Dialectics, Paradox, and Development
In his Practicing Existential Therapy: The Relational World, Ernesto Spinelli dedicates a section of the text to examining the role of what he calls existence tensions in the work of doing therapy. In this section, he provides a list of some of the more common existence tensions that come up with clients, a list which he cites as having its origins in the work of a psychologist by the name of Bill Wahl. I won’t repost the entirety of the list here, but it contains some of the themes one would expect to come up in doing relationally oriented therapy, such as attachment—separation, the relationship between mind and body, power—impotence, union—separateness, and self-centeredness—other-focus.
These tensions have come up in my thinking again recently as I’ve been sifting through the work of two other thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard and Ronald Fairbairn, while also recalling me to another paper I think about often, Emmanuel Ghent’s “Paradox and Process”.
Much of what I have been taught about psychoanalysis has been given to me through a philosophical lens, with a particular interest in the existential and continental traditions. It is a technique for reading those writers I have done my best to carry forward, not just because I think it draws something out of psychoanalysis that otherwise gets covered over, but also because as the discipline has continued to evolve the influence of philosophy on many of psychoanalysis’ more recent thinkers (Ogden, Bromberg, Benjamin, Mitchell, etc.) seems increasingly obvious. In fact, it seems to me that much of what often gets carried forward from many of psychoanalysis’ early theorists, whether the Freuds, Winnicott, Klein, Kohut, or others, are less the moments that are encased in layers of psychoanalytic jargon and are much more commonly the moments where those thinkers allow themselves to get lost in the poetry and humanity of their theoretical concerns.
I’ve lately been having that experience with Fairbairn’s Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, which feels to me, the more I read it, like a lost text of psychoanalysis. Fairbairn, I think lies just on the other side of obscurity for most casual readers of the psychoanalytic tradition. I’ve been scouring this material for probably close to a decade now, albeit at times as more of a hobbyist than as a dedicated acolyte, and only now am I getting to his writing as a primary text, rather than via interpretation and secondary sources. Which is a shame. Though at times the text can be rigid and systematic, the phenomenological conditions Fairbairn describes seem to have refined and heightened my thinking in recent weeks when it comes to working through certain problems encountered in therapy. You can see his influence scattered throughout the writings of the modern day relational and intersubjective theorists. And when he allows himself to slide into metaphor, the concepts take on a kind of life that can be quite intoxicating, if you’re prone to getting swept up in those sorts of things (or haven’t been rendered completely anaesthetized by the routes Fairbairn takes to get there).
Without getting too into the weeds on the many essays contained within the collection, the broad overview is that the writings included in Psychoanalytic Studies chart the trajectory of Fairbairn’s development, transition into, and exploration of object-relations and the concepts of splitting and good/bad objects. Fairbairn introduces the notion that all of us have implicit schizoid tendencies, and that even the more sophisticated levels of defense carry with them a quality of the schizoid response. The major contribution, however, is the shift away from the drive model to the relational model of understanding libidinal impulses. Essentially, what Fairbairn argues is that the erotogenic zones identified by Sigmund Freud, and the sequence they develop through, are less about drive based libidinal impulses choosing to express themselves through that particular channel at that particular age, but instead that the channel itself is the most accessible means by which the individual can initiate contact with the desired object at that particular phase in the life cycle. So, for instance, the oral phase evolves as such because the infant, in their limited ability to initiate contact, must find their connection with the object through the orifice of the mouth. Even more succinctly, Fairbairn will identify one of his clients as saying back to him “You’re always talking about my wanting this and that desire satisfied; but what I really want is a father.”
Where the text gets more phenomenological (and a bit more lyrical) are in the tensions Fairbairn identifies at specific ages, noting that the early oral dialectic takes shape as one of emptiness and fullness while the late oral/early anal transitions to one of giving and taking. Here Fairbairn allows himself to get swept up in descriptions of the desperation the child must feel in response to their need to consume, elucidating a wonderful hermeneutic in which it is not just the infant’s own emptiness and fullness with which it is concerned, but the emptiness and fullness of the object of desire as well. Later, as the child grows into more differentiated understanding of themselves and their objects as whole and seemingly independent entities, this develops into a complicated dynamic of giving and taking. To Fairbairn, the healthier the circumstances of our development, the more effective we will be at giving, at being able to tolerate temporary feelings of emptiness. The harsher the circumstances, the more needs go unmet, the more we will hold on, not just to that which is good and nourishing, but also to that which is bad and toxifying. The direction of libidinal energy gets turned inward in the face of unsatisfying relationships, leading to all kinds of complications in relatedness and perceptions of reality.
Throughout the various essays, Fairbairn seems sophisticated enough of a thinker to recognize that these paradoxes don’t necessarily get resolved, but are rather held onto at various layers of psychic integration. The strategy here, and the move from Freud to Fairbairn, in someways recalls to me the work of Kierkegaard and his position with relation to the work of G.W.F. Hegel. One of Kierkegaard’s primary projects was to fashion a response to Hegelian dialectics via an allegiance to traditional Socratic irony. Hegel’s major critique was that Socrates missed the positive end of the dialectic and failed to resolve his many negations, which meant his work was bereft of arguments or well-developed ideas which later philosophies could continue to build and expand upon. For Kierkegaard, this was exactly the point, with the challenge being to hold the ironic position with regards to already developed thoughts or culturally/politically motivated influences. The purpose of which being to better understand one’s own subjectivity, noting in what we can call his early “mature” works that existence is littered with unresolvable paradoxes which must be maintained as such. One need only read Kierkegaard’s earliest published of his so-called “literary” texts, Either/Or, to see the ways Kierkegaard plays with negation, irony, and the dissatisfaction of trying to mediate seemingly opposite poles of a perceived dialectical tension.
The Ghent paper I referred to earlier argues for exactly this position (following the citation of a passage from Winnicott rather than Kierkegaard). Ghent discusses the ways of responding to the relationship between dialectical positions, referring to the two responses as paradox (holding the tension) and process (resolving the tension) respectively, noting within the relational nature of these concepts the ways in which, when used accordingly, one can inform, enhance, and contribute to the development of the other. Ghent argues against the bypassing of the paradox, either by adhering blindly to one pole of the dialectic or mediating the tension in a way that denies the paradox its true complexities. Ghent’s call to the analyst/therapist is a commitment to holding open the paradox as long as possible, labeling the failure to do so as an “empathic failure”. Ghent frustrates the desire for easy dialectics further by noting the oppositional tendencies of what could otherwise be experienced as the same side of the dialectic, such as need and demandingness and surrender and submission. For those not inclined to go back and read Kierkegaard and Fairbairn in their original, much could be gained conceptually from reading this short paper by Ghent.
The above merely serves as a quick outline for some otherwise complicated ideas to which I would hope to return. What I will offer as the purpose of the outline, in as much as it could be assumed to be starting a conversation about something, is the commitment the therapist must have to not resolving paradoxical tensions as they arise in the therapeutic encounter. Though the maintenance of those kinds of tensions can often lead to some kind of suffering or agitation on the part of the client (and therapist), all of the above thinkers would likely offer that in some capacity the suffering is the point. That discomfort is at once the indicator and catalyst for change, not in the cognitive-behavioral sense, but with regards to one’s relationship with their own existence or intrapsychic mechanisms. Life is a paradoxical process. Creating a holding environment that allows clients to better understand their own ability to hold open those paradoxes serves the function of leading to something beyond acceptance. Something that might be most adequately referred to as resoluteness…though that is a post for another day.
