Credo: I Believe in What, Exactly?

I'm going to let you in on a couple of secrets from my previous life that bear directly on this book I shall be reviewing.

First, those of us with some scholarly background in religious studies and theology (especially its Christian variants) tend to hear the word credo and immediately have a set of fairly specific and rather clearly defined associations and connotations come to mind. In typical usage, a credo ("I believe" in Latin) is a very succinct and often dense statement comprised of propositions establishing belief on frequently contested points of doctrine. In some versions, after laying out the positive claims, a series of anathemas follow, establishing what beliefs are to be explicitly rejected as heterodox. 

In the book under review we have almost none of this at all. Given that we are talking about psychoanalysis and the authors are all analytically trained, it would be rather queer to find such statements being proffered too categorically for psychoanalysis, of course, seeks always to question definitive claims and probe what lies beneath the lust for certainty. 

While there are, as the eminent historian Jaroslav Pelikan and others demonstrated, many versions of such creedal statements within just Christianity, the most common example still in use today is the Nicene Creed, as it is usually called, though its fuller title is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol of Faith, reflecting the fact that the statement begun at Nicaea I in 325 was amended and added to at the first council of Constantinople in 381. Unlike the word "creed" and cognates, "symbol" in Greek is less a carefully and cogently constructed series of propositions but instead often translated as that which is thrown together.

I'm going to suggest straightaway that had the editor or contributors to this volume, Psychoanalytic Credos: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts, ed. Jill Salberg (Routledge, 2022) been aware of the etymological history I've just so roughly sketched, they would have called their volume Psychoanalytic Symbols of Faith or something along those lines instead of using the word credos, which promises a type of statement, and a corresponding level of certainty in its propositions, very nearly entirely absent from this volume. That is not a fatal flaw but merely a rather minor mismatch between title and contents. (Perhaps, they might reply, the subtitle, especially with its use of the word journeys, gives cover here, as indeed it does, for many authors seem to have written not tight compact creedal essays, but meandering autobiographical sketches, many of them quite banal and of very limited interest.) 

The second secret I shall let you in on also comes from my scholarly life organizing international conferences, editing two academic journals, and also being editor of scholarly collections and proceedings, several of which I have published. In every case, one often begins with a dream list of contributors, but then has to settle for those who actually say yes and show up. Roughly 15% will say yes and then drop off the face of the earth; roughly 35% will say yes and hold you hostage while they wickedly blow past all deadlines and may eventually get their submission to you months or even years after deadline; and the rest will usually be professional and accommodating in working with you to submit decent materials on time. The resulting collection, of course, is invariably going to be very uneven and even the most ruthless editing I could provide could never totally smooth it out entirely. Such is the fate of all collections. 

Sometimes it is fairly well accepted (though should not be) that especially "big names" may agree to give a paper or make a submission to your journal or book, but it will be some paper they've recycled four times already and couldn't be bothered publishing, or the paper was not really top-drawer stuff, but because of their status in the field they can pawn off second-rate materials and people will gladly take them because, of course, you want their name in your publication, and they know you want their name. Thus they send you some such material--not their best stuff because it may be incomplete, or the sources haven't been updated since they first gave the paper in 1998, or they wrote in sloppy haste--and you accept it even though it doesn't quite fit your focus. 

Similarly, if the "big name" really should be in your book or conference program--else people will sneer How could you publish on gravity without asking Newton for an essay?--but does not want to write something original, or finds you insufficiently important enough to think of writing something fresh for your focus, they may condescend to let you have a paper previously published that, they think after two seconds, clearly fits your focus (but doesn't really). Again, being glad to have this person, you will snatch up the previously published paper and include it in your collection even though it doesn't quite fit your focus.

There are, then, a number of prominent people in Psychoanalytic Credos who fit into this category. These essays, if not previosuly encountered, may be profitably and perhaps even enjoyably read here. I shall not name names nor pay them any attention in what follows.  

Rather, I am content to highlight a half-dozen chapters that offered some excellent insights. 

The first of these--it will come as no surprise--is Nancy McWilliams' chapter "Credo: Psychoanalysis as a Wisdom Tradition." I am, of course, greatly indebted to McWilliams, as I showed here. If I were the editor here, I'd have sent her chapter around to other contributors as a model of what to write: she begins with some autobiographical reflections and then, in a section labelled Credo, tells us how she believes psychoanalysis to be a wisdom tradition, and what that means. 

A central feature of her article, not encountered much elsewhere in the book or the wider literature, is that "much of the healing in analytic treatment seems to me to be essentially a grieving process...and deep acceptance of what cannot be changed" (p.74). What she does not say on this point, but clearly implies, is that such grieving can be a conduit to greater liberation and even to some change not possible until and unless grief happens first and is really worked through. 

The very next chapter is by the British analyst Michael Parsons. He gives us two gifts. The first is to remind us that "to be an analyst...is to lay oneself continually on the line," that is, clinicians (if they are to do what he calls "transformative" work) must "have their own psychic life at stake in an analysis." Only, he says, if you can tolerate this will you have the potential to be both changed and to help your patient change. (This theme is taken up in a later chapter by Lewis Aron, who suggests "the biggest thing getting in our way is that we're afraid to be bad objects, we're afraid to just let ourselves out.")

Parsons ends his chapter with a very striking suggestion: what if we conducted supervision or case consultation in a freely associative manner? How might this help the supervisor, supervisee, and patient? 

Jessica Benjamin (about whom I wrote a bit here) has a wonderful chapter which opens with the ringing declaration that "if psychoanalysis were a religion, I would be not only a practitioner but also a theologian"! She launches into a discussion about Winnicott on uses of an object, and the non-retaliatory stance of the clinician whose failures of the patient and ruptures in the alliance can be "developmentally necessary." 

She also draws on Emmanuel Ghent's celebrated distinction between submission and surrender to note that if the patient has to surrender to the clinical process, so too does the clinician, and the latter's surrendering first is a salutary model for the anxious patient to see that they are not alone (even if the level of surrender is, she notes, assymetrical).

To my mind, the best chapter in the book is, by far, Steven Cooper's "Credo: Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis." There is a refreshing candor in what he reports of how he talks to patients with great modesty:

"I have faith in your ability to grow even if I don't always know how to facilitate that. I believe that there is something unique about this setting and the two of us trying that can be useful. I would like to become useful in helping you with the process of becoming who you are." 

Cooper says that the key way he attempts to help patients is through play, which he learned from Winnicott, and about which published a book last year, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis. 

Therapeutic play, Cooper argues, should help the patient to develop "elasticity," a term he borrows from Ferenczi. None of this should be thought easy; we cannot be seduced by the word 'play' into thinking of it as something facile. Instead Cooper says that "finding new forms of play is immensely messy and challenging" (p.106). Some of the challenge comes from patients who "hold on to bad, sometimes persecutory objects rather than feel alone or helpless." Only if they can play with you can they perhaps come to surrender those objects.

Echoing McWilliams, Cooper says that "the play of mourning" is crucial: "limit and mourning are just as constitutive of play as more frequently described forms." Mournful play, though, can facilitate movement "from the chains binding the self to an internal object toward new experiences with self and other" (109). 

Play is ultimately a form of love, Cooper briefly notes, quoting Hannah Arendt (who was herself writing about Augustine of Hippo) who said that love consists in saying "I want you to be." Play is useful here insofar as it expresses "the wish to appreciate the patient as he or she is." 

The last chapter I will note here is from Ken Corbett, "Credo: So Our Lives Glide On." He foregrounds the importance of freedom, drawing here on Freud (and not, as I expected, on Fromm) in several striking ways. Part of the freedom of the clinician, he suggests, is to not know, to not intrude with one's knowing too soon, and certainly to not talk too much: "too much talking is akin to wind drag, and slows the patient down" (p.162). 

He then links his discussion of freedom to "the eroticism of coming into existence" through periods and experiences of "libidinal turbulence." These striking phrases are not developed in any depth, alas, no doubt reflecting the limitations of a word count in a volume such as this. 

There are a few gems in almost every chapter of Psychoanalytic Credos, but I will not drag this on with more talking! 

Gabbard and Bejnamin on Love and Hate

Freud won the Goethe prize for his magnificent German prose. We do not seem to have comparable prizes (so far as I know) in English to award to psychoanalysts like the venerable Glen Gabbard, whose prose is cogent and crisp, and written in an accessible and admirably humble way. In a future world when justice is finally and permanently established, that is, when I am at last emperor of all I survey, I shall bestow a prize on him. Perhaps we might call it the BST Prize. 

Having, as you will see here and here, recently written of how profoundly helpful I have found Andrea Celenza on the challenges of erotic and loving transferences and counter-transferences, and the associated problems of boundaries, it is no surprise to find Gabbard, in Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting, to be equally valuable on precisely the same points. Indeed, Gabbard and Celenza have collaborated on these issues in previous publications.

What follows is less a systematic reflection on Gabbard (and, toward the end, Jessica Benjamin, whose The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination I finished on the same weekend as Gabbard) and more a kind of "aphoristic plundering," as it were. I used to feel vaguely guilty about this method of reading (which I do not use all the time), but having been fortified by stiff doses of Winnicott, quoted lavishly by both Gabbard and Benjamin, I justify such a method to myself by saying I am "using up" both authors, consuming them as good objects, and they are manifestly able to survive this "destructive" consumption of mine. 

Gabbard on Love and its Limits:

Gabbard begins on a note that might seem commonplace to many but which, within the hidebound context of psychoanalytic schools-cum-ideologies, is startlingly rare to read: "No one theory had all the answers to the challenges we confront in clinical practice" (xi). With this one simple manumission, as it were, Gabbard frees himself to range widely and unapologetically over Freudian, object relational, intersubjective, Kohutian, and other analytic traditions, finding what is useful and leaving the rest behind--the very model of "plundering the Egyptians" (cf. Exodus 12:36) one expects, but infrequently finds, in scholars and clinicians alike. 

Chapters 1 and 2 went over well-trod territory (for me) in quoting Freud's famous line to Jung that "essentially, one might say, the cure is effected by love." Gabbard admires this but is also troubled by it, leading him, in the second chapter, to note that one common motive in choosing to follow a vocation to be a psychotherapist is that you wish to be loved and admired. This is fine, he seems to say, provided you come (as he will spend the bulk of the book doing) to grapple with how much "sadism and aggression are ubiquitous forces in love relationships" (p.43). 

You must, to be an effective clinician, not fall into the trap of assuming that love is all you need, for love never goes anywhere by itself: tagging along are always aggression and hatred, and your failure to recognize and deal with these can, at best, lead to stalemate in the treatment, and at worse destructive enactments of various sorts (up to and including sexual boundary violations, about which he has written definitively in several places, including here). 

Gabbard on Hate and its Purposes:

Hatred, Gabbard shows, has multiple functions. Inter alia, it can:

• organize the ego
• master rage and destructiveness to prevent them from getting out of hand
• "conceal longings for love and acceptance" (especially in the transference; p.47)

Why, we often ask, do we hate for so long? Why can we not adhere to the simple counsel, "let it go!"? Gabbard says that "to hate is to hold on to an internal object" which may have had some purpose, including maintaining some contact with that object which was and is better than no contact. Such contact cannot just be dropped by the patient alone: the ties that bind to the object, he argues, can only be undone via the transference. Once again, following Franz Alexander, we see that what we learn to hate in one relationship we can relearn to hate (less) in another, and perhaps even to love it (more). 

Gabbard sees"hatred as residing on a continuum." My crude attempt to illustrate his several points would look like this: on the mild end of the continuum we'd see attempts at control or "domination" (as Benjamin calls it); in the middle there would be preservation of the hated object, but with some sadistically inflicted suffering; and on the extreme end, we would find complete destruction of the object. 

Regardless of type, Gabbard repeatedly cautions the clinician against rushing in to change focus, or try to control the hatred, or urge the patient on to replace it quickly with "positive" thoughts or "happy" memories (or worksheets and breathing exercises one might add somewhat snippily). I have often felt the pressure to do so, but every time I have resisted such pressure it has turned out for the best. As he rightly reminds us, "with many patients the necessary depth of understanding is not reached until one has sat for a sustained period with searing hatred or painful longings" (p.65).

Gabbard reminds us throughout the book that we all have our own hatreds and propensity for aggression. We cannot, even as well analyzed clinicians, fool ourselves into thinking we are utterly incapable of such things. Thus, he seems to suggest, it should not be that hard for us to have empathy for the patient's hatred and aggression if they are relatively accessible within us. (He quotes Searles and often Winnicott on this point of having your own hatred and aggression close by.) If we do find those things hard to understand, then we have forgotten what Christopher Bollas said decades ago: "In order to find the patient we must look for him within ourselves."

No Collusion!

Gabbard reinforces an important lesson, especially relevant to work with teens or disaffected spouses, but in some ways to all of our patients and their diverse hatreds: do not collude in creating an extra-transferential object to hate together. A therapeutic alliance cannot be built upon having a shared person or movement or experience to hate. Remember: hatred and love always co-exist, and to indulge in one-sided and totalized hatred (of, say, your patient's spouse, boss, or parent) is to risk collapsing the analytic space, to destroy the therapeutic stage on which you need to be able to "play" with these things for the patient to move forward. 

How Special Am I?

At one point Gabbard says we must confront the tension inherent in this work: we can only be special to the patient by renouncing all other special relationships, including lover, mother/father, friend, etc.

I admit to finding this very helpful with certain cases from time to time which seem to evoke a very strong protective-paternal counter-transference (discussed weekly in supervision, I hasten to say!). Part of me wants to fill multiple roles for such patients, being special in a good 4 or 5 different roles they lack--but which I know I cannot play because doing so would actually be harmful. 

What I can do, instead, is make sure that this one role--that of psychotherapist--is done according to the best of my ability. Allen Frances, on one of his very valuable videos with Marvin Goldfried (some of which I have my students watch), says that at every session the therapist should ensure it is a memorable experience for the patient. Do not treat it as just an ordinary event because, he says, for some their appointment with you is the highlight of their week. Thus it is special for the patient even as I am not that special. 

Such tension is hard to maintain for some. Gabbard recognizes that the forbidden nature of the relationship can make it highly erotically charged. We might not even experience conscious erotic or sexual attraction to the person; but the fact that we operate inside the frame, with its restrictions on what and how we meet and work together, increases the desire some have for a deeper intimacy than is possible (or healthful). 

At the same time, however, erotic and sexual desires may not be the hardest to deal with. I admit I was rather stopped cold by Gabbard's claim that "Sexualization may also defend against feelings of love...,which are relatively more difficult for many analysts to acknowledge than lustful feelings" (p.91). I have never thought of that before, but in reflecting on it, especially in light of my own analytic therapy, I think I see the logic of this now.  

Gender Fluid Transferences:

Perhaps the most valuable thing I have learned, first in Celenza, and now in Gabbard, is that--as it were--the unconscious mind and its desires are not gendered in the ways we might consciously expect. Some of the transferences toward me have been baffling until reading these two authors who argue, as Gabbard does here, that "there is considerable gender fluidity in the roles played by both analyst and patient in the analytic drama, and if these are allowed to emerge without premature foreclosure, a variety of transferences may appear that involve both homosexual & heterosexual longings" (120). 

Thus, whether with male or female patients, and prescinding from their manifest gender and sexual identities, I can at times be mother, father, brother, lover, and many other objects in the transference. And my counter-transferences are not just what might be called "paternal" (this one seems the most obvious) but also (much less obviously) "maternal": on this latter point I am constantly reminded of how much the experience inside the consulting room is indeed a "holding environment" as Winnicott put it, a "container" as Bion called it, and how those contemporary-clinical experiences are not far removed from the primitive experience of being held and cradled as a child as one's upsets and unknown desires are contained by the soothing mother. 

Let me turn now from Gabbard to Jessica Benjamin. Her book The Bonds of Love is one I have found helpful in dealing with overly sadistic material in some patients. 

I will not go into the wonderful (I almost said masterful!) ways she spends the first part of the book going beyond the understanding of domination in Freud to bring in Winnicott and others. She very helpfully gets us past the rather narrow range within which Freud understood these concepts into a wider terrain from which we gain a broader perspective. 

Much of this is possible by returning to Winnicott on "The Use of an Object." There he famously outlined how objects can be used and are destroyed--but survive. Indeed, use and destruction are linked: they must be destroyed inside our minds in order to see that they can survive outside and beyond us. This is a necessary first testing of reality, and (unlike Winnicott) Benjamin says such a discovery of reality is not merely grim awareness, but can be joyful: the destroyed object has--I discover to my delight--survived after all. 

Benjamin says the utility of this experience lies in the fact it reminds us how interconnected we forever are to each other: "if we assume complete control over him and destroy his identity, then we will have negated ourselves as well. For then there is no one there to recognize us, no one there for us to desire" (39). In saying this, of course, what echoes loudly in the background is Winnicott's famous declaration "there's no such thing as a baby!" By that he meant that a baby is always and only an object-in-relation: to the mother, father, and others around it on whom it depends. 

This dynamic helps us understand relations between sadists and masochists. Both need each other to undergo but survive the experience. Both may arrive at love via the experience. 

For the sadist (and I must say Benjamin gives rather more attention to masochists: her attempt to understand sadists is much less developed), the "thrill of transgression and the sense of complete freedom" are tinged with "fear (guilt) that his aggression will annihilate her." Her survival, however, "creates for him the first condition of freedom." The survival of the masochist creates in and for the sadist a real feeling of "love." 

In turn, the masochist's "submission is ambiguous," Benjamin suggests. It is a "false self," that is a "compliant, adaptive self that has staved off chaos by accepting the other's direction and control, that has maintained connection to the object by renouncing exploration, aggression, separateness" (p.72). But in giving over to an experience of pain "in the presence of a trusted other who comprehends the suffering he inflicts," the masochist can find not just relief but also a form of love. 

There is something a bit too neat here, I must admit. But I have already inflicted my own form of suffering on the reader with this over-long reflection, so I shall rein in my sadism for now, recommending both Gabbard and Benjamin and their excellent books to those who are not familiar with them.