Whose Resistance is it Anyway? Levy-Warren, Marsha H
Psychoanalytic dialogues,
01/2020, Letnik:
30, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In considering the three papers that are unified under the umbrella of how to think about the concept of “resistance” in contemporary psychoanalysis, it is through my lens as a developmental ...psychoanalyst that their discussion unfolds. The papers, each from a different theoretical position, can be considered together if one looks at them from the perspective of the evolution of Self and how it plays out in the clinical exchange with psychoanalysts of different theoretical persuasions. Each of the authors presents a point of view that has resonance with aspects of what facilitates and what interferes in the development of Self. The forces and counter-forces in treatment mirror those forces in development. This paper was first presented at the Spring meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis in 2014 in New York City as part of a panel entitled: “If it is Not Resistance, What is it?”
"Psychology has stepped down from the university chair into the marketplace" was how the New York Times put it in 1926. Another commentator in 1929 was more biting. Psychoanalysis, he said, had over ...a generation, "converted the human scene into a neurotic." Freud first used the word around 1895, and by the 1920s psychoanalysis was a phenomenon to be reckoned with in the United States. How it gained such purchase, taking hold in virtually every aspect of American culture, is the story Lawrence R. Samuel tells in Shrink, the first comprehensive popular history of psychoanalysis in America. Arriving on the scene at around the same time as the modern idea of the self, psychoanalysis has both shaped and reflected the ascent of individualism in American society. Samuel traces its path from the theories of Freud and Jung to the innermost reaches of our current me-based, narcissistic culture. Along the way he shows how the arbiters of culture, high and low, from public intellectuals, novelists, and filmmakers to Good Housekeeping and the Cosmo girl, mediated or embraced psychoanalysis (or some version of it), until it could be legitimately viewed as an integral feature of American consciousness.
I view Stephanie Pass's paper (this issue) as an instructive illustration of what therapists who do not work with children stand to learn from child therapists. Despite the reality that much ...psychoanalytic meta-theory was generated by theorists treating children, in addition to the contributions made by infant researchers and developmentalists, psychoanalysis has yet to fully attend to these domains of clinical work and research especially as regards their implication for the psychoanalytic process (commonly referred to as "technique"). The privileging of the capacity for representation and communication through language/verbalization in psychoanalysis has limited our theories and our conversations. However, the tide is shifting in favor of exploring what I would call the "ground" level of our work. By that I mean the non-verbal, non-conscious, unpredictable and intuitive contact-making dimension that establishes the foundation upon which the house of meaning-making is built.
