"Both therapists and patients are likely to retreat from the shared conjunction of metaphorical space into the relative safety of the literal and concrete. In this they are enacting, or reenacting, a retreat from a self sustained by selfobject relationships into a self sustained by concretization and reification. Such a retreat accomplishes two goals: It shores up a shakily organized subjective world, and it withdraws from an ambiguous and potentially disappointing relationship context into the protection of a separate and inviolable belief in the objective reality of one's thoughts and feelings (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987). Concretization is a universal hallmark of subjective experience, but it comes to dominate psychic organization when "early, validating responsiveness has been consistently absent or grossly unreliable" (Stolorow et al., 1987, p. 133). Then a retreat to the literal, or to the compulsive, as in psychosexual enactments, dominates and isolates psychic life. One way of understanding the therapy process is to see it as elevating concretizations into metaphors—vehicles of shared understanding. Adequate therapeutic treatment lifts the patient's communications out of their literal heaviness and lets them float in the room as mutually held conduits for understanding. In this sense, a life of rigidly held, even delusional beliefs, a life of compulsive sexual enactments or psychosomatizations, is a life without poetry. And from my perspective as poet and therapist, I add it is a life in search of poetry—of a metaphor replete with shared meanings.
If patients are prone to reduce metaphors to the literal, therapists are prone to move in the opposite direction, to elevate metaphors into reified universal truths. Reification involves a withdrawal from the poetic, from the intersubjective. To speak of a patient's Oedipus complex as something that exists as an entity is to withdraw from the intersubjective power of metaphor in which a patient's description of being "shot down" when he asked his father for a loan interacts with the therapist's own construction of meanings—based perhaps on trace memories of his own childhood shame and rage, his reading in a college survey course of Sophocles' shocking play, his reading of Freud and subsequent theorists. The reification of metaphors withdraws them from the intersubjective field and coats them with a kind of pseudoscientific Teflon. Metaphors, on the other hand, are adhesive—they draw meanings to them".
No comments:
Post a Comment