Irony as an Instrument of Change
I have been thinking a lot lately about the role of irony in the therapeutic process, due in large part to an ongoing reexamination of some of the major works of Soren Kierkegaard, whose entire philosophical project began with a book called The Concept of Irony. This isn’t a novel consideration. I have found scattered papers through the PEP data base that touch on the use of irony. And though it’s not framed this way in the material I’ve come across within the CBT framework, the idea of Socratic questioning has its roots in Socrates’ original project of ironic inquiry and reflection.
I found myself recently reflecting on this concept further while reading Winnicott’s essay “The Sense of Guilt” (1958) in his collection The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. In tracing the development of the “guilt-sense” Winnicott begins dutifully with Freud and explores the traditionally understood development of guilt as a consequence of the child’s healthy navigation of the Oedipal situation. From there he incorporates some Kleinian concepts to contextualize guilt as a move from “ruthlessness to ruth”. That is, in the infant’s early interactions with the mother, there is an instinctive tendency to want to “take out of [the mother] everything that is felt there to be good”, somewhat similar to Fairbairn’s descriptions of the infant’s infatuation with emptiness and fullness, concepts largely expanded upon from Fairbairn’s work with Klein. As the infant comes to observe the mother’s capacity to survive the acquisitive impulses of the infant, taking on the more differentiated quality of becoming a tangible other, the child comes into a capacity to feel concern and some sense of responsibility for these behaviors, moving into a position where they are capable of care and concern for the other. As is often the case, most of this is best understood as much metaphorically as it is literally.
Something about Winnicott’s phrasing here cued me to the potential pitfalls of irony and how it can be both useful and a hindrance to this particular developmental task. Winnicott wrote often about the idea of object usage, asserting that part of the function the mother/therapist serves is as an object to be manipulated, used, and destroyed by the infant/client. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Quite to the contrary. Good parenting and good therapy alike should be striving towards a point where the child and client have theoretically gotten what they can out of the other and the other has not only facilitated that process, but demonstrated that they can survive that process, that the destructive capacities of the child/client’s most personally guarded against aggressive impulses or shame inducing desires are not as dangerous or cataclysmic or abhorrent as they may seem/feel. It seems to me that one possible way of receiving and responding to the need to be a useable object is through the kind of verbal play that can be accessed via such literary strategies as irony and metaphor, techniques that fundamentally deconstruct and then reappropriate the referential capacities of language.
However, I also can’t help but wonder about the destructive potential of simple irony or mere irony. I’m thinking here of something like the kind of hip, ironic detachment that often gets attributed to the “counterculture” of the 1990’s. It’s not to say that the things marked by this quality that came out of this period were bad, but it seems to me a flattened version of the kind of darkly comic irony that cropped up in the 60’s and 70’s in the world of American literature. The irony of that time, as observed in works of folks like Thomas Pynchon, Ismael Reed, Donald Barthelme, and countless others was specifically about deconstructing norms in a way that had not yet become conventional or part of a culturally agreed upon aesthetic, i.e. the “postmodern”. There was a specific kind of antiestablishment stance being taken up that was about undermining apparent authority while recognizing the trappings of offering easy solutions. The works are difficult, ambiguous, subversive. All of which was seemingly very much in line with the Socratic and Kierkegaardian project of cultivating a state of aporia in those willing to converse with the project.
The ironic detachment of the 90’s didn’t seem to be about that. In its swift commoditization, it seemed to be more about offering a solution to the disenfranchised masses who failed to head the message of the previous generation. Irony became the authority. This reflexive promotion of more irony as a way to resolve the disillusionment brought on by irony feels like a recipe for what Nietzsche was talking about when he discussed things like decadence or nihilism. It’s as though the response to the emperor not having any clothes is for everyone to just get naked. To draw a parallel, it’s important that the therapist/mother shows that they can tolerate the affective qualities of the child/client, not that they demonstrate the ability to be flatly disaffected by them. To try to honor the importance of the impact of the other by undermining and attempting to feign neutrality could actually be quite damaging to the infant and the healthy development of a relational self.
It is also important not to lose sight of the ways in which irony can be generative, even in the absence of the Hegelian notion of negating the negation. Sometimes the role of the caregiver is to playfully dismantle the restrictive impulses and perceptual biases that impact those they care for. Lacan stated it most explicitly when he stated that the unconscious is structured like a language. But even in the way we might talk about the repetition compulsion as it exists in traditional or object-relations orientations to psychoanalysis, there is something about the nature of the intersubjective process that gets structured through a discourse of words, gestures, and affective interpersonal expressions that characterize the relational aspects of the repetition compulsion. If this were not the case, the repetition compulsion would not be a dynamic entity in the way that it is. This doesn’t even necessarily require a theoretical structure to make sense. Anyone who has been in a crisis and paid attention to the way that crisis impacts relationships with others can feel this.
The therapist’s responsibility is not to bow to the authority of a particular semantically structured organizing principle, but to enter into and deliberately dismantle it. Not recklessly, but in a kind of communion with the client. It’s a process that needs to be done artfully and, dare I say, lovingly in order to ascend to the kind of dramatic change we aspire to in deeply subjective therapeutic work. We cannot remain detached. Language must be utilized to serve both a cognitive and an affective function, to enhance modes of feeling rather than nullify them. This is why, to go back to Winnicott for a moment, play is such an essential part of the therapeutic process, that in fact therapy is the coming together of the play of therapist and the play of the client or, as can often be the case, the therapist teaching the client how to return to a state of play.
How to do this does not always seem easy, but it seems to me to be rooted in the cultivation of the imaginative and creative capacities of the therapist. Whether through literature, film, movement, philosophy, or some other mode of creative discourse, I don’t think therapists can get by without having spaces for themselves that cultivate some sense of awe or wonder about the world. Which might seem weird in an essay that began as a discussion of irony, but I think it is important to remember the two paragons of the ironic position, Kierkegaard and Socrates, were deeply moved by and in awe of the world. They were never merely ironic. Their irony sprung from a deep well of curiosity and a compulsion to move their world, as they inhabited it, to deeper and richer repositories of meaning and significance. There is a reason they are two of the philosophers with whom therapists seem to be the most interested. And in an over-technologized and isolated world like the one we are living in, where it seems like myriad new authorities are assumed and appealed to everyday, where decades worth of cynicism has left many feeling detached and only flatly connected to the world we all share, it may be as important to heed their call as ever.
