For more than four decades, George Atwood and I have been absorbed in rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. In the course of this work, I repeatedly made the claim that phenomenology led us inexorably to relationality, but until now I did not offer an explanation of this inexorability. In this article, I show that emotional phenomenology and relationality always already form an indissoluble unity, because relationality is constitutive of emotional experience

Stolorow, Robert D.

English

PhilPapers

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttps://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hpsi20Psychoanalytic InquiryA Topical Journal for Mental Health ProfessionalsISSN: 0735-1690 (Print) 1940-9133 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsi20Emotional Phenomenology and Relationality:Forever the Twain Shall MeetRobert D. StolorowTo cite this article: Robert D. Stolorow (2019) Emotional Phenomenology andRelationality: Forever the Twain Shall Meet, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 39:2, 123-126, DOI:10.1080/07351690.2019.1561126To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2019.1561126Published online: 18 Mar 2019.Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark dataEmotional Phenomenology and Relationality: Forever the TwainShall MeetRobert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.ABSTRACTFor more than four decades, George Atwood and I have been absorbed inrethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. In thecourse of this work, I repeatedly made the claim that phenomenology ledus inexorably to relationality, but until now I did not offer an explanation ofthis inexorability. In this article, I show that emotional phenomenology andrelationality always already form an indissoluble unity, because relationalityis constitutive of emotional experience.A science is defined by its domain of inquiry. In its most general form, our thesis… is that psychoanalysis seeksto illuminate phenomena that emerge within a specific psychological field constituted by the intersection of twosubjectivities—that of the patient and that of the analyst. In this conceptualization, psychoanalysis is not seen asa science of the intrapsychic, focused on events presumed to occur within one isolated “mental apparatus.” Noris it conceived as a social science, investigating the “behavioral facts” of the therapeutic interaction as seen froma point of observation outside the field under study. Rather, psychoanalysis is pictured here as a science of theintersubjective, focused on the interplay between the differently organized subjective worlds of the observer andthe observed. The observational stance is always one within, rather than outside, the intersubjective field …being observed. … Psychoanalysis is unique among the sciences in that the observer is also the observed.[Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, pp. 41–42]We contend that both psychological development and pathogenesis are best conceptualized in terms of thespecific intersubjective contexts that shape the developmental process and that facilitate or obstruct the child’snegotiation of critical developmental tasks and successful passage through developmental phases. The observa-tional focus is the evolving psychological field constituted by the interplay between the differently organizedsubjectivities of child and caretakers. [Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, p. 65]Although certain authors have, for political reasons, sought to marginalize and isolate Atwood’s andmy intersubjective-systems perspective, Mitchell and Aron (1999), in their introduction to ourchapter in their anthology, characterized us as “pioneers” of the relational turn:Robert Stolorow and George Atwood are among the leading pioneers of the intersubjective approach. It wasthey and their collaborators in the 1970s who introduced the term intersubjectivity into the vocabulary of thepsychoanalytic community in this country.1 These authors have long argued for a paradigm shift in the fieldtoward a dynamic systems perspective and have been most articulate and persuasive in their radical critique of“the myth of the isolated mind” … and so influential for the emerging relational tradition. [pp. 365–366]The two passages quoted at the beginning of this article show unambiguously that our perspective has beena relational one since its early beginnings. Upon further reflection, however, I have realized that there issomething about the development of our relational perspective that distinguishes it from most others.Typically, contemporary relational viewpoints have their origins in prior psychoanalytic theories—Sullivan’s, Klein’s, Fairbairn’s, etc.2 In contrast, our perspective evolved from considerations of method—namely, our commitment to rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. Indeed, theCONTACT Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. robertdstolorow@gmail.com 744 21st Place, Santa Monica, CA 90402.1In Stolorow, Atwood, and Ross (1978).2These prior psychoanalytic theories often contain concepts that are instantiations of Cartesian isolated-mind thinking—such asparataxic distortion, projective identification, and endopsychic structures—that are carried over more or less uncritically into thecorresponding contemporary relational viewpoints (see Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002, Chapter 5).Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald SilverPSYCHOANALYTIC INQUIRY2019, VOL. 39, NO. 2, 123–126https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2019.1561126subtitle of the book (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984) from which my opening quotations are drawn isExplorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology. Let me explain further.The historical origins of our phenomenological perspective harken back to a series of psychobiogra-phical studies that we conducted in the early and mid-1970s, of the personal, subjective origins of thetheoretical systems of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank, studies that formed the basis of our first book, Facesin a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979), which was completed in1976. From these studies we concluded that because psychoanalytic theories derive to a significant degreefrom the subjective concerns of their creators, what psychoanalysis needed was a theory of subjectivityitself—a unifying framework capable of accounting not only for the psychological phenomena that othertheories address, but also for the theories themselves.In the last chapter of Faces (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979) we outlined a set of proposals for thecreation of such a framework, which, as I alluded to, we called psychoanalytic phenomenology.Influenced by the work of George S. Klein (1976), we envisioned this framework as a depth psychologyof personal experience, purified of the mechanistic reifications of Freudian metapsychology. Ourframework took the experiential world of the individual as its central theoretical construct. Weassumed no impersonal psychical agencies or motivational prime movers to explain the experientialworld. Instead, we assumed that this world evolves organically from the person’s encounter with thecritical formative experiences that constitute his or her unique life history. Once established, itbecomes discernible in the distinctive, recurrent patterns, themes, and invariant meanings thatprereflectively organize the person’s experiences. Psychoanalytic phenomenology entailed a set ofinterpretive principles for investigating the nature, origins, purposes, and transformations of theconfigurations of self and other pervading a person’s experiential world. Importantly, our dedicationto illuminating personal phenomenology had led us from mind to world and thus from mentalcontents to relational contexts, from the intrapsychic to the intersubjective. From our phenomenolo-gical perspective, all of the clinical phenomena with which psychoanalysis has been traditionallyconcerned were seen as taking form within systems of interacting, differently organized, mutuallyinfluencing subjective worlds. Phenomenology had led us inexorably to contextualism.3How and why did this inexorable movement from phenomenology to contextualism occur?4The central reason, I have come to realize, is that a psychoanalytic phenomenology, as opposed toother forms of phenomenological inquiry, is always devoted to investigating affectivity—that is,worlds of emotional experience. During the period when George Atwood and I were fleshing outour psychoanalytic phenomenology, I was working on an article with Daphne Socarides Stolorow(Socarides and Stolorow, 1984/85) in which we were suggesting that Kohut’s central clinicalcontributions pertained essentially to affective experience. Furthermore, the experience of affectwas grasped in this article as being inseparable from the contexts of attunement and malattune-ment in which it is felt. This understanding became seamlessly woven into the fabric of psycho-analytic phenomenology.The shift in focus from the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves psychoanalysistoward a phenomenological contextualism and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective systems.Unlike drives, which are claimed to originate deep within the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind,affect—subjective emotional experience—is something that from birth onward is coconstituted withinongoing relational systems. Therefore, locating affect at its center automatically entails a radicalcontextualization of virtually all aspects of human psychological life.3Later (Stolorow, 2011), I found in Heidegger’s (1927) ontological contextualism (In-der-Welt-sein) a philosophical foundation forour psychoanalytic phenomenological contextualism, replacing the Cartesian isolated mind that undergirds Freudian theory.4A similar progression can be discerned in the evolution of Kohut’s ideas. In his early article (Kohut, 1959) on the relationshipbetween mode of observation and theory in psychoanalysis, he conceived of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenologicalinquiry, without naming it as such, by arguing that only what is accessible to empathy and introspection belongs within thedomain of psychoanalytic theory. In his subsequent important contributions to psychoanalytic clinical theory (e.g., Kohut, 1971),he claimed famously that the experiencing of selfhood, or of its collapse, is always embedded in a relational context. Still later(Kohut, 1977), he unfortunately moved away from both phenomenology and contextualism by positing “the self” asa metaphysical entity with thing-like properties (p. xv).124 R. D. STOLOROWFor example, the focus on affect contextualizes the very boundary between conscious andunconscious. Unlike the Freudian repression barrier, viewed as a fixed intrapsychic structurewithin an isolated Cartesian container, the limiting horizons of emotional experiencing areconceptualized as emergent properties of ongoing dynamic intersubjective systems. Formingand evolving within a nexus of living systems, the horizons of experiencing are grasped asfluid and ever-shifting, products both of the person’s unique intersubjective history and of whatis or is not allowed to be felt within the intersubjective fields that constitute his or her currentliving.In my experience, a consistently phenomenological approach has also been especially fruitfulin the effort to grasp the context-embeddedness of emotional trauma (Stolorow, 2007).5 Froma phenomenological perspective, developmental trauma is viewed, not as an instinctual floodingof an ill-equipped Cartesian container, as Freud (1926) would have it, but as an experience ofunbearable affect. Furthermore, the intolerability of an affect state cannot be explained solely, oreven primarily, on the basis of the quantity or intensity of the painful feelings evoked by aninjurious event. Traumatic affect states can be grasped only in terms of the relational systems inwhich they are felt. Developmental trauma originates within a formative intersubjective contextwhose central feature is malattunement to painful affect—a breakdown of the child-caregiverinteraffective system, leading to the child’s loss of affect-integrating capacity and thereby to anunbearable, overwhelmed, disorganized state. Painful or frightening affect becomes traumaticwhen the context of emotional understanding—the relational home—that the child needs toassist in its tolerance and integration is profoundly absent. Such contexts of developmentaltrauma are where pathogenesis takes form.Corresponding to the relational constitution of emotional trauma, I have recommended an active,relationally engaged form of therapeutic comportment that I call emotional dwelling (Stolorow, 2014).In dwelling, one does not merely seek empathically to understand the other’s emotional pain from theother’s perspective. One does that, but much more. In dwelling, one leans into the other’s emotionalpain and participates in it, perhaps with aid of one’s own analogous experiences of pain. The languagethat one uses to address another’s experience of emotional trauma meets the trauma head-on,articulating the unbearable and the unendurable, saying the unsayable, unmitigated by any efforts tosoothe, comfort, encourage, or reassure—such efforts invariably being experienced by the other asa shunning or turning away from his or her traumatized state. In dwelling, by contrast, the therapistcan become established as a relational home for the unbearable emotional pain.In work too voluminous to review here, my collaborators and I, in an abundance of articlesand books written over a period of nearly four decades, have shown that the intersubjectivecontext plays a constitutive role in all forms of pathogenesis and in all aspects of the psycho-analytic process.6 What I am emphasizing now is that emotional phenomenology and relation-ality always already form an indissoluble unity, because relationality is constitutive of emotionalexperience.Notes on contributorRobert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., is a Founding Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, LosAngeles, and at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York. Absorbed for more than fourdecades in the project of rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry, he is the author of World,Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011) and Trauma and HumanExistence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Routledge, 2007) and coauthor of eightother books. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Harvard in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from theUniversity of California at Riverside in 2007.5Additionally, Heidegger’s (1927) analysis of Angst, world-collapse, uncanniness, and thrownness into Being-toward-deathprovided me with extraordinary philosophical tools for grasping the existential meanings of emotional trauma (Stolorow, 2011).6Such context-sensitivity is seen with particular vividness when working with the phenomenology of psychotic states (Atwood,2011).EMOTIONAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND RELATIONALITY 125ReferencesAtwood, G. E. (2011), The Abyss of Madness. New York: Routledge._____, & R. D. Stolorow. (1984), Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology. Hillsdale,NJ: The Analytic Press.Freud, S. (1926), Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. Standard Edition, 20: 77–175. London: Hogarth Press, 1959.Heidegger, M. (1927), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.Klein, G. S. (1976), Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials. New York: International Universities Press.Kohut, H. (1959), Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 7: 459–483._____. (1971), The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press._____. (1977), The Restoration of the Self. New York: International Universities Press.Mitchell, S. A., & L. Aron, eds. (1999), Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition. Hillsdale, NJ: TheAnalytic Press.Socarides, D. D., & R. D. Stolorow. (1984/85), Affects and selfobjects. Ann. Psychoanal., 12/13: 105–119. Madison, CT:International Universities Press.Stolorow, R. D. (2007), Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections.New York: Routledge._____. (2011), World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge._____. (2014), Undergoing the situation: Emotional dwelling is more than empathic understanding. Internat.J. Psychoanal. Self Psych., 9: 80–83._____, & G. E. Atwood. (1979), Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson._____, G. E. Atwood, & D. M. Orange. (2002), Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and ClinicalDimensions in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books._____, G. E. Atwood, & J. M. Ross. (1978), The representational world in psychoanalytic therapy. Internat. Rev.Psycho-Anal., 5: 247–256.126 R. D. STOLOROW

Emotional Phenomenology and Relationality: Forever the Twain Shall Meet

https://philpapers.org/archive/STOEPA-5.pdf

Emotional Phenomenology and Relationality: Forever the Twain Shall Meet

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

PhilPapers