Stephen Mitchell: The Analyst's Knowledge and Authority

Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis

Stephen A. Mitchell

Chapter 7
The Analyst's Knowledge and Authority

There is no issue on the contemporary psychoanalytic scene, either in our literature or in our clinical conferences and discussions, more important than our ongoing, wide-ranging efforts to understand and redefine the nature of the analyst's knowledge and authority. In some sense, this problem subsumes all other current issues and developments, for it raises questions both about the very claims psychoanalysis makes for itself as a discipline and about what we, as clinicians, think we are offering our patients. It is also a key ingredient of any position on both the history of psychoanalysis and the important question of the relationship between contemporary psychoanalysis and the classical tradition.

What sort of expertise do psychoanalysts have? Is the kind of knowledge and authority we claim for ourselves today the same kind of knowledge and authority claimed by Freud and his generation of clinicians? There are many different facets to the problem of knowledge and authority in psychoanalysis, and it would take a hefty volume even to begin to do them justice.

What I intend to do in this chapter is to outline the kind of knowledge and authority that I believe today's analytic clinician can justifiably claim, an expertise in meaning making, self-reflection, and the organization and reorganization of experience. The kind of authority and knowledge that I highlight in this chapter, however, has often been difficult to see clearly and hold on to because it becomes obscured by other, closely related problems concerning psychoanalytic politics and transformations in philosophy of science. Our task here is to get to the heart of the problem for today's clinicians, but to do that, we first have to peel back other dimensions of the problem, to traverse some sweeping historical and philosophical terrain.

The Nature of Knowledge: Psychoanalytic and Otherwise

Let us begin by peering out from the seemingly self-contained community of matters psychoanalytic onto the world around us. There we find pervasive changes in ideas about ideas, in understandings of what it means to know anything. For almost 350 years, from the beginnings of the scientific revolution in the 17th century to the mid-20th century, Western culture moved more and more pervasively toward a world view and self-understanding dominated by rationalism, objectivism, and scientism. Of course, there were counterpoints and countercurrents, but in many respects, Freud's era, the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, was the apogee of this extraordinary movement. Freud took great pains to argue the scientific status of psychoanalysis as a discipline. Psychoanalysis was a part of science, the part involving the exploration, understanding, and control of that domain of the natural world constituted by the human mind. Psychoanalysis was part of the general scientific Weltanschauiing of the time and claimed for itself what any other science claimed for itself, no more and no less (Freud, 1933). (1)

It is important to distinguish science from scientism, the former referring to the accumulation of certain kinds of knowledge by way of certain methods, the latter referring to the belief that such knowledge will tell us all we need to know about human experience, meaning, and values. It is not insignificant that Freud considered religion to be the greatest adversary of psychoanalysis, because he believed that psychoanalysis, and science in general, were in the process of generating knowledge that would serve as a much firmer basis for answering all the questions that religion had previously addressed. As Loewald (1977) has put it:

Freud's insistence on the centrality of sexuality vis-à-vis Jung was in good part a fight against the religiously and theologically tinged, moralistic separation of and opposition between the sacred and the profane, between earthly body and sexual lust versus heavenly spirit and divine love or, in more secularized terms, between instinctual life and spiritual life. It was a fight against what Freud saw as a religious or philosophical escapism in the face of the human condition [pp. 413-414].

Psychoanalysis in Freud's day was both scientific and scientistic; the analyst's knowledge and authority were one and the same. His knowledge, scientific knowledge, gave him the authority, authorizing him to pronounce the definitive understandings about the realm of nature he was in the best position to understand--the patient's mind.

Since Freud's time, the pendulum has swung back in the other direction. Science itself has continued to advance, to generate knowledge, in often astounding fashion. But scientism, the faith that science would toss off, as a byproduct, the ultimate answers to the questions that are most important to us in human terms--scientism--has faded. There are many signs in contemporary culture of an often desperate groping around for some other footing to serve as a basis for self-understanding, the establishment of personal values and meaning, even to provide an ethic framework to help us best use science itself. Both religion and spirituality more generally have made comebacks, and one sees the search for a framework for value and meaning in a wide array of contemporary phenomena, from the most abstract discourse about postmodernism to cynical political manipulation and rhetoric about "family values." There are many ways in which this swing of the pendulum has been too extreme, overcorrecting for previous skewing; pendulums have a way of doing that. In its more extreme versions, objectivism is replaced by a total subjectivism and facile relativism, rationalism by a celebration of irrationalsm, and science is reduced to cult status. The more useful approach emerges when we grasp that the problem has not been science itself, but scientism, our inflated expectations of science, the mistaken faith that science will provide answers to our most personal questions of meaning and value.

These broad, culturewide upheavals and developments have enormous significance for psychoanalysis. If psychoanalysis is to remain vital as a discipline and a treatment, it has to be responsive to the shifting cultural and historical contexts of the lives of both analysands and analysts. It can hardly survive in the monkish isolation traditionally generated by psychoanalytic pretensions of existing on a higher or deeper plane from the rest of humanity. Some of the recent attacks on psychoanalysis in the public forum are aspects of this broad reaction to the scientism of earlier analytic generations. Clay feet are being rapidly exposed beneath the robes of virtually every traditional institution and authority, and psychoanalysis is no exception.

Because of the swing of the pendulum away from the scientism most of us were brought up on, we are particularly vulnerable to a clinical state I have observed in psychoanalysts that I have come to think of as the "Grünbaum Syndrome." This may afflict psychologist-analysts more than others: I don't know. I have come down with it several times myself. It begins with some exposure to the contemporary philosopher Adolph Grünbaum's (1984) attack on psychoanalysis. Grünbaum wants to indict psychoanalysis for not meeting the criteria he designates as necessary for an empirical, scientific discipline. Since the analyst's interpretations operate at least partially through suggestion, he argues, there is no way of testing their validity in any independent fashion. What follows is several days of guilty anguish for not having involved oneself in analytic research. There may be outbreaks of efforts to remember how analysis of variance works, perhaps even pulling a 30-year-old statistics text off the shelf and quickly putting it back. There may be a sleep disturbance and distractions from work. However, it invariably passes in a day or so, and the patient is able to return to a fully productive life.

The most striking thing about Grünbaum's impact on psychoanalysis is the extraordinary play his critique has attracted despite its almost total irrelevance to contemporary clinicians. (2) The reason virtually all clinicians suffering from the Grünbaum syndrome put the statistics text back on the shelf within a day or two is that clinicians tend to be satisfied (if not complacent) with kinds of confirmation different from the singular empirical one Grünbaum insists on. Nevertheless, there are several important features of psychoanalysis as a discipline that have contributed to our vulnerability, as a field, to Grünbaum's kind of critique.

Knowledge Claims: Excessive and Legitimate

First, there are the cultist features of traditional psychoanalytic institutions and literature. Analysts have often claimed for themselves an esoteric knowledge of mysterious realms and expressed that knowledge in thickly jargonized accounts, inaccessible to the uninitiated. Because they felt they had singular, proprietary rights of access to the unconscious, traditional psychoanalytic authors claimed a unique, foundational knowledge of the underpinnings of all human experience. Every now and again someone like Grünbaum comes along to burst the bubble by arguing that the psychoanalytic situation is not methodologically pure enough to justify such claims; they have not been convincingly substantiated by nonclinical (methodologically controlled) experimentation. Those advancing this sort of critique are right, but psychoanalysts had no business making those claims in the first place.

Second, there has been a strong authoritarian current in the political management of psychoanalysis (Benjamin, 1997), at times almost Stalinist in proportion. From Freud's secret Committee, to the banishment of dissidents, to the kind of control Melanie Klein maintained over the minds and publications of her followers (see Grosskurth, 1986), to the medicalization of psychoanalysis in the United States and the occasionally medieval practices of both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psycho-Analytical Association--the reigning political powers within psychoanalysis have hardly allowed psychoanalytic theorizing to flourish in an atmosphere of freedom and open exchange. It is true that form Freud's day to ours psychoanalysis has often been under siege, in one way or another. But like the Bolsheviks, the guardians of psychoanalysis often seemed not to grasp that the greater danger is not the wrong ideas but rigidly held ideas. This has become much clearer to us today, and part of the vitality of postclassical psychoanalysis comes from its emancipation from the constraints of Freudian orthodoxy.

For many, there is a clear analogue between the illegitimate wielding of power in classical psychoanalytic politics and the orthodox analyst's illegitimate claim to a singular scientific knowledge and authority vis-à-vis the patient's mind. In recent years, there has been a broad-scale democratization of psychoanalytic institutes that has been constructive and liberating. And there have been attempts to democratize the analytic relationship. Some lines of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, in critiquing classical theory, seem to offer a kind of relativism or epistemological democracy as the major alternative to what is taken to be classical authoritarianism. It has seemed as if the alternative to the analyst's traditional, arbitrary claims to exclusive, objective knowledge is the renunciation of objectivity and the avoidance of truth claims altogether. This sort of relativism amounts to a kind of unconditional surrender to the kind of critique Grünbaum presents, and a confusion of political issues with problems of knowledge.

Other missed in these battles between anachronistic positivism and total relativism is that the convictions developed both by analytic clinicians and by their patients rest on an intuitive, pragmatic credibility, a kind of enriched common sense. Ironically, by claiming a special, esoteric knowledge and privileged expertise, and by trying to protect the Truth through institutional control, psychoanalysts have traditionally deprived themselves of the strongest, most compelling basis for the most important thing they have to offer--a method of self-reflection and participation that is, generally, extraordinarily useful, immediately graspable, and enriching.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel (1995) has offered, in response to Grünbaum and similar critics, a very persuasive account of psychoanalytic knowledge. Nagel views psychoanalysis as an extension of what he calls "commonsense psychology," the fundamental human activities through which we make meaning out of our experiences with other people. We are constantly making assumptions about what is going on in other people's minds without the benefit of methodologically controlled, empirical verification. This assumption of meaning is a precondition to functioning in a world of other people. He writes, "When we interpret other people...we are trying to understand, within the limits of a nonscientific psychology, what really makes people tick, and we often hope to be confirmed by the person's own self-understanding" (p. 28).

There is battle being waged in philosophical circles over whether science provides objective knowledge or merely interesting and useful narratives about things like rocks and stars. Radical constructionists like Richard Rorty (1991) and Kenneth Gergen (1994) regard science as no closer to objectivity in any absolute sense than any other belief system, only more useful for certain purposes. Neorealists like Nagel regard science as producing empirically verifiable knowledge; social sciences, like history and psychoanalysis, as producing knowledge (e.g., the concept of unconscious processes) verifiable through plausibility and the enrichment of common sense. (3) Of course, "common sense" in any realm is always, to some extent, bound by culture or paradigm. But the question is whether common sense in disciplines like history and psychoanalysis is common only within a small, esoteric cult speaking a highly technical language, or whether knowledge and judgment in these realms is an extension of ordinary life within the larger culture. Nagel stresses that different types of knowledge require different forms of confirmation to establish their credibility:

Much of human mental life consists of complex events with multiple causes and background conditions that will never precisely recur. If we wish to understand real life, it is useless to demand repeatable experiments with strict controls...(in any particular case) we simply have to decide whether this is an intuitively credible extension of a general structure of explanation that we find well supported elsewhere, and whether it is more plausible than the alternatives--including the alternative that there is no psychological explanation (p. 31).

Whether the kinds of knowledge generated by historians and psychoanalysts are best termed science, social science, or hermeneutics is much less important than an appreciation of the nature of this knowledge and its legitimacy. The mystique in which psychoanalysis has traditionally wrapped itself has deprived us of our strongest claim to validity--its often stunning obviousness and utility in understanding human difficulties in living. This is why Rorty (1996) refers to "our common-sense Freudianism" (p. 42) and Nagel stresses the ways in which psychoanalytic understandings are an extension of those everyday assumptions that enable us to live with other people who, we assume, have minds like ours:

The general Freudian method of extending the familiar interpretive scheme of psychological explanation to the unconscious in particular cases, the method on which all such theories depend for evidence, is something that all of us should be able to confirm from our own experience; It is simply a matter of making sense of irrational or unintentional or involuntary conduct, when it fits into the same type of pattern so familiar from ordinary psychology, with some of the blanks filled in by thoughts or wishes of which the subject is not aware [p. 42]

Freud's most important contribution was not the specific content he ascribed to the unconscious at any particular time (sexual, aggressive, oedipal, preoedipal), but the discovery of an enriched mode or method of explanation and meaning making itself. Thus, even though the relevance of many specific features of Freud's theories have faded, the principle of unconscious intentions linking present and past, rational and fantastic, interaction and interiority has become a constitutive feature of contemporary Western culture. And the broad shift from classical oedipal explanations concerning sexual and aggressive conflicts to contemporary relational explanations concerning conflictual attachments and discordant self-other organizations reflects a lawfulness grounded in the utility of such explanations in current lived experience.

It is crucial that psychoanalysis expand its newly established beachhead in the territory between anachronistic objectivism and irresponsible relativism. Believing that there is no single correct canonical version of the patient's mind does not suggest that all versions are equally valid or compelling. Many facts make up a life, and we are justified in having varying degrees of conviction about our beliefs concerning them. There is a great deal of work to be done here in establishing distinctions between factual events such as your mother died when your were five; your father lost his job, became depressed, and was treated with ECT; and interpretations of complex interpersonal relationships, such as your mother withdrew from you when your younger sister was born; your father gave up hope and became demoralized; or your father tended to act seductively with you. Different features of past and present allow for different degrees of interpretive conviction. The leveling that equates all ideas generated in the analytic situation with stories claiming equal degrees of validity confuses clinical with political realms of power and tend to destabilize the analyst's expertise, making us more vulnerable to the kind of critique Grünbaum proffers. (4)

We do not have to choose between facts and acknowledging the analyst's expert participation in generating meaning about those facts. As Michael Wood has put in a review of Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar,

A fact is what won't go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth, Mr. Palomar looks at the sky, the lawn, the sea, a girl, giraffes, and much more. He wants only to observe, to learn a modest lesson from creatures and things. But he can't. There is too much to see in them, for a start...And there is too much of himself and his culture in the world he watches anyway: the world is littered with signs of our needs, with mythologies [quoted in Goodman, 1989, p. 85]

Human beings require systems of meaning, including a sense of personal history and motivation, to knit their world together,. Psychoanalysts are experts at the way those systems of meaning become constructed and change. Compelling and generative meaning systems do not work well if they are contradicted by known facts; the patient who claims no responsibility for his actions, or no connections with or feelings about his parents, or extraterrestrial ancestry is likely to have those beliefs questioned over the course of an analysis. But personal meaning systems are not derived directly from facts, nor can the analysand wait for the facts to become clear and indisputable before he or she tries to make sense of their existence. Each individual, like each nation, requires a narrative of origin to locate himself on the planet. And each analysand requires a narrative of the history of the analysis itself. Analysts are experts at coconstructing and helping to transform those histories in useful, illuminating ways. Contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty have argued the need for philosophy to move from unanswerable questions like "What is the truth?" to pragmatic questions like "What are we justified in believing?" Psychoanalysts need not be hesitant to claim, and can demonstrate, that psychoanalysis, over many decades, has generated many ideas worth believing. What we are struggling toward in contemporary revisions of psychoanalytic epistemology is a framework that allows us to take what we might think of as the analyst's culture (and subjectivity) into account in the process through which he and the patient hold on to the facts and coconstruct a new mythology about them, "shimmering" as Michael wood put it, "with complication" (quoted in Goodman, 1989).

On Whose Authority

Consider the actual, clinical process of psychoanalysis in the simplest terms. The analysand enters treatment suffering in some fashion, whether symptomatically or characterologically,. She leaves treatment, undoubtedly still suffering, but there is more to her now. In ironic contrast to the popular term "shrink," those of us who love the work feel that we help people expand and enrich themselves. There is an enlargement of their memories of their own past, of their awareness of the complexities of their present functioning, and of their sense of options in the future. There are many ways of describing this enrichment, but one of the best is as the development of a broader sense of personal agency.

Schafer (1976) has pointed out that action and agency have always been the "native tongue" of clinical psychoanalysis. The analysand entering treatment feels victimized by forces external to himself--an outside world with intractable features and an inner world of irresistible forces and damaged parts. The analysand leaving treatment experiences himself, to a greater or lesser extent, as the agent of much more of his experience, perpetually generating and reshaping both his outer and inner worlds, as the author of his own story. The heart of the clinical process, as Schafer has suggested, is the assumption of agency for previously disclaimed actions, a kind of self-authorization.

Consider the close relationships among a group of words central to the analytic project. These words continually reappear in any effort to describe it: authority, author, authorize, and, with increasing frequency in the analytic literature, authenticity. They derive from the Latin roots, aug and augere, meaning to increase or expand. Over time this word group took on an idiomatic sense of "origination." Each of these words refers, in one way or another, to the generation or increasing of something and, especially, to the question of claims to have the right to create or expand. Thus, they all deal in some respect with power.

On whose authority does the analysand come to assume greater self-authorization? Here's where things get tricky. The analysand generally grants great authority or, to use Sullivan's (1954) term, "expertise" to the analyst. Whether or not we want to consider such positive transference "unobjectionable," as did Freud (1912), it is certainly there most of the time. And well the analysand should grant such authority to the analyst. After all, that is why she is there, and that authority or expertise is delegated by social institutions like analytic training institutes, state licensing agencies, and so on. The analyst's authority is built into the very asymmetrical structure of the analytic relationship. Yet the whole process, as I have noted, is one in which the analysand gradually is to assume authentic, functionally autonomous, self-authorization. (As Phillips, 1995, has put it, "Freud, after all, had done a very paradoxical thing: he had invented a form of authority, the science of psychoanalysis, as a treatment that depended on demolishing forms of authority" p. 30) What is the relationship between the institutional authorization of the analyst and the emergent authenticity of the patient?

Freud was spared having to think too deeply about this problem. For Freud, the patient's mind is part of nature, a particular part of nature that the analyst comes to know more about than anyone else. The patient appropriately grants the analyst the authority that does and should accompany this knowledge. The analyst's interpretations, in effect teach the patient about the underlying structures and contents of her mind. The more the patient learns, the more she too can use this knowledge to assume an authority of her own. The analysand is in the same position as a student learning biology from a teacher. The latter makes available to the student objective information about a piece of nature and that increase in knowledge expands the student's understanding. What made it all easy for Freud was the nature of the knowledge the analyst could persuasively feel he was offering the patient. Consider a recent paper by Charles Brenner (1996), in which he reaffirms Freud's approach, arguing that it still works quite simply and clearly in our day.

Brenner declares that his understanding of psychopathology, in terms of the conflicts and compromises concerning childhood sexual and aggressive wishes, is empirically derived, objective fact. He validates this claim by appealing to the authority of Freud and the observations of "the majority" of subsequent analysts. Later in the paper he significantly qualifies what he means by the truth of the analyst's understanding of the patient. Psychoanalytic truth, like all scientific truth, is the best guess one can make on the basis of the available evidence. But the use of words like "guess" and "conjecture" toward the end of the paper do not change the claims Brenner makes for his position at the beginning of the paper. It is clear that Brenner feels that, just as with other scientific procedures, there is an objectively best guess to be made in any particular analytic context and that the analyst, armed with Brenner's particular model of pathogenesis, is in the best position to make that best guess.

Once Brenner has laid claim to his consensus, everything else follows. The analyst has a perfect right to claim expertise in the conduct of analysis. Any patient in his right mind would cede that authority and knowledge to the analyst. And if the patient is not in his right mind in this regard, the analyst should hold his ground until the patient comes to see it his way. Because psychoanalytic theory gives the analyst a blueprint of the inner structures of the patient's mind, the analyst, Brenner suggests, often, perhaps always, knows better than the patient what is going on in the patient's mind. Of course, the analyst must decide how much of that understanding is to be communicated at any given time, at what pace, and in what form.

Brenner represents the extreme end of the continuum of views on the nature of the analyst's knowledge and authority, in that he seems completely oblivious of the intellectual revolutions swirling around outside of psychoanalysis and still feels, as did Freud and his contemporaries, that the analyst can claim, with complete conviction, to know what is in the patient's mind. (It doesn't seem to bother Brenner that the consensus of analysts on which he rests his claim to objectivity has disappeared in the sweeping shifts of analytic clinicians toward postclassical points of view like object relations theories and self psychology.) In contrast, Kernberg is very mindful of the current philosophical context and seriously tries to address it.

I noted in the previous chapter that, by distinguishing "analytic anonymity" from "technical neutrality," Kernberg (1996) disassociates himself from the artificiality of the traditional image of the analyst's demeanor, which he links to the pursuit of a false and stilted anonymity. Kernberg suggests that the posture of anonymity, which was designed to remove the analyst from the analytic situation and protect his role as objective interpreter, had the opposite and ironic effect of establishing the analyst as a powerful, idealized, grandiose presence. On the other hand, Kernberg regards the concept of "technical neutrality" and its classical ideal of equidistance as generating and guaranteeing a true sort of objectivity.

The concept of technical neutrality assures the functional authority of the psychoanalyst and protects the patient from an authoritarian imposition of the analyst's views or desires...[p. 143].
[The analyst's interpretations], if carried out within a broad observational basis while tolerating necessary periods of nonunderstanding, should eventually reflect what is actually dominant in patients' experience [p. 149].

Kernberg is committed to preserving the traditional claims to objective analytic authority, which is under siege from so many sides. By distinguishing anonymity from neutrality and acknowledging that the former is illusory, he is attempting to cut his [loses]: trying to be anonymous does not generate objectivity, but trying to be neutral does. What is striking about Kernberg's formulation is his belief that trying to be neutral actually makes it possible to be neutral, to arrive at a perspectiveless vantage point. Kernberg has been at the vanguard of exploring the constructive use of countertransference, and that concern, along with his genuine effort to take into account current trends in contemporary philosophy of science, leads him to qualify his claims to analytic objectivity. In the end, however, he wants to believe, like Brenner, that the analyst knows what is really in the patient's mind. While Brenner bases his claims on a historical psychoanalytic "consensus," Kernberg bases his on the state of mind "neutrality" creates. Perhaps the most chilling description of the kind of objectivity analytic neutrality is presumed to generate was provided by Theodore Shapiro (1984), who points to "the need for neutrality as a means of achieving the aim of understanding the unconscious." Shapiro suggests that physician-psychoanalysts will grasp the process through which subjectivity is transcended and objectivity is achieved by recalling their experience of dissecting cadavers in medical school: "The distressing feeling as we see its skin, its face, its fingers, is a common experience, but once we are at work on the organ systems below, we put aside the feelings about the surface. The task becomes more technical, more universal" (p. 277).

Minds: Uncovered or Constructed?

In my view, the traditional approach, claiming knowledge about what is going on "in the mind," as if there were something to be found there that is inert and simply discoverable, starts us off on the wrong foot. There are no clearly discernible processes corresponding to the phrase "in the patient's mind" (in contrast to neurophysiological events in the brain) for either the patient or the analyst to be right or wrong about. The kinds of mental processes, both conscious and unconscious, that analysts are most interested in are generally enormously complex and lend themselves to many interpretations. There is no uniquely correct interpretation or best guess. As with good history, there are many possible good interpretations of important events occurring in the analytic situation.

In this way of thinking, mind is understood only through a process of interpretive construction. This is equally true for the first person, who is the mind in question, and for someone in the third-person position who is trying to understand the mind of another. Further, this is true for both conscious and unconscious mental processes. In a complex interpersonal situation, one can present to another in many different ways what is or was in one's mind. In an important sense, consciousness comes into being through acts of construction either by other or, through self-reflection, by oneself. Daniel Dennett (1991), one of the most influential contemporary philosophers, proposes a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness:

Just what we are conscious of within any particular time duration is not defined independently of the probes we use to precipitate a narrative about that period. Since these narratives are under continual revision, there is no single narrative that counts as the canonical version, the 'first edition' in which are laid down, for all time, the events that happened in the stream of consciousness of the subject, all deviations from which must be corruptions of the text [p. 136].

The phrase first edition is interesting to compare with Freud's (1912) phrase "stereotype plate" p. 100. Where Freud believed, consistent with the science of his time, that there is a discernible, objective prototype that the analyst comes to be able to identify, Dennett does not, because the edition, or draft arrived at is, for Dennett, partly a product of the process through which it is produced.

In this view, mind is an enormously complex set of processes of which anyone, including the person whose mind it is, can grasp only a small, highly selective segment. Thus, there can be no singular, authoritative version "in the patient's mind" about which either the analyst or the analysand can be right or wrong. Of course, this does not mean that anything goes, that all constructions of conscious experience are equally plausible or accurate. The actual experience, despite its malleability and ambiguity, provides constraints (in a way that is similar to form level in Rorschach cards [Hoffman, personal communication]) against which interpretations are measured. But it does mean that events in the patient's mind are knowable both to the analyst and to the patient only though an active process of composing and arranging them. Many arrangements are possible; although some are better and some are worse, there are no best guesses.

Unconscious processes, by definition, are even more ambiguous. As Ogden (1994) suggests, they are experienced as absences in presences and presences in absences. To understand unconscious processes in one's own mind or that of another is not simply to expose something that has a tangible existence, as one does in lifting a rock and exposing insects beneath. To understand unconscious processes in one's own mind or that of another is to use language in a fashion that actually discovers and creates new experience, something that was not there before. And there is an additional, crucial factor in the psychoanalytic situation: through interaction with the patient, the analyst is also cocreating new conscious and unconscious experiences, including our very efforts to interpret what took place previously.

This is really the crux of the matter. Traditional claims to analytic knowledge and authority presupposed that the central dynamics relevant to the analytic process are preorganized in the patient's mind and that the analyst is in a detached and privileged position to access them. As Friedman (1996) suggests, this is not a question of humility, but of epistemology and perhaps ontology:

What carries us beyond the question of the analyst's modesty is the more radical question of whether, a hidden meaning is known even to the Eye of God. If it is, then perhaps some piece of it might also be known to the eye of the analyst. If it is not--if there is no already given predisposition from which momentary developments are lawfully elicited--then the analyst's "co-creation" of meaning is, indeed, an adventure of a vastly different sort than we have imagined [p. 260].

When it comes to the question of what is in the unconscious, determining the best interpretation, the heterogeneous state of contemporary psychoanalytic schools is probably the most persuasive evidence against a singular standard of objectivity. Each school, each theory, each clinician organizes interpretations of unconscious dynamics in a particular fashion, and there are many, many plausible interpretations, or, in Nagel's (1995) terms, many ways to enrich commonsense.

Most interesting about Friedman's position is that, although he grasps the ways in which the "co-creation of meaning" makes psychoanalysis "an adventure of a vastly different sort," he wants to retain the trappings of classical authority as a hedge against what he fears will turn out to be an abyss.

It is hard to picture how an analyst would work who no longer believes in hunting for something that is already there to be discovered. For instance, Hanly observes that the strongest pillar of analysts' authority has always been their dedication to objective truth; it is that dedication that prevents analysts from pulling rank on patients, or engaging in other personal manipulations. If there is no objective truth to be known, what self-discipline will take its place? [p. 261].

Friedman (1988) often comes to the conclusion (this is true in many places in The Anatomy of Psychotherapy) that the psychoanalytic process cannot possibly work in the way that traditional psychoanalytic theory told us it did, but that there is something valuable, indeed absolutely essential, in analysts' acting as if they still believe it works in just that way. belief in a fictional objectivity is retained as a barricade against unrestrained feeling and activity on the analyst's part. This seems a weak rationale for retaining a dubious, increasingly anachronistic doctrine. (5)

Yet it is possible to anchor self-discipline, clinical responsibility and a respect for the patient's autonomy in an acknowledgement of the intersubjective nature of the analytic enterprise rather than a denial of it. Indeed, in my experience, "rank pulling" tends to be found more often in clinical work where the analyst believes he represents objective Truth (often under the banner of "standing firm") rather than in clinical work where truth and meaning are regarded as coconstructed. The patient's autonomy is more honestly and meaningfully protected through the acknowledgment of the analyst's influence than through claims to illusory objectivity.

A fundamental difference between the traditional approach to the analyst's knowledge and authority and more contemporary approaches is that many of us believe that each analyst provides a model or theoretical framework that does not reveal what is in the patient's mind, but that makes it possible to organize the patients conscious and unconscious experience in one among many possible ways, a way that is one hopes, conducive to a richer and less self-sabotaging existence. Thus, I would make very different claims for my model of psychopathology, based on conflictual relational configurations, than Brenner makes for his model, based on conflictual childhood sexual and aggressive impulses. I do not regard my model as empirically derived and objective, although it has certainly been influenced by empirical data and would likely be changed in response to disconfirming empirical data and any growing consensus of clinicians regarding some other viewpoint. I regard my model as one among many possible and valid ways of viewing psychopathology, one that reflects both the interpretive community that I was drawn to and trained in, and also my own distinctly subjective experience. Thus, my approach to the problem of the analyst's authority and knowledge is different from the traditional one, because it presupposes a different phenomenon (a different kind of mind, ambiguous and amenable to multiple interpretations rather than prefigured and distinct) about which the analyst hopes to have authoritative knowledge.

The analyst, if he or she is meaningfully engaged in the process, inevitably becomes touched and moved by the patient, and happily so. The understandings that emerge within the analyst's mind about the patient are embedded in the fluid, interpenetrating mix of their encounter, with their perpetual impact on each other. The analyst's guesses about the patient are not simply derived from the application of his or her theory but are saturated with the analyst's countertransferential responses to the patient. The traditional notions that the analyst is essentially invisible to the patient and that the properly functioning analyst understands the patient largely in dispassionate terms are essentially illusions, serving to disclaim the analyst's personal impact.(6)

This is not at all to deny that most, if not all, patients begin by attributing vast authority of various kinds to the analyst. That initial authority, which Freud (1912) approvingly called "the unobjectionable positive transference," is not the authority that the patient will ultimately come to respect as a meaningful feature of analytic change. The latter authority is not brought to the treatment but is a product of the analyst's participation in the treatment.

One important implication of the approach I am suggesting is that any understanding of a mind, one's own or another's, is personal; it is one's own understanding, based on one's own assumptions about human life, one's own dynamics, and so on. So, unlike Freud and Brenner, I do not regard any analyst's understanding of his or her patient's mind as a best guess in any sort of objective, generic sense, but rather as that particular analyst's best guess, embedded in the analyst's experience and in the context of the predominant transference-countertransference configurations. The analyst always participates in and, inevitably, cocreates precisely what she is also collaborating with the patient to try to understand. As Donnel Stern (1997) has put it, "psychoanalysis is not a search for the hidden truth about the patient's life, but the emergence, through curiosity and the acceptance of uncertainty, of constructs that may never have been thought before" (p. 7).

The analyst's expertise lies, most fundamentally, in her understanding of a process--what happens when one begins to express and reflect on one's experience in the presence of a trained listener, in the highly structured context provided by the analytic situation.

Perhaps these differences will be sharpened if we consider a brief clinical example of a patient beginning analytic treatment.

Robert and His Inner World

Robert, a 40-year-old corporate executive, seeks psychoanalytic treatment because he is tortured by bad dreams in which he is swamped with tasks and demands on his time and discovers that he has overlooked or forgotten about some crucial detail, leading to disastrous consequences. Robert has a simple, unidimensional view of his own mind. His parents were devoted to their children and made enormous personal sacrifices to fund their education; they were poor but happy. Robert understands his nightmares as due to the pressures of his job, but he does not understand why he cannot handle those pressures with greater ease.

Within the first several weeks of sessions it becomes clear that the affect in the dreams vis-a-vis work-related pressures corresponds to a more general worry about his wife and children that he has suffered from for many years. Robert fears that he will become absorbed in some project or distraction and will not be available to them when they are endangered. He has particular concerns about his son, David (he also has two older daughters). He sees David as caught up in the greedy, television-impaired materialism of American culture and worries about how he will be able to instill in him the self-sacrificing devotion he learned from his own parents. He then reports his first dream in analysis:

I am climbing down a stone wall in my backyard; David is with me. I am lowering him down to the ground by holding on to his arm. He was about a foot from the ground when I let him go. It should have been safe, but he punched a hole in the ground and sank into some kind of chamber. He disappeared into the hole. There was some sort of light, as if there were a floor five or six feet below the ground. He bounced and rolled off to the side. I couldn't see him. I started screaming for my wife to call the police, an ambulance, something. I began digging frantically. I wasn't getting anywhere. There were sliding rocks. Then there were rescue workers, lots of people. There was an horrific feeling that David was dying. Then I noticed a piece of wood poking out of the dirt some distance away. It was moving. I dug down and uncovered a box like one of my filing boxes in which I keep all sorts of things I think I might need someday. I pulled the box up, and inside was David. He was alive and well.

Several features of the interaction between Robert and myself around this dream are of particular interest. After exploring and developing many of his rich associations to the dream, which included his chronic fears that his world and his mind might suddenly give way, I told Robert I thought the dream might be understood to suggest that there were places in his mind that he was not aware of, places where pieces of his own experience had been placed for safekeeping for future reference. I also suggested that his struggles with his son were in some measure reflective of struggles with a part of himself that had been long buried.

Robert began the next session by complimenting me on my "creative" understanding of the dream, by which it soon became clear he meant far fetched. But he then told me another dream in which now his wife (who has an interest in psychoanalysis and had encouraged him to enter treatment) disappeared into an elaborate system of underground pipes. In his associations to this image, he recalled that the house in which his family had lived when he was a child had a septic system underneath the backyard. The tank in this system would need to be drained periodically by a visiting truck, at considerable expense. To save money for the education of the children, his father undertook the massive project of digging trenches for lateral pipes to the tank, which would increase the available drainage underground. The children would be enlisted in these massive digging projects. Robert remembered his mother's concern for his safety, since the trenches were at times deeper than he was tall. There was one memory in which he struck at some rocks with his shovel and water from an underground spring began to fill the trench. But he was pulled to safety before the trench filled with water.

Through the lens of relational psychoanalytic theory, Robert's conscious, isolated sense of himself is embedded within a complex network of relationships within his own mind of which he is largely unaware. His father, whom he remembers only lovingly, was internalized by him in a complex fashion. There is a part of him--a greedy, aggressive part of him, perhaps a phallic, sexual part of him (as suggested by the waving stick)--that had been buried in his father's world of devotion and hard work. The sector of his experience that was buried and remains dissociated seems to correspond to, and resonate with, his son and his typical childish egotism and greediness. Robert becomes involved in desperate efforts to control his son, partly because the son stands also for the version of himself that he has long entombed and that he deeply fears. Yet his dreams of something important that has been forgotten suggest to me that he is struggling with a sense that he is struggling with a sense that he has tragically mutilated his own inner resources and potentials.

This is just one way of understanding this dream; there are no doubt many others. But to be occupied primarily with figuring out what the dream "really means" is to miss the point. Dream interpretation must facilitate the analytic process. If one thinks about the analytic process as generating insight by correctly identifying the patient's dynamics, then the "best guess" decoding of the dream is essential. But for me the analytic process is about expanding and enriching the patient's experience of his own mind and facilitating his capacity to generate experience that he finds vitalizing and personally meaningful. From this perspective, arriving at a "best guess" decoding of the dream is neither possible nor desirable; what is important is engaging him about the dream in a way that sparks and quickens his own analytic interest in himself (Bollas, 1987; Phillips, 1993).

What does psychoanalysis offer this man? The dream suggests some possibilities, because we might regard the dream as a reference not just to his childhood and the world of his father, but also to his feelings about the psychoanalytic project on which he has just embarked.

Psychoanalysis seems to provide Robert entry into a complex, labyrinthine world in which he might very well get lost, as he did in some sense in the world of his father. (The anal metaphor of the septic system suggests fecal passageways, a fantasy of paternal bowels in which he was hiding and trapped.) Partly because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, we can certainly make the guess that his relationship with his father will reemerge in the same basic forms in the transferential relationship with the analyst. My analytic concepts and vision will become an analogue of his father's septic vision. In fact, at a later point in the analysis, this feature of the transference announced itself in what he experienced as a shameful admission of concerns that I might disapprove of his analytic efforts, at his not "digging deep enough."

What sort of claims can I, should I, make for my analytic understanding? I believe that if I present my ideas about his mind as if I knew what is there and that he would come to see it my way, I will likely be experienced by him as reenacting his relationship with his father, and he will be faced with the choice of either passive surrender or defiance. Freud and his contemporaries might have been able to proceed in just this way, because they were practicing at a time when everyone ceded enormous authority to professional, religious, and intellectual leaders of all sorts. In our day, virtually all authorities have come under attack and are questioned, and the same deference to authority that in Freud's day was normative and adaptive is in our day, a form of masochistic pathology.

I believe that what I can offer Robert instead is possible ways to view his mind and experience (including thinking about it in terms of metaphors of interiority) that I hope to show him will be both enriching and liberating. (As Phillips, 1995, has put it, "So instead of asking, Is there an unconscious?, we might ask, In what sense are our lives better if we live as though there is one?" p. 56). I believe my expertise lies not in knowing what is there in him, but in devising ways of construing his experience that are potentially helpful, and also in inquiring into what happens between us when he is confronted by my ideas about him. Thus, with the emergence of his concerns about my feeling that he is not "digging deep enough," his ambivalent hopes and dread about my system, his sense of what my system means to me, become at least as important as his efforts. I don't believe that it is useful to insist on his recognition of my authority and knowledge as a contractual basis for our work. He has his ideas about what I can possibly provide for him, and I have mine. The proof is in the proverbial pudding. My authority and knowledge can become meaningful to him only through the process; it is not a precondition of the process.

My job, the way I conceive of it, is to find ways to show Robert that my conceptual diggings are likely to be safer than he imagines, perhaps even exhilarating; that, despite what might be a wish to surrender to my efforts, he does not have to participate in a way that is over his head and threatens to down him; that he and I might collaborate in a new system of understanding that neither he nor I can envision at the start; that he and I will be able to find a way for him to use me without becoming buried in me. Robert's struggle with his father and his trenches will be fought in the analytic trenches with me.

So I am offering a view of the analyst's knowledge and authority that portrays the analyst as an expert in collaborative, self-authorizing self-reflection, in developing useful constructions for understanding the analysand's experience. (7)

Analytic constructions are neither uniquely objective nor idiosyncratically subjective. They are among many possible organizations of the analysand's experience that have proved helpful in generating a sense of personal meaning and value.

Mutuality/Asymmetry

Irwin A. Hoffman, Lewis Aron, Thomas Ogden and other authors who have emphasized the "mutuality," the continual reciprocal influencing that characterizes the analytic relationship, also note that the forms through which analyst and analysand participate are asymmetrical. The effort to define this asymmetry precisely has been one of the trickiest features of the current reconceptualization of the nature of the analytic relationship. Ferenczi's (1932) experiment in "mutual analysis" foundered when he lost sight of the difference in the roles of analysand and analyst.

One of the implications of the argument I have been developing is that it is crucial both that the analyst not pull rank and that he also hold his ground when necessary. In the self-authorizing empowerment of the analytic process, the analyst's traditional rank-pulling can only be counterproductive. Yet it is important that the analyst be able to hold on to a sense of the value of his input as offering potential utility for meaning making, self-expansion, and self-reflection. Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central challenge of emotional life. (The Kleinians call this depressive anxiety.) Can the patient learn to take in something important from the analyst without risking impossible self-betrayal in a myriad of forms? It is precisely in their collaborative struggle to find a way to make that possible that the most important analytic work is done.

One of the major features of the analyst's role is his or her function in preserving the relationship as analytic and conducting and protecting the inquiry. While the analysand's role entails giving oneself over to the experience of the analytic process, the analyst, in addition to the experiential self-monitoring, must also pay attention to holding and protecting the process. The asymmetry of the analytic relationship derives greatly from the necessity for the analyst to bear this responsibility. In some respects, the analyst's role is analogous to that of the "designated driver" at a party, or the designated negotiator of reality in a group drug trip. Someone has to be mindful of the bigger picture, and it is precisely that mindfulness that allows a surrender to the experience for the other participants. The person in the role assigned such responsibilities is, of course, expected to join the party, but she must also maintain a state of mind in which she can guarantee the safety of all involved, and that difference in roles makes possible a different range of experiences.

Does the enormous responsibility the analyst bears in safeguarding the analytic process suggest that his role is largely parental? From its inception, parental metaphors have been an important avenue for thinking about the analyst's participation. Freud conceptualized the analyst largely in paternal terms; postclassical theorizing, especially that derived from Winnicott and Kohut, has often cast the analyst in terms of maternal metaphors. Hoffman (1996) has argued that the analyst is inevitably experienced as reflecting a certain aura, a power that is an accompaniment of the developmental significance the analyst inevitably comes to play.

Yet, Phillips (1993) has pointed to the dangers of developmental metaphors, "playing mothers." When we presume that the analyst will serve specific developmental functions, whether defined as paternal, maternal, or in terms of an array of self-object functions, Phillips suggests, we foreclose the valuable possibility of being taken by surprise. But to argue against a universally assumed developmental significance or parental aura does not preclude an appreciation of the unique configuration of the analytic relationship, which for each analyst-analysand dyad, in its particular way, makes possible an extraordinary intimacy.

The context-specific intimacy of the analytic relationship contributes to its oddness,. So much cannot happen. The preset formal structure of time and place, the almost exclusive conversational focus on the experience of one participant and not the other, the prohibitions against touching--all this makes for an odd relationship indeed, one that does not translate easily into chance encounters on the street. Yet it is this very constellation of constraints that opens up the possibility of a kind of intimacy, self-expression, and self-reflection that is simply not available in any other way.

The setting of a patient's dream for me captured this creative tension at the heart of the analytic relationship. In the dream, she and I were in session in my office. Two of the walls were intact, parallel to each otter, as they actually are. They seemed clear and close together. But the two ends of the narrowed room were open; there were no walls, only open spaces. For this patient, who struggles with boundaries and transgressions, imprisonments, and liberations, the analytic relationship provides both agonizing limits and dizzying possibilities. And for all patients there is something in the limits themselves, guarded by the analyst in his authoritative role, that opens up the uniquely analytic possibilities.

Over the course of an analysis, the analysand's experience becomes increasingly self-authorized. What sort of enduring presence remains of the analyst in the patient's mind? What, then, is the fate of the analytic object? In the early decades of analytic theorizing, when the analyst was thought to be solely a transference object, the analytic relationship was understood to leave no residue. If the transference were "completely resolved," the analytic relationship would vanish like a figment of the patient's imagination, which, in fact, it was understood to be. In recent decades, there has been increasingly greater emphasis on the ways in which the analyst is internalized in lasting identifications. We are generally most comfortable speaking of these identifications as generic functions, like the analyst's "observing ego," analyzing funticon, and so on. But more and more we are able to acknowledge to ourselves and to each other that the specific person of the analyst, in his or her unique subjectivity, becomes a lasting presence in the postanalytic world of the analysand.

For many patients, the most difficult thing about the analytic relationship is precisely the differential importance analyst and analysand have in each other's lives. For the analysand, the analyst is at or near the center of his or her emotional life. For the analyst, each patient necessarily occupies a more peripheral spot. Many of us began doing analytic work with one or two patients and quickly learned something of the dangers of depending on too few for too much. No matter how reciprocal the analytic relationship, the patient starts in need, while the analyst starts by offering a service. The patient has one analyst; the analyst has many patients. The patient will go on to a life without analysis; the analyst will continue to practice with other patients.

Part of what the analyst has authoritative knowledge about is the shimmering complications of these facts, these givens of the context-specific intimacy of the analytic situation. But there is a great deal about what this will be like for any particular analysand that neither analyst nor patient know beforehand. One function of the analyst's self-reflective interpretations, especially during the final phases of an analysis, is to try to help facilitate a tolerance of and a sense of excitement about precisely those unknowns.

Footnotes

1. Although the major thrust of Freud's positioning of psychoanalysis as a discipline is as a science, there are many complex subplots within the richness of Freud's writings. Many commentators have argued that Freud also viewed psychoanalysis, at least in potential, as a very different sort of discipline, of a spiritual, hermeneutic, or intersubjective nature (see Bettelheim, 1982; Habermas, 1968; Lear, 1990).

2. This is not to say that the issue of empirical validation itself is irrelevant to contemporary clinicians (especially outcome studies), but, rather, that Grunbaum's (1984) narrowly defined basis of validation misses so much of the very intersubjective nature of the analytic process. For an in-depth exploration of Grunbaum's work in this context, see Curtis, 1996; Fourcher, 1996; Jacobson, 1996; Protter, 1996; and Schwartz, 1996.

3. Isaiah Berlin (1996) defines good judgment in politics, that elusive quality political scientists continually strive to grasp, in similar terms: "Their merit is that they grasp the unique combination of characteristics that constitute this particular situation--this and not other...we mean nothing occult or metaphysical; we do not mean a magic eye able to penetrate into something that ordinary minds cannot apprehend; we mean something perfectly ordinary; empirical and quasi-aesthetic in the way that it works" (p. 27).

4. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis has explored the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge with its Special 75th Anniversary Edition (1994, Vol. 75, parts 5 and 6) on the theme of "What is a clinical fact?" These essays provide an illuminating array of different points of view. There seems to be a general consensus on both the impossibility of clinical facts outside of theoretical perspectives and the utility of a systematic, disciplined explication of the formulations and reasoning that leads analysts of various persuasions to arrive at their conclusions. For insightful discussions of the original essays, see Schlesinger (1995) and S. Cooper (1996).

5. The link between the epistemological claim of neutrality and the emotional and behavioral restraint of the analyst has a long history. Thus, Warren Poland (1994) argues that "neutrality is ...a principle used to circumscribe the interpersonal aspect of the transference process from eccentric intrustions by the analyst's intrapsychic forces" (p. 255). Robert J. Leider (1983) notes that a key element in subscribing to Freud's basic principle of neutrality has always been "keeping the countertransference in check and avoiding imposing values upon the patient" (p. 673). And Michael Basch (1983) similarly notes approvingly "the desirability of...controlling his (the analyst's) affective needs and emotional predilections so as to maintain an even-handed attitude towards his analysand's productions" (p. 697).

6. Renik (1993) has mounted a strong critique of the traditional presumption that a striving for neutrality generates anything approaching objectivity: "Instead of saying that it is difficult for an analyst to maintain a position in which his or her analytic activity objectively focuses on a patient's inner reality, I would say that it is impossible for an [anlayst] to be in that position even for an instant: since we are constantly acting in the analytic situation on the basis of personal motivations of which we cannot be aware until after the fact, our technique, listening included, is inescapably subjective" (p. 560).

7. This is a claim for analytic knowledge that is perspectivist without being relativist (Elliott and Spezzano, 1996, p. 61).

Stephen A. Mitchell, Ph.D., a training and supervising analyst and faculty member of the William Alanson White Institute, is the editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. In addition, he is a supervisor and clinical associate professor of psychology at the N.Y.U. Postdoctoral Program and adjunct professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has won many prestigious awards and has published widely in a variety of areas of psychoanalytic thought.

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