The Pain of Getting Close and the Chill of Living Apart

One of course often encounters such a lot of nonsense of Twitter and other platforms, but the former has more than earned its worth in my mind for introducing me to the work of Jonathan Shedler and a few others like Allen Frances. From the former I recently read a recommendation to read Deborah Anna Luepnitz's 2002 book Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas, and I'm very glad I did. In fact, so delightful is this book that I read it in one day, and then immediately set to trying to figure out which courses I can assign the book in. 

The book is a collection of five case studies of patients Luepnitz has treated over the years. I have been reading case studies for many years now, and vanishingly few clinicians have enough literary skill to present them with the felicity and fluidity that Luepnitz does. Too often they are rendered tendentiously, with tiny bits of the person's life farced between leaden dollops of whichever theory is being served up. Freud rightly won the Goethe Prize for his prose, and his case studies even in English often read very well. If that is the standard we should congratulate Luepnitz for surpassing it so splendidly.

In any event, the book is off to a rollicking start by recounting the author's trek to Freud's last residence in London. I have not been there, but hope to some day; I have, however, made my own pilgrimage to Bergasse 19 when I was giving a paper at the University of Vienna in 2016. I wrote briefly about that experience elsewhere. 

Then it moves on to telling how Freud loved the story of Schopenhauer's porcupines, and used it in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Buy the book just for her profitable retelling of this tale. 

From here the book moves into a brief discussion about ambivalence (well treated in this book) and then the role of hatred in all our loves. Here, of course, Luepnitz cites a paper I have so often turned to in the last three years: Winnicott's "Hate in the Counter-Transference." Luepnitz sums up Winnicott's lengthy paper by quoting the poet Molly Peacock, "there must be room in love for hate." 

From here, the rest of the book simply allows the five stories to unfold, with the barest of theoretical commentary on the cases, and this along familiar lines--pointing out examples of projective identification, of "resistance" and its often salutary uses (which clinician and patient alike may not take seriously enough), and again the ambivalence that obtains in therapy: "Everyone who seeks therapy brings a desire for and a resistance to change--a yes and a no" (p.78). I will give away no more of its riches but encourage you to read the whole thing. 

In its final pages, Luepnitz's book returns again and briefly to Winnicott on how to understand termination in therapy. In his famous discussion on transitional objects (whose possible theological applications I discussed here), he notes that there will come a time when the blanket is neither destroyed nor eaten, but simply set aside as no longer necessary.