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Dialogue, Confirmation, and the “Good”
Abstract
Perhaps more than most psychological concepts, the concept of recognition is central to the most fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? Recognition underscores one of our basic ideas about being human; namely, that our selfhoods emerge from, are maintained within, and contribute to the shaping of our community of other human beings. However, I think the concept of recognition can also serve to illuminate a more hidden aspect of what it means to be human, what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a desire “to be rightly placed in relation to the good.” Our relationships to ourselves and others are transformed when we are recognized as orienting towards a “good.” I use phenomenological description and case examples to illustrate my thesis.Quizá en mayor grado que la mayoría de conceptos psicológicos, el concepto de reconocimiento es central para la pregunta fundamental por excelencia: ¿qué significa ser humano? El reconocimiento subraya una de nuestras ideas básicas acerca de ser humano, a saber que nuestro sentimiento de sí emerge de la comunidad de los seres humanos, es mantenido en ella, y al mismo tiempo contribuye a la formación de la misma. Pero creo que el concepto de reconocimiento puede también servir para iluminar un aspecto más escondido de lo que significa ser humano, lo que el filósofo Charles Taylor denomina el deseo de “ser correctamente situado en relación al bien.” Nuestra relación con nosotros mismos y con los demás queda transformada cuando nos sentimos reconocidos como orientados hacia “el bien.” Utilizo una descripción fenomenológica y ejemplos clínicos para ilustrar mi tesis.Peut-être davantage que la plupart des concepts psychologiques, le concept de reconnaissance est central dans la question la plus fondamentale: que signifie être humain? La reconnaissance souligne l'une de nos idées fondamentale au sujet d'être humain, à savoir que le sens d'être soi émerge, est maintenu à l'intérieur, et contribue au façonnement de notre communauté des autres êtres humains. Mais je pense que le concept de reconnaissance sert aussi à éclairer un aspect plus caché de ce que veut dire être humain, ce que le philosophe Charles Taylor appelle un désir «d'être à juste titre placé en relation au bon.» Nos relations à nous-mêmes et aux autres sont transformées lorsque nous sommes reconnus comme nous orientant vers le «bon.» J'utilise une description phénoménologique et des exemples de cas en illustration de ma thèse.Mehr als die meisten psychologischen Konzepte ist das Konzept der Anerkennung zentral für die grundlegende Frage: Was bedeutet es ein Mensch zu sein? Anerkennung unterstreicht eine unserer grundlegenden Vorstellungen des Menschseins: Unser Selbst-Sein entwickelt sich, wird aufrecht erhalten und liefert seine Beitrag zur Formgebung unserer menschlichen Gemeinschaft. Ich denke aber, dass das Konzept der Anerkennung auch dazu dienen kann, einen mehr versteckten Aspekt dessen, was es heiβt Mensch zu sein, zu erhellen; der Philosoph Charles Taylor benennt die Sehnsucht, “gut platziert in der Beziehung zum Guten zu sein.” Unsere Beziehung zu uns selbst und zu anderen verändert sich, wenn wir als etwas anerkannt werden, was sich zum “Guten” hin wendet. Um diese These darzustellen, benutze ich eine phänomenologische Beschreibung und Fallbeispiele.Forse più della maggior parte dei concetti psicologici, il concetto di riconoscimento è centrale per la questione più fondamentale: cosa vuol dire essere umani? Il riconoscimento sottolinea una delle idee di base circa gli esseri umani, cioè che il nostro sé emerge da, è mantenuto in, e contribuisce a dar forma a, la comunità di altri esseri umani. Ma io credo che il concetto di riconoscimento possa servire anche a chiarire un aspetto più nascosto di cosa significa essere umani, quello che il filosofo Charles Taylor chiama desiderio: “di essere giustamente collocati sin relazione al bene”. La nostra relazione con noi stessi e con gli altri si trasforma quando siamo riconosciuti come orientati al “bene”. Utilizzo una descrizione fenomenologica e degli esempi clinici per illustrare la mia tesi.
... The third foundation, the project of restoring dignity, is what gives the process of the work on the first two themes their gravity, depth, and richness (Kunz, 2007;Orange, 2011). I believe that gaining skill with one's emotional process and gaining the resilience to use one's voice in a community that does not hold one well is what restores a person's sense of dignity (Jacobs, 1996(Jacobs, , 2008(Jacobs, , 2017a. ...
... Finally, a sense of agency is woven through the repair or restoration all of these foundational reasons for entering therapy (Weisel-Barth, 2009). A sense of agency is crucial for persons to have a sense of their own dignity (Jacobs, 2008;Wollheim, 1986). ...
This report draws on insights from contemporary Gestalt therapy and intersubjective psychoanalysis to examine the relationship between the felt sense of hope, dread, and dignity in a dialogic therapeutic process. Both schools of thought emphasize the relationship of hope and dread in the dialogic process, and this report explores working how a sense of dignity emerges from working with hope and dread dialogically. Hope and dread vacillate in the process of a therapy relationship as the patient reaches for their dignity through truthful, agentic dialogue. The restoration of dignity during the coronavirus shutdown process has moved from background to foreground in our therapeutic conversations.
... Given that dignity concerns the worth of the person, it is understandable that many selfpsychologists devote attention to the topic (Jacobs, 2008;Ornstein, 1993). As Orange (2013) observes, "Self psychology, with its awareness of the many forms of shame and degradation, has placed the restoration of human dignity in the center of the therapeutic project" (p. ...
This paper explores the foundational status of the concept of human dignity in relational thought. The author highlights the importance of dignity in everyday clinical work, as well as the role this notion has played in inspiring what has been called the "relational turn" in psychoanalysis. Utilizing concepts from ethical theory and current analytic ideas regarding the multiplicity of self-states, the author sketches a model of psychic experience in which dignity plays a defining role. This model emphasizes the ongoing dialectic between dignity-based processes (in which Self and Other are experienced as unconditionally valuable) and processes in which we experience Self and Other as only conditionally valuable, or in many cases of pathology, unconditionally bad. A dignity-based vision of analytic process is proposed, wherein analyst and patient are engaged in the co-construction of an intersubjective space that is progressively more consistent with their intrinsic worth as human beings. It is suggested that, by explicitly affirming human dignity as an overarching value of relational thought, we would be encouraging continuous revision of our theories in order to further reflect the worth of the human subject, a process that could lead to more humane theories of analytic work.
Drawing heavily on a dream with Biblical themes, this paper describes my spiritual psychoanalytic journey whereby, my personal, spiritual, and psychoanalytic identities have self-organized into one inseparable whole. The celebration and recognition of our infinite interconnectedness will be seen to define a spiritual psychoanalytic practice that includes a willingness to act against any structures of oppression that impinge on any portion of our human and natural collective. The paper will conclude with some reflections on moral dilemmas inherent to a radical contextual approach informed by the ethics of a spiritual psychoanalytic activist sensibility. An afterword will introduce a brief epilogue written by one of my patients, an epilogue that constitutes an uncanny interconnection between our respective spiritual journeys.
Questo report fa riferimento alle intuizioni della psicoterapia della Gestalt contemporanea e della psicoanalisi intersoggettiva, per esaminare la relazione tra i sentimenti di speranza, paura e dignità all'interno di un processo terapeutico dialogico. Entrambe le scuole di pensiero enfa-tizzano la relazione tra speranza e paura nel processo dialogico, e questo report esplora il modo in cui un senso di dignità emerge dal lavoro dialogico con la speranza e con la paura. Speranza e paura oscillano nel processo di una relazione terapeutica nel momento in cui il paziente ricer-ca la dignità attraverso un dialogo attivo ed autentico. Nel periodo di lockdown causato dal Co-ronavirus il tema del ritrovamento della dignità è passato dallo sfondo in primo piano durante i nostri colloqui terapeutici.
Résumé La conception de Frederick Perls était que l’empathie favorise la confluence, c’est-à-dire qu’elle brouille les distinctions (« frontières ») entre le soi et l’autre. « Il ne peut pas y avoir de vrai contact dans l’empathie. Au pire, cela devient de la confluence » (1973, p. 106), disait-il à sa façon sévère. Depuis, « empathie » est resté presque un gros mot pour de nombreux Gestalt-thérapeutes jusqu’à présent. Cependant, je suis convaincu que l’empathie ne peut pas être exclue de la pratique gestalt-thérapeutique. Il peut être utile de penser à une compréhension gestalt-thérapeutique de l’empathie. Bien sûr, d’un côté l’avertissement de Perls doit être pris au sérieux (mais pas avec rigidité). D’un autre côté le danger de la pensée individualiste, selon laquelle l’individu est enfermé dans son monde intérieur et reste en fin de compte inatteignable pour l’autre, doit être évité. Dans cet article je proposerai quelques idées sur une notion d’empathie que je pense être en accord avec les tendances les plus récentes de la gestalt-thérapie (par exemple l’approche dialogale et la théorie du champ). J’aurai aussi recours à des sources telles que la phénoménologie, la Gestalt-psychologie, l’herméneutique, les neurosciences, et d’autres.
This is a beautiful paper that tells a moving and gripping story of how two people come together to create a mutually vitalizing therapeutic process. And it is a story of courage, mutually facilitated by the two protagonists: Anne’s courage in relaxing her lifelong defenses of toughness and laying her needs and vulnerabilities on the table, and Karen’s courage to trust her therapeutic instincts by meeting Anne toe to toe by not only challenging Anne’s’ defenses but by putting her own vulnerability onto the therapeutic stage.
What role does ethics play in the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy?
For most of its history, psychoanalysis has viewed ethics as a "side issue" in clinical work—occasionally relevant, but not central to therapeutic action. In Psychoanalysis as an Ethical Process, Robert Drozek highlights the foundational importance of ethical experience in the therapeutic relationship, as well as the role that ethical commitments have played in inspiring what has been called the "relational turn" in psychoanalysis.
Using vivid clinical examples from the treatment of patients with severe personality disorders, Drozek sketches out an ethically-grounded vision of analytic process, wherein analyst and patient are engaged in the co-construction of an intersubjective space that is progressively more consistent with their intrinsic worth as human beings. Psychoanalysis can thus be seen as a unique vehicle for therapeutic and ethical change, leading to a dramatic expansion of agency, altruism, and self-esteem for both participants. By bringing our analytic theories into closer contact with our ethical experiences as human beings, we can connect more fully with the fundamental humanity that unites us with our patients, and that serves as the basis for deep and lasting therapeutic change.
This book will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as scholars in ethical theory and philosophy.
The word dignity encompasses more than we can say of it. It is difficult to define, and yet we work with it every day in our offices. I explore various ideas about dignity, and then examine the place of dignity in the process of analysis and therapy. I draw out psychological components of dignity that are often strong themes in our psychoanalytic work. Many patients come to therapy as a result of assaults on their dignity, or from the effects of family situations that are so corrosive that they never developed a sense of their own dignity. For these patients, I think of therapy as a process of either finding or restoring dignity.
Dr. Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity, a Sense of Dignity, and Inspirational Shame” is an interdisciplinary integration of a priori ethics and a phenomenology of dignity. She contends that the human person’s engagement with other people—writ large in the therapeutic encounter—is inherently ethically situated. Moreover, she avers an inherent content to this ethics, namely, mutual respect for distinctively human value—dignity—between and among people. Her ethics of dignity informs her psychoanalytic exploration of experiences of dignity, indignity, and her notion of inspirational shame, among others. I join in Jacobs’ advocacy for therapeutic facilitation of a person’s sense of inherent worth, as well as her opposition to relational contexts of devaluation and degradation. However, the primordiality Jacobs grants to her ethics of dignity often obscures the constitutively cultural, familial, and personal contextuality of, first, her—and in my view, any—ethical conviction; second, what she describes as the experience of being human; third, the alleged indignity of human vulnerability; and finally, the claim that shame is the natural reaction to one’s failure to live up to personal ideals. In the end, and subject to certain clinical concerns, Jacobs’ article integrates into psychoanalysis primordial ethical duties that she and others claim inhere in us as human beings.
As much as a bidirectional model of influence has enhanced our understanding of the therapeutic process, this article argues that reliance on two-person models has limited our ability to explore the role that influence plays in therapeutic action. From a psychoanalytic complexity perspective, the manner in which the dyad adapts to influence is a dynamic, emergent property of numerous systems in which the dyad itself is embedded. The conditions that support the dyad's capacity to adapt to and use influence in a manner that builds complexity and supports therapeutic change are explored and contrasted with the qualities of systems that "dread influence" and tend to resist change. From a complexity perspective, therapeutic action involves the dyadic capacity to adapt to one another, as well as to these multiple sources of influence, and to self-organize in a manner that produces and sustains therapeutic change. © The International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.
This article outlines my essential paradigm as it relates to self psychology, how I arrived at it, and how I would position my perspective in the context of the larger psychoanalytic and scientific community. My dialogic complexity systems model is most closely aligned with the intersubjective systems theory of Atwood and Stolorow and was shown to have acquired its defining shape in the context of an in-depth exploration of the connection between the latter theory and Kohut's self psychology. My paradigm is part of the wider relational turn in contemporary psychoanalysis. I have characterized the evolution of my perspective as my continuous preoccupation with the deepening and refinement of my understanding of the limits of psychoanalytic theory and practice and the cultivation of a clinical attitude that allows me to fully embrace those limits, an attitude that combines the caring ambience of genuine dialogue with the spiritual calmness of nondual awareness. My perspective can, therefore, be understood as my ongoing attempt at unifying my intellect, my heart, and my spirit into one experiential whole. A dialogic complexity systems model grounded in a post-Cartesian nondual philosophy constitutes the explanatory reduction of my theory and philosophy as lived in real time.
In this paper, two clinical sequences are presented in an effort to describe the methods by which the analyst attempts to recognise, understand and verbally symbolize for himself and the analysand the specific nature of the moment-to-moment interplay of the analyst's subjective experience, the subjective experience of the analysand and the intersubjectively-generated experience of the analytic pair (the experience of the analytic third). The first clinical discussion describes how the intersubjective experience created by the analytic pair becomes accessible to the analyst in part through the analyst's experience of 'his own' reveries, forms of mental activity that often appear to be nothing more than narcissistic self-absorption, distractedness, compulsive rumination, daydreaming and the like. A second clinical account focuses on an instance in which the analyst's somatic delusion, in conjunction with the analysand's sensory experiences and body-related fantasies, served as a principal medium through which the analyst experienced and came to understand the meaning of the leading anxieties that were being (intersubjectively) generated.
It is by now generally accepted that something more than interpretation is necessary to bring about therapeutic change. Using an approach based on recent studies of mother-infant interaction and non-linear dynamic systems and their relation to theories of mind, the authors propose that the something more resides in interactional intersubjective process that give rise to what they will call 'implicit relational knowing'. This relational procedural domain is intrapsychically distinct from the symbolic domain. In the analytic relationship it comprises intersubjective moments occurring between patient and analyst that can create new organisations in, or reorganise not only the relationship between the interactants, but more importantly the patient's implicit procedural knowledge, his ways of being with others. The distinct qualities and consequences of these moments (now moments, 'moments of meeting') are modelled and discussed in terms of a sequencing process that they call moving along. Conceptions of the shared implicit relationship, transference and countertransference are discussed within the parameters of this perspective, which is distinguished from other relational theories and self-psychology. In sum, powerful therapeutic action occurs within implicit relational knowledge. They propose that much of what is observed to be lasting therapeutic effect results from such changes in this intersubjective relational domain.
- Kohut H.