Response to Commentaries

"I felt that the focus on the analyst's knowing "what's going on here now" implied a subtle form of objectivism, enhanced by disregard of the patient's subjectivity and deep unconscious motives" (292)"These contradictions have bequeathed to us a clinical tension that we continue to debate strenuously (as Mitchell, 1997, makes clear discussing Slochower) between the need to submerge ourselves in the patient's experience and the importance of providing an experience of otherness. As with many clinical issues, I find it necessary to hold this tension" (293)"My idea of intersubjectivity, based on a dialectic of recognition and destruction, thus grew out of this unlikely resonance between Hegel and Winnicott" (293)"There is an important distinction in my mind between the interpersonal and the intersubjective. As Mitchell says, there is no necessary contradiction between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic, they can be seen as two dimensions of the same process by which mind interacts with the outside. But I used the intersubjective perspective to add something different" (293)"The tension between recognizing the other and wanting the self to be absolute (omnipotence) is, to my mind, an internal conflict inherent in the psyche; it exists independent of any given interaction - even in the most favorable conditions. It is not interpersonally generated but is, rather, a psychic structure that conditions the interpersonal" (294)"I appreciate Mitchell's recognition of my efforts to "save" a notion of developmental phases not as a linear sequence but as layering of organizational patterns, each of which can remain available at different moments, thus allowing for multiplicity without a necessary synthetic unity... from the beginning, I have argued that the basic positions of gender polarity, femininity and masculinity as we know them, are constituted through a process of splitting" (294-295)"As he (with his customary ability to restate things more clearly than they were originally), concisely sums it up, my point is that "precisely tensions that cannot be sustained intersubjectively become intrapsychic, experienced as 'other' within the self, pervaded by aggression." Yes! The point is that what appeared to Freud as instinct is what Marx called a "real appearance": something that looks natural or intrinsic but is actually the outcome of a complicated social process" (295-296)"So my aim is not precisely to conserve Freud, but rather to psychoanalyze his categories, to see what intuition he might have been struggling to realize in a language not adequate to do so, what social and psychic origins were occluded by his search for a natural, instinctual origin. If his intuition could be translated into categories that make sense to us - if the loss of energetic tension really equals the loss of intersubjective tension - we would be like mathematicians solving a problem passed down to us, not "saving" Freud" (296)"I use the method of critique rather than the Angloempirical tradition of sorting: accept this part, reject that. Perhaps I place more wieght than Mitchell on the intrapsychic, if not on the drives (although I am no so sure we can dispense with a notion of energy)" (297) I want to stay with this for a moment: what is the difference between the method of critique and the Angloempirical tradition of sorting? What is Benjamin saying about her reading/writing method here?"destruction does essentially constitute recognition" (298)"As I think might be evident to clinicians, I am trying to show why "empathy is not enough," how, even with a steady provision of recognition, the traumatic, destructive experiences have to present themselves in full force in the microcosm of therapy. If such full-force destructiveness is met, then recognition is not an idealized, protected experience but one sturdy enough to face trauma. Reading "survival becomes possible" as equivalent to "destruction is overcome once and for all" might be a manifestation of how the critical theory perspective diverges from the clinical" (298)"While I agree with Butler that "destructiveness poses itself continually as a risk... perennial and irresolvable," I cannot agree that "any therapeutic norm that seeks to overcome [it] is basing itself on an impossible premise." But - and here's the issue - I myself would not use the word overcome. I think the words counter and ameliorate would suffice" (299)"The idea is not to posit an ideal space that is free of something bad (destruction), a kind of idealized "authenticity," but rather to conceptualize a movement between expansion and collapse of mental space, as part of the movement between recognition and breakdown. Intersubjective space may be thought of practically as mental activity occurring in or between persons that, like our well-loved metaphor, the container, expands and collapses, depending on the quality of the destruction and of our practice in sustaining our capacities in the face of it" (300)"Butler begins with our shared Hegelian notion that "the self never returns to itself free of the Other," that "it is transformed through its encounter with alterity, not in order to return to itself, but to become a self it never was." So far, so good: this is Hegel's notion of nonidentity, a cornerstone of critical theory. In effect, every encounter with the other negates the identity of the self" (300)"Paradoxically the logic of owning and disowning can be transcended only by owning our unwanted parts" (301)"Should we say that the notion of self as defined by "ek-stasis" is inherently paradoxical, since there never was an intact self divided from what is ostensibly outside itself?" (301)"I thought I was agreeing with Cornell from the beginning, as I understood her, like Derrida, to be taking the position that the Other is not merely beyond or unknowable: "as an "I" the Other is the same as "me." Without this moment of universality, the otherness of the Other can be only too easily reduced to mythical projection" (Cornell, 1992, p. 57)" (301)"I would prefer to speak pragmatically of the psychic action of splitting - without trying to solve the quandary of how we can be split if we were never whole to begin with. Butler takes the words out of my mouth when she says, "It is possible and necessary to say that the subject splits, but it does not follow from that formulation that the subject was a single whole or autonomous"" (302)"However, even as there is always a potential third (triadic structure) in the dyad, there is always a dyadic infrastructure in all triadic relations. The interesting tack Butler takes is to suggest that such dyadic structures might be related to the use of a binary model with regard to gender. She implies that, in order to get beyond binary gender oppositions, we might need to go beyond the dyadic structure. This idea seems worth considering, insofar as a dyad with no third is essentially a collapsed power relation (imaginary in Lacan's terms, paranoid-schizoid in Klein's)" (302)"Is the oedipal structure of complementarity - based on splitting - ever fully surmountable?" (302-303)"Thus, while the principle of heterosexuality persists, it is not seamless, since it is continually destabilized by multiplicity and gender ambiguity. As Harris (1991) and Dimen (1991) have shown, the complementarity constantly breaks down: gender is at once reified and evanescent, substantial and insubstantial, and this is "a sign of what gender is" (Dimen, 1991)" (303)"That he cannot be a man and have a man underlies his sacrifice - the split between being and having, identification and object love, which I see as central to heterosexual complementarity. This split constitutes masculine desire (being a man), as the repudiation of identification with the woman's desire (having a man)" (303)"Butler's views on desire rely on a Lacanian perspective, mediated by Sedgwick, in which desire is not simply for the Other or, more ambiguously, "of the other," but also for the others contained in the Other. Desire moves through identification with the others who desire the Other, as in the homosocial desire between men that circulates through the woman they exchange. The point, she says, is that desire is simultaneously circulating as homosexual and heterosexual, "thus confounding the identificatory positions for every actor in the scene."" (304)"I do not see the third as someone (a child, a former lover) who interrupts or even as some otherness that unravels, but as a mental function or capacity" (304) [It’s a matter of uptake — a Peircean triangle!]"I proposed that it is the symbolic space in the dyad that gives the father his symbolic function, that makes a child able to use symbols and tolerate otherness. I suggested that, rather than seeing a figure as the third, we should look for the origins of the mental function of thirdness in the dyadic development of dialogue" (304)"The third is thus not simply constituted through harmony, nor is it "an ideal of transcendence... a reference point for reciprocal desire that exceeds representation, and so its meaning, in Butler's phrase, both exceeds and constitutes the relation of desire. Ultimately, for this thirdness to develop, it must sustain the challenge of difference and opposition, so that one can decenter from the identification with only one position (only I am right; or, if you are right, I must be wrong)" (305)"We see thirdness as a mutually achieved state that affords a position from which it is possible to recognize the position of the other. It is a position from which to step outside or think beyond the complementarity dyadic relation in which the other is simply a projection or the self feels coerced by the projections of the other" (305)"Reaching the dyadic place of thirdness, in which symbolic relations are possible, is a prerequisite for transcending rigid gender binaries in triadic relations. Moving from the defensive use of repudiation to tolerance of overinclusiveness allows the postoedipal use of symbols to bridge multiple and contradictory identifications (Bassin, 1998) in configurations of desire" (306)"In a sense, all my work has been an effort to think about the link between the splitting of gender polarity and the breakdown of recognition, to grasp the overcoming of complementarity in terms of both gender and intersubjectivity" (306)