Selected Papers of Joseph Lichtenberg : The World Book of Psychoanalysis by Lichtenberg Joseph

Author:Lichtenberg, Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 2195035
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

The empathic and other vantage points

The original ideal of “unbiased” analytic listening was meant to most closely approximate the vantage point believed to be optimal for the nineteenth-century natural scientist.2 Neutral, impartial, evenly suspended attention to everything there is to observe places the analyst outside the immediacy of interaction (regulatory or otherwise). He resides above the scene as benevolent fair-minded appraiser, or as patients often depreciatingly describe it, like an experimenter watching a rat in a maze. The dehumanizing sound of these precepts was never meant as a denial of the analyst’s disciplined concern—only as a guidance for it. Likewise, the precepts were never meant to disassociate analytic technique from the orienting features of analytic theory. Thus, in following the dictum to stand at a point equidistant from id, ego and superego, the analyst knew that it meant he was to particularly observe the defensive activity of the ego. He was to identify and interpret this activity first, penetrating layer by layer from the surface down—the “onion-peeling” technique. At the bottom lay conflicts related to specific developmental challenges—the mastery of oral dependence, anal ambivalence, castration anxiety, penis envy, primal scene exposure, etc. The degree of dystonicity was the sign of readiness for the recognition of defense. Thus the patient who reported how well he was doing in some area of his life might have been responded to with silence by the analyst-observer; while absorbing the report as information, he might have too readily inferred the patient’s defensive use of avoidance, and therefore waited until the analysand returned to his problems.

The empathic vantage point, by emphasizing “experiencing with the patient’s experience,” prompts the analytic listener to ask: “What is the patient expressing?” This, I believe, is a more basically unbiased question than what the patient is defending against and how he is doing it. The answer to the question, “What does empathic entry into the patient’s experiencing tell me he is expressing?” may well be, in some instances, the same as that inferred by the analyst-observer pictured above, namely, that the patient needs to protect himself against a deeper problem when he says that he is doing well. Often, however, a perception closer to the analysand’s intention-in-depth may be that he is saying this not to defend himself, but to invite my sharing a moment of pride and pleasure at his or our joint accomplishment. The analyst-observer might infer this too, but I believe the analyst employing the empathic vantage point is better positioned to do so. Likewise, I believe the empathic vantage point allows the analyst to note that the patient who expresses disappointment with him or a parent most often is not invested in asking the analyst to define objective reality as in a natural science reality test. He is expressing the subjective “realness” of his experience as a necessary cooperative compliance with the basic principle of free association, and it is his expression of his subjective reality that alone constitutes the information required for effective analysis at that moment.

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