Action and the Analyst’s Responsibility

Commentary on Greenberg

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8333783
AutoresDale Boesky (autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume63
Fascículo1
Páginas65-83
Data de publicação2015-02-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0003-0651 • E-ISSN: 1941-2460
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0003065115572470
PMID25753797
OpenAlexW1988727905
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas15

ion ARe incoheRent At issue here is not that we lose something by inadvertently shifting from the low altitude of our “fictions” about the meaning of what our patients are saying to the lofty altitudes of our highly abstract theories about the mode of therapeutic action. Making shifts from lower to higher levels of generalization without recognizing we have shifted is indeed perilous. It is by no means proven we all get the same results. For the moment I will refer to inter-model differences in content as horizontal, and to differences in the methods by which given assumptions are inferred from clinical data as vertical. Why is it that we console ourselves that it doesn’t matter what the horizontal differences between models might be when we lack so much information about the profound and often unacknowledged vertical differences? For example, for many analysts psychic determinism is a central principle of mental functioning. For those analysts, the concept of defense underlies the inference of altered meaning and overdetermination of meaning. This is a fundamental assumption on which the principle of psychic determinism rests.6 5To cite one example: the epistemological links between psychic determinism and free association are just two of the babies thrown out with the bathwater of earlier orthodoxies (Boesky 2008). 6Niels Bohr, the father of quantum theory, has suggested that his “principle of complementarity,” according to which the same phenomena must be described in two mutually exclusive models, may be a universal principle rather than merely a principle of atomic physics. He would consider the issue here as another example of this universal phenomenon and would have us look upon determinism and freedom as both true, each in its own frame of reference. This view is apparently in line with the following statement attributed to Bohr: “There are the trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true” (Waelder 1963, p. 17)

Action (physics) · Bohr model · Causation · Compatibilism · Complementarity (molecular biology) · Determinism · Epistemology · Free will · Indeterminism · Meaning (existential) · Metaphysics · Overdetermination · Physicalism · Physics · Psychic · Quantum mechanics · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications