Click Here to Read: Helmut Thomä’s Contribution to the Panel, “Developments and Controversies in Psychoanalysis: Past, Present and Future” at the IPA Berlin Congress on July 25th, 2007.
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October 15th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Comment Posted for Zvi Lothane:
Commentary on Helmut Thomä’s Berlin Address.
First let me disclose that Helmut and I have known each other personally and have been partners in dialogue. It started before we met when Helmut came to New York to receive the Sigourney Award. The comments below are in the spirit of a debate among friends.
I can empathize with Helmut’s statement that this was a difficult paper to write. The issues are intellectually complex and emotionally charged.
HT refers to “Anna Freud and Melanie Klein and their adherents claimed to represent the true heirs of Freud’s work. The ideas of Freud are part and parcel of cultural history.
Sooner or later all schools of psychotherapy will discover anew various psychoanalytic findings.”
I fully agree about Freud as having created a universe of knowledge and ever-evolving scholarship, like Aristotle, or Kant, or Nietzsche (Lothane, Z. Freud’s legacy – is it still with us? Psychoanalytic Psychology, 23:285-301). As to the Klein-A. Freud wars, it was indeed a happy outcome, more than in other wars of orthodoxy, e.g. Adler, Jung, W. Reich, Karen Horney, Schultz-Hencke, and others. Sheridan’s title School for Scandal could be applied to the political shenanigans that fueled the doctrinal disagreements.
HT notes: “a comparative psychoanalysis, i. e. to a comparison of psychoanalytic processes of different schools in respect to their outcome.”
That would be interesting; I would like to emphasize that first it is important to examine how the different schools DEFINE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY. For instance, the Kleinians, the Kohutians, the Hartmann-Loewenstein-Krisians had different definitions of the etiology of disorder. I think they differ in the above but are very much alike in what they actually do in their offices: the do the “talking cure,” or “chimney sweeping”, as Anna. O. called it.
Concerning: “Often, empirical research is falsely identified with the natural science model of the so-called unity of science and with theory-free empiricism and outdated behaviorism. Many analysts are in opposition to any research and decline scientific reasoning of any kind.”
Both the one-case study that is the psychoanalytic situation AND multiple case studies of researchers are EMPIRICAL. The issue here is to take into account the result of both these empirical approaches. I think we are in agreement here.
He says: “Analytic thinking cannot remain in an abstract space, so to say free-floating in mid-air, but must be anchored in tentative concepts related to psychological phenomena” – agreed, but needs to be spelled out more precisely: whose abstract, free-floating in mid-air thinking? The Kleinians, or the mystic Bion? Or, perhaps free-floating attention and the analyzing instrument, which I renamed reciprocal free association is Thomä referring to? By the way, there is no mention of free association in the paper, not a complaint. (see Lothane, Z. Reciprocal free association: listening with the third ear as an instrument in psychoanalysis.The contributions of Reik and Isakower. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 23:711-727, 2006).
HT states: “Intersubjectivity was Freud’s latent paradigm (Altmeyer und Thomä 2006).” I don’t like the term “intersubjective,” I find it trendy. A better word is “interpersonal.” Moreover, the interpersonal was NOT latent in Freud, it was out there but not labeled “interpersonal,” as I argued in my 1997 paper, “Freud and the interpersonal,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 6:175-184, not only in his case reports, but also in the papers on technique 1912-1915: interpersonal through and through.
HT is rightly critical of “The rigid understanding of neutrality, for instance, resulted in a very impersonal attitude.” The term neutrality confuses impartiality and objectivity of judgment with a personal quality of the patient doctor relationship, which is based, Freud said already in the Studies on Hysteria, on “Sympathie,” the German synonym for LOVE. Michael Balint wrote about “primary love and psychoanalytic technique”.
I would place HT’s statement that follows in the context of primary love and psychoanalytic technique:
“In my experience, all patients are relieved and satisfied when I admit my affective reactions. Patients understand that my professional role and my knowledge bring about a kind of distance, which softens my emotional reactions.”
“In psychoanalysis, there has existed from the very first an inseparable bond between cure and research. Knowledge brought therapeutic success,” said Freud as quoted by Helmut. I would add that in this quotation “cure” means treatment, NOT therapeutic success. Adolf Grünbaum did not know that difference when he berated Breuer and Freud for lying about Bertha Pappenheim’s treatment outcome.
More on love: “The Independents, of having given up to search for psychoanalytic truth. “In further developments, the Middle Group, which changed its name to the Independents, also established a new model of the mind, deriving from Ferenczi and developed by Balint, Winnicott, and, later in the United States, by Kohut. The fundamental difference between this model and those of Freud, Klein, and their followers lay not in the fact that it took into account new clinical evidence, but rather in the kinds of uses that it made of clinical evidence.” No, Helmut, the fundamental difference is about love: from Ferenczi to Balint to Winnicott to Kohut: they all talked about love in roundabout terms (see Lothane, Z. The feud between Freud and Ferenczi over love. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 58:21-39, 1998).
October 17th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Responses to Zvi Lothane’s Comments about Helmut Thomae
I would like to differ with two of Zvi Lothane’s criticisms of Helmut Thomae’s paper presented at the IPA Congress in Berlin, 2007. Helmut quoted Freud about the inseparable bond between cure and research. Zvi wrote, “in this quotation “cure” means tratement, NOT therapeutic success.” I am flabbergasted that Zvi, without any justification, asserts that his translation of Freud’s German is correct, and that Helmut’s translation of Freud’s German is in error!
Helmut had written: “The fundamental difference between this model [Ferenczi, Balint, Winnicott] and those of Freud, Klein, and their followers lay not in the fact that it took into account new clinical evidence, but rather in the kinds of uses it made of clinical evidence.” Zvi commented: “No, Helmut, the fundamental difference is about love.” I think herlmut means to say that the difference is about love, when he refers to the “uses it made of clinical evidence.” I think that is what Helmut meant when he referred to “the beneficient results brought about by the influence of the analyst by his personified method_ - his love.
Joe Schachter
October 18th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Comment from Zvi Lothane
Joe Schachter is flabbergasted, but that’s what the dictionary says:
German / English
Kur / cure; (course of) treatment; reconvalescence treatment
Kuren / {pl} cures; treatments; reconvalescence treatments
eine Kur machen / take a cure
eine Kur machen / to drink the waters
Delfintherapie {f}; Delfin-Kur / {f}dolphin therapy
Rosskur {f}; Roßkur {f}[alt] / drastic cure; drastic remedy
That’s also what the word “cure” meant in 19th century English. Anna. O. talked of “the talking cure,” i.e., talk therapy.
I believe Joe that Helmut intended to make a comment about love, but the fact is, he did not use the word love.”
Thomä cited Freud as saying that „Unser analytisches Verfahren ist das einzige, bei dem dies kostbare Zusammentreffen gewahrt bleibt,“ which can also be rendered as: psychoanalysis is the only method in which there is a concurrence of healing and doing research.
The word ‘heilen”, like cure, is also ambiguous: it may mean treatment, and it may mean the successful result of treatment, depending on the context.
In pointing to the conjunction, concurrence, coincidence of Heilen und Forschen, Freud first speaks of Heilen, to cure, in the sense of treatment method: healing and investigating go hand in hand. He points to the difference between treatment and success in the sentence that follows: “Knowledge brought therapeutic success,” he makes a distinction between the knowledge thus gained and its therapeutic suceess, adding: “It was impossible to treat a patient without learning something new: it was impossible to gain fresh insight without perceiving its beneficent results (wohltätige Wirkung.” There is double knowledge here: of helping the patient and learning something new for the benefit of science thus able to help other patients.
Here Thomä and I are in full agreement.”
October 24th, 2007 at 8:08 am
This is my short reply to Zvi Lothane. He knows that I regard the discussion of disagreements more fruitful than to adore personal friendship and agreements.
I disagree with Zvi Lothane. Firstly, free association of the patient and evenly suspended attention (gleichbleibende Aufmerksamkeit) are quite different processes with asymmetrical goals. Secondly, intersubjectivity was very latent in Freud’s theory. In fact, the tragedy of the practice of psychoanalysis lies in the fact that for at least half a century it was dominated by rules which destroyed therapy AND the science of psychoanalysis. Intersubjective is more comprehensive than interpersonal, therefore I prefer it, although it might be trendy.
Clearly, Joe Schachter is correct with the Freud quotation. In the original German, Freud spoke of the therapeutic Erfolg (success). Strachey translated the famous Junktim (in German) as the inseparable bond of cure and research. In its context, there is no reference to love. The whole paragraph Zvi Lothane refers to and Joseph Schachter takes up accordingly is neither from Freud nor from me. It is brought up by Hanna Segal. This is marked in my text.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Here’s my latest exchange with Helmut:
Dear Helmut, Dear Joe,
yes, we like debate, it’s like playing chess. Freud said that doing psychoanalysis was like playing chess. Playing is an interpersonal occupation, not an intersubjective one.
Therefore I disagree with Helmut again: interpersonal is the better term. But then we can say: to each his own, de gustibus non disputandum est.
Isakower referred to the activity of analyzing as the analyzing instrument. I prefer the term reciprocal free association.
The free association in the analytic dyad is NOT assymmetrical in activity and form but IS asymmetrical in the ROLE played by each participant. The analyst dreams the same way the patient does, but it is not the analyst’s dreams that are being analyzed.
The patient tells the analyst how he feels, and, on your own showing, Helmut, you sometimes tell a patient about your feelings. Feelings and thoughts, or associations, are the same phenomenon in both. The patient tells about his feelings without any limits, you as analyst use judgment as to when it is appropriate to tell a patient about your feelings and when it is not.
Reciprocal free association works the same way. Like Luther, here’s where I stand.
In my remarks about love I was responding to Joe. Thus it is still true that Helmut did not discuss love, while Joe said that he had implied it. It is not enough to be implicit about love: one must be explicit about it.
It is also unfair to Freud to claim that the interpersonal was ‘very latent’ in Freud’s theory. How much is very? Which theory do you have in mind? The theory of technique WAS interactional, very explicitly so in the papers on technique. Besides, both the published case histories, and especially the unpublished notes on the Wolfman, show how caring, how warm, Freud was. There are also testimonies by his patients Hilda Doolitle and Maryse Choisy.
What you are confusing here, Helmut, as the half a century that destroyed psychoanalysis was not Freud but Freud’s epigones at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and society, the hegemony of Ha’rtmann & Co., who were rigid in ways that Freud was not. If you want to see a description of similar phenomena among the Kleinians, see Greenson’s paper in the IJPA in 1974.
Lastly, I saw no reaction to my differentiating Kur=treatment from the success of the Kur.
Zvi
—– Original Message —–
From: Helmut Thomä
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 6:13 pm
Subject: online discussion
To: Zvi Lothane , joseph schachter
> Dear Zvi, Dear Joe,
>
> I made an online contribution (internationalpsychoanalysis.net),
> that I
> also attach to this e-mail.
>
>
> “This is my short reply to Zvi Lothane. He knows that I regard the
> discussion of disagreements more fruitful than to adore personal
> friendship and agreements.
>
> I disagree with Zvi Lothane. Firstly, free association of the
> patient
> and evenly suspended attention (gleichbleibende Aufmerksamkeit) are
> quite different processes with asymmetrical goals. Secondly,
> intersubjectivity was very latent in Freud’s theory. In fact, the
> tragedy of the practice of psychoanalysis lies in the fact that for
> at
> least half a century it was dominated by rules which destroyed
> therapy
> AND the science of psychoanalysis. Intersubjective is more
> comprehensive
> than interpersonal, therefore I prefer it, although it might be
> trendy.
> Clearly, Joe Schachter is correct with the Freud quotation. In the
> original German, Freud spoke of the therapeutic Erfolg (success).
> Strachey translated the famous Junktim (in German) as the
> inseparable
> bond of cure and research. In its context, there is no reference to
> love. The whole paragraph Zvi Lothane refers to and Joseph
> Schachter
> takes up accordingly is neither from Freud nor from me. It is
> brought up
> by Hanna Segal. This is marked in my text.”