COMING OF AGE AND THE OTHER

Don Brix, Ph.D.

Don Brix, Ph.D. will continue DSPP's series on Finding and Being Found: Self and Other Through the Life Span with the March presentation: Coming of Age and the Other, a look at the issue of patients of advanced age in psychoanalytic treatment. Denise Humphrey, M.M. will be the discussant for Dr. Brix's presentation.

Dr. Brix has provided the following observations as an introduction to his topic:

" '...He was a man who had faced personal tragedy without succumbing to bitterness. He could experience moments of depression without being defeated by it.

He brought to his personal relationships an enthusiasm tinctured with his characteristic good-humor and sincerity. And each of you know this ... he simply relished opportunities to make conversation with other human beings.

And finally, in relation to the world he lived in, he maintained an abiding intellectual curiosity, a gratitude and, perhaps most important of all I think, a humility, a genuine humility...'

This is an excerpt from a eulogy I wrote on the occasion of the death of a beloved neighbor. He was in his mid-eighties when he died. So far as I know he never visited the office of a psychotherapist, not that he needed to. Had he done so though, he would have been a great patient.

Usually though, whether in terms of overt resistance or countertransference reactions, aged patients are thought to present us with different challenges than do younger patients. But do they really?

Reviewing an interesting case written by Calvin Settlage, M.D., I'll try to examine the issue of advanced age and psychoanalytically-oriented therapy. I'll also draw some ideas from Sidney Tarachow, M.D. whose writing I've found useful as a point-of-entry into thinking about the spectrum over which various therapeutic relationships develop."

Dr. Brix holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He worked as a psychologist at Terrell State Hospital early in his career and then entered private practice in Dallas. Presently, in addition to his private practice, Dr. Brix works with patients in nursing homes and one day per week serves the homeless population through an outreach clinic of Parkland Hospital. Dr. Brix has been a stalwart member of DSPP since its inception and served on its first slate of officers. He was president of the organization in 1990-1991. We look forward eagerly to his upcoming presentation.

Ron Schenk, Ph.D.

By

Cheryl Martin RN, LPC

The DSPP meeting, held in February, offered members an opportunity to compare and contrast the works of Freud and Jung as analysts with the poetic writings of T. S. Eliot in "The Wasteland". Ron Schenk, Ph.D., a senior training analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, presented a challenging paper entitled, "The Sunken Quest, The Wasted Fisher, The Pregnant Fish: Finding the Other in Metaphor".

In keeping with this year's DSPP theme of the intersubjective perspective, Dr. Schenk stated his intention to show how psychoanalysis emerged out of a cultural context containing guiding metaphors that the psychoanalytic field used in its formation. In addition, he intended to demonstrate that co-constituted metaphor may be a path to discovery in intersubjective psychology. He also offered comments on Eliot's "The Wasteland" to show how a modern poem provides a model of intersubjective practice through metaphor. Finally, he addressed the notion of "self" viewed in terms of intersubjectivity, bringing Jung's contributions into the current DSPP dialogue.

Dr. Schenk prefaced his paper with a tale of his own failed attempts at becoming a writer and thirty years later being faced with a patient who "could not write". He then went on in his presentation to develop the cultural context for the emergence of psychoanalysis. The struggles of modernity at the turn of the century led the founders of depth psychology in their development of a paradigm that sought to retrieve meaning from materialism. A key image informing the paradigm was that of "the

journey", in particular, the journey of return. Freud and Jung were both touched by the significance of archeological finds, physically in their own fondness for archeological artifacts, as well as metaphorically, as they sought to define the underlying genesis of surface problems encountered by their patients. Analytic interpretation became the vehicle for traversing the "journey" into the depths of the psyche.

Freud and Jung were presented as artistic psychologists and Eliot as a psychological artist with similarities in their work connecting them to the developing paradigm. The psychologists, Freud and Jung, "held that we do not simply carry memories of the actual past experience, rather we create present images of the past, 'imagoes', combining objective fact and fantasy". The artist, Eliot, believed that "past poetry writes the present; present poetry rewrites the past". Dr. Schenk then went on to explore Freud's journey of free association, Jung's journey of amplification, and Eliot's journey of allusion.

Dr. Schenk suggested that the movement from one-person to two-person paradigm needs a new genre and proposed that free form poetry, such as Eliot's, serves as a model for contemporary intersubjectively oriented therapy. He then offered an erudite comparison of the form and content of "The Wasteland" with the therapeutic process.

With the somber tones and fragmented form of "The Wasteland" as background, a case history of a narcissistically disturbed man consumed with a severe depression was presented. As Dr. Schenk described the case, he reported that, "the result of this treatment could be summarized as the gradual, but insistent emergence of death as metaphor". Interpersonal connection was paradoxical and fleeting, and in the end the patient terminated treatment, choosing to hold on to his dark world rather than connecting with the other. Dr. Schenk concluded his presentation with discussion of the symbolic and metaphoric language utilized by Carl Jung.

The invited discussant for Dr. Schenk's paper was Walter Geerts, Ph.D. Coming from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Geert's is a visiting professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Geert's was respectful but direct in describing Dr. Schenk's presentation as not only rhetorical but dense. He described the paper as being as "pregnant as the fish was". He delineated three topics covered by the paper: the story of the therapeutic relationship in which the analyst's failure reflected the patient's deeper failure; modernity and post-modernity as a common horizon between literary and psychological fields; and "what appears at the end to be one huge post-modern text stretching itself over us". A brief discussion then followed.

I hesitantly would like to close with some personal comments. I am hoping that the continued development of DSPP programs allows room for using our monthly meetings as a tool for learning beyond the time of the meeting. With that in mind, I want to share an experience I had listening to this paper, which apparently was echoed by some others in the room. As Dr. Schenk was finishing his presentation, I found myself engaged in a parallel process. He was describing the disconnected aspects of T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and the disconnected relationship with his depressed client, and I found myself disconnected from his presentation. As noted by Dr. Geerts, the paper was dense and full of rhetoric. The extensive literary jargon and references seemed to distract from the essential theme of the paper. I applaud Dr. Schenk for bringing Jung into the DSPP dialogue and for being willing to share such a difficult case which he perceived as ending in failure.

I will freely admit, I am no literary scholar. I am an ordinary clinician with an ordinary appreciation for practical language. If, as Dr. Schenk proposes, poetry is to be a catalyst for forming a new paradigm of intersubjective practice, don't ordinary clinicians need to be able to understand the language of the paradigm?

COMPETITION

Submission deadline is March 15, 1999.

For information and entry forms,

See the DSPP Web Site at

http://www.dspp.com

French-Vietnamese drama begins in 1951 when a ten year old girl goes to work in a Saigon Household.

Lingering, Lovely, and Captivating

Hosted by

Robert Aberg, Ph.D. and Sarah Aberg, LMSW,ACP

A discussion focused on psychoanalytic issues arising from the film will follow.

*Please note change in day of week and time.