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- Title
בין מונאדה לדיאדה: ריבוי הפנים של פעולת כינון העצמי.
- Authors
ציקי כהן
- Abstract
In the last decades the psychoanalytic community has witnessed what is often referred to as a “relational turn” in psychoanalysis, following which the psyche began to be described in terms of configurations of self and other, intrapsychic and interpersonal, past and present, reality and fantasy (cf., Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983; Hoffmann, 1983l Chodorow, 1986; Aron, 2013). This turn is sometimes described as an epistemological change from a one-person to twoperson psychology. The present paper focuses on this epistemological change from a monadic and intrapsychic psychology to a dyadic and intersubjective perspective. It suggests that even if, on a theoretical and meta-psychological level, it is essential, required and important to distinguish the monadic from the relational approach to the psyche, on a clinical level both perspectives are necessary and useful. This is so because together the two express the main, parallel and complementary pathways of self-constitution, two main roads along which human subjectivity is shaped and expressed. While the classically-conceived one-person psychology emphasizes the importance of the monad in the formation and realization of past and present subjective experiences, a certain solipsism characterizes this approach. The two-person psychology sets intersubjectivity as a basic characteristic of human development, illustrating how the encounter with the other exerts a formative influence on the constitution and shaping of the self. I demonstrate why, notwithstanding the epistemological differences between the basic assumptions of one-person and two-person psychology, we may see the history of psychoanalysis as having evolved, from the start, via a dialectic movement between the two models (see Modell, 1984; Berman, 1986; Ghent, 1989; Gill, 1994; Aron, 2013). My main argument is that it is the combination of the monadic and the dyadic experiences of the self that forms the real person, his personality, and his comprehensive and integrated sense of selfhood. The importance of these two theoretical models lies in the fact that they represent two inner models that exist simultaneously in the psyche and are both essential to the constitution of the subject and his world. I further show how from a philosophical perspective too, the question of whether the self is constituted relationally or monadically is one of the central philosophical problems of all time, expressive of the quality of mutual relations between man’s nature as a sovereign and autonomous subject and his nature as a social creature. At the same time, I show that the relational approach’s pretension to serve as an alternative model to drive theory has led to the collapse of the carefully maintained dialectic tension in psychoanalysis between intrapersonal and interpersonal, between the monadic and solipsistic foundation of the self and its social and relational basis. I propose that although these two approaches represent contradictory thinking paradigms and general theoretical structures that rely on irreconcilable basic assumptions, we must still hold on to both approaches, in the spirit of Winnicott’s paradoxical truths, without artificially or forcefully unifying them or choosing one over the other. It also seems to me that the need for both models relies on the assumption that the constitution of the self – developmentally-speaking and as encountered clinically – is best explained from both a diachronic-developmental perspective and from a synchronic-present perspective; as a phenomenon developing along a historic timeline and as a dynamic configuration that is ‘always becoming’ in the here-and-now. Thus, from the synchronic perspective as reflected in daily therapeutic work, the self is founded and constituted in the seam between the two models; i.e., in the liminal space between monad and dyad, between one-person and two-person psychology. While some therapeutic moments emphasize the importance of the solipsistic monad in the formation and realization of past and present subjective experiences, other moments seem to establish human relationships as a basic characteristic of human development, demonstrating how the real encounter with the other, in the past and in the present, has a formative influence on the founding and the shaping of the self. To illustrate the necessity of both models, the second part of the paper presents an applied analysis of The Children of the Shadow (1962) by Polish-Israeli play-write Ben Zion Tomer (Teitelbaum) (1928-1998), and focuses on traumatic lacuna. I demonstrate why and how practices of psychic transformation tend to occur in the liminal seam between a solipsistic world and intrapsychic conflicts, on the one hand, and environmental influences and significant object relations, on the other hand. I suggest, in the footsteps of Winnicott (1971), that we must embrace the necessary understanding that in psychic transformation and change, “a paradox is involved which needs to be accepted, tolerated, and not resolved” (p. 53); these are liminal states of being in which the patient is both in and out, present and withdrawn, communicating and silent, moments of metamorphosis during which subjectivity is founded and is becoming.
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019, Vol 9, p257
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article