Coming to terms with intersubjectivity: keeping language in mind.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association http://apa.sagepub.com/

Coming to Terms with Intersubjectivity: Keeping Language in Mind Bonnie E. Litowitz J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2014 62: 294 DOI: 10.1177/0003065114530156 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa.sagepub.com/content/62/2/294

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Bonnie E. Litowitz


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Bonnie E. Litowitz

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COMING TO TERMS WITH INTERSUBJECTIVITY: KEEPING LANGUAGE IN MIND Recent reports of clinical experiences, from multiple theoretical perspectives using different terminologies, converge on the topic of the origin and nature of intersubjectivity as it emerges in clinical interactions. Intersubjectivity is explored from the point of view of language and communication, and the distinctive properties of language that create a shared intrapsychic world, on which intersubjectivity subtends, are discussed. This viewpoint can explain behavior and pathologies that arise from the struggle to maintain one’s personal subjectivity in an intersubjective world. Understanding the role and functions of language may also illuminate the therapeutic benefits of talk-based therapies. Keywords: complementarity, deception, intersubjectivity, joint reference, language, mediation, negation, semiotics

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y topic is intersubjectivity: the different ways we have come to think and talk about it, and how I think about it. My perspective is that intersubjectivity is dependent on shared semiotic systems, chief among which is language. Since we are born into a world of linguistically saturated activities, it follows that the conditions for intersubjectivity are present from the start. To begin with intersubjectivity, rather than having to arrive at it or achieve it later, has consequences for how I view the individual’s struggle to maintain a private world. In what follows I present my perspective through a series of sections, the first of which provides some historical background on how we have come to be interested in intersubjectivity. Plenary address, American Psychoanalytic Association, January 17, 2014. Submitted for publication February 27, 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0003065114530156 Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Gebze Yuksek Teknoloji Enstitu on April 24, 2014

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COMING TO TERMS WITH INTERSUBJECTIVITY

One of the first problems we encounters in exploring the history of intersubjectivity is terminological. What are the relations among Freud’s das Ich, the translators’ “ego” as an agency, Kohut’s (and others’) use of “self,” and Lacan’s (and others’) “subject”? A common feature of all these terms is their focus on the lone individual, though in each case on a different aspect of that individual: das Ich is one who refers to himself consciously in the first person singular; an ego is a composite of functions and identifications with others; the self is a cohesive, integrated entity with continuity through space/time; and a subject is a product of sociocultural discourses (i.e., a subject is always a subject for another). No one of these terms captures everything about the individual. They are, rather, complementary in the sense that Niels Bohr used the term in quantum physics: Our task is not to penetrate into the essence of things, the meaning of which we don’t know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature. . . . whenever you come with a definite statement about anything you are betraying complentarity [Pais 1991, p. 446].

Taking this perspective, we can say that it has been productive for us to talk about the ego: the various ways it is divided within itself; its relation to other objects (object relations) or when it takes itself as its own object (narcissism); its capacities as an agent to act on and master its environment; or its collapse when overwhelmed by that environment. On the other hand, it has also been productive for us to talk about the individual as a self: how the individual becomes a cohesive psychological unit; what may fracture that integrity; what actions may be pursued to maintain a sense of internal wholeness. In addition, from academia—critical theory, queer theory, postmodernism—we have gained another way to talk about the individual: as a subject who is a product of and a participant in sociocultural discourses. Viewing the individual as a subject has opened up our thinking about gender identities and power relations, given us concepts like “subjugation” and the “other”; it has helped us think about the individual both as narrator and as narrated. At the same time as we have been, through our clinical work, exploring these different aspects of the individual, we have also been developing ways to talk about a second person that we call the object. Having 296



started our theorizing with ego as an active agent doing something—discharging or sublimating drives; repressing or denying guilty feelings; projecting or introjecting anxieties—there soon arose the need to consider further the recipient of the ego’s actions. Freud’s original label of object has remained in use even though the definition of the second person became (grammatically speaking) that of the indirect object: the one to whom drives are directed; the one onto whom relational patterns are transferred or with whom they were enacted; the one from whom functions are borrowed or internalized; the one into whom affects or thoughts are placed. Viewing the object in terms of its recipient functions has made for an easier transition into conceptualizing the other person also as a subjectivity in its own right. We can chart that trajectory in our evolving narrative arc about countertransference: from impurity to be eliminated; to a source of further information about the patient; and finally, to our contribution as a subject in dialogue with the patient as a subject. That is, as two interacting subjectivities. Thus we have evolved to our current interest in intersubjectivity. Greenberg and Mitchell mapped out this evolution in their 1983 book as a competition between one-body and two-body theoretical positions. Which position one takes on the number-of-bodies question will influence whether intersubjectivity is conceptualized as a fantasy, an actuality, or the co-construction of a third entity such as the analytic third (Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2004). The terminology that expresses the intersubjectivity we experience with patients reflects our theoretical starting points: Do I experience my patient through my empathic immersion with him, through his projective identification into me, or through transference-countertransference configurations (Racker 1968)? Is my experience the result of our mutual enactments of past self-other patterns; are we constructing here and now a new, third (inter)subjectivity? Once again, our diverse perspectives have generated a number of complementary ways to talk about our intersubjective experiences, using the vocabularies from where we started. In the late 1970s and 1980s Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandchaft began writing about the “myth of the isolated subject,” and that myth has continued to be deconstructed by psychoanalysts from across a spectrum of theoretical perspectives (Atwood and Stolorow 1984; Stolorow and Atwood 1992; Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandchaft 1994); Apprey and Stein 1993; Ogden 1994; Aron 1996; Frie 1997; Benjamin 1998; Mitchell 2000; Stern 2009). Despite their differences, all such perspectives may be Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Gebze Yuksek Teknoloji Enstitu on April 24, 2014

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considered manifestations of a shift within psychoanalysis away from the isolated subject toward “field theories” (Baranger and Baranger 2008; Psychoanalytic Inquiry 2013). They argue for the need to enlarge the scope of our inquiry beyond the lone individual, to take into account the contexts in which that individual functions: the mother-child dyad, the analytic couple; the setting or frame; and the culture. This questioning of the isolated subject was, arguably, an inevitable consequence of shifting our focus to the preoedipal period, as writers began to explore the beginnings of ego development. Consider, for example, Hans Loewald’s use of the mother-child dyad as a model for therapeutic intervention; or George Klein’s suggestion that psychoanalysis needs to supplement its concept of ego with “a concept of ‘we-go’” (1976, p. 178). Significant for the perspective on intersubjectivity that I will be articulating is that both writers acknowledged the mediational role of language in those beginnings. For example, Loewald (1980), critical of the existence of a “preverbal period,” describes the infant’s embeddedness in the “sound [and] rhythm” of the mother’s speech as they interact (p. 187), and Klein (1976) noted that both “we-ness” and self-identity are “promoted by language” (p. 180). In other words, they understood that interaction is inseparable from communication: all interaction involves some form of communication.1 (This is true at the macrolevel between persons and at cellular micro-levels.) Communication is an exchange of messages in some medium (i.e., some form of mediation) that both interactors share. In general, an explicit link from the mediating role of language in mother-child dyads to its capacity for therapeutic change in analysis has been left unexplored.2 Instead, a phenomenological perspective has been adopted, wherein child and mother are observed in their interactions, with a mediational system supposedly arriving only later, built on these early unmediated experiences (Litowitz 2011a). But what would our conception of intersubjectivity be like if we did not artificially separate interaction from communication but kept language in mind from the start?

1 Biosemioticians pursue the question whether there is ever a point of interaction without some form of message exchange, for example, at a chemical or intracellular level (Favareau 2010). 2 Notable exceptions include Ed Tronick, Ana-Maria Rizzuto, and Jeanine Vivona.

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KEEPING LANGUAGE IN MIND

The starting place for understanding the role of language in mediating experience is with our first introduction to language (even before we are born): the sound patterns and rhythms that Loewald wrote about. The synaptic connections that represent those patterns in the infant’s brain will, through increased exposure, be the same as those in the adult brain in its environment. As a consequence, even though there are two bodies (each with its own brain) in “interaction,” there is an entanglement of brains and minds through shared language structures, thus making intersubjectivity a fact from the beginning of life. Already in the early nineties, Stolorow and Atwood (1992) were using the phrase “the myth of the isolated mind ” (p. 7; emphasis added)) and Ogden (1994) was writing about the shared mind as an “interpenetration” of subjectivities (p. 45).3 This entanglement of minds is only possible due to shared semiotic systems, chief of which is language. A body cannot be in two places at once, but through language we can be, because units of language (e.g., a word) are never only in one mind.4 It is through language that mind is distributed (Colapietro 1989, pp. 102–104), forming the basis for intersubjectivity. Right from the start, the sounds and rhythms of language systems are much more than signals. They are indices or addresses to information about affect states and relationships, as well as about concepts and objects. Here it is important to keep in mind that every utterance activity or communicational act encompasses not only information but also an appeal to another person, as well as affect or attitude about that information or person.5 It is these last two elements that are so often ignored in views of language as just a set of labels for things existing in the world (see Wittgenstein’s critique [1953] of St. Augustine’s account of language learning). Words do not have referents; referencing is something that speakers of a shared language do with words, always as they appeal to or respond affectively to appeals from others. The establishment of this joint referencing is the fundamental basis for any relationship, and a shared sign system is its prerequisite. 3 I prefer the concept of entanglement from physics. Entanglement in English evokes confusion; in the German, Vershrankung, it is a “cross-linking” (Gilder 2008, p. 172). 4 That is, Wittgenstein’s famous argument (1953) that there is no such thing as a private language (there is, of course, a private use of language). 5 In Aristotelian terminology logos, ethos, pathos (respectively).


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HOW TO BUILD A JOINT REFERENT

Let me illustrate how adults use language to build a joint referent. In a televised interview with Charlie Rose (January 29, 2013), the American novelist George Saunders described the relationship between himself as writer, the reader, and the text. It isn’t, he explained, that there is a preconceived set of ideas in his head already formed that he then transcribes onto the page for the reader to decode. Rather, the text is “co-created” by him and the reader: “for a brief moment we are together—one entity.” For example, he said: “If I write, ‘A man walks up a dusty road to a white house,’ the reader supplies his or her own knowledge or images and then together we see what happens to this character. If I write, ‘Jim wore a red sweater,’ the reader and I can see this object; it’s just a fact. But if I say, ‘Jim wore a dirty red sweater,’ we have rhythm and Jim is coming into focus. Or, more interesting, if I say, ‘Jim wore a dirty red sweater with a torn yellow pocket,’ now he is disheveled, a little bit of a slob.” What Saunders is describing is a speech activity, the process of joint reference-building, that very speech act that begins for each of us at birth: the use of a shared sign system to create joint attention to a third entity, real or imagined, which is the starting point for all communication. Marcia Cavell (1998) has written about this process as a “triangulation”: the creation of a third entity to which speaker and addressee are jointly attending. That “third” can be an actual or imaginary object, the speaker or addressee herself, some internal state, or whatever can be identified through a shared mediational system such as language or gestures. Note that this third is not something outside the two subjects that then establishes intersubjectivity.6 That process only works with a sign system that is already intersubjective (i.e., shared), and one that has very specific properties. The most important of these properties are reciprocity, reflexivity, and self-reference. These three properties distinguish language from other sign systems (such as gestures or facial expressions) and give language its priority over them.7 Let me explain what these properties are.

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See Peirce on the thirdness inherent in semiosis (Buchler 1955). I am not including here others, such as the temporal and aspectual properties of language, that I have addressed elsewhere (Litowitz 2007, pp. 218–220).

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Reciprocity

Speakers and addressees are in reciprocal roles: all normal language users are interchangeably speaker “I” and addressee “you” as we take turns in discourse. This interchangeability between “you” and “I” underlies our confusion as to “who is speaking to whom” (Litowitz 2007), as well as our ability to “speak as another” (i.e., to speak to someone as we have been spoken to). Stephen Mitchell (2000) has given us a wonderful example of this feature of reciprocity: “When I find myself speaking in irritation to my daughter in precisely the words with which my father spoke to me. . . . my father’s irritated words were not taken into me, they are me” (p. 23). Our subjectivity is thus constituted through dialogue. In analysis we attempt to disentangle these voices, but as soon as we step in we become one of them. We cannot be surgeons who cut away the others to reveal the “true” or “core” or “authentic” self. And so we must live with the anxiety of our influence (Friedman 2012). Reflexivity

The speaking “I” can take my self as my own referent, telling “you” about my self. It is this “I of enunciation” (narrator) who gives an account of the me-self (narrated) in my story (Butler 2005) or retells my story in analysis (Schafer 1992).8 In addition, the speaker is always his own addressee since he hears himself when he speaks. Unlike vision, which depends on an external other for recognition and confirmation (e.g., mirroring), speech provides its own feedback loop. Thus, we continually speak to ourselves and for ourselves even as we are speaking to others (D.B. Stern 2009). From our beginnings, we are engaged in an ongoing self-narration (Weir 1962) that results in a very specific form of human consciousness. Self-reference

Unlike gestures or facial expressions or postures, speech simultaneously establishes a referent and is a referent.9 That is, we can use language to talk about language. Although in other communicational media one can imitate or replicate an action or a behavior (e.g., copy a gesture or mimic a facial expression), one cannot use those media to predicate about it (i.e., to comment or expand on it). You can’t build on it. 8

See also Ogden’s “semantic reflexivity” of subjectivity (1994, pp. 26–27). Philosophers say that natural languages are both object language and metalanguage. Note that one cannot point to pointing or gesture about gesturing.

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The creation of an existence through language establishes factivity; as Saunders said, “Jim wore a red sweater. It’s just a fact.” But that is only one part of a speech act, which always includes how the speaker feels about what exists as well as his appeal to us, his intention. In Saunders’s example we sense the disdain, the desire for distance from that slob. It is difficult not to speak (or write or read, which reengage speech) about that dirty shirt with its torn pocket without scrunching up the nose, turning down the corners of the mouth, furrowing the brow—the classic emotional facial expression of “disgust” or “dis-smell.” By identifying Jim in this way, the speaker/writer is appealing to us listeners/readers to see Jim in the same way, which we may or may not want to do. Expressions of affective states and appeals to others exist, of course, outside of language, as Darwin (1872) saw in the cries and purrs of our pets, the calls of the wild, and the songs of birds or humpback whales. They exist—are facts—and carry information for others in each species. We can guess at their meanings, based on our own human experiences, but can never be sure. Only our language has the capacity for self-reference. The use of language to talk about language allows us to discover if we are indeed “getting the message,” are “on the same page.” (We’re constantly checking for that, you know? You know what I mean?) I can state, “I sense that you feel disdainful about this man in a red shirt. He seems to disgust you.” You can say that you do and we can then build on the establishment of this new fact about your feelings to create more joint references, attitudes, and appeals. Or you can say that you don’t and I can wonder, Is it your attitude that I’ve misinterpreted, or your appeal to me? It is possible that you did not want to acknowledge your feelings about this fellow or, perhaps, did not want me to know them. Perhaps those were my feelings and I wanted you to agree with me. As we strive to understand our patients we are constantly trying to understand the nature and possible causes of our misinterpretations. Misinterpretation is inevitable when we communicate. We may share the same sounds and rules for their combination and uses, but each of us has learned these in unique experiences and, consequently, the webs of meaning—the semantic/conceptual/imagic interconnections and their attendant subjective feeling states—are subtly different. (What is dirty and disgusting to me may be sad and pathetic to you.) Misinterpretations provide us the opportunity to explore those differences. The structures of language are conservative—they resist change—or we could not use them to establish joint reference, but through such usage meaning is 302



always in flux (i.e., always both expanding and contracting). This tension between finite structure and infinite generativity of meaning is a unique characteristic of human languages and is tied to its capacity for selfreference.10 For it is through its capacity for self-reference that the inevitable misinterpretations are explored and meanings evolve. It is against this background knowledge of ordinary language use that psychoanalysis has made one of its great contributions to what defines us as human: the addition of deception to the inevitability of misinterpretation. All animals, even plants and microbes, deceive others; only we humans deceive ourselves. I will return to the topic of deception before I end my talk to explain what I see as its important role in how one maintains oneself as an individual in an inherently intersubjective world. But first some further comments on the inevitability of misinterpretation. BREAKING FREE FROM THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE

There is a frustration that comes from not being instantly understood, with having to work to establish joint referencing and a shared reality that is continually open to misinterpretation (Wertsch 2003). This frustration is evident in our longings for perfect understanding or a perfect language or a desire to escape altogether from what Fredric Jameson (1972) calls “the prison-house of language.” The desire to escape can take different forms. On the one hand, there are attempts to get “below,” “before,” “beyond” language in our theorizing, from preverbal procedural knowledge or implicit relational knowing to embodied cognition, about which I, and others, have written (Litowitz, Vivona, Wheeler). These views propose the individual’s unmediated encounter with the world, resulting in what are seen as veridical representations, such as Piaget’s sensorimotor schemata (Piaget and Inhelder 1969) or Daniel Stern’s RIGs (1985). These then are later pushed aside or distorted by the introduction of a shared mediational system such as language. On the other hand, a desire to escape the prison-house of language has created a longing for a perfect system of communication, where all meaning would be unambiguous and complete understanding guaranteed 10 The conception of infinite semantic generativity from finite grammatical structures through recursive processes was Chomsky’s major contribution to modern linguistics.


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(Eco 1997). Examples range from mathematics and formal logic to constructed languages like John Quijada’s Ithkuil, profiled in a 2012 New Yorker article by Joshua Foer. But, closer to home, we find a similar desire in Bion’s grid (López-Corvo 2003) and Lacan’s Borromean knots and mathemes (Evans 1996).11 Then there is the fantasy of effortless, total understanding. The science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein (1961) created the word grok to mean instant and perfect understanding by one person of another’s meaning. He had to invent the term because there was no word for such nonexistent total intersubjectivity. Yet, ironically, the creation of the term demonstrates how a speech act by one person (Heinlein) can use language to create a fact through joint reference, which we can then build on. Further, this example demonstrates that the word-concept-object connection that is established includes directions or rules on how to use it. Although it is a completely made-up word, we know that grok functions as a verb because we can use it to refer to the past or future: “He grokked me” or “I’ll grok you later.” Without having to be told we know that we can use it as a noun in its gerundive form—“Grokking would be so cool”—but that it is not a noun because we cannot say “the grok” or “a grok” or “groks are or do such-and-such.” So now we know what it is like to be a baby, hearing a sound pattern that creates a bit of joint reality—a fact—and knowing also how it may be used in communication. Of course, not just any sound patterns will evoke this response; only those where there is an intent to communicate that we recognize by its appeal to us (Tomasello 1999). Adults use speech to appeal to babies to do or don’t do something, see or don’t see the world in some way, be or don’t be some kind of person or another.12 It is during the course of these activities that the child acquires language, which incorporates his interpretation and representation of the other’s intentions and affects (Litowitz 2005, 2008). In our world of linguistically saturated activities, where neither grokking nor perfect languages exist, we must work, and sometimes fail, to make ourselves understood through an imperfect sign system. As the semanticist and semiotician Uriel Weinreich (1961) noted on looking 11 Other examples are Piaget’s INRC Group and, ironically, the abstract algorithms of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. 12 George Klein (1976): “building up cognitive structures, the child and man try to find out not only how things are and how they relate to each other but also how they ought to be” (p. 181).

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across vast numbers of human languages (living and dead), “Perhaps the most impressive conclusion is that languages are universally less ‘logical’, symmetrical, and differentiated than they could be. . . . The greatest challenge arising from this finding of a property of ‘limited sloppiness’ in language is to determine what good it does” (p. 190).13 THE PERFECTION OF IMPERFECT LANGUAGES

There are two major benefits from a system that has some openness (i.e., sloppiness) but within limits (i.e., constraints). One is obvious by comparison to our genes: there is a transmission of sameness across individuals who share genetic structure but also opportunities for a unique individual to emerge, the source of change and adaptation across populations. Similarly, our language system is the condition for our intersubjectivity but imperfectly so, thereby necessitating that we communicate. (Here I am assuming that the selection of a system that requires ongoing communication is the perfect adaptation for an organism with such a lengthy dependency in environments of such biocultural diversity.) Out of those communicational exchanges, over time our individual subjectivity is formed, shaped by our shared sign systems but uniquely so for each of us. From a perspective that starts with intersubjectivity, psychopathologies arise due to an excessive demand for total sameness, as in the colonization of the child’s mind by a narcissistic parent or in the child’s construction of a “false self” in order to maintain an attachment. As analysts and therapists we experience the transferential appeals from our patients for sameness, their intrusion into our minds and attacks on our thinking as they take up defensive positions, either to protect themselves from us (the Barangers’ “personal bastion” [2008, p. 814]) or to treat us reciprocally as they had been treated (Benjamin 1998). The second major benefit of limited sloppiness is the wiggle room it affords for deception. In a world of absolute transparency, complete understanding, perfect intersubjectivity, how could we deceive others or deceive ourselves? Eliminating the opportunities for our capacity for 13 The limited sloppiness of language structures differs from the notion of sloppiness invoked by the Boston Change Process Study Group (2005). Their goal is to make us comfortable working at the “local” or “surface” level of communication in dyadic exchanges, accepting the unpredictable and indeterminate nature of what is meant or intended.


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deception is a hallmark of all fascist regimes—whether in the home or in the state. As already noted, a great contribution from psychoanalysis is its understanding of our most human capacity for self-deception—indeed, our need for deception—but that very knowledge may be a reason why we alienists have been viewed as subversive or why our cooperation with any fascist regime is especially heinous. DECEPTION

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive! —Sir Walter Scott, Marmion In the human infant’s world of complete dependency, where neither fight nor flight are options, evolution has equipped us with a powerful third strategy: deceit. Deception is an adaptation to ensure survival that we share with other living systems (macro- and micro-). The question of survival arises wherever there is interaction, and, as I have noted, interaction always involves communication. Thus, the nature of deception will vary depending on the affordances of the communicational system: for example, whether the organism changes its shape or color or cries to gain a food source or mate, or to avoid danger.14 Here again, our communication system provides unique capacities that have profound effects on what separates us from other species. Like them, we deceive others but, due to the properties of language that I have mentioned (reciprocity, reflexivity, self-reference) we also deceive ourselves. As we saw in earlier examples, we use language to state and thereby create a fact: “A man walks up a dusty road to a white house”; “grokking is instant understanding.” But we also use language to express our hopes and fears, to question and demand of others. So what is a fact and what is a wish, what is a wish and what is a fear, what is a need and what is a demand—these distinctions are always confusing for human language users in ways that are not true for other species. And, as I have noted, since our shared language entangles our minds with the minds of others with whom we are in reciprocal relations, we are further confused 14 Over the past two decades there has been a spate of interest in deception: for example, in studies of when children learn to deceive; how other animals deceive for survival advantage; the use of deception in medical treatments.

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about whose need or wish or fear or demand it is.15 We cannot help but identify with others with whom we share so much, but at the same time we must resist their influence in order to maintain our private worlds (our individuality, our own subjectivity). How do we do this when we are constituted through exchanges with others and, internally, through ongoing reflexive exchanges with ourselves as an “other”? Freud’s great contribution was to identify the ways that human languages allow us to both accept and resist at the same time. In the perfect worlds of mathematics or formal logic, something cannot be true and false, positive and negative, at the same time. But, as Freud pointed out in 1925, the logic of the psyche not only allows for excluded middles and contradictions, but requires it; and the means to meet this requirement lie in language’s unique capacities for negation, which can simultaneously affirm and deny. Some forms of negation can be enacted, as when the baby rejects the breast (Spitz 1957) or the patient refuses to come to sessions. In general, actions cannot be both performed and not performed simultaneously, and in this way “no” (a performative refusal) differs from “not” (a propositinal denial) (Litowitz 2011b). One exception is in playing or pretending. As Gregory Bateson (1972) pointed out using the example of dogs at play, the playful nip is the bite that is not a bite. Or, as Winnicott (1971) noted, play contains the paradox of both accepting what exists and resisting its consensual (intersubjective) definition by endowing it with a personal (subjective) meaning. Coming to a similar conclusion, from the perspective of language and mediation, Vygotsky (1933) described play as the activity that “teaches [the child] to desire by relating her desires to a fictitious ‘I’. . .” (p. 100) and, in so doing, to “float” over the “field of meaning” (p. 101). Thus we see the direct lineage from the capacity for negation to the creation of imagination and fantasy, those capacities for “weaving the tangled webs” of meaning that form the core of our work with patients, which I have referred to as “textuality” (Litowitz 2002).16 As I have described elsewhere (Litowitz 2011b), the infant’s first forms of negation are performative—rejecting, refusing, saying “no.” Even “not” first appears in play, for example, in the sequential seeing and 15 Among psychoanalytic writers who have addressed these confusions are Ferenczi in his 1933 “confusion of tongues” paper and Laplanche writing on the “enigmatic signifier” (2011). 16 Thus, we often find psychoanalytic writers noting the importance of a capacity for play in analysis (e.g., Winnicott 1971, p. 57).


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then not seeing of peek-a-boo. But the simultaneous expression of affirmation and negation is possible only in language.17 As we know, Freud introduced the concept of negation in the context of defense: specifically, denial as an expression of repression. Since then the number and taxonomy of defenses have been greatly expanded. Nevertheless, as Charles Brenner (2006) cogently pointed out, whatever a defense may be called, it is simply a way of saying “no” or “not,” a form of sequestration by dissociation or denial (pp. 117–118). I refuse to know it; I refuse to see it; it’s not me, it’s you; I refuse to recognize this part of me or this behavior as mine. If Brenner is correct—and I believe he is—then each psychoanalytic school’s taking on a particular defense or set of defenses as its shibboleth is yet another example of complementarity. In the end, all our defenses are processes of deception that allow us to maintain a sense of privacy in an intersubjective world. In By the Grace of Guile, his panoramic overview of “the role of deception in natural history and human affairs,” Loyal Rue (1994) speculates that for humans deception serves the “ultimate goal of survival by the process of achieving the intermediate goals of personal wholeness and social coherence” (p. 127). The philosopher Paul Ricouer (1992, 2005) refers to these twin goals as the dialectics of ipse and idem. In psychoanalytic theory, the struggle to achieve these ends has been told, following Freud’s example, as a linear narrative of successive developmental periods, each identified by a challenge to ego or self: for example, securing attachment; separating and individuating; establishing autonomy; internalizing functions; relinquishing omnipotence. From the perspective of primary intersubjectivity, the struggle for self-definition— of accounting for oneself to oneself—begins at birth and is lifelong as we engage continually in configurations of acceptance and resistance. As Brenner (2006) went on to say, “Anything that comes under the heading of normal mental functioning or development can be used defensively” (p. 118)—surely, language itself (Litowitz 2013) and even deception itself (LaFarge 1995). CONCLUSION

Every change in psychoanalytic theory originates in clinical experiences: an analyst experiences some phenomenon that current theory has not accounted for and for which the analyst then seeks an explanation. I 17

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believe that in our work we do experience the entanglement of minds, but we have only the terminologies that have come down to us from our original psychology of the lone individual. As we expanded our scope of inquiry to include others we simply extended the same way of thinking to second persons. In this context, then, we were left to express the intersubjectivity we experienced in terms of that original framework: one person putting into or taking out from the other (projection, introjection, projective identification); as one person functioning as part of another (negative or positive introject; selfobject); as two persons graphically linked by a hyphen (transference-countertransference, bi-personal field, self-selfobject); or as two separate persons creating a third entity. We have been as terminologically stymied as Einstein was when he tried to explain the “mutual influence . . . of a quite mysterious nature” between two independent particles. He called it “spooky action-at-a-distance,” or “a sort of telepathic coupling” (Gilder 2008, p. 6). We know from mirror neuron research that two brains, encased within two separate bodies, can be in rhythm at a distance. But to move from shared rhythm to meaning requires that rhythm be a part of a communicational system such as a human language. I have tried to show how the unique properties of language provide the necessary conditions for both our individual identity (our subjectivity) and our intersubjective encounters with others. The uniqueness of the acquisition of the same language system for each of us, plus the limited sloppiness of this perfectly imperfect system as it has evolved, ensures that we must keep communicating if we are to maintain a sense both of self and of belonging. When we ask our patients to communicate freely we are asking them to relinquish their fantasy of perfect understanding, to have faith in processes of communication. We are asking them to engage with us in building joint referents, in parsing out feeling states and appeals for what we want (wish for, need, demand) from others, and they from us. These are the processes that they (and we) have been born into, but, somewhere along the line, have lost faith in. We ask them to stay with us despite our inevitable misinterpretations and the imperfections of the process. All our interventions are aimed at restoring that faith, however this might be described by our various theories. The therapeutic action of talk therapies that enable us to live fully in solitude and in solidarity lies within the properties of language. I am suggesting that the therapeutic goal of all talk therapies is to restore the patient’s faith in communication such that he or she can better maintain a private self within an intersubjective world. Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Gebze Yuksek Teknoloji Enstitu on April 24, 2014

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Philosophy of mind: coming to terms with traumatic brain injury.

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Trust and recognition: coming to terms with models.

Keeping the fundamentals in mind.

Name-calling in the hippocampus (and beyond): coming to terms with neuron types and properties.

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Homeopathy and integrative medicine: keeping an open mind.

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Keeping Mind in Mind: Mentalizing and Executive Functioning in Substance-Abusing Infant Mothers: Effect on Dyadic Relationship and Infant Outcome.

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Feelings and Intersubjectivity in Qualitative Suicide Research.

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