside. This quality is its ethos, its moral tone. Psychoanalysis has a profound moral vision, but that vision is not focused on the rights and wrongs of behavior. That is why Philip Rieff, in a famous book, Freud: The Mind of a Moralist, could argue that though Freud had a sternly moralistic mind, psychoanalysis by its nature was amoral because it ignored conventional standards. A world that took psychoanalysis seriously, Rieff said, would have no ethical core because its culture would have no basis for guidance. Analysts do tend—as Earle pointed out—to listen in order to understand, not to judge. They want to know why someone committed adultery and lied about it more than they want to condemn the action. They are interested in intentions, both conscious and unconscious, and in how those intentions lead to action. They see, as one senior analyst put it, action as in service to the self, and what fascinates them is not what people do but why—what self those actions serve. Analysts also believe that the “why” is inherently unknowable, because aspects of one’s own psyche are always hidden and an observer can never see clearly because his own unconscious intentions distort his vision. But analysts also believe that you can come to know more than you did, even if you can never know everything. The psychoanalytic ethos, then, focuses on the honesty with which you try to know and the caring in the way you try to help another person know.

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