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At the Kohut Memorial Lecture, attendees of the 30th Annual
International Psychology of the Self Conference were treated to a
particularly bountiful feast. Following a warm introduction by long
time colleague, collaborator, and friend, Dr. Robert Stolorow, Dr. Donna
Orange took the podium. In her opening remarks, she graciously thanked
her many friends, teachers, supporters, encouragers, and collaborators.
To be the first lecturer not to have known Heinz Kohut in a long line of
lecturers who knew him personally was quite an honor for her. She set
forth to deliver what was to be a most substantive, robust, personal,
and deeply thoughtful lecture. In her lecture, entitled "Attitudes,
Values, and Intersubjective Vulnerability," she engaged her audience to
"ask ourselves what has been the journey of the empathy Kohut so
cherished and taught us all to prize, and where its leading edge might
be now."
She proceeded to offer a solidly intersubjective and expansive view
of the contemporary meaning of empathic therapeutic engagement. Those
holding this view can claim terra firma far beyond what critics
have mistakenly characterized as Self Psychology's flight from
aggression and human cruelty via forms of empathic niceness. Donna
asserted that empathy is not only what we do to someone, but
rather, a way of being with the other. In firm hold of this
attitude, Donna said, "we proclaim with Terentius that we are human and
that nothing human is alien to us."
Donna asserted that empathy entails an intersubjective process
whereby psychotherapists and psychoanalysts hold attitudes and values
that require them to be intersubjectively vulnerable. She turned to her
phenomenological philosophical foundations to ground these ideas; ideas
shared by her close collaborators Dr. Robert Stolorow and Dr. George
Atwood. Of herself and her cohorts she said, "we philosophical
subversives are bringing into psychoanalysis, and specifically into this
community, all our phenomenological doubts about the possibility of
interpretation-free knowing, as well as a conviction that our being is
embodied from the start in experiential worlds. We exist together in
lifeworlds." In other words, understanding our patients requires, in
Donna's words, "empathic stretch to include in our horizons of
understanding that someone whom we find challenging." We are, as Donna
quotes from the poet John Donne, "involved in mankind." Drawing from
the work of philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer, Donna reminds us, "The
person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands
apart and unaffected; but rather as one united by a specific bond with
the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with
him" (Gadamer, 1975/1991).
Cautioning us against the "temptation to distance by diagnosis, by
reductive thinking, by adopting an impartial observer's attitude, by
dissociation," Donna encouraged us to accompany our patients. This
requires an awareness of the ways in which our particular life worlds,
the worlds the phenomenologists say we are thrown into—worlds
of class, race, culture, privilege, poverty, emotional trauma or
empathic care, etc.—impact our development. These circumstances,
and our resultant organizing principles can work to potentially enhance
or limit our ability to understand our patients.
It was at this point in the lecture that Donna moved into a more
personal realm of sharing. She touched on bits and pieces of her own
painful family history and the ways in which her experiences have shaped
her, including her particular vulnerabilities to shame. These personal
disclosures set the stage for us to more deeply understand how the
analyst's vulnerabilities are equal factors in the clinical exchange.
She held the rapt attention of her audience as she lived out, before us,
her deeply felt empathic attitudes, values and ideals; these being made
up of "where-I-find-my-self-ness," the unbidden Heideggerian
thrownness of experience, and "a kind of personal choice."
Embedded here is Donna's notion of empathic stretch.
Donna expanded on three attitudes important for us to hold:
egalitarianism, a dialogic spirit, and mindful and meditative
responsiveness. By egalitarianism, she referred to our needing to
respect the "common human dignity and frailty" of both parties in the
analytic relationship. Doing so can help us refrain from defensively
distancing ourselves through the holding of authoritarian attitudes that
mark a retreat into cultural/intellectual privilege, rankism, classism,
racism, or sexism.
By holding a dialogic spirit, we would approach our work with
patients as an "opportunity to learn from a valued other, a chance to
engage together in a search for emotional truth." As therapists with a
dialogic spirit, we would not retreat into the comfort and
predictability of certainties, or theoretical reductionisms, rather
remain open to otherness, even if it discomforts or hazards us. "A
dialogical spirit keeps us open and tentative all the way down, as the
philosophers say." The third attitude, mindful and meditative
responsiveness, was presented as an antidote to the frantic, reactive,
technique-centered, evidence-based, results-driven foci of many mental
health practices today.
For Donna, and for many of us, these attitudes are at the very heart
of intersubjective vulnerability. Donna related the importance of these
attitudes to the values and ideals Kohut believed were so important to a
vital selfhood. Curious to understand some of the influences that
shaped Kohut's values and ideals, Donna referenced the bravery of Sophie
Scholl, a student of the White Rose resistance whose life, firmly held
beliefs, and eventual execution in Muenchen in 1943 deeply touched
Kohut. Donna reminds us that Kohut's rejection of theories of
individualism and innate aggression came from his deep belief in our
connectedness and need for one another.
But, as Donna points out, establishing and maintaining one's
connectedness to others is often difficult and challenging. We each
have our particular vulnerabilities, and can feel particularly
vulnerable in certain intersubjective contexts. Our patients can feel us
failing them in a myriad of ways, and we can experience ourselves as
falling short, not measuring up, and needing to stretch further to make
contact.
Following two illustrative case examples in which Donna modeled both
her beliefs and fallibilistic courage, her lecture came to an end. The
room burst with applause as attendees rose to give her a standing
ovation. She had deeply connected with her audience in her humble but
heroic way. We left with a feeling of plentitude.
Elizabeth Corpt, LICSW, is on the faculty at the
Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and is a supervising analyst
there. She is a supervisor in the Program for Psychotherapy, Cambridge
Hospital, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. She was a
founding member of the former New England Center for Self Psychology.
She is in private practice in Arlington, MA. Her most recent paper,
presented at IARPP in Athens, Greece was "The Role of the Analyst's
Generosity in the Treatment of a Precociously Self-Sufficient
Patient."
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