Как появились эти заметки 10 страница

called countertransference phenomena are the same as those to his explanation of the transference phenomena. In each case criticism centers on the very notion of the "transfer" of an affect from persons encountered in childhood to the partner in the psychoanalytic situation. We must emphasize again that all relationships of the analyst to the analysand are autonomous interpersonal phenomena directed totally and exclusively to this particular partner. It is, of course, quite possible that the analyst, because he is caught in neurotic entanglements of his own, is not fully capable of relation­ships to his patients which correspond to their essential require­ments. His manner of relating may even have become so severely restricted by his own childhood experiences that it is impossible from the outset for him to free his patient through analysis. How­ever, the fact that a man's freedom for being together with another is curtailed does not in the least justify the assumption that these deformed relationships—just because they originated in childhood —are not really relationships to the present partner. A man whose leg was broken in a car accident when he was eight, who has been crippled ever since and bears on his leg the imprint of the automobile that hit him, may limp in exactly the same way as he has limped since the accident. But it would be absurd to claim that the limp is "directed" at the driver responsible for the accident.

At any rate, we believe that the cold, mirror-like attitude recom­mended by Freud is itself an inadequate and restricted relationship, at least insofar as it ignores the patient's own unique selfhood. It, too, creates anything but the therapeutically effective atmosphere necessary for psychoanalysis. This kind of relationship to the patient has two sources: the attempt to achieve a scientific objectivity which permits the observer to exclude his own influences on the observed, and the authoritarian claim of infallibility and demand for un­questioning obedience which parents in Freud's time still considered tiie proper attitude toward children.

No wonder, then, that patients who never received sufficient warmth at home, and are trying to make up for what they missed, feel unbearably frustrated by the analyst's "surgical" attitude to­ward them. Often such frustration leads them to reduce all their interpersonal claims on the analyst to crassly sexual demands. Frustration of this sort may even drive patients progressively fur­ther into sexual acting-out; it is most likely to occur if the analyst, because he protects himself too much, or because he is not free so

258 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

far as his own sensuality is concerned, v/ithholds from patients the protective care they so desperately need. Again and again young analysts report that patients make intensive erotic demands on them. The training analyst then suggests that they should give up their rigorously correct role as a mirror and let the patients feel their natural concern, that they should reveal more openly their sympathy and antipathy. Whenever a young analyst follows such counsel, the compulsive erotic demands on him cease.

If the analyst is aware of this problem, he will not mistake the erotic demands of female patients for those of mature women either, in spite of the fact that such demands often appear in the guise of a seemingly grown-up sexuality. He will recognize that they arise from a child-like longing to be loved and cared for as a small daughter. If those patients realize that the analyst understands their true nature, their oversexualized transference usually disappears quickly, even though they may at first rebel violently against acknowledging and accepting the fact that they are still fundamentally small children. All patients who are mature enough for genuine sexual relations find possibilities outside of the analytic situation for re­lating in this way. Hence the analyst's yielding to sexual relations with patients could never be more than a pseudo-permissiveness which would hinder the unfolding of the patient's whole self. To permit acting-out of previously non-admitted, infantile, pre-sexual manners of behaving is another matter. A person who is outwardly grown-up has no chance, outside of the analytic situation, to let such modes of behavior come forth, to let them grow, and to make them his own.

Every kind of analytic permissiveness, however, presupposes the

correct handling of so-called countertransference. First of all, the

analyst must realize that there can be no psychoanalysis without

an existential bond between the analyst and the analysand. Analysis

without countertransference is an illusion in a double sense. An

emotional relationship with the analysand can never be avoided by

the analyst; it can only be denied by him. (The objectifying attitude

of indifference is itself a mode of emotional relating.) Second,

< "countertransfeience" is not transference»,at all, b ut, a. g enuine ещ)-_

\ I tional interhuman relation^sMp_between_the analyst and his patient,

* J distorted as it may be. ~

I The adequate human relation between the analyst and his patient,

wrongly called coun tertransference, presup poses in turn t hat the

Daseinsanalytic Handling of "Countertransference" 259

analyst himself has matured into thcL.free.dom of selfless concern for his patients. This includes full awareness of the true meaning of every permissive and frustrating action he undertakes in regard to the analysand's genuine maturing. It also includes a free relation of the analyst toward his own sensuality and his egotism. It means that the analyst has all his own sensual and egotistical tendencies at his free disposal and can keep them from interfering secretly or openly with his genuine concern and selfless love for the patient. In short, the analyst should be able to play the selfless role of the eighteenth camel of the ancient Arab legend. Here an old father is on his death bed. He calls in his three sons and bequeaths all his worldly goods—seventeen camels—to them. The eldest son is to have one-half of these, the second one-third, and the third one-ninth. The father closes his eyes forever. The sons are at a complete loss. Eventually they find a man who is as wise as he is poor. His only property is one camel. The three sons ask him for his help in solving the seemingly insoluble problem of dividing the heritage. The wise man merely adds his own camel to those of the father, and the division immediately becomes childishly simple. The eldest son gets half of eighteen camels, namely nine; the second one-third, namely six; the youngest one-ninth, or two. But lo and behold, nine and six and two make seventeen, the original heritage. The eight­eenth camel of the wise man has departed of its own; it is no longer necessary, although temporarily it had been essential.

Psychotherapists would perhaps be wise to do away altogether with the misleading term "countertransference" and to replace it with the term "psychotherapeutic eros."⁵ This "psychotherapeutic eros" is different from the love of parents for their children, different from the love between two friends, different from the love of the priest for his flock, decidedly different from the extremely variable love between the sexes, and different from the matter-of-fact in­difference of purely conventional kindness. Genuine psychothera­peutic eros, in other words, must be an otherwise never-practiced selflessness, self-restraint, and reverence beforgjhe partner's exist­ence and un iqueness. These qualities must not be shaken or per­turbed by cooperative, indifferent, or hostile behavior on the part of

⁵ This term has also been suggested independently of the author by A. Seguin, whose papers on this subject are of paramount importance for a more adequate psychoanalytic theory. See A. Seguin, "Love and Psychotherapeutic Eros," Acta Psychotherapeutica et Psychosomatica, Vol. X, 1962.

260 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

the patient. Ps ychothe rapenHr» ргля mnsf go hpynnA ctph nhrj.stJP¹¹ humihty in its selflessness, its modesty, and its triumph over egotism, ui that it musjtjiqt intervene even in the in terest of the therapist's [own God to seek to guide the^partner's^life.

"If the analyst lacks the maturity we described, he will do less harm, it is true, if he sticks to Freud's classical technique of being only a mirror. But a genuinely mature analyst will be able to analyze his patients in the exemplary way in which a certain hermit of the Himalayas cared for the flowers of his small garden. When praised for the extraordinary beauty of that Httle piece of ground, he simply remarked that he permitted the flowers to un­fold into their full blossoming—not for his own sake and aesthetic pleasure, but only for the delight of his God. Patients with whom an analyst is not capable of relating in this way, to some extent at least, should better be sent to another analyst.

Such genuine maturity is difficult to attain. The author himself has more than once been forced to admit that he was not ready to open himself to an analysand sufficiently to be able to live up to the Daseinsanalytic demands made upon him. Whenever he found himself in this situation, he referred the patient to another analyst who was capable of meeting the demands of the patient. Invariably the patient improved in an amazingly short time with the new therapist.

The Therapeutic Use of Daseinsanalytic Dream Interpretation

The fundamental difference between Daseinsanalysis and the psychoanalytic theory is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the understanding of dreams. The discrepancy between the two approaches is bound to have far-reaching consequences for the therapeutic handling of dreams—so far-reaching, in fact, that Daseinsanalytic dream interpretation requires separate and compre­hensive elaboration; the reader is referred to the author's Analysis of Dreams.¹ Occasionally, however, we have made use of Daseins­analytic dream analysis in some sections of the present work. For this reason, it may be helpful to recapitulate here the main features of the Daseinsanalytic approach to dream phenomena and its therapeutic impact.

We have no right to judge the dreaming state of human existence by the standards of the waking state. It is an unwarranted judgment from outside the phenomena in question to devaluate the dream world to mere "images" or "mental pictures" within a psyche. Nor should we isolate the experiences of our dreaming state, abstracting them into discrete things which are had or made by man. Thus the phrase "I have had a dream" is, strictly speaking, a grave mutilation of the facts. We have no dreams; we are our dreaming state, in that we exist in the ways of our dreamed behavior toward the world as much as in our waking behavior. In other words, we must con­sider the dreaming state as an equally autonomous and "real," although different, way of behaving and of relating to what is shin­ing forth in the light of Dasein.

Consequently, the Daseinsanalyst lets the phenomena of his patient's dream world speak directly to him, and has no need for

¹ New York, 1958.

262 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

the complicated mechanisms of a hypothetical, disguising "dream work." To him, dream phenomena are therefore always just what they are as they shine forth; they are an uncovering, an> unveiling, and never a covering up or a veiling of psychic content.,—-— Because the Daseinsanalyst recognizes being-in-the-dream-world I as one of the autonomous ways of man's existence, he treats the dream behavior of the patient in exactly the same way that he treats

__ his waking world-relationships. This means that he submits the

patient's dreamed ways of behaving and perceiving to a strict "analysis of resistance." He focuses his whole therapeutic handling of the dreams on questioning the assumed necessity of the barriers of anxiety, shame, and distaste which are in one way or another restricting the dreamer's free relationships within his dream world. Daseinsanalysis agrees with psychoanalytic experience that those realms of the human world which find admittance into the light of the dreaming Dasein are those a human being has not become aware of in his waking state, at least not adequately and fully. It is this fact which gives dream phenomena their immense value, which we cannot deny just because the old psychoanalytic dream theory seems increasingly inadequate. A few practical examples may help to clarify the characteristics of the Daseinsanalytic use of dreams in psychotherapy.

l. A man, aged twenty-eight, dreams that he is visiting the zoo in his home town, where there are especially fine, large tigers and lions. The director of the zoo joins the dreamer and proceeds to open the heavy gate of the cage; he enters, and feeds the animals with very large chunks of raw meat. The animals become excited. The dreamer becomes increasingly terrified when he realizes that the director has left the gate open and that the seemingly sohd iron bars of the cage are not made of iron at all but only of ice. Because the sun had broken through the clouds when the director arrived, the fence of ice is melting rapidly. The dreamer runs away as fast as he can and awakens out of breath.

Certainly, this is a very common dream. Freud discussed similar dreams, both in the fashion which С G. Jung later called interpre­tation on the "objective" level and in a so-called "subjective" way. But the only thing we are justified in saying about this dream ex­perience is that something alive—presenting itself in the phenomena of the tigers and lions—which has been safely imprisoned is now running after the dreamer, threatening to destroy him, to devour

The Therapeutic Use of Daseinsanalytic Dream Interpretation 263

him. The Daseinsanalyst's first question was, "Must you really be so afraid of the tigers and lions? Couldn't you make friends with them?"

Instantly the dreamer retorted, "You, too, I am sure, would be terrified in such a situation."

The analyst's reply was, "The real question is, why can the essence of nature's vitality shine forth to you only through danger­ous, wild animals in your dream? Perhaps it is your anxiety about this vitality which limits your existence to the admittance of vitality's dangerous and aggressive features. Of all the possible natural and vital phenomena, only lions and tigers could appear in your dream, because the nature of their particular being alone corresponds to the anxious restriction of your Dasein's openness. A fearless and free man might have encountered the essence of nature's vitality in a dream of a joyful encounter with his sweet­heart, in which he embraced her wholeheartedly."

In this way the analyst remained with the immediately given phenomena of the dreamer's world. Any further interpretation in regard to the wild animals of this dream would have been an un­warranted and arbitrary imposition on their genuine phenomeno-logical meaning. The traditional psychoanalytic "subjective" dream interpretation would probably say that the dreamer's drives and "animal" instincts were projected out of his "psyche" onto a hal­lucinatory external world and were experienced as external per­ceptions. Advocates of this theory, however, can never justify their assertion that the lions actually "represent" the dreamer's own impulses. Nor will the nature and the process of such a psychic projection ever become intelligible and demonstrable (see pp.

i*5 GO-

Most analysts would assert, too, that this dream was a clear-cut "transference dream" especially if they were informed that the zoo director resembled the analyst somewhat in stature. This again would be a completely unwarranted assumption. Nothing whatever justifies declaring that the zoo director actually "means" or "signi­fies" the doctor. It is true that this patient would probably not have had this dream if he had not already been in analysis for some time. The zoo director, however, refers to the analyst only insofar as the dreamer's existence had already opened up to some extent through the liberating influence of the analyst-analysand relation­ship. This greater openness of the patient's existence makes pos-

264 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

sible the appearance of the zoo director; the appearance of the director indicates the dreamer's awareness of the possibility of a fearless, free relationship with even the most vital phenomena of the world. Simply to see another man's fearless relationship with wild animals is of course a long way from being open to the extent that nature's vitality can shine forth in one's own fearless ways of handling the respective phenomena of the human world. Daseins­analysis was able to lead this patient to the point where he could relate freely, fearlessly, and wholeheartedly to all the phenomena of man's vital erotic and sexual world as well. Nothing, however, was transferred from the analyst to the zoo director of the dream. This man remains the zoo director, with his own features. Nor would anything justify the interpretation of the dream director as the symbolic representation or personification of the dreamer's own hidden grown-up psychic capacities.

However incorrect and arbitrary such a subjectivistic interpreta­tion may be, "scientifically" speaking (in this term's genuine and original meaning; see p. 29), it need not prove to be devoid of all practical, therapeutic effect. In some cases such a distorted ex­planation of a dream may even be unavoidable at first, as long as a patient is himself still rigidly caught in this traditional under­standing of man. It is essential to enter a patient's world through the "language" which he himself is speaking. Often enough the truth may shine forth to some extent into the patients' awareness even through such a veiled, subjectivistic interpretation.

2. A thirty-year-old man dreamed of seeing his brother's corpse lying in a coffin. The funeral is soon to take place. The brother has been killed in an auto accident.on the eve of his wedding. Some­how, the dreamer has been involved in the traffic in which this accident occurred. He is extremely sad at this loss of his favorite brother, the one to whom he has always felt closest.

Current dream interpretations on the "objective level" would probably assert that this dream betrayed hidden death wishes against the brother. Again, Daseinsanalysis would have to ask how on earth such an assumption could be justified. Not the smallest feature of this dream experience actually speaks of any death wish. On the contrary, the dreamer feels genuinely sad about his brother's death. It is irresponsible arbitrariness to call this sadness a disguis­ing transformation of aggressive death wishes into their opposite. To give such a fantastic interpretation to the patient would be a

The Therapeutic Use of Daseinsanalytic Dream Interpretation 26S

disastrous therapeutic mistake as well. Accusing this dreamer of hidden death wishes against his brother would overburden him by evoking completely unjustified pangs of bad conscience. The practi­cal result would be the opposite of therapeutic liberation, an emotional withdrawal and closing up. If resistance against the analyst ensues, it will not be a resistance which can be analyzed away. It will be fully justified, and will stop any further psycho­analytic progress if it does not altogether halt the psychoanalysis.

On the so-called subjective level of dream interpretation the j brother would be "identified" as the projected representation of the dreamer's own potentialities for loving, which had been killed. In his waking state this man was, in fact, on the brink of completely ~\ killing his humanity—his heart—in the "traffic" of his overwhelm­ing, intellectual, rational, egotistical business life. He suffered from sexual impotence and emotional depersonalization. Nevertheless, all assertions that the brother of the dream was "only" a projected symbol of psychic content are false. What actually happened in this man's world while he existed in the dreaming state was nothing but the death of a beloved brother in a traffic accident on the eve of his wedding day and the deep depression which the dreamer felt after this loss. This occurrence shows us, simply and clearly, that the patient's existence was tuned down and closed in to an extreme degree. Even in the dreaming state he was open only to the dis­closure of the meaning of dying in a world of reckless business traffic, even in regard to that being who was closest to him and whom he had originally been capable of loving.

The first therapeutic use of this dream experience, therefore, had to consist in drawing the patient's attention to-this state of affairs by these same words. The next therapeutic action was to pose tha, one legitimate question prompted by the dream: "What" we asked him, "might have brought about such an enormous restriction of, your existence's openness that the meaning of dying alone de- \ termines your whole dream world?" Very soon the patient under-^i stood that this existential reduction had to do with his being completely caught in, and absorbed by, the purely technical, heart­less "traffic" of his waking and his dreaming life. At the same time, he became aware of the possibilities of other, wider, and more human ways of relating to the world. The simple exposition of the immediately given meaning of his dream proved to be very helpful

266 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

to the patient. Not long afterward the dead brother began to come alive again in the patient's dream world.

3. A twenty-year-old woman dreamed that she was sitting in a perambulator. She was still a small child in the dream, although the pram had already become somewhat too small for her. A young, healthy nurse, about twenty years old, was pushing the pram up a hill. The nurse asked the dreamer to get out of the pram and to walk on her own feet. The dreamer refused, kicking and screaming. The nurse took the dreamer out of the pram, cut off her head and her limbs, buried the parts in the ground, and walked off. At this point the dreamer awoke in terror.

To explain this dream as revealing severe masochistic tendencies would have been artificial and arbitrary. Nothing in the im­mediately given dream refers to masochistic behavior. Nothing would have been gained therapeutically, either, by the analyst's attempt to point out hidden masochism. On the contrary, such an arbitrary explanation would have greatly impaired the therapeutic situation. At best, it would have led to the endless juggling of theoretical conceptions and psychoanalytic formulas by which patients usually defend themselves against the greater harm being done them by such unwarranted and destructive interpretations.

In this dream experience, the patient became aware of the un­avoidable burial of her childish way of existing. In everybody's development, the child's world must die and give way to ever more grown-up ways of behavior. The terror which finally awakened this dreamer shows only too clearly her attitude of panic toward growing up.

A Daseinsanalyst would use this dream therapeutically by first pointing out to the dreamer her terror of growing up and walking on her own two feet. Secondly he would reassure her, by correcting the grave mistake in her self-interpretation, by showing her that she is no longer only a small child. Already she has opened her existence to an understanding of mature womanliness, if only by being able to recognize a healthy nurse and to understand her as such. The death of her child's world, therefore, cannot possibly mean the total annihilation of her existence. Therefore, would it really be such a tragedy if her childish way of existing were to be superseded by her opening up to a wider and more mature world, including the awareness and understanding of grown-up womanli­ness? The understanding of this grown-up feature of human exist-

The Therapeutic Use of Daseinsanalytic Dream Interpretation 267

ence, which occurs in this dream in the patient's seeing and recogniz­ing another grown-up woman as a grown-up, healthy woman, is the first step toward full appropriation of any mature womanly relation­ships to her own self-being and carrying them out responsibly in her dreaming as well as her waking life. Again, it would be entirely arbitrary, speculative, and unnecessary to call the nurse in this dream a "hallucinatory projection" of so-called personified subjective psy­chic functions out of an assumed unconscious of the dreamer. We do justice to the immediate experience of our dreamer only if we accept the nurse as the nurse she showed herself to be, with all the meaningful world-references which constitute such a woman's existence.

4. Very tricky explanations are given of the frequent dreams about teeth. One thirty-five-year-old woman dreamed that one of her front teeth had fallen out. At first she was very sad. Soon, how­ever, she knew that another tooth, stronger and more beautiful, would grow in its stead. At the end of the dream she felt very happy.

More often, however, dreams in which teeth get lost leave the dreamer unhappy, even terror-stricken. Happy and unhappy dreams about losing one's teeth seem to be equally difficult to understand if only the current dream theories are applied. Instead of discussing the highly artificial explanations of these dreams by Freud, for instance (who felt they were closely connected to masturbation²), and by other psychoanalytic theorists, we simply ask about the im­mediately given meaning of our teeth. Our teeth undoubtedly belong to the world-relationship of catching hold of, of grasping, of seizing something. It is not only our physical food that is grasped and caught hold of. We also grasp the mental content of what we encounter, in the sense of understanding and comprehending it, in order to catch hold of our world.

Through the experience of losing a tooth in the dreaming state 1 a person perceives the meaning of giving up hitherto used means _ < of grasping the world, in any sense of this term. Therefore, this kind of dream often occurs at the point during an analysis when a patient is changing from his old way of looking at the world to new con­ceptions about it. In short, dreams about losing teeth can be said to belong to the context of a changing Weltanschauung. It is not

² S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in SE, Vol. V, pp. 385, 388.

268 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

surprising that sometimes the loss of the old, well-known frame of reference is first experienced as a catastrophic end of the world. If more adequate, freer ways of relating to the world are already in sight for such a dreamer, the same occurrence may be welcomed joyfully, as was true in our example.

Further Daseinsanalytic Corrections in Therapy: The Analysis or "Guilt Feelings" ana tne Goal or Psychotherapy

Daseinsanalytic insights into human being demand another es­sential correction in therapy. Here the goal requires correction. Freud assumed man's original nature to be that of a pleasure-ego, bent solely on satisfying the sexual instinct and preserving itself. He believed that early man, primitive man, and children exemplified the more or less unadulterated, primary, guiltless "naturalness" of man—a naturalness obligated only to the "pleasure principle." Modification of the pleasure principle is forced on man by the external world; but this modification, called the "reality principle," is secondary, according to Freud. It occurs because the individual would perish (and thus be unable to have any kind of satisfaction) if he did not take the given realities of the external world into consideration. Part of this adaptation to external reality is the child's acceptance of the moral demands his parents make on him. Eventually, the superior force of external reality results in the child's psychic incorporation of these and other demands and prohibitions which originally came from outside. The end product is Freud's "super-ego," or conscience. Once the super-ego has been formed, it becomes a source of guilt feelings. Hence, man ex­periences feelings of guilt every time he violates, or intends to violate, one of the commandments which have been drilled into him. Characteristically enough, Freud in all his papers never spoke of guilt as such, but only of guilt feelings. Consistent with such theories, Freud expected psychoanalysis to liberate the patient from neurotic serfdom and allow him to return to his "original natural-

Дата добавления: 2015-06-04