Chapter Xi[60]

THE PROLONGED INTERVIEW AND ITS OBJECTIFICATION

The empirical material assembled in this book has appeared in the course of prolonged interviews with individuals under unusually intimate conditions. This method of the prolonged interview has now had a history of some thirty years in the form devised by Freud, but so far there are very few efforts to objectify the events which transpire there. Otto Rank has written a series of studies of the “interview situation” which is the most important effort so far made to characterize the distinctive features of the method. But the empirical material which is so far reported does not rest upon the verbatim recording of what happens, except in a few specimen instances of highly pathological cases, and attempts are only now being made to record some of the principal physiological changes in the subject.

It will be remembered that Freud learned to predict the future course of reminiscence by watching word slips, random movements, and many other acts which were formerly dismissed as chance occurrences. He also found that he could abbreviate the laborious efforts of the patient to recall the traumatic (the original) episode by proposing various interpretations. It is at this point that the cautious physician and psychologist have picked serious quarrels with psychoanalytical findings. They allege that the patient produces the kind of material which the analyst suggests is to be brought forth, and that the whole process is one of putting a rabbit in the hat which you triumphantly extricate later on. They have seized upon the schisms in the analytical fold, and declare that you eventually dream about anima figures if you are analyzed by Jung, that you relive birth traumas if you are analyzed by Rank, and that you welter in a galaxy of anal, oral, and urethral symbols if you are deeply analyzed by Freud. You talk about inferiority feeling if you work with Adler, and about castrative anxiety if you work with Freud.

One might suppose that after thirty years of labor there would be in existence a body of documents which could be consulted by a group of competent specialists who were trying to reconcile their differences and doubts about what actually goes on in the analytical interview. At the present time the interview situation is poorly reflected in the notes taken by the analyst at the expiration of each period (if and when he takes them). Nobody knows what processes distort the reporting practices of different listeners, and nobody knows the value of the published scraps. Since one of the avowed purposes of therapeutic analyses is to bring the person to stand on his own feet and to stop leaning on others, or upon symptom indulgences, personal relations are usually broken off at the end of the interview. This obviously impedes the possibility of following up the subsequent history of the personality, and of ascertaining the stability of the supposed therapeutic results. The case-history documents available in good institutions have the advantage of representing the combined product of several people who are in touch with the subject, and who may be supposed to operate as a check upon one another. But these documents are usually short, and betray the psychopathological slant of the ones chiefly responsible. And these documents are typically incomplete in reporting the whole personality of the subject on account of the clinician’s interest in the more circumscribed disease phenomena displayed.

When John Brown reports an episode in which he was told that his nose would be cut off if he didn’t quit handling himself, how do we know what importance to assign to the alleged reminiscence? Are we to accept this as a historical statement? Are we to construe it as a fabrication which, however, shows what he wanted to have happen, or supposed would happen, if he disobeyed orders? Are we to interpret it as a sign of his fear of the interviewer, couched in the language of the past, because this mode of exercising the imagination has been trained into him? Are we to interpret this as a sign of his hatred of the interviewer, on the theory that a self-punishing fantasy is a defense of the conscience against a murderous impulse of the unadjusted portion of the self? Are we to accept it as an effort to win the approval of the interviewer by reporting the kinds of things which he has learned to suppose the interviewer wants to hear, a supposition which is based upon a private study of psychoanalytical literature? Are we to accept it as an “original trauma” and to expect an immediate or eventual decrease in the neurotic anxiety which the individual shows? Are we to look upon it as a screen reminiscence for a genuinely traumatic episode in which the threat was made, not against his nose, but against his penis? Or is it a screen for a prohibited impulse which was once activated, and which seized upon a past episode and gave it the significance of a threat?

These are a few of the specific questions which can be raised about the proffered material, and the scientific problem is to devise more convincing demonstrations of the available theories, or more conclusive refutations, than we now have. What are some of the criteria of a “traumatic episode”? If the reminiscence is accompanied by much affect (excitement), there is a presumption of its authenticity. And how is affect measured? We depend at the present time upon the observer’s judgment of the variations in the voice, and shifts in posture, or the twitches and jerks of the body. This can be augmented under experimental conditions by taking a continuous record of variations in blood pressure, respiration, galvanic reflex, etc.--all of which offer some indication of excitement. We are thus able to improve our assessment of the possible significance of the reports, speculations, and general fantasies of the subject. It may be that in due course we shall be able to differentiate on a physical basis between “suppressions” and “repressions,” and that we shall be able to follow through the transformations from beginning to end of the interviewing process.

Our judgment of the “traumatic episode” is also influenced by the subject’s certainty. If the subject reports that he believes what he remembers, this has some value in raising a presumption. This is especially true if the subject has fought against the idea, but it has spontaneously continued to appear and plague his associations. But a reported sense of certainty is flimsy stuff, unless this certainty survives for some time. We know that individuals try to escape from anxiety feelings by a flight into explanations, and that they are ready to volunteer or to accept all kinds of interpretations of their behavior rather than to continue to endure anxiety. This is the basis for the credulity of the neurotic, and explains why everything from mysterious “glandular unbalances” to “astral perturbations” are accepted from time to time as completely adequate explanations of personal troubles. So the subject’s reported certainty must survive even disparaging suggestions and prolonged self-scrutiny, and become emancipated from affect, if it is to be taken very literally.

Another criterion is the consistency of the reported episode with all the other relevant facts. There must be something wrong about the report that K was brutally punished by his father at a time which was some years after the parent’s death.

The obstacles which lie in the path of a research program which calls for objective records of as much as possible of what transpires in the interview situation are not to be minimized. The bulk of a verbatim report of an hour’s conversation per day over several months is almost overwhelming. But historians are accustomed to plow through whole libraries of pages about Napoleon or Bismarck, and from the standpoint of a comprehensive theory of personality development any personality is almost as good as any other, although high elaboration and distinguished achievement are advantages.

There are some points in favor of applying this technique of personality study to people who are normal, at least in the sense that they are suspected of normality by themselves and others. There is a moral to be learned from some of Freud’s early mistakes when he assigned critical significance to certain childhood experiences which later investigation showed were very common. The clinical caricature is invaluable for the high relief in which certain tendencies of the normal are revealed. Indeed, “normality” is more difficult to understand than disease, from one point of view, since it involves a complicated integration of many tendencies, a flexible capacity to snap from one mood, preoccupation, and overt activity to another, as the changing demands of reality require. Normality is complexity and integration, and it ought to be approached as directly as possible as a control on the pathological.

The main advantage which the normal subject hopes to glean from the analytical interview is a judgment of the importance of this, in comparison with other, psychological methods. Records being as they are today, only one who has been through the mill can talk with much assurance about what happens, and if he has a critical mind, he isn’t too sure then. The analytical interview is a discipline in self-scrutiny. The subject learns to exploit a new method of using the mind, which he tries to cultivate and to correlate with the logical methods to which he is partly accustomed in ordinary adult life. The new technique of using the mind is the free-fantasy technique, whose chief function is to produce new material for logical consideration.

The interview necessitates the reactivation of the individual’s struggle with his antisocial impulses. This happens be the subject sick or well, for every individual possesses more or less active and powerful antisocial drives. Every personality displays some pathology in the form of remainders of the Oedipus phase of growth. The socially adjusted portion of the personality takes up the battle again against the unsublimated drives, and a considerable amount of neurotic anxiety is generated in the process. The problem is to encourage the subject to face these unadjusted remnants frankly, to bring them to the full focus of waking consciousness, and to discharge their bound energy. This comes to pass in the roundabout way of recapturing the original episodes in which the neurotic solution was invented. The work of reminiscence is the preliminary to liberation and understanding.

The interview substitutes the talking-out for the acting-out of personality drives. One learns to recover the critical points in one’s past history by watching the present for clues to the full meaning of the present situation, and this includes the inspection of reminiscences. A reminiscence is always relevant to a present situation, and serves the double rôle of annotating the present and reporting the past. The interview experience is long and arduous, and the subject learns very slowly to deal with himself as an object in a world of objects, and to free his judgment more and more from the distorting effects of primitive psychological structures.

The analytical situation is so arranged as to facilitate this process of self-inspection. The provocations to act out rather than think out are reduced by simplifying the sensory present. The subject lies in a relaxed position, and is better able to observe those stiffenings of the body, those variations in respiration, those oscillations of visceral tension, those impulses to scratch and finger which escape ordinary attention, but which are indicative of the meanings put in the current situation. The sensory environment remains substantially constant, and the interviewer handles the situation on a rather fixed routine. The subject is temporarily encysted from the demands of professional and conventional tasks, but the interviewer is present to prevent the individual from dissipating his energy in musings which are quickly forgotten. The interviewer is a prod to associate freely, and a spur to the critical consideration of the material supplied by the freely moving fancy. The necessity for verbalization brings the acts of fantasy into clearer focus than usual, which is a necessary preliminary to moments of sustained logical reflection. Since the interviewer permits the subject to disregard the usual amenities of society, and to let his fantasies fly for the sake of finding where they land, regressive responses are permitted to appear. That is, the individual is not required to adjust to a conventional world of adult reality, but is permitted to reactivate earlier forms of dealing with the world. In the world of adult reality, the multiple tendencies of the individual are canalized into conventionally acceptable forms, and the most maladapted drives may display themselves in unobtrusive variations on the pattern. When conventional reality is no longer present, and the individual is encouraged to watch his partly forming responses, rather than to co-ordinate, condense, ignore, or suppress them, these tendencies spread forth diffusely in imagination and reminiscence. When this process continues far enough, the individual achieves a high degree of insight into the genetic development of his current preoccupations and traits.

Since the analytical process is a period of strain for the subject, it may be wondered why it is bearable. Fortunately for the investigator, there are many advantages to the participant which sustain and fortify his conscious purpose to persevere until understanding has been substantially deepened. The analyst treats every manifestation of the personality, no matter how trivial, with respectful interest. This is exaggerated unconsciously by the subject, who greatly overestimates the personal affection which the interviewer has for him. Some of the energy of the personality is always free to begin new object attachments, and this energy is concentrated upon the interviewer. The subject is permitted to talk at length about himself, and when the interviewer listens attentively and patiently, the subject identifies himself with the listener on the basis of a common attitude of interest in a beloved object. The interviewer’s ascendancy in technical knowledge (his authority) resembles the authority of the adults who were once supposed to possess unlimited knowledge. The day-by-day solicitude tends to reinstate the emotions of the early family situation in which the child could play irresponsibly, under the watchful, responsible care of the adult. The subject relaxes the effort to keep bawdy, disloyal, mean, and revengeful thoughts from welling into this mind. The frank expression of these thoughts in ordinary social life would bring down punishment upon his head, or mark him out as a victim of mental disorder. The subject is enabled to welter in unsocial or antisocial ravings and imaginings, and the process of developing these symptoms in the presence of another person becomes an absorbing part of his daily, weekly, and monthly existence. The subject intensifies his warm emotional interest in the one who exempts him from society’s code of reticence. This is a mark of the analyst’s tremendous power, and also of the analyst’s special interest in the subject. The free-fantasy procedure even exempts the individual from abiding by the ordinary forms of logic and grammar. He is also able to enjoy the pleasure of impressing someone else with the brilliance of his language. From time to time, new insight comes into old habits and worries, and the zest of intellectual comprehension is added to the other pleasures.

At first sight the teaching or research interview might seem to sacrifice the most powerful motive upon which the interviewing procedure has relied, namely, that of securing relief from disturbing symptoms. The individual who is suffering from some crude pathological disturbance, like a functional gastro-intestinal disorder, psychological impotence, obsessive ideas and compulsions, comes to the interviewer as a weak person seeking aid of a stronger. If he has been shuttled from one internist to another perhaps receiving derisive looks and contemptuous preachments, the objective interest with which the psychotherapist treats his symptoms produces a keen conscious and unconscious gratification. Even the symptoms are beloved parts of the self, and like the ugly ducklings, they are sometimes treated with special affection (Ferenczi). The hope of being relieved of the annoying symptoms, which is consciously present in many pathological cases, is supported on the unconscious level by an old infantile attitude which expects the interviewer to work miracles. Even some of the antisocial impulses of the personality may welcome the therapeutic situation. These antisocial tendencies are themselves not entirely gratified in the symptoms, for the nature of a symptom is a compromise between these antisocial tendencies and the socialized impulses of the self. Nunberg has pointed out that the unsocialized portions of the personality may support the misguided hope that the outcome of therapy will be the boundless and unlimited gratification of their demands. There is also evidence of the existence of a compulsion to confess (Reik) to antisocial tendencies, which are rejected by the socialized self, and thus to gratify an unconscious need of punishment.

Now the sense of being sick and the desire to get well are not entirely absent from any normal person. No one is entirely free from remnants of his adjustive problems, and no one is entirely satisfied with himself. At the beginning of the interview, this motive may appear in consciousness as nothing more substantial than the innocuous belief that any increase in self-knowledge will enable one to deal even more satisfactorily with personal problems as they arise.

Among the other motives which play into the analytical situation, and enable the subject to go through with it, may be mentioned a few very primitive ones. Life has meant the blocking of many impulses by authorities whose power cannot be successfully defied on the spot. Hatreds can only express themselves under these conditions with some prospects of success when they seek to overcome the superior by trying to take his power into one’s own personality by copying him. That is to say, the individual seeks to identify himself with the one who possesses superior knowledge in the analytical situation, and by becoming like him, to secure independence, and thus to annihilate him as an intimidating and obstructive external object. There may be a desire to secure a weapon by means of which other people may be eviscerated, and deprived of their power to outstrip the individual. On the conscious level, these motives are partly visible in excessive aspirations for self-mastery and control. This taking-in and biting-off of the analyst’s power is also rooted in some of the earliest reaction patterns which the infant displays toward objects. The sheer pleasure of talking, and giving and withholding information is also present.

As the subject withdraws attention from the original symptoms or motives, concentrates on the game of dilating upon the past, and indulges in prohibited delights, the analytical situation becomes an orgy of illicit pleasure. Emotions are released from old channels and find new objects of crystallization, especially in the person of the analyst. The interviewer who permits this “transference” is now in a position to aid the subject in coming to grips with the underlying unsocialized impulses of the personality. The behavior of the subject has by this time given a host of clues to the history of his emotional growth. The analyst continues to stimulate the individual to scrutinize his associations, to state honestly the wayward wishes flit across his mind, or which lurk half-seen in the marginal recesses of attention. Back and forth, bit by bit, there is reconstructed the subjective history of a life. To put it metaphorically, old sores run anew, smoldering embers of jealousy and lust flame once more, and ancient wounds yawn again. Reminiscence reguilds the faded tapestries of the past, and restores to the full glare of consciousness the cobwebs of the mind which house the spiders of malevolence and lechery. Primitive meanings, once appropriate to a situation, and later projected unintentionally into the adult world, are recovered and criticized in the light of their appropriateness to society. Regressive reliving, which is powerfully supported by narcissism and the repetitive compulsion, is observed and overcome.

It should not be supposed that the secrets of the mind are exposed for the asking. The method of repression is a primitive means by which the feeble, nascent self seeks protection from impulses which, if tolerated, if not shut out with unreflecting violence, would overrun it (Alexander). When the self becomes strong and stable, primitive impulses can be permitted to develop farther in consciousness without imminent danger that they will pass over into action by controlling the motor apparatus. Now the critical, reflecting, deciding self must not be crippled by an unduly strong conscience. The structure which we know as the conscience is begun in early childhood, and is formed by the incorporation into the self of the orders and commands which are administered by authority. When the self is weak, as during these formative years, the conscience relies on crude methods to protect its hard-won ascendancy over the antisocial drives in the personality. It visits penalties of anxiety upon the self whenever there are any signs of leniency toward these impulses. The conscience keeps its summary, sadistic quality long after, and neurotics are properly said to suffer from an excess of conscience. Blind denial of the existence of fundamental trends in the personality must be supplanted, and the obiter dicta of the conscience subjected to the criticism of the more mature and experienced self. An obstacle to this procedure is furnished by those energies of the personality which are specialized in resisting the antisocial impulses which have been repressed and denied direct and undisguised access to consciousness. Any lowering of resistance subjects the individual to acute anxiety, as the conflict between the socialized and the unsocialized drives is reinstated. All sorts of subterfuges are hit upon to obviate the necessity for enduring this anxiety and bringing the hidden into consciousness, where it can lose its charge. The overcoming of this resistance to taking up the battle again is a major process in the prolonged analysis.

The recapitulation of the drives which the individual has experienced throughout his life is the process which lends unique value to the psychoanalytic interview record. The literature of psychoanalysis is full of sample fantasies which are assigned to places in the hypothetical sequence of personality growth. Over twenty years ago Freud wrote some preliminary remarks on character types, especially stressing the rôle of certain excretory pleasures in the development of some psychological structures. The sucking, biting and anal retention interests of the infant and young child have been the subject of theoretical treatment by several analysts, among whom Abraham is the most important. Ferenczi has sketched a comprehensive theory of the rise of genital interests on the part of the child, and this has been amplified in various directions by Reich. The differences between male and female development have been sketched by Sachs, Deutsch, and Horney.

It is not within the necessary limits of this discussion to go farther into the nature of the hypotheses which have been proposed by these various investigators. We will be able to formulate them more precisely when we have succeeded in objectifying what happens in the course of the interview, and this is to be achieved along the lines previously sketched. Some day we can state hypotheses more definitely which can be taken and tested by non-analytical methods. Some of these conceptions can be confirmed or eliminated by the direct observation of children of all age groups. It is quite possible, however, paradoxical though it may sound, that the best way to study some phases of infancy and childhood will be to study the adult. There is some reason to believe that the superior expressive power of the adult, whether in words or in drawing, may render explicit many states which are beyond the scope of one who merely looks at movements. If we find that the subjective reconstructions during the adult analysis check closely with the results secured by modified analytical and behavioristic procedures applied directly to older children, we will have more confidence in the material which purports to relate to very early experience. We may also test out as far as possible the “historicity” of the reminiscences produced at different phases of the analysis. It should be said in passing that the analysis of children requires important revisions in the externals of the technique, as Anna Freud has shown.

I want to stop at this point to comment upon the significance of the fact there should be such a thing as the psychoanalytic method of dealing with the genesis of personality. How does it happen that at the end of the nineteenth century there appeared in Western European civilization this remarkably intricate procedure? Why do we regard it as worth while to spend months or even years in constant introspection?

Viewed in the large, I suppose this is the most spectacular sign of the value crisis in our civilization. Here is an effort to stimulate the individual to the reconstruction of values, not on the basis of imposed authority, but through prolonged scrutiny of the self as a process. The processes of the human personality are subjected to the same patient, arduous, and minute inspection which has proved so successful when applied to the objects of the physical world by the naturalist, astronomer, and microscopic specialist. The end result of a long and successful analysis is an individual who is able to interpret his relation to the world in terms of a few master-symbols. These symbols take on meaning because they have been acquired in the course of a long apprenticeship under the exacting eye of another. These symbols define for the individual in comprehensive terms his relation to unfolding reality. They permit in favorable instances added smoothness of adjustment, and offer a means of relief from disproportionate feelings of futility, despondency, persecution, and omniscience.

The appearance of a system of communicable master-symbols for the definition of one’s relation to the universe is anything but a novel phenomenon in the culture history of mankind. At one time a leading question was, “What is God’s will for me?” The belief was that this could be made manifest after the reading of Holy Writ, reverent supplication, and sudden revelation. Our Western civilization has sapped at the pillars of this structure of thinking. We are committed to the persistent querying of the world of change, and the problem is always “How does it change?” How do the routines of the seeable, smellable, touchable, audible, tasteable universe actually work? In what characteristic order do the subjective events of the mind follow one another? In what order do subjective and objective events occur? And no matter how many intermediate links in the sequence have been named there always remain new intermediate and new all-embracing frames of reference to be identified and placed in orderly relationship.

Values are sought to be defined, not on the authority of another, but in the act of scrutinizing processes. We place enormous value upon the quest for sequences, and discover our new values in the act of broadening or deepening our understanding of change. If you tell a sophisticated carrier of Western culture that God reveals his wisdom after the reading of a printed passage, he will be less impressed by what is put in than by what is left out of the account. What relation is there between what is read and what is decided? Can you set up controlled repetitions for the sake of testing the predictive value of these generalizations? Are there other words which can be read but which will result in the same decisions when the reader has the same pecuniary stake in acting a certain way? And so on and on.

It is worth noticing that the symbols supplied by analysis are not “ought” words but “process” words. You are not told to die for your country; you are told to face all the values which you can find in the situation. This does not, however, eliminate the “arbitrary” character of decisions actually reached. The decision comes with all the shock of revelation, of inevitability, of unexpectedness; the individual may only control decisions by rehearsing the pertinent values until he finds himself in the clutches of a judgment. This willingness to accept uncertainty, to scrutinize intermediate terms and pertinent values, is an outcome of the analytical discipline.

Such a procedure grew up in a civilization whose values have been in confusion since the medieval cosmology broke down. President Masaryk, serious thinker and scholarly writer, began his sociological work with a study of suicide, which he found to be a rough index of the value strains in culture. When emotional bonds are forged with exponents of life-patterns of different design, the mental stage is set for both creative originality and destructive disintegration. The individual must assume the load of working out his own scheme of values, and many are disorganized in the attempt.

The validation of the prolonged interview as a contributor to our dependable knowledge about life depends upon objectifying its processes; the achievement of its implications for the reconstruction of the hierarchy of individual values is an impressionistic and often turbulent experience.