Saturday 25 December 2010

Hermeneutics; sex and the gospel story

I won’t be writing every day, but thought I’d write about Robert Caper’s Building out into the Dark which I’ve been reading recently.  I admire Caper – a West coast Kleinian – and especially his A Mind of One’s Own.  His is a radical psychoanalytic position – anything other than the search for truth, neutrality, and an impersonal Bionic and often tangential response to the patient’s material is to be eschewed, although he acknowledges that the analyst will always be pulled into potentially collusive, supportive, controlling judgmental positions – and that he/she need an ‘analytic attitude’ to wrench him//her away and back to analytic neutrality.

He tries to make the case that psychoanalysis is a kind of ‘science’, not the ‘reductive’ sort that depends on replicability, but nevertheless a systematic search for the truth with the analyst’s unconscious as the ‘instrument’, analogous to Galileo’s telescopes, the CERN LHA etc, through which the unconscious can be glimpsed.  It’s a nice metaphor, but doesn’t entirely convince – he’s very keen to avoid tendentiousness in the consulting room – as above, the analyst’s tendency to try to persuade, cure, etc – but there seems to be to be a tendentiousness or special pleading about his championing of the analytic attitude.  And I’m not convinced that  analytic discourse cannot be studied and measured using conventional scientific approaches – especially if qualitative methods are included.  I hang on to the idea of ‘triangulation’ – the need for a ‘third’ which if the analytic relationship is to be studied entails recording what goes on – by videotape, audiotape or even detailed post-session recall by both therapist and patient.  All of this is do-able,  and doesn’t depend of over-valuing the Bionic austerity of the well-trained analyst.

From my perspective a hermeneutic interpretation can never be a ‘fact’ in the way that the speed of light or mass of a pound of sugar can be.  It’s an emotional response in an interpersonal and linguistic framework.  This is not far removed, I have to admit, from Bion’s formulation, expounded by Caper of the combination of a physical sensation, ‘passion’, and a ‘mythological’ component, the latter two of which I would translate into affective and ideological aspects of interpretations.

25/12/10

At Christmas Carol service last night + readings,  surprising how explicit the gospels are about Mary and sex and virginity and Joseph wanting to divorce her when he discovers she’s pregnant and then brought round when told it was only the holy ghost who ‘came over’ her!  Seems to fit well with the Ron Britton model of Oedipus – i.e. the post-Oedipal child needs to be able to let his/her parents get on with it without being crippled by envy or intrusiveness.  The message is:  a child is born:  you will inevitably want to know how that’s possible, but it’s a sort of happy mystery – and when your time comes you’ll find out the real story (and anyway you’re in a stable, and you only have to look around at the animals which surround you to work out where babies come from)!  Now it’s all about attachments – gifts, the devoted mother etc.  So we get not just the alternation and difference between the generations and between the sexes a la Chasseguet-Smirguel,  but also the difference between Attachment and Sex and the life-cycle rhythm of the alternation between them.

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