posed by his therapist in individual psychotherapy. From his reaction in the couple’s session emerges an investigation of what his historical experience of others lateness has meant to him. Again, this is less about his “fantasy” of what his “strange” individual therapist is up to, than about his raw experience in the couple’s therapy session. Playing with this illustration further, let’s imagine that we learn that when his was a boy, his mother was always late picking him up from school. Sitting alone, as the sun was setting, with little prediction of her arrival time, understandably filled him with dread, fear, and apprehension. Eventually, however, in a flagging attempt at coping, he assumed a kind of dissociated depression, though not it is finally surfacing in rage towards his wife. This, I hope we can agree, offers unimpeachable evidence of his palpable transference reaction to his wife’s lateness. Meanwhile, since this is couples therapy, we can then get into what her chronic lateness is about. Perhaps in her narrative, we learn that it represents a kind of oppositional transference to her father for his having berated her constantly in her youth. In sum, we are immediately into the domain of the transferences of both partners along with how this is becoming systematically orchestrated in a vicious circle in their relationship, i.e. her lateness triggers his rage, and his rage further exacerbates her being oppositionally late. Returning to the contemporary topic of Relationality, we know that a primary issue facing 21st Century Psychoanalysis is, that from birth to death, every aspect of human psychology is deeply and inextricably embedded in relationships. This includes what goes on in the actual interactional realm, for sure. But even more so, it involves what is going on in our imaginings, along with how we represent our sense of “self” in relationship to others, as they do to us.
“systems” that the very construct of “self” was anathema. On the other side, were theories that remained entrenched in the concept of self. These latter theories were wed to the importance of struggling with what it means to be one’s self in a system. One that embodies influences that are forever shaping, challenging, and in pathological circumstances, even threatening the existence of one’s sense of self. In my mind, the more strident systems thinkers went too far in arrogating sense of self as something quaint if not somewhat “delusional”. Especially when compared to the inexorable machinations of the contextual system. Their emphasis undermined for me what it means to be an individual in a system. That is, for one to feel impassioned, to create and pursue one’s dreams while also learning to face the vicissitudes of one’s own existentiality and ontology. Ultimately, to also face the inherent confusions of facing one’s mortality. In short, I could not abandon the sense of what being one’s self entailed, no matter how confounding that became in the face of the power of a system’s perspective. For me, a system without a concept of self was simply unacceptable. Still, whatever one’s experience of self means, it also can never be fully realized unless it finds its place in a system, especially in relationship to the one in which it developed. Hence, self without a sense of how it’s embedded in a system was also simply unacceptable. This led to my contemplation of three critical themes relevant to relational psychoanalysis in general, but especially to the model of couple’s psychotherapy as I was conceiving. These themes take up first, self-actualization in a long term committed relationship, followed by the second theme of the necessity of mutual recognition versus mutual negation (for self-actualization to be able to occur). Finally, came a third theme regarding something quite
intersubjectivity involves the cultivation of each partner’s nascent curiosity about their own and their mate’s subjectivity, hence subject-to-subject relating. Without this, marital relations potentially devolve into patterns of “dominance and submission”, Benjamin refers to as “split complementarity.” Mutual-recognition, however, does not aspire to the “twinship” myth of perpetual “mutual attunement.” Indeed, mutual recognition makes no sense seen independently of its dialectical position with “mutual negation.” In this manner, we are intrinsically mired in the fundamental “paradox of recognition.” Embodied in it is, the perpetual dialectical tension between the assertion of self versus the recognition of other. The former entails the self-centered aspect of self-actualization (sometimes being “ruthless”, i.e. without focusing one’s care and concern upon the other over one’s self needs and desires) juxtaposed with the other’s need for one’s recognition (involving being ruthful). Being “ruthless” or “ruthful” readily becomes complicated in the dialectics of versus affiliation. This then leads to the third theme which is, the relationship having a mind of its own. With the sweeping impact of general systems theory in the 1970s, psychoanalysis underwent a massive paradigm shift. There was no longer any place for the linearity of “cause and effect” thinking. The fundamental premise of systems theory is that “everything influences everything”. Hence cause-and-effect ideas such as “drives”, no longer held sway in psychoanalysis which gradually shifted from seeing “drives” as so fundamentally causal, to seeing them more akin to motivational systems that arise or are inhibited in relational contexts. (Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage, 1992 and 1996) This cemented our understanding that all human relationships are circularly causal, meaning inextricably mutually influential and mutually regulated.
its own can be achieved in manners more wholesome and helpful to the partners than a life mired in the “split complementarity” of perpetual “dominance and submission” and perhaps eventual dissolution of their relationship. These three themes inform the entire organization of my relational psychoanalytic approach to couple’s psychotherapy. It is an approach outlined in Six Steps, though these are not “steps” in the traditional sense of a linear, hierarchical progression. Instead they are to be thought of as nonlinear, much like the Escher print in Appendix A, wherein one notices two disparate lines of Monks both ascending or descending four stair cases, though paradoxically, they always end up at the lowest (e.g. “first”) landing. The image of nonlinearity involves Escher’s artistic genius, a feat captured by the optical illusion. My concept of the “six steps” is presented in linear fashion mostly for organizational purposes while less for practicable ones. Elements of any of the Six Steps may at various times during the treatment, not necessarily in the same order. More to the point, however, the Six Steps do suggest an arch of the treatment which I will elaborate momentarily. The steps of the arch progress until the couple achieves some mastery of the problem that typically brought them into therapy. My experience however, is that once this problem has been satisfactorily addressed, new issues emerge that require cycling through the Six Steps again. This is why patients and therapists alike sometimes lament, “After all this work, it feels like we are back at ‘Step One!” Of course, in a sense that is true, though not something to fret. I encourage them that after they have worked through their focal complaint, it makes room for them to analyze other issues. However, once they have so mastered the model through its repetition of disparate (albeit connected) issue, they will be ready to terminate. I will speak more
one, while being many.” This becomes a far more essential idea in the asymmetrical side of the arch, though frequently I allude to the idea of multiple self-states very early in treatment. Nevertheless, it is in the therapist’s capacity to identify the respective “forward edges and trailing edges” of each partner’s complaint, that the theme of their respective “hope and dread” is revealed. In this manner, the therapist not only develops a powerful identification with each of their experiences of “hope and dread”, but even more importantly, also powerfully demonstrates what is happening that is activating their states of transference. To do so, she points out how the “forward” edge (the hopeful longings) of each partner’s transference triggers one another’s “trailing” edges (the dreaded experience), rapidly linking their experience of “hope” with one of “dread”, in a circularly reinforcing fashion. Two and Three, augment what is undertaken in Step One. Step Two is profoundly ensconced in the epistemological idea of “perspectival realism” wherein we must accede to the idea that there is actually something we are all relating to that we call “reality”. That it is something that we agree truly exists, notwithstanding the fact that our subjective experiences of “it” can differ mightily. Simultaneously however, we must recognize that whatever that “it” is that we are referring to as “reality”, is “something” that no one can apprehend in totality. At best, each of us can only have our unique perspectival “slice of it.” Hence, differences in our perspectives are both abundant and yet completely expectable. This then, is the essential rub of human nature and relationality. To varying degrees, we agree or disagree about our respective perspectives - that which we collectively call “reality.” The commonality of disagreements in couple’s treatment underscore why I speak of it as often involving a “war of epistemologies.” In the most extreme cases, where differences in the points of view about what is “true” and “real” are of great importance, partners can end up feeling that
their very sanity is being called into question. Each partner can find them self in a conflict Jody Davies (2003) described when each one feels that, “To feel sane I must forgo love and to feel loved, I must forgo my sanity.” The issue of perspectivalism is not only isolated to the perspectives of the partners, but includes the degree to which the therapist’s perspective culminates in her countertransference, “conjunctions and disjunctions” with her patients’ perspectives. Conjunctive countertransference, entails the therapist’s subjective point of view being so correspondent with that of one of the partners that it obstructs her being able to recognize, much less, assert meaningful difference. To invoke an English idiom, she becomes unable to “see the forest for the trees.” Meanwhile, disjunctive countertransference involves there being such a degree of difference between the therapist and one of the partner’s perspectives, that they are unable to find any common ground. In couple’s psychotherapy, it is normal for conjunctive and disjunctive countertransference to What is critical, however, is for the therapist to openly embrace it when it occurs. Not doing so can lead to the partner in the disjunctive position to threaten to terminate the therapy or to submit to becoming pathologically accommodating thereafter engaging in a kind of pseudo-treatment that leads the therapy into impasse. However, when the therapist openly acknowledges her biases, she begins to demonstrate how such controversy can be taken up in very constructive ways, that are not yet a part of the partners’ repertoire. The essence of Step Two then, is the cultivation of an atmosphere more committed to curiosity, particularly with respect to the illumination of, collaboration of, and negotiation of, the couple’s differing perspectives. A key part of the symmetrical arch of the treatment approach, is
“That, partners cannot authentically negotiate between one another (intersubjectively), that which they have not negotiated within themselves (intrasubjectively).” This brings us to Step Five takes up the recognition and negotiation of conflicts between each partner’s multiple self-states which have not been reckoned with. We might refer to this as the intrapsychic, or “intrasubjective” illumination of the treatment model. This step entails the enrichment of each partner’s capacity for self-actualization through enhanced introspection into their conflicts. And, what is especially compelling, is that they do so in the actual presence of the other. This work involves transforming “dissociated self-states” into “distributed ones” (Pizer, 1998) or what I have referred to as the work of illuminating multiple self-states evolves into something of a “’working’ committee of the mind”. An analogous space in which the conflicts between self-states are finally recognized, making space for their collaborating and negotiating positions representative of something resembling a composite “voice” of the multiple self-states. It is through each partner’s increased sense of ownership of the multiplicity of their personality, as well as in facing certain conflicted aspects of their sense of self, that they become fortified to pursue more authentic engagements with one another. Furthermore, that through this, they are vastly better equipped to collaborate and negotiate including reckoning with aspects of themselves that cannot be negotiated and therefore may require assuming a place of “surrender” as elaborated in the third theme, the relationship having a mind of its own. As progress is made in the work of the conflictual aspects of each partner’s mind, we begin to see each one’s capacity to attune to and support one another’s introspection and personal growth. This movement in Step Five, is the precursor to Step Six, the setting of the stage for greater intersubjective collaboration and negotiation of their conflicts.