CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

by Stephen A Mitchell

The passionate conviction with which analysts have traditionally held their own theories makes particularly astonishing the growing revolution in thinking about what the analyst knows that has emerged in the past ten to fifteen years. This shift in thinking has taken place not on the level of theory but on the level of metatheory: theory about theory. It does not concern questions about what motivates the analysand, the structure of mind, the development of emotional life. Rather, it concerns the question of what the analyst can know about any of these things! This realm of current psychoanalytic debate entails a fundamental redefinition of the very nature of psychoanalytic thought and of psycho-analysis as a discipline. Whereas earlier generations of psychoanalysts prided themselves on knowing and being brave enough to know, the current generation of psychoanalytic authors tends increasingly to stress the value of not knowing and the courage that requires. A growing chorus of voices from quite different psychoanalytic traditions stresses the enormous complexity and fundamental ambiguity of experience. Consider the following excerpts from three contemporary psychoanalytic authors with very divergent points of view. One of the few things they have in common is their emphasis on how little the analyst can really know, and how anxiety-provoking that is. The very breakdown of narrative order, the temporary chaos which is provoked, may, in itself, be vital to a creative process: a reorganization of experience into far more complex and flexible patterns.
I am claiming that the real task in therapy is not so much making sense of the data as it is, but resisting the temptation to make sense of the data! (Levenson, 1992, p. 189)One reason that psychoanalysts cling to rules and heroes is the realization that without them they would be set adrift. ...To suggest that we need neither rules nor heroes nor neurology is perhaps the scariest position of all. ...We walk through life uncertain and unsure and, yes, a little frightened. The fear is of living in the open without the sense of security that comes from closure. (Goldberg, 1990, pp. 68-69)When approaching the unconscious-that is, what we do not know, not what we do know-we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. Anyone who is going to see a patient tomorrow should, at some point, experience fear. In every consulting room there ought to ; be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psycho-analyst. If they are not, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what ': everyone knows. (Bion, 1990, pp. 4-5) :
Donald Spence (1987b, chap. 5) has noted the similarity between the self-portrait of the analyst in Freud's case histories and Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle's detective stories. In both, the brilliant and discerning detective/analyst finds the singular solution to a bizarre and totally confusing quagmire of apparently unrelated details. In more recent psycho- analytic literature the analyst (more like the plodding, seemingly confused television detective Columbo than Holmes) is portrayed less as presenting the patient with the Truth about experience than as challenging the false and overly simplistic truths that the patient brought into the analysis. Other authors and practitioners who still believe they know things are often portrayed as fainthearted worshipers of illusions. In a reversal of traditional psychoanalytic machismo, it now sometimes appears that the capacity to contain the dread of not knowing is a measure of analytic virtue; the fewer convictions, the better and the braver!The reasons for this very different attitude about theory can be found both outside of psychoanalysis in the culture at large and also within psychoanalysis and its maturation as a discipline in its own right.

From Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysisby Stephen A. Mitchell

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