Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“The struggle that anthropologists and psychoanalysts have in common, then, is the struggle to come to terms with a sense of partial failure.”“Anthropologists and analysts are usually interested in the experience of the chess-playing, and yet it is not clear that an analyst/anthropologist of mediocre chess ability can ever understand the experience of a profoundly skilled player”-exactly; the patient will only be treated as good as the analyst, but what makes a good analyst, and what are the constant limitations?“The authors of Writing Culture ask how the fact that anthropologists write ethnographies is relevant to the anthropological production of ethnographic knowledge, particularly in a cultural climate in which the right of marginalized people to speak for themselves has become a charged political issue”“1) that ethnographers are situated in the ethnographic context, that they cannot see all that context, that their presence alters it, that they have a certain political and psychological relationship with it and to it; 2) that the way in which you write about something reflects an implicit truth claim or assertion about what you know and how you know it; and 3) that culture is not some coherent set of propositions or symbols shared and acted upon by all members of a society, but that different members of a culture have varied interpretations and experiences of whatever culture is”“The reason for the outrage against the essays (and other writing that followed in this style) was that some anthropologists understood them to imply that ignoring the anthropologist's embeddedness was tantamount to asserting the anthropologist's authority over her/his field subjects. From that perspective, anthropology was not only morally difficult but morally corrupt.”“The interesting, important aspects of this work raise questions about the nature of the knowledge gained through anthropological fieldwork and the problems associated with the representation of that knowledge. What came to be seen as one of the underlying motivations of anthropological postmodernism in this and other works was far more subversive: to challenge the very possibility of anthropological fieldwork and anthropological knowledge by labeling that attempt as hegemonic, authoritative, and morally bankrupt.”“1) the analyst is not outside the analytic situation, watching objectively as the sessions unfold; 2) the patient tells a narrative, not necessarily a historically true accounting, in which the analyst's listening is implicated; and 3) the patient's experience has an oblique relationship to metatheories about the grand theories of psyche, self (or self-representation), and development for which psychoanalysis is justly famous; and indeed, the metatheories can impede the analyst's listening.”-similar to that of an anthropologist: “the analyst, like the anthropologist, gives up the claim to authoritative, final knowledge of what "really" happened; the analyst must not fit the patient to the theory, just as the anthropologist must not fit the person to the anthropologist's understanding of the culture. As in anthropological theory, these patient-centered writings take authority from the professional observer and give it to the observed subject”“Empathy is a model of understanding another human being by means of a temporary and partial identification. To accomplish it the analyst must renounce for a time part of his own identity, and for this he must have a loose or flexible self image. This is not to be confused with role playing, which is a more conscious phenomenon. It is more like the process of "serious make believe," which is experienced when one is moved by a work of art, a performance or a piece of fiction. It is an intimate, non-verbal form of establishing contact”“Schafer is sometimes called a constructivist, by which it is meant that he understands analysands' accounts of their experience to be constructed in the interaction between analyst and analysand. Schafer understands the analytic process as an interaction between two people who are different in this dyad from the way they are in nonanalytic contexts. In the analytic dyad, as he conceives it, both analyst and analysand work with "second selves."-adapting to environment and becoming a version that fits uniquely to that set of circumstances“"Psychoanalysts may be described as people who listen to the narrations of analysands and help to transform these narrations into others that are more complete, coherent, convincing and adaptively useful than those they have been accustomed to constructing"“So it is not that analysands come to remember a more complex past or even to understand more deeply; it is that they have experienced that past in a different way, and so have profoundly changed it.”“Potters' skills are not the same as those of plumbers, and economists' are not those of historians, and that is because they need to achieve different ends. But we often forget that there is a moral quality to these construals, that it is not simply a matter of knowing how to use the clay, but being "good" with clay, that there is a way to have integrity as a potter which is different from the way one has integrity as a plumber. The good potter uses the clay as it "ought" to be used, with respect for its substance and the demands of its skill. These evaluations are tied in specific ways to the achievement of the potter's goals. “