Aug 11, 2011
Interview with Alan Bass
Alan Bass is philosopher and psychoanalyst, a professor at the New School for Social Research, and a Fellow at IPTAR. He the author of two books, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (2000) and Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (2006), He is interviewed by Jared Russell, a senior candidate at IPTAR.
JR: Your new book, Interpretation and Difference, fleshes out with greater complexity the philosophical stakes of your previous book, Difference and Disavowal, to which it appears as a companion. It's recognizably more theoretical than clinical, more philosophical than psychoanalytic. But my impression is that one of your major concerns is the breakdown of these sorts of oppositions, to show how philosophy and psychoanalysis fit together. It would seem wrong or at least inadequate to consider it simply more theoretical or more philosophical than the previous book, although you're treating Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, who are more readily considered philosophers. So, how does the new book extend the previous work in ways that are still relevant to clinical practice?
AB: The answer is clearly in the title. Difference and Disavowal starts with the clinical problem of resistance to interpretation, concrete patients. There are two basic points: concrete patients have a defensive stance toward any differentiating process, and in treatment, interpretation serves a differentiating function. Such patients will bring to treatment their basic defenses, which will be manifest against the interpretive process itself. However, I always feel we learn the most from limit cases. And since these are limit cases for interpretation, they force us to think about interpretation in ways that we have not heretofore. Particularly about the question I call the reality of difference. In Difference and Disavowal I tried to make clear that one of the things that has to change for analysts, if they are to work effectively with concrete patients, is their own conception of reality. If the analyst has the same concrete understanding of reality as the concrete patient, he or she will never be able to understand what the patient is defending against, how the patient is using the presupposition that reality is what is objectively there, to defend against something else, other aspects of reality. Nor will the analyst be able to understand why interpretation itself is a function of an expanded view of reality. InInterpretation and Difference my aim is to look at those philosophers who have reexamined interpretation along with metaphysical presuppositions about reality. These are, most prominently, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida.
JR: That was inherent to my question about the breakdown of the opposition between psychoanalysis and philosophy, because each of these thinkers you're working with considers himself to be practicing something other than philosophy as it is traditionally conceived.
AB: This has always been one of my basic ideas. Freud always said psychoanalysis cannot be metaphysics. Yet Freud, I believe, did not understand in depth what metaphysics really means. He did not understand how he repeated metaphysical presuppositions in some of his most basic thinking, including what it means to practice interpretation. So yes, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are the great line of thinkers who are trying to think outside the constraints of metaphysics, all the while understanding that metaphysics — as Derrida in particular emphasizes — is not something we can just jump out of. It has to be very carefully and rigorously understood, then deconstructed and dismantled, to find other ways of thinking. So that indeed, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are not philosophers in the traditional sense, and there is a very strong psychoanalytic cast to what they do.
JR: Perhaps Nietzsche most of all, who considered himself a psychologist and genealogist — practicing on history by practicing with force.
AB: And he uses interpretation as part of what he calls active thinking and active interpretation, which is an entirely different conception of interpretation than the reactive, identity-producing, equality-producing interpretation of metaphysics. Heidegger, I would say, is a reader of the history of metaphysics in terms of "symptoms." He is always looking at how metaphysics is the history of a repression — not repression in the psychoanalytic sense, but the history of a forgetting of the question of being. But then metaphysics itself becomes a set of symptoms that manifest this forgetfulness. There is a kind of theory of compromise formation in Heidegger, although if he were in the room with me he wouldn't like to hear that! Derrida, in one of his earliest papers, picks up on Nietzsche's two interpretations of interpretation: the metaphysical one, that is always based on the idea of a lost origin that cannot ever be recovered, (which in many ways has been the psychoanalytic theory of interpretation), versus Nietzschean interpretation as active intervention and differentiating process not grounded in causality and determinism.
JR: You write that working with concrete patients demands that the analyst maintain an attitude of questioning. Interpretation here, non-causally conceived, is not about providing information, but about holding open a space for asking questions. Does this mean inhabiting a certain philosophical position in relation to clinical material, and could we think of philosophy then as an intrinsically "clinical" project?
AB: "Philosophical" in the way you mentioned a moment ago, not philosophical in the usual sense. Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are again not exactly philosophers. Heidegger talks about a kind of thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science, which is able to think the complex ways in which science itself is the inevitable product of metaphysics, contrary to our usual understanding of science and metaphysics as simply opposed. That was Freud's problem, that he only saw it the usual way: science over here, metaphysics over there. Nietzsche had already understood this before Heidegger. He's very cogent about the way in which the positivist thought that dominated the science of his day "halts before the factual" — prevents the development of a rigorously interpretive psychological discipline of unconscious processes.
JR: I wanted to emphasize Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as having practiced philosophy in a non-classical way, in order to draw out the fact that Interpretation and Difference isn't purely or "simply" philosophical. I imagine many readers, particularly clinicians, risk picking it up and thinking, "Oh, this is philosophy," or, "It's just theory," as if to say what you're working on is peripheral to clinical, "practical" concerns.
AB: These thinkers have everything to offer the clinician who gets to the point of seeing that there are constraints within psychoanalysis against understanding what it is we are doing when we interpret.
JR: Putting together previous work that you've done on Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and of course Derrida, this book would seem to be the culmination of a large project for you. This has been a long time coming.
AB: To say the very least! I started as a student of Derrida, and then for all sorts of personal reasons decided I wanted to become an analyst, which I did. And I found myself happy as an analyst. My own orientation was strongly based in Freud, although there are decades of important work after Freud that have influenced me. All along I kept working on the philosophy, but it was a thing apart, and not yet really integrated with my actual clinical work. Of course Derrida has written a great deal about Freud, much of which I had translated, so that was always there for me. But the way in which this project has been so long in coming is the following. I was in a study group at New York Psychoanalytic on psychoanalysis and literature. At one point we started to read Wallace Stevens. And we read one of his most famous poems: "The Snow Man." I had a kind of light bulb moment, where the things that Derrida had written about fetishism in Glas seemed to provide a very good lever for a reading of this extremely profound poem. I started to present my ideas to the study group, and was enthusiastically received. I then wrote a paper called "Fetishism, Reality and The Snow Man," in which the basic argument about fetishism and the disavowal of difference was elaborated. But there was still nothing clinical. What happened next was something I can't quite pin down, but was in the context of encountering the vexing patients we all encounter, the patients who resist interpretation.
JR: Patients who resist interpretation, but who keep coming for treatment.
AB: Exactly. And analysts have always worked with such patients. I love to cite Karl Abraham's paper from 1919, in which he describes this phenomenon to a "T." He doesn't have a good theoretical grasp, but the patients he describes are exactly the same. In Freud there are moments, for example when he throws up his hands at patients who accept nothing but "the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments." I personally believe that one of the problems in the Wolf-Man case, which Freud finally came to understand in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," was that there were very large pockets of concreteness. And there's a major reference inBeyond the Pleasure Principle, when Freud discusses patients who repeat the past, but without a sufficient degree of aloofness to understand it. He's interested in patients who repeat painful experiences, but who cannot link it to the past, so they develop what he calls, in a very telling phrase, a "demonic transference." I think this is very close to concreteness, but Freud doesn't really tackle the problem.
Again tracing my own evolution, at one point I had a concrete case of my own, and simultaneously was supervising the treatment of a concrete patient in which the analyst was really stuck. I wanted to help both of us. I don't know exactly how it happened, but I came to think about these patients in terms of fetishism as defense against differentiation. These patients have a great problem differentiating fantasy from reality, they take fantasy as reality. That's why we can't analyze the transference, and yet as you say they keep coming. Why? That's when I began to think through my revision of Freud on fetishism, and to see that the central problem of fetishism as sexual difference could be extended to fetishistic compromise formations in general.
I then found out that this idea is not original to me. There's a fundamentally important article by Edith Jacobson, "Denial and Repression" (1957), in which she very clearly sees the link between patients who resist interpretation and fetishism. She doesn't conceive fetishism the same way I do, but from within her developmental framework she says that such patients reflect a stage in which the child has differentiated between inner and outer, but then acts as if that differentiation has not occurred. So she really sees these patients as poised between differentiation and non-differentiation. And what's so valuable about her idea is that it's not a deficit theory of concreteness. There is a lot of deficit-theorizing of concreteness, but hers is a theory of conflict, even though she speaks developmentally. So as I say, there are other people who have seen the link between fetishism and concreteness: Owen Renik in "The Use of the Analyst as a Fetish," John Steiner in Psychic Retreats. There's a literature on concreteness, and a small literature on fetishism and concreteness. But I found that in this literature, everyone comes up against the question of differentiation. Some treat it as a major theme, some don't, but they come up against it.
This is where I draw on my philosophical perspective. Given everything I've learned from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, I think that one reason analysts do not explore the question of differentiation in depth, is because they don't have the tools to do so. It takes them into a way of thinking about reality that they haven't been prepared for. That was exactly Freud's problem. He got embroiled in the famously oxymoronic phrase, "reality of castration," because he could only think of sexual difference in terms of phallic and castrated, presence and absence. He couldn't think sexual difference in any non-concrete way.
JR: Not just Freud, also his critics. Psychologists are generally unable to think beyond a classical, Cartesian framework: presence and absence, subjects and objects.
AB: But it's about more than the "subject/object dichotomy," which has become a buzzword today. This is why I insist on the question of reality. It's about the expansion of our thinking about reality, a thinking you traditionally see in philosophy or in certain branches of science, a thinking about space and time. You mentioned, when we started to speak, holding open a certain space. This is one of the big themes of the book: interpretation and difference in relation to a non-metaphysical thinking of space and time. This is what my chapter on Heidegger tries to spell out. It is a huge theme in Derrida, whose concept of differance has to do with space and time — the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space — and certainly has everything to do with his thinking about interpretation. I'm trying to link interpretation to a non-metaphysical thinking of space and time. This is totally necessary for analysts if they're going to understand what they do when they interpret, especially in relation to the environmental space of analysis, and to time in analysis.
JR: It's true that "subject/object dichotomy" is a buzzword these days, but that's because the background most analysts are trained in is cognitive psychology. Cognition describes a certain relationship to reality, where I'm inside my head and the objective world is out there, and I take in information through various perceptual and mechanical processes. Two analysts — Winnicott and Loewald — who try to think beyond this simplistic paradigm, are also two thinkers most touched by philosophy, certainly Loewald
AB: Certainly Loewald, who is a major presence in both books. The idea that the basic phenomenological function of interpretation — not the content of interpretation but, what we're doing when we interpret — is a differentiating process — that's Loewald's idea. Loewald's conception of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis is rooted in the internalization of the differential between the patient and the analyst. Loewald is also specific about his debt to Heidegger. You can hear Heidegger on almost every page of Loewald. Now, Winnicott…Yes, transitionality is about space and about time, what he calls the "root of symbolism in time." Winnicott, in a potentially powerful way, takes us into what he explicitly calls a "third area" thinking, which is neither subjective nor objective, but which thinks about space and about time as the possibilities of symbolization.
JR: You seem hesitant about something in Winnicott though.
AB: I'm hesitant about a lot in Winnicott. I'm hesitant about his somewhat artificial separation of interpretation and setting. I think he looks at interpretation only in the traditional way. Where he innovates is in his conception of the setting, but I don't think he sees what I would call, following Loewald, the differentiating function of all interpretation as part of the space and time of the setting. This leads to a clinical approach I don't agree with.
JR: A re-parenting model, where one is trying to kick-start once again some arrested developmental process.
AB: Basically, yes.
JR: You describe fetishized transferences — the concrete patient has a transference to the framework, to the clock, to various objects in the room. But I wonder if the idea of a fetishized or "desymbolized transference" isn't redundant. That is, isn't the essence of transference a certain desymbolization, a defensive refusal to witness what's going on in the symbolic dimension of experience? Isn't transference in the end the paradigmatic case of concreteness, which is why Freud describes transference as both the greatest resistance to and the very possibility of an interpretive approach?
AB: I think one has to examine that question in depth. This is one of the things I talk about in Difference and Disavowal. Take Freud, who understands, as you cite him, transference as the greatest ally and the greatest enemy of the treatment. There Freud is still thinking in the usual terms of the symbolized transference, in terms of the transference as potentially liberating the drives, and transference as resistance to the drives. But, where this becomes a complex and essential question, is in the idea of transference as repetition. The question is: what is repetition? This is one of the main topics of my Derrida chapter. Derrida is a thinker for whom the concept of difference is inseparable from that of repetition, and so the question becomes: what is transference in relation to repetition of difference? One of the things I'm particularly out to show, particularly in the Derrida chapter, is something along of the lines of what you just articulated. It is that we need an expanded thinking of repetition, as well as of difference, in order to understand how it is that transference inevitably becomes concrete. This is due to what Derrida calls the constitutive duplicity of repetition. He speaks of classical and non-classical repetition. Non-classical repetition for Derrida has to do with the same kind of thinking that addresses the reality of difference. He's trying to think time and space, to use the Kantian phrase, as conditions of possibility. For Derrida, there has to be a possibility of repetition — iterability — for there even to be an encounter with anything.
Now, transference can operate in either way. Our traditional understanding of transference is that first there's the thing, then there's the repetition. First I have my Oedipus complex, then I repeat this with my analyst. Non-classical repetition, which concerns conditions of possibility, has everything to do not with content, but with process. Concrete patients are reacting to the analytic environment, and to the differentiating function intrinsic to it. They always encounter precisely what they defend against: the repetition of difference. But remember that difference is not an objectifiable thing, is not objectively present, comes from the order of reality that one can't see, hear, touch, taste or smell, like space and time themselves. What concrete patients, I think, are really reacting to, is the relation between the actual structure of analysis, (what's more repetitive than analysis?), and the function of that repetition, which is the encounter with differentiation. What is being encountered is the repetition that is the only possibility for change. Hence, I think that these patients are defensively concrete: they insist that what is real is only what is objectively present, because they are traumatized by the nonobjective reality of difference. If you presume these patients are repeating an objectifiable piece of mental content — again, the Oedipus complex, for instance — interpretations will misfire.
JR: But the point being that, by talking about concrete patients in the way you described them — as limit cases — that's to say that this is not just a specific diagnostic entity. These patients are reacting to something that's there in any analytic treatment, that's intrinsic to an interpretive framework, and that is the condition of possibility of transference as a clinical phenomenon.
AB: Yes, precisely. In Difference and Disavowal, I went to great lengths to show the importance of Freud's astonishing change of heart at the end of his life, that the basic model of compromise formation is fetishism, his move from a repression model to a splitting and disavowal model. Freud is trying to show how in both neurosis and psychosis that is what we're seeing. I try to extend Freud, to say that the basic question of compromise formation as fetishism is primary disavowal of differentiation. My point about certain philosophers is that they've already done this. When Derrida talks about the constitutive duplicity of all repetition, he is coming from the place to which we need to go. His essay "Resistances of Psychoanalysis" is an examination of what analysis itself really means. It's like what you're saying about transference: what Derrida is trying to show, by a very close reading of Freud, is that the very possibility of analysis emerges from something that is always, in the traditional sense, unanalyzable. That's the importance of Derrida's reading of Freud on the uninterpretable navel of the dream. The project of analysis always has to encounter something that is unanalyzable, and I think transference is an excellent example. That's what's so befuddling about concrete patients: they do seem to form transferences of the sort that should be interpretable, but that are not. They show us where transference and interpretation are an encounter with the unanalyzable.
JR: As Freud did at the end of his career, in his rethinking of the basic nature of defense — turning from a classical psychology to a more philosophical appreciation of the question of reality.
AB: Yes.
JR: So, to make a broad summary statement, we could say that repression — defense at the level of unconscious fantasy as representation — is concerned with psychological content; disavowal — defense at the level of the trace of self-as-other — is concerned with ontological structure.
AB: You're using the philosophical vocabulary, but still yes. That's what I'm trying to show in Interpretation and Difference. When I talk about the necessity of expanding our view of reality, I mean expanding it into the areas akin to what Heidegger calls being. For Derrida, this is always a question of trace. I'm trying to get analysts to consider how and why these "ontological" questions are necessary for analysis. You have the beginnings of that in Winnicott; transitionality is an opening to that kind of thinking.
JR: I think the same resources can be drawn from the theory of transitional phenomenality that you find in Loewald's theory of primary narcissism. But getting back to Freud rethinking the entire edifice of psychoanalysis as both a theoretical and a clinical project at the end of his career —
AB: He starts to rethink it, it's only a bare beginning.
JR: But it's a bare beginning where the Freudian project for a scientific psychology begins to coincide with, or at least to open up toward, the Heideggerian project for a fundamental ontology — an analytic thinking about being that is necessarily clinical.
AB: That is certainly the position I'm advocating in Interpretation and Difference. But here you also need to know the specifics. The early Heidegger of Being and Time, the Heidegger who rethinks interpretation as a rethinking of space and time, who understands anxiety as ontological or existential, offers tremendous resources for expanding our conception of what interpretation is and how it functions. There are similar resources in the later Heidegger, the Heidegger who is so much more preoccupied with the question of difference. The later Heidegger — and this is the interesting link to Nietzsche — is always thinking about difference as relation, separation, tension, opening, uncanniness. This is the lever for a thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science in a traditional sense.
JR: To me, this is what psychoanalysis closes itself off to by confining itself to the mental health professions: psychology, social work —
AB: And psychiatry!
JR: Psychiatry most of all! But would you go so far as to say that there is a threat to the future of our discipline if we don't start thinking outside these areas? Not to say that all analysts should become philosophers, but there seems to be a refusal even to consider questions like these. In my experience, this refusal is prevalent today, and the result is a serious lack of creativity.
AB: There is a threat to the discipline. I'm not saying the only potential source of creativity in psychoanalysis is of the kind that I'm advocating. I think there are many possible others. But I would say (with all due immodesty) that this one is necessary. It's necessary because there has been more than a hundred years' worth of thought, starting with Nietzsche, that has proceeded along lines parallel to and converging with psychoanalysis, thought that can provide analysts with the concepts that they need. Just to come back to the basic understanding of interpretation: is the function of interpretation to produce an identity between past and present? Is the function of interpretation to be true, either in terms of a coherence theory or a correspondence theory of truth? Psychoanalysis has gone round and round in this debate, and it has never come to any conclusion. Why? Because it doesn't have the tools to come to a conclusion. There is a revised conception of truth in Nietzsche, in relation to interpretation. There is a revised conception of truth in Heidegger, in relation to interpretation. Derrida is totally immersed in Freud and goes even further, but in going further it is always in relation to interpretation.
JR: The openness of these thinkers to psychoanalysis should encourage a reciprocal openness of analysis itself.
AB: I'm glad you used that word. These have to be reciprocal enterprises. I myself see no other way of thinking about unconscious processes with the rigor that they deserve. I think that is why, going back to your idea of a kind of degeneration of psychoanalysis into a cognitive discipline, the rigor with which Freud started in thinking about unconscious processes is being lost. Some imagine that it's been exhausted. And there's the huge clinical problem of whether our basic thinking about unconscious processes is always therapeutically effective. And there the real answer is: no. This is again what Freud was starting to think about at the end of his life, switching his models away from repression and toward splitting and disavowal. Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida would all explain why that would inevitably be so.
JR: Which is also to make a pitch for the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in psychoanalysis.
AB: Yes, absolutely. For Derrida certainly.
JR: But also for Freud, for whom resistance to lay analysis was the greatest resistance psychoanalysis faced.
AB: But why did Freud say that? I think it's about specificity — the specificity of psychoanalysis as a discipline that thinks rigorously about unconscious processes. Freud was very clear that no matter what the discipline — whether it's a traditional mental health discipline, or philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology — there's no particular discipline that has a claim to that. Only psychoanalysis has a claim to that rigor. And then the question becomes: are there people from other disciplines who, because they have been trained with a similar rigor, and have understood the specificity of psychoanalysis, can bring something to psychoanalysis that can expand it, in what I believe are necessary directions? Of course, I'm saying yes. I don't see how it could be otherwise.
JR: Your new book, Interpretation and Difference, fleshes out with greater complexity the philosophical stakes of your previous book, Difference and Disavowal, to which it appears as a companion. It's recognizably more theoretical than clinical, more philosophical than psychoanalytic. But my impression is that one of your major concerns is the breakdown of these sorts of oppositions, to show how philosophy and psychoanalysis fit together. It would seem wrong or at least inadequate to consider it simply more theoretical or more philosophical than the previous book, although you're treating Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, who are more readily considered philosophers. So, how does the new book extend the previous work in ways that are still relevant to clinical practice?
AB: The answer is clearly in the title. Difference and Disavowal starts with the clinical problem of resistance to interpretation, concrete patients. There are two basic points: concrete patients have a defensive stance toward any differentiating process, and in treatment, interpretation serves a differentiating function. Such patients will bring to treatment their basic defenses, which will be manifest against the interpretive process itself. However, I always feel we learn the most from limit cases. And since these are limit cases for interpretation, they force us to think about interpretation in ways that we have not heretofore. Particularly about the question I call the reality of difference. In Difference and Disavowal I tried to make clear that one of the things that has to change for analysts, if they are to work effectively with concrete patients, is their own conception of reality. If the analyst has the same concrete understanding of reality as the concrete patient, he or she will never be able to understand what the patient is defending against, how the patient is using the presupposition that reality is what is objectively there, to defend against something else, other aspects of reality. Nor will the analyst be able to understand why interpretation itself is a function of an expanded view of reality. InInterpretation and Difference my aim is to look at those philosophers who have reexamined interpretation along with metaphysical presuppositions about reality. These are, most prominently, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida.
JR: That was inherent to my question about the breakdown of the opposition between psychoanalysis and philosophy, because each of these thinkers you're working with considers himself to be practicing something other than philosophy as it is traditionally conceived.
AB: This has always been one of my basic ideas. Freud always said psychoanalysis cannot be metaphysics. Yet Freud, I believe, did not understand in depth what metaphysics really means. He did not understand how he repeated metaphysical presuppositions in some of his most basic thinking, including what it means to practice interpretation. So yes, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are the great line of thinkers who are trying to think outside the constraints of metaphysics, all the while understanding that metaphysics — as Derrida in particular emphasizes — is not something we can just jump out of. It has to be very carefully and rigorously understood, then deconstructed and dismantled, to find other ways of thinking. So that indeed, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are not philosophers in the traditional sense, and there is a very strong psychoanalytic cast to what they do.
JR: Perhaps Nietzsche most of all, who considered himself a psychologist and genealogist — practicing on history by practicing with force.
AB: And he uses interpretation as part of what he calls active thinking and active interpretation, which is an entirely different conception of interpretation than the reactive, identity-producing, equality-producing interpretation of metaphysics. Heidegger, I would say, is a reader of the history of metaphysics in terms of "symptoms." He is always looking at how metaphysics is the history of a repression — not repression in the psychoanalytic sense, but the history of a forgetting of the question of being. But then metaphysics itself becomes a set of symptoms that manifest this forgetfulness. There is a kind of theory of compromise formation in Heidegger, although if he were in the room with me he wouldn't like to hear that! Derrida, in one of his earliest papers, picks up on Nietzsche's two interpretations of interpretation: the metaphysical one, that is always based on the idea of a lost origin that cannot ever be recovered, (which in many ways has been the psychoanalytic theory of interpretation), versus Nietzschean interpretation as active intervention and differentiating process not grounded in causality and determinism.
JR: You write that working with concrete patients demands that the analyst maintain an attitude of questioning. Interpretation here, non-causally conceived, is not about providing information, but about holding open a space for asking questions. Does this mean inhabiting a certain philosophical position in relation to clinical material, and could we think of philosophy then as an intrinsically "clinical" project?
AB: "Philosophical" in the way you mentioned a moment ago, not philosophical in the usual sense. Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are again not exactly philosophers. Heidegger talks about a kind of thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science, which is able to think the complex ways in which science itself is the inevitable product of metaphysics, contrary to our usual understanding of science and metaphysics as simply opposed. That was Freud's problem, that he only saw it the usual way: science over here, metaphysics over there. Nietzsche had already understood this before Heidegger. He's very cogent about the way in which the positivist thought that dominated the science of his day "halts before the factual" — prevents the development of a rigorously interpretive psychological discipline of unconscious processes.
JR: I wanted to emphasize Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as having practiced philosophy in a non-classical way, in order to draw out the fact that Interpretation and Difference isn't purely or "simply" philosophical. I imagine many readers, particularly clinicians, risk picking it up and thinking, "Oh, this is philosophy," or, "It's just theory," as if to say what you're working on is peripheral to clinical, "practical" concerns.
AB: These thinkers have everything to offer the clinician who gets to the point of seeing that there are constraints within psychoanalysis against understanding what it is we are doing when we interpret.
JR: Putting together previous work that you've done on Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and of course Derrida, this book would seem to be the culmination of a large project for you. This has been a long time coming.
AB: To say the very least! I started as a student of Derrida, and then for all sorts of personal reasons decided I wanted to become an analyst, which I did. And I found myself happy as an analyst. My own orientation was strongly based in Freud, although there are decades of important work after Freud that have influenced me. All along I kept working on the philosophy, but it was a thing apart, and not yet really integrated with my actual clinical work. Of course Derrida has written a great deal about Freud, much of which I had translated, so that was always there for me. But the way in which this project has been so long in coming is the following. I was in a study group at New York Psychoanalytic on psychoanalysis and literature. At one point we started to read Wallace Stevens. And we read one of his most famous poems: "The Snow Man." I had a kind of light bulb moment, where the things that Derrida had written about fetishism in Glas seemed to provide a very good lever for a reading of this extremely profound poem. I started to present my ideas to the study group, and was enthusiastically received. I then wrote a paper called "Fetishism, Reality and The Snow Man," in which the basic argument about fetishism and the disavowal of difference was elaborated. But there was still nothing clinical. What happened next was something I can't quite pin down, but was in the context of encountering the vexing patients we all encounter, the patients who resist interpretation.
JR: Patients who resist interpretation, but who keep coming for treatment.
AB: Exactly. And analysts have always worked with such patients. I love to cite Karl Abraham's paper from 1919, in which he describes this phenomenon to a "T." He doesn't have a good theoretical grasp, but the patients he describes are exactly the same. In Freud there are moments, for example when he throws up his hands at patients who accept nothing but "the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments." I personally believe that one of the problems in the Wolf-Man case, which Freud finally came to understand in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," was that there were very large pockets of concreteness. And there's a major reference inBeyond the Pleasure Principle, when Freud discusses patients who repeat the past, but without a sufficient degree of aloofness to understand it. He's interested in patients who repeat painful experiences, but who cannot link it to the past, so they develop what he calls, in a very telling phrase, a "demonic transference." I think this is very close to concreteness, but Freud doesn't really tackle the problem.
Again tracing my own evolution, at one point I had a concrete case of my own, and simultaneously was supervising the treatment of a concrete patient in which the analyst was really stuck. I wanted to help both of us. I don't know exactly how it happened, but I came to think about these patients in terms of fetishism as defense against differentiation. These patients have a great problem differentiating fantasy from reality, they take fantasy as reality. That's why we can't analyze the transference, and yet as you say they keep coming. Why? That's when I began to think through my revision of Freud on fetishism, and to see that the central problem of fetishism as sexual difference could be extended to fetishistic compromise formations in general.
I then found out that this idea is not original to me. There's a fundamentally important article by Edith Jacobson, "Denial and Repression" (1957), in which she very clearly sees the link between patients who resist interpretation and fetishism. She doesn't conceive fetishism the same way I do, but from within her developmental framework she says that such patients reflect a stage in which the child has differentiated between inner and outer, but then acts as if that differentiation has not occurred. So she really sees these patients as poised between differentiation and non-differentiation. And what's so valuable about her idea is that it's not a deficit theory of concreteness. There is a lot of deficit-theorizing of concreteness, but hers is a theory of conflict, even though she speaks developmentally. So as I say, there are other people who have seen the link between fetishism and concreteness: Owen Renik in "The Use of the Analyst as a Fetish," John Steiner in Psychic Retreats. There's a literature on concreteness, and a small literature on fetishism and concreteness. But I found that in this literature, everyone comes up against the question of differentiation. Some treat it as a major theme, some don't, but they come up against it.
This is where I draw on my philosophical perspective. Given everything I've learned from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, I think that one reason analysts do not explore the question of differentiation in depth, is because they don't have the tools to do so. It takes them into a way of thinking about reality that they haven't been prepared for. That was exactly Freud's problem. He got embroiled in the famously oxymoronic phrase, "reality of castration," because he could only think of sexual difference in terms of phallic and castrated, presence and absence. He couldn't think sexual difference in any non-concrete way.
JR: Not just Freud, also his critics. Psychologists are generally unable to think beyond a classical, Cartesian framework: presence and absence, subjects and objects.
AB: But it's about more than the "subject/object dichotomy," which has become a buzzword today. This is why I insist on the question of reality. It's about the expansion of our thinking about reality, a thinking you traditionally see in philosophy or in certain branches of science, a thinking about space and time. You mentioned, when we started to speak, holding open a certain space. This is one of the big themes of the book: interpretation and difference in relation to a non-metaphysical thinking of space and time. This is what my chapter on Heidegger tries to spell out. It is a huge theme in Derrida, whose concept of differance has to do with space and time — the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space — and certainly has everything to do with his thinking about interpretation. I'm trying to link interpretation to a non-metaphysical thinking of space and time. This is totally necessary for analysts if they're going to understand what they do when they interpret, especially in relation to the environmental space of analysis, and to time in analysis.
JR: It's true that "subject/object dichotomy" is a buzzword these days, but that's because the background most analysts are trained in is cognitive psychology. Cognition describes a certain relationship to reality, where I'm inside my head and the objective world is out there, and I take in information through various perceptual and mechanical processes. Two analysts — Winnicott and Loewald — who try to think beyond this simplistic paradigm, are also two thinkers most touched by philosophy, certainly Loewald
AB: Certainly Loewald, who is a major presence in both books. The idea that the basic phenomenological function of interpretation — not the content of interpretation but, what we're doing when we interpret — is a differentiating process — that's Loewald's idea. Loewald's conception of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis is rooted in the internalization of the differential between the patient and the analyst. Loewald is also specific about his debt to Heidegger. You can hear Heidegger on almost every page of Loewald. Now, Winnicott…Yes, transitionality is about space and about time, what he calls the "root of symbolism in time." Winnicott, in a potentially powerful way, takes us into what he explicitly calls a "third area" thinking, which is neither subjective nor objective, but which thinks about space and about time as the possibilities of symbolization.
JR: You seem hesitant about something in Winnicott though.
AB: I'm hesitant about a lot in Winnicott. I'm hesitant about his somewhat artificial separation of interpretation and setting. I think he looks at interpretation only in the traditional way. Where he innovates is in his conception of the setting, but I don't think he sees what I would call, following Loewald, the differentiating function of all interpretation as part of the space and time of the setting. This leads to a clinical approach I don't agree with.
JR: A re-parenting model, where one is trying to kick-start once again some arrested developmental process.
AB: Basically, yes.
JR: You describe fetishized transferences — the concrete patient has a transference to the framework, to the clock, to various objects in the room. But I wonder if the idea of a fetishized or "desymbolized transference" isn't redundant. That is, isn't the essence of transference a certain desymbolization, a defensive refusal to witness what's going on in the symbolic dimension of experience? Isn't transference in the end the paradigmatic case of concreteness, which is why Freud describes transference as both the greatest resistance to and the very possibility of an interpretive approach?
AB: I think one has to examine that question in depth. This is one of the things I talk about in Difference and Disavowal. Take Freud, who understands, as you cite him, transference as the greatest ally and the greatest enemy of the treatment. There Freud is still thinking in the usual terms of the symbolized transference, in terms of the transference as potentially liberating the drives, and transference as resistance to the drives. But, where this becomes a complex and essential question, is in the idea of transference as repetition. The question is: what is repetition? This is one of the main topics of my Derrida chapter. Derrida is a thinker for whom the concept of difference is inseparable from that of repetition, and so the question becomes: what is transference in relation to repetition of difference? One of the things I'm particularly out to show, particularly in the Derrida chapter, is something along of the lines of what you just articulated. It is that we need an expanded thinking of repetition, as well as of difference, in order to understand how it is that transference inevitably becomes concrete. This is due to what Derrida calls the constitutive duplicity of repetition. He speaks of classical and non-classical repetition. Non-classical repetition for Derrida has to do with the same kind of thinking that addresses the reality of difference. He's trying to think time and space, to use the Kantian phrase, as conditions of possibility. For Derrida, there has to be a possibility of repetition — iterability — for there even to be an encounter with anything.
Now, transference can operate in either way. Our traditional understanding of transference is that first there's the thing, then there's the repetition. First I have my Oedipus complex, then I repeat this with my analyst. Non-classical repetition, which concerns conditions of possibility, has everything to do not with content, but with process. Concrete patients are reacting to the analytic environment, and to the differentiating function intrinsic to it. They always encounter precisely what they defend against: the repetition of difference. But remember that difference is not an objectifiable thing, is not objectively present, comes from the order of reality that one can't see, hear, touch, taste or smell, like space and time themselves. What concrete patients, I think, are really reacting to, is the relation between the actual structure of analysis, (what's more repetitive than analysis?), and the function of that repetition, which is the encounter with differentiation. What is being encountered is the repetition that is the only possibility for change. Hence, I think that these patients are defensively concrete: they insist that what is real is only what is objectively present, because they are traumatized by the nonobjective reality of difference. If you presume these patients are repeating an objectifiable piece of mental content — again, the Oedipus complex, for instance — interpretations will misfire.
JR: But the point being that, by talking about concrete patients in the way you described them — as limit cases — that's to say that this is not just a specific diagnostic entity. These patients are reacting to something that's there in any analytic treatment, that's intrinsic to an interpretive framework, and that is the condition of possibility of transference as a clinical phenomenon.
AB: Yes, precisely. In Difference and Disavowal, I went to great lengths to show the importance of Freud's astonishing change of heart at the end of his life, that the basic model of compromise formation is fetishism, his move from a repression model to a splitting and disavowal model. Freud is trying to show how in both neurosis and psychosis that is what we're seeing. I try to extend Freud, to say that the basic question of compromise formation as fetishism is primary disavowal of differentiation. My point about certain philosophers is that they've already done this. When Derrida talks about the constitutive duplicity of all repetition, he is coming from the place to which we need to go. His essay "Resistances of Psychoanalysis" is an examination of what analysis itself really means. It's like what you're saying about transference: what Derrida is trying to show, by a very close reading of Freud, is that the very possibility of analysis emerges from something that is always, in the traditional sense, unanalyzable. That's the importance of Derrida's reading of Freud on the uninterpretable navel of the dream. The project of analysis always has to encounter something that is unanalyzable, and I think transference is an excellent example. That's what's so befuddling about concrete patients: they do seem to form transferences of the sort that should be interpretable, but that are not. They show us where transference and interpretation are an encounter with the unanalyzable.
JR: As Freud did at the end of his career, in his rethinking of the basic nature of defense — turning from a classical psychology to a more philosophical appreciation of the question of reality.
AB: Yes.
JR: So, to make a broad summary statement, we could say that repression — defense at the level of unconscious fantasy as representation — is concerned with psychological content; disavowal — defense at the level of the trace of self-as-other — is concerned with ontological structure.
AB: You're using the philosophical vocabulary, but still yes. That's what I'm trying to show in Interpretation and Difference. When I talk about the necessity of expanding our view of reality, I mean expanding it into the areas akin to what Heidegger calls being. For Derrida, this is always a question of trace. I'm trying to get analysts to consider how and why these "ontological" questions are necessary for analysis. You have the beginnings of that in Winnicott; transitionality is an opening to that kind of thinking.
JR: I think the same resources can be drawn from the theory of transitional phenomenality that you find in Loewald's theory of primary narcissism. But getting back to Freud rethinking the entire edifice of psychoanalysis as both a theoretical and a clinical project at the end of his career —
AB: He starts to rethink it, it's only a bare beginning.
JR: But it's a bare beginning where the Freudian project for a scientific psychology begins to coincide with, or at least to open up toward, the Heideggerian project for a fundamental ontology — an analytic thinking about being that is necessarily clinical.
AB: That is certainly the position I'm advocating in Interpretation and Difference. But here you also need to know the specifics. The early Heidegger of Being and Time, the Heidegger who rethinks interpretation as a rethinking of space and time, who understands anxiety as ontological or existential, offers tremendous resources for expanding our conception of what interpretation is and how it functions. There are similar resources in the later Heidegger, the Heidegger who is so much more preoccupied with the question of difference. The later Heidegger — and this is the interesting link to Nietzsche — is always thinking about difference as relation, separation, tension, opening, uncanniness. This is the lever for a thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science in a traditional sense.
JR: To me, this is what psychoanalysis closes itself off to by confining itself to the mental health professions: psychology, social work —
AB: And psychiatry!
JR: Psychiatry most of all! But would you go so far as to say that there is a threat to the future of our discipline if we don't start thinking outside these areas? Not to say that all analysts should become philosophers, but there seems to be a refusal even to consider questions like these. In my experience, this refusal is prevalent today, and the result is a serious lack of creativity.
AB: There is a threat to the discipline. I'm not saying the only potential source of creativity in psychoanalysis is of the kind that I'm advocating. I think there are many possible others. But I would say (with all due immodesty) that this one is necessary. It's necessary because there has been more than a hundred years' worth of thought, starting with Nietzsche, that has proceeded along lines parallel to and converging with psychoanalysis, thought that can provide analysts with the concepts that they need. Just to come back to the basic understanding of interpretation: is the function of interpretation to produce an identity between past and present? Is the function of interpretation to be true, either in terms of a coherence theory or a correspondence theory of truth? Psychoanalysis has gone round and round in this debate, and it has never come to any conclusion. Why? Because it doesn't have the tools to come to a conclusion. There is a revised conception of truth in Nietzsche, in relation to interpretation. There is a revised conception of truth in Heidegger, in relation to interpretation. Derrida is totally immersed in Freud and goes even further, but in going further it is always in relation to interpretation.
JR: The openness of these thinkers to psychoanalysis should encourage a reciprocal openness of analysis itself.
AB: I'm glad you used that word. These have to be reciprocal enterprises. I myself see no other way of thinking about unconscious processes with the rigor that they deserve. I think that is why, going back to your idea of a kind of degeneration of psychoanalysis into a cognitive discipline, the rigor with which Freud started in thinking about unconscious processes is being lost. Some imagine that it's been exhausted. And there's the huge clinical problem of whether our basic thinking about unconscious processes is always therapeutically effective. And there the real answer is: no. This is again what Freud was starting to think about at the end of his life, switching his models away from repression and toward splitting and disavowal. Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida would all explain why that would inevitably be so.
JR: Which is also to make a pitch for the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in psychoanalysis.
AB: Yes, absolutely. For Derrida certainly.
JR: But also for Freud, for whom resistance to lay analysis was the greatest resistance psychoanalysis faced.
AB: But why did Freud say that? I think it's about specificity — the specificity of psychoanalysis as a discipline that thinks rigorously about unconscious processes. Freud was very clear that no matter what the discipline — whether it's a traditional mental health discipline, or philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology — there's no particular discipline that has a claim to that. Only psychoanalysis has a claim to that rigor. And then the question becomes: are there people from other disciplines who, because they have been trained with a similar rigor, and have understood the specificity of psychoanalysis, can bring something to psychoanalysis that can expand it, in what I believe are necessary directions? Of course, I'm saying yes. I don't see how it could be otherwise.
