Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration

Abstract

KENNETH A. FRANK: Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ, 1999, 304 pp., $47.50, ISBN 0-88163873-2. Psychoanalytic Participation, Volume 16 of the Relational Perspectives Book Series edited by Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Aron, is written by an analyst steeped in the object relations-intersubjectivist-interactionist tradition, which in recent decades has furnished some of the more interesting and provocative developments in psychoanalysis. This tradition takes as its starting point the essentially moral idea that the analyst ought not to represent and conduct himself or herself as a patriarchal authority but rather as an ordinary helping person equipped with some special, if provisional, knowledge. Dr. Frank aims to review recent developments and to extend them in a useful way to some important practical problems, such as openness and self-disclosure on the part of the analyst, handling of countertransference, including erotic countertransference, equality and mutuality. Dr. Frank's book stands on two legs of very disparate length and strength. The short critical leg is an extremely truncated and overconfident assessment of classical psychoanalytic theory, done in a few pages. Frank's central assertion is that Freudianism theory is a one-person (p. 3) psychology, by which he means a based on a view of people as separate, self-enclosed systems whose motives and interactions with the world are to be understood as driven by endogenously arising drives (p. 6). Shifting to the much longer expository leg, which occupies virtually all of the remaining 268 pages, he argues and seeks to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is in process of being rescued from this error by the advent of a two-person psychology that acknowledges the importance of object-seeking as a, or perhaps the, basic developmental motive and which therefore understands mind in terms of internalized object-relations and intersubjective experience. This, of course, has become the conventional wisdom of a large segment of psychoanalysis. Frank knows object-relations theory and its latest refinements in intersubjectivity and interactional theories. He provides useful discussions of important practical analytic issues. He is at his best when he comes close to making a case for radical analytic openness and fearlessness, and for shifting the burden of intellectual responsibility to where it properly belongs, onto the analyst who claims special authority for anonymity and inequality. Frank seems to recognize intuitively that the authority of the Freudian analyst is bogus, based as it is on an indefensible theory. His problem is that he does not seem to really understand why the theory is indefensible. Thus he cannot make his case in a rigorous way or take his arguments far enough. His critique of Freudianism is actually that of the loyal opposition within psychoanalysis, which fails to penetrate beneath its rhetoric. What makes Freudianism intellectually slippery and even dangerous is not that it regards the person as a closed system determined by endogenous instincts or that it is a natural-science based theory, but that it pretends to do so (and seeks to derive its authority therefrom) while actually being an extreme socialization-based psychology. This is a problem of rhetoric versus reality. Freud's instinct and Oedipal theories are no more based on natural science and biology than is social Darwinism, with which it has much in common. …