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Marilyn Charles, "Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis" (American Psychological Association, 2025)
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New Books Network hello and welcome to this episode of New Books in Psychoanalysis. I'm your host for today's program, Dr. Ben Greenberg, psychoanalytic psychologist and founding director of the center for Dynamic Practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity to introduce to you our guest for Today's program today, Dr. Marilyn Charles, who is quite graciously here with us to discuss her recently published volume in 2025, Echoes of Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis, published by the American Psychological association, and Just a Few Words about the Author Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austin Riggs center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, co chair of the association of the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and council representative for Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. Her affiliations include the Chicago center for Psychoanalysis, La Universidad de Monterrey, Harvard Medical School, and the association for Psychosocial Studies. Marilyn is a mother and grandmother, an artist and a poet, with a volume of her poetry from her years on the couch forthcoming titled Orphans of the Reflections on Love and Loss with Mission Point Press. Her grounding in these diverse aspects of self inform her practice, writing and mentoring of future generations of psychoanalytic scholars, clinicians, and researchers. Her research interests include creativity, metacognition, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the impact of devaluation on women and other marginalized groups. She has consulted with many groups, including, I apologize for Very likely pronouncing this Wrong, Guinna Wira in South Wales, which resulted in the publication of the Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education with Jill Bellinson, and has presented her work nationally and internationally, publishing more than 150 articles and book chapters and six books including Patterns, Building Blocks of Experience, Working with Trauma, Lessons from Beyond, and Lacan Psychoanalysis and Literature, the Stories We Live, and most recently, Echoes of Trauma, Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis. She has also published five edited volumes, including Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering with Michael o', Loughlin, and Woman and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness with Marie Brown. And to start our episode in this podcast dedicated to written works about the human unconscious, perhaps an intrinsic paradox by nature, I pose to you our traditional opening question as far as our motivation is anything we can ever fully know? What motivated you to write this book?
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B
I wrote this book to advocate for a developmental view of psychoanalysis. I think current times pull toward sort of a concretization of both meaning and practice. And with the plethora of information available to people interested in psychoanalysis, I think it's really easy to kind of get stuck in formulations that sort of bind our anxiety, but don't leave us free to engage with another human being. And over time, I've become increasingly convinced that what we do in psychoanalysis is create a space where someone can develop their reflective capacities. And so if we're going to invite someone on that journey, we have to be willing to take it ourselves. So we have to be open to being a person in the room with another person and being willing to take the ride wherever it takes us, including not knowing what we're doing, including being very anxious, including being frightened, including being angry. Whatever it is, we have to be willing to take the ride. And I think the other thing that led me to want to write this book is an appreciation of the fact that complex trauma seems to be at the core of everyone's troubles these days. Not surprising in today's world. But because of that, we have to be able to understand the intergenerational transmission of trauma and how it happens that we wind up sort of inheriting trauma from the past in our own particular kinds of ways, so that we can sort of recognize the waves we're riding along, how we're both implicated in them and moving in relation to them in order to be able to locate ourselves in the story. And certainly there are a lot of psychoanalysts who have invited us to think about the fact of this. People like Abraham and Torok and Morris Apry. But then we also have these other people like Pierre Olagne and Laplanche, who help us to understand in an experience near way how this transmission process happens. So I find myself at the intersection of having dived as deeply as I can into all sorts of theoreticians and trying to come back with ideas that. That I think are integral to being able to do the work that are often ensconced in language and literatures that one probably can't hope to read, much less master in a lifetime. And yet there are these gems, and you see it in my earlier books where I tried to give concepts to particularly younger people, people who are starting in the work and need something to hold on to. What can we hold onto that's useful to us, that can grow with us, that we can grow alongside? And so I think in this book, I'm doing some of the same thing in terms of. I imagine, adding to the work I had already done some of these other ideas that are currently informing my work, some of which come from the more cognitive dimension in terms of ideas about metacognition, and some which come from very deep psychoanalytic ideas like Olenier's work or. Kristeva.
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Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And Emmy, What? Just for listeners, that was a. I think a. A really small microcosm almost of. Of. Of how much this book, I think, really successfully synthesizes. And you start off with Beyond's grid. Yeah, and. And I. I so appreciated that, the way you made it intelligible, especially with regards to as. As a tool to be able to, like, make sense of this and. And approach, I guess, the human phenomena of being.
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B
I started off with the Grid because I spent a year unable to begin the book because there were two threads, and I couldn't figure out which came first because neither one comes first. They're happening simultaneously. And it finally occurred to me that Beyond's grid was a way of locating these two pathways, one of which is more interpersonal and relational, and one which is more cognitive in terms of the development of symbolization. And so the grid gave me a way of beginning that I hadn't been able to come to any other way.
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And I mean, to be honest, I've never really seen it used that way. I think I took a course through the San Francisco center for Psychoanalysis with psychoanalyst who had studied with beyond and said, no one ever uses this. It's just something that we only include because he put it at the front of all of his books. So to see it become alive, and I felt like it feels like a really crucial in, like, sort of creating a crux between the metaphorical paths you took in this book, which is a major theme leading into, like, Winnicottian and, you know, Marianne Miller's book about play, things like that. And then metacognition, which was a really central, powerfully explored component of this too, along. I'd say the. The third major component is that this book included so much more of your personal experience than any I've ever read.
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Yeah, that's. That's where we work from.
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What inspired that this time around? That this. There's so much of you in this book.
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Because I feel like this work is profoundly personal and we have to be able to draw on our own experience in order to really respectfully meet another human being where they are. And what I'm trying to take a stand for is drawing on the personal rather than explicitly referring to it. Because part of the problem in this work is that we're not free to talk. We can only speak in relation to the other person's need, as best we can figure that out. And so then we need some sort of ethical position in relation to what we say and what we don't say. And for me, it's about what does the other person need from me, which then helps me notice what I want to talk about. Because. Because I am drawn forward as a person in relation to what they're saying, but they don't need to hear about me. And there's something about the meeting point of you are evoking my own experiences in a way that allows me to be profoundly empathic to what you're doing. They need that to register without having to have the debris of my personal experience. Sometimes somebody, it's useful to speak about one's own experience. There's no nevers or always in this work. Sometimes it's useful, but most often somebody doesn't need to hear the particulars. They need to know that. That we can go there with them. And so then embedding the book and the personal marks that we're all using our histories in order to do the work that we need to know about it. We need to become friendly with who we are and humble in the face of it so that we can move forward. And one of the things that I've learned as I'm getting older is that younger people need me to speak in the places where speech is inhibited or prohibited in order to open the door for them. And so in some ways, this is a door opening
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in what frame? Yeah, the door. Because clinical work, teaching work, self inquiry.
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The door is to having the courage of your convictions and speaking from the place that you are. Because people may not agree with you, but they're not necessarily right. For example, I was doing a paper recently and there was a Lacanian commenting on it. From a very dogmatic position and certain that I didn't know Lacan well, that I was just missing something. And so they were explaining to me how Lacan I was talking about. I think it was the gays in a particular way, in a particular place where Lacan talks about film. And this person told me, you know, you're misunderstanding. He's not talking about film. He's talking about the gays in a different kind. And he's like, no, go back to the page, please, because he's really talking about film. And, you know, so there's something about. And also, the other book that took me a long time was the. The one Lessons from Bian and Lacan. Because speaking about my reading of Lacan was difficult because there's all these experts, and I will never be an expert, but. But I have an affinity. And the person who helped me was Shoshana Feldman, who, in her. Her introduction to her book on insights from Lacan, just said, this is my reading. So it helped me. Okay, this is my reading. And you can do whatever you want, but nobody owns. Even Milair does not own, you know, Lacan. And I got my own reasons. You were talking about beyond and people who studied with him. I used to talk with Jim Gradstein because I have a sense of beyond. And, yeah, he was analyzed by Beyond. He knew him. But he would come to me at certain points and ask what my reading is, because my sensibilities are very in line with. With beyond in a way that Jim could recognize. And, you know, fair enough. And it was helpful to me because it was sort of like, you know, I had the idea I was channeling beyond, which is obviously kind of crazy, but I was.
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You know, we both lived in Santa Fe, right. As you mentioned in the previous Trauma book, there were a number of passages about that. I think there's something there where you do evoke this powerful paternal function. You've integrated and internalized through Beyond. And I want to bookmark the stuff you said about Lacan, because that's interesting. And the way you include it in this book, I find quite compelling. And I've had similar experiences in Lacan circles, too. But I was. I had this fantasy version of, like, the way you have interjected a Beyonian paternal sense direct to the human being himself. Almost like the way beyond, interjected Melanie Klein and did something so new with her that. That I would. I would have. You know. Yeah, that.
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But she grew from it. She. She adopted his recursive arrows in relation to the paranoid schizoid. And depressive position for her.
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I wasn't. I was thinking more about some of her followers when were far more dogmatic than she was. And I feel Winnicott and beyond give us traditions really, not just humans or theorists or clinicians themselves, imperfect as they may be as well and through their own journey, but that for whatever reason their traditions seem to be more flexible or porous at the outset. Whereas Lacan, I think I found it to be radical, having been in Lacanian reading groups and studied with the Lacanian, the Malarian school, blah blah blah. For you to focus so much on the imaginary.
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For me, my Lacan is when he gets to the James Joyce and the Santo, that's where his ideas come together. And my sense is he realized they came together and he starts being incredibly poignant and funny at that point in time. In those later seminars you see him in the beginning, in his earlier seminars he's talking about how many people are in the room and whether he's welcome and whether he's not. Whatever, whatever. In his later seminars he's talking about there being no one to talk to in the room because he's so made way for the grandiose Lacan that there's no one left to speak to and his profound loneliness, which is just so endearing. The other thing he does is in his later seminars is he laments his inability to get to the place where women live from, which is also really delightful and entertaining as a woman to read. So yeah, I have these study groups that are really wonderful. The only criterion for joining is you have to leave your narcissism at the door because it really inhibits narcissism and dogma because it inhibits playing with the ideas and finding what's useful for each person. And if each person can sort of resonate to something and offer it back, then we all learn and grow. But if there's a right answer, nobody learns.
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New Year, new me. Cute. But how about New Year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit cards. Card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're going to crush start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian that rigidification, that narcissism Right, Yeah. And I loved how you worked your way towards there. From beyond grid, the developmental perspective, the neuroscience, and then from somaticization to eating disorders, to borderline versus narcissism, finally to narcissism as something that I've really personally seen, even as a. As a pedagogue and a supervisor, it. The damage this can do.
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Well, the damage that has been done in order to be stuck in that place.
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Right, right. It's like an enacted fear of breakdown where the. The paranoia and the attacks of it.
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Right.
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But can you say more about your conceptualization experience of narcissism? Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate that.
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Okay. Yeah. For me, you know, I started getting interested in narcissism and going back through other people's formulations. There were, you know, there was a period when the bulk of the formulations were assuming that narcissism was more highly developed than the borderline position, which to me is just crazy because if you think about the borderline position being object related but unstable and the narcissistic position being not object related, like which comes first. So, you know, there was. There was something about a failure to appreciate the profound deficits that were being offended against in, you know, the grandiosity and the fragility and, you know, all these things that we see in people who actually struggle with narcissism as opposed to, you know, sort of the epithet. Right. But people who are really struggling from this kind of a place. The difficulties are profound. The other thing that was useful to me in sort of helping me believe in what I thought I was seeing was a research project that a colleague did when he was a graduate student, David Neal, when he was at George Fox from the Riggs follow along data looking at borderline people had been diagnosed borderline people who had been diagnosed narcissistic using Paul Liesecker's Metacognitive scale. And what we could see is that people who are borderline could develop their reflective capacities. They could make use of self experience to refine their ideas about their thoughts and feelings, and if they really worked at it, to apply those to other people's thoughts and feelings and really develop relationally. Whereas people we would term narcissistic had a hell of a time actually making use of self experience. And what they would do is, you know, what I talk about in the book in terms of Gliese talks about the third person conjecture. So they would use their mind to think about where other people might be, but it wasn't embedded in self experience, which is not the Precondition for what we actually call reflective capacities or metacognitive development. So you see this profound deficit that people have a hell of a time getting past because of the difficulty of actually sitting with their own experience and making sense of their feelings. And that's where some of the thoughts versus feelings that I focus on in the book comes forward. Because it matters a great deal whether somebody's more situated in the realm of thinking or in the realm of feeling
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and narcissism more the obsessive realm of thinking and Borderline the more what was
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once oversaturation with feeling. Yeah. And if you're oversaturated with feeling, then the challenge becomes to sort of tone it down. And we know something about providing containment through which someone can make use of their thinking. And it helps someone to have that kind of a metaphor, a conceptualization, so that they can work at toning down their own feelings when they get extreme. So in the service of being able to think. That's a very easy pathway for us. From a psychoanalytic perspective. It's much more difficult to help someone who's very lodged in feelings and defense thinking and defended against feelings to invite them into actually paying attention to feelings, given that it's their least developed function. So it's the place where they feel most vulnerable.
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Yeah.
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And vulnerability is the thing that gets defended against. So you know, it. It takes a lot for somebody to move from that place and people can. But it's an incredible amount of work.
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Yeah. And I mean, you describe that work quite poignantly throughout, interwoven. I mean, you work at the Austin Riggs center, which probably has, I would imagine, a good proportion of some of the most difficult cases. And so could you talk a little bit more about both that work, as you've done within yourself, you've helped others to do as a teacher and a supervisor. And how do we deal with these parts of ourselves when the borderline wants intimacy so badly that they're actively always destroying the capability from a more shame based perspective. And the narcissist, in contrast from an also shame based perspective, feel so vulnerable about any possibility of intimacy that they're just fending it off without any hope of any object relation.
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Well, one way that people fend it off and that we clinicians generally help them fend it off is through the language of diagnoses, which on the one hand sort of marks particular deficits or areas for growth, et cetera, et cetera. Buying well enough. But I think that people look for diagnoses as a way of locating the problem outside of themselves or beyond themselves. And so then when people ask me for diagnoses, I tell them that that's not really how I think about things. How I think about things is in terms of more of a formulation of how did this happen? And so what I'll offer somebody is a story of what I think happened. Because I do believe that people who are really in trouble are suffering from complex trauma. And something happened that they can't appreciate because nothing happened. Because if everything was fine and something happened, there would have been people there to help them manage it. They would be okay. But it's sort of the. The nothing happening, the things that should have been happening that weren't interpersonally, developmentally, in terms of parental functions that leave people in trouble, but it's hard to locate. And then they're ashamed for not being fine. And so then there has to be a story. We were talking about intergenerational transmission of trauma before, which is the story beyond the story, which at Riggs we try to get also. So people can kind of find themselves in the history that preceded them because there's reasons why their parents weren't available. So you have to be willing to go back the generations, so you're not sort of blaming somebody, but rather you're recognizing what needed to happen that didn't. So that they can have an idea of what kind of work they might need to do in order to have more wherewithal as a person, to make use of their feelings as signals, which is what they're supposed to be, and to be able to put together a story where they can have some respect even for where they're stuck.
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Like constructions versus interpretations, which you highlighted. Yeah. Which is a. Felt like one of the ways you contend with the magnitude of this problem of naming the thing that isn't there. What is impacting the subject. Right. More profound than anything. And to be able to do this name the thing that isn't there and the thing that wasn't there as the cause of why the thing wasn't there.
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In all of that, I think one of the things that's been most important for me, even beyond La Planche's enigmatic signifiers, which are incredibly useful, is Olanier's idea about the sort of initial moments of being where the child is finding the world, finding safety, finding warm security, finding. And that those moments, she says, are overlain by the parents, usually the mother's reception to the child, and when there is an unwelcome and ambivalence or even a difficult delivery process, it contaminates the sense of being welcomed into the world. And it has an impact which is really helpful to people who can't understand their own shame, their own negative self identity because they can't find it in the story as it has evolved. And it's got to be somewhere and it's usually there. And when we look for that, they're always aware of their parents ambivalence or hostility or whatever it is. But the story gets written as though they were the problem as opposed to that they were presented with a problem
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as though they're the problem. Right. That's the shift that shame does, is it makes me the thing rather than this is the thing that happened to me. That feels like a major theme of this book.
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And rejection invites shame. So it's. When that's the first experience, it colors everything. Everything, Everything.
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Right, right. And even if it's felt like there's something there about the way that you describe in this book and throughout your work, powerfully that how shame is this absorbed thing, it's. It's this presence without a symbol to name it. And therefore it. It's as if it starts to tell the subject. This is what this means to have this terrible feeling. And so yeah, yeah, to, to you, you offer many different approaches towards getting at that. That just hidden place where the words haven't.
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It's gotten to be very interesting to me this. These early messages, because one of the things that I've been thinking of, I've gotten interested in the death drive. You sort of have to be interested in these days, given what's going on, but how we move toward death in relation to death. If we are in time, we are moving toward death. But there's this. I think that part of what gets formulated in psychoanalysis in terms of the death drive is sort of this underbelly of experience that for some people is the mother's wish that they not have been born or that they not be there that we wind up riding along. And for many of the people we work with who had an unwelcome into the world, they're always riding alongside the maternal. At the extreme, you have Andre Greene's dead mother, you know, who you're trying to keep alive, which is one variation of it. But I think it's bigger than that. I think it's this sort of. That we. There's always a part of us that moves in relation to the maternal. And it's so powerful that that's probably some of Our need to keep women in their place because it's so formative,
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like in a preceding ourselves kind of intergenerational way. Like we're structurally. The woman is made to not be there by the time she gives birth to the infant us or our patient, that it's like we lose ourselves in time. Like the way I'm hearing you say it, like there's a. There's a. There's a normative or maybe an abnormal or a death drive where. Like being in relation to the shame derived from the unsupported mother who wasn't given, which he needs to make us feel welcome in the world and our
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first senses, Western culture. There's a fundamental alienation that happens in the birth process for most of us because birth has become sort of a medical thing. I mean, increasingly now the number of C sections is like, you know, it's staggering. That's the word. And if you think about how birth was a normal process that people participated in collectively, the relationship to oneself that is invited in that kind of a lineage is so different than what's invited in this sort of disrupted. Like the cultural meanings that get loaded into what happens in childbirth in a hospital, you know, which is a sort of paternalistic structure anyway. Right. And, you know, worth sort of thinking about. I hadn't really thought about it.
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Where is your. No, it's great. It makes me think of a case of mine who. Whose mother themself is a physician and probably of everyone I've ever worked with, has felt least welcome into the world and what it means for women to contort themselves and, you know, as a man, I don't want to overstep my balance here, but there's something about that system that. That really does take away something of the agency of. Of the communal, of the support of. Of. Of not just the good. The good enough mother is one thing, but. But the good enough mothering environment, the good enough environment that helps there to be mother and baby as a symbiotic place. We all come from and are here as humans to.
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One interesting trope that's been coming forward in my work with some older women recently has been the idea of locating themselves in relation to their ancestors, their maternal line of ancestors. And, you know, I think about the feminine because of a woman, but it's always seemed to me that in the binary split between men and women that men really get the worst deal because they're disenfranchised from their own legacy of being feeling beings. And.
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A
Yeah, I mean, if we're More, you know, mapping the. The more archaic hysteric onto the current borderline and the more cac. Obsessive neurotic onto the current narcissist. Really? Then I think that again, like to start off from a place that is inherently object related or seeking that relationship versus to be caught in a repetition compulsion of actively fighting it off because of this fear of a vulnerability that already happened, that one has already survived. There is something there where like at least, even if females are. There's still. I think there's a long way to go. I mean, the threat of feminism in your book is really profound and I appreciate it deeply. But at least women are kind of located somewhere along some trajectory of trying to get back to a place, whereas men and males in this culture are like flailing amidst nowhere and nothing. Again, with within a possibility of naming. Or would you say that there are
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B
groups of men who are coming together to try to refine themselves and locate themselves in the same way that some women are doing? Which I think is really important because I think we need to reconsider and repair our ideas of what it means to be a man in this culture, just like we need to do that in relation to what it means to be a woman. And I'm thinking of that in relation to what we were talking about, about the point of the book, because I think it's also what it means to be a psychoanalyst or an ethical therapist in today's world. Because it has to be a personal stand. You can't, you can't locate your ethics in a guidebook anymore.
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Right. Like you have to locate at the place where you stand and the identities that we own, that we bear, be it male or female or white.
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I just submitted a paper on ethics which is a. About locating ethics in. In relation to authenticity. Because I don't think we can't. We can't trust speech that comes from the outside anymore. We have to be able to find ourselves in relation to it.
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A
And. Yeah, how are we doing with that? Yeah, would you say? Or where are we as a field, even in supporting that needed.
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B
Well, that's. That's the point of the book. That's the point of my study groups, the teaching I do, the supervision I do just staying at rigs, just trying to support people, trying to find their way. I found it interesting over time, you know, as you become more public, people do various things with you and you know, sometimes it's frustrating because I can't sort of speak as a person because I'm, you know, People are doing something else with me, okay? But on the other hand, I find that people find me who are really trying to do something important in their own right and have the idea that I can support them, which I am very humbled by and grateful for, because if I could have thought to wish for something, that would be at the top of the list. You know, there's something about living in a troubled world which I think is always true, and having so many things you can't do anything about. But then, you know, how do you situate yourself in relation to what you can do? And what we can do in this field is try to be true to our own principles, whatever they are, and try to share them and shelter them, which is psychoanalysis. It's providing a containing space where somebody can do something real and true for themselves. And so it might happen in the consulting room, it might happen in a study group, it might, you know, happen at. At a talk. But wherever it happens, if it happens, then, you know, we're there. We are.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mind's going in two directions. I want to ask you how we're doing as a field with our own. Even just going back to the first quote of the book, we're contending with our own inherent madness in the beautiful quote by Lacan, that not only can we understood, not only can our being not be understood without madness, it would not be our being if it did not bear madness within itself as a limit of our freedom, which I think poses particular challenges. And again, like with being told by various groups that that's not psychoanalysis, or that's not what Lacan meant, and so on and so forth. But even as you're talking about it now, I feel like you're able to take this oblique angle of looking at things from the side and maybe referencing what is possible. Even the very first quote before that by Nina Coulthardt, it is of the essence of our impossible profession that in a very singular way, we do not know what we are doing. At the heart of our work is a mystery. And I take some solace in that mystery as the thing that transfigures, maybe through metaphor, possibly metacognition, something becomes more possible. Like in the register, which I heard you just. I think. I don't know if that and all
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B
those things allow us to play a little bit, which loosens us up. But if you think about it, this work is profoundly paradoxical because the person coming to us knows much more about themselves than we do, but we know something about possibility. And so Then they kind of ride on our faith that that something can change, something can come of all of this, that things can transform in a way that they can't possibly imagine, and we know that the keys are in them. I worked with this guy for about five years at Riggs. He was very sort of concrete and dull, but his dreams were absolutely. It all happened in his dream dreams, and he was looking for the secret key that he hadn't received from his father, and he was looking for it, and it was in all of his dreams. And then in a later dream, he walked into a hut and the key was there, and he had had it all along. And it was this sort of nothing, everything moment, which is the truth of psychoanalysis, that we have the keys, and if somebody's working with us, they're recognizing that. And that's, again, where Lacan, in spite of whatever he was playing with, kept pointing to that it's the person's relationship with themselves that's the problem, and that they're going to have to figure out and try not to get in the way with your stupid, brilliant interpretation.
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Always a danger, if we.
- [45:46]
B
Always a danger. You know, we get anxious. We want to offer something, and. And I think it's important to be able to recognize our anxiety so that we can just sort of stand with it and think about what we can or can't do. Like when somebody's sort of wanting something more from us, you know, then, you know, there was a time where I could get completely caught up in, oh, I'm supposed to be doing, you know, and trying to find the something more. And now, you know, I can ask the question of, what more are they needing? Where might they find it? And sometimes people get very mad at me because it feels like I'm firing them or abandoning them or something, but I'm.
- [46:45]
A
But you're making space for something of a meeting ground that is already there, I think. But you talk about the fear of seeing oneself in the book, too. And I've sensed that in my own way. I just. Not to interrupt, and I'm not wanting
- [47:02]
B
to get involved in something perverse. I think Lacan's ideas about perversion are really helpful because it's very easy to get hooked on something perverse. And anything that sort of idealizes or demonizes us threatens to hook us into fighting against it, rather than being interested in what's going on and. And why am I getting hooked? And where is somebody positioning me that makes me unable to do my job?
- [47:37]
A
Yeah.
- [47:38]
B
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered from free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh sorry. Namaste.
- [48:02]
A
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with EBGLIS, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking empglis achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Empglis Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapy, therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLIS before starting Eglis. Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about eglis and visit eglis.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-597. Yeah, yeah. And doing that self inquiry is hard. I think. You know, in the French decio is both wish and desire, right? There's a relationship whoosh in German, I think in English I've seen when held in the way you just described it can really be helpfully disentangling. But I've also seen it used in ways that it really is much more about that perverse desire and that way of keeping it within the register of the things that are kind of what I want it to be. And I've seen my work with patients, but also even students have issues that they have a very intimate relationship with the ideas that drew them to this work. And it's so hard because we have to face ourselves. We have to discover that the key is within ourselves, likely in a chamber or a box in our existence. We were just simply too terrified to go into or just look too ordinary, like the Purloin letter, to even consider that that's where the useful information might be. And there's something there where I feel like this book, kind of like the grid, in and of itself, is a helpful, like, placing of these various concepts in a way where we can use them to create more of a sense of spaciousness, even capaciousness. As my dear colleague Karim Dejani.
- [50:31]
B
Right.
- [50:33]
A
It's so natural to you sometimes that I wonder, you know, like, how you perceive this. And, you know, for those who don't have. Like, there's something, I think, that's so aspirational for me, you know, working more or less independently. I think there's something in colleagues of mine and people I've seen doing this work for a long time. It's very isolating. I think we struggle with our own sense of alienation ourselves, and we want to be clever, we want to feel clever, like we're doing something, like we've learned something or accomplished something, and it's easy to lose ourselves in that. I think based on the way mental health training is happening in. More back here, perhaps even not happening in. In the world out there, it's really easy to cling on to ideas that feel like this is the thing or that's the key. And. And a lot of fear comes up in people where it's. It's. This is why I love using your work as. As. As. As a. As a pedagog, a pedagogical frame. Sorry, is that it? I think if we're true to the way you write and even the way. I think this interview even portrays the way you are in the moment, in the process, it forces us to take that oblique Anglo approach. It forces us to look at the points on the grid and not get caught anywhere and rigidify. I think that's the main risk.
- [52:10]
B
Increasingly, I find this issue of character interesting because I think when we start off as clinicians, we're sort of thinking we need to be able to do something that will lead in some direction. But then I think over time, the issue of character starts to come in, where you do something and then you see how somebody responds, and you can see their character in their response. So rather than sort of going for the response you want, it's Sort of opening up something that shows something, right? And what you wind up seeing is character, which is very useful to be able to see so that you can invite someone to be interested in their own character and what they do, which is a different language, I think, than defenses or, you know, those kinds of things, which is more in a pathological framework, which I think is not terribly helpful, particularly because there's this question of how does something work for someone or not work for them, because it's really up to them. And I was like, how's this working for you? You know, and if it's working well, then, you know, okay, fair enough. There do seem to be these other consequences that you don't like so much, which I could talk to you about if you're interested. But it takes it out of the what. What somebody should be doing or the right thing, or the, you know, certain kind of impossible things, like, who knows, you know, the right thing? Like, people say things. There's some words that just completely stymie me, like normal, you know, like, you know, what is that? Is it. Is it something you actually are aspiring toward? Doesn't sound very inciting to me, you know.
- [54:30]
A
Yeah, but the force of social. I mean, it's a statistical term, right? It's who's inside of the bell curve, and what risk will I bear for not making the same compromises they've made to be there, whether that's me or who I am not. And that perspective on character and the shape of it, I feel it touches on something where it feels like, between psychology and just somehow it was in my mind this whole time. This book was published by APA. You presented both, like APA and the Division 39 conferences, that there's something between, like, scientific psychology, both in the contemporary frame and the thing Freud was trying to talk about that he failed to fully bring into, you know, likely for the best fruition way back then, about how we can talk about these things scientifically in a deeply reverential, curious way, staying true to the field and like the Freudian endeavor, while also critiquing Freud, which I was really appreciative of how you did that throughout the book, too. And then something else like this register of metaphor, of play, of poetry, of art, of creativity, where it's like the shape of something, and some of it's human, some of it's us, you or mayor, we in that.
- [55:54]
B
Well, one thing that happened at psychology is in trying to nail things down, we got increasingly concrete and increasingly divorced from the human. And so I'M sort of sitting on the opposite end of the spectrum where I'm very, I don't do categories very well. I'm very interested in the shape and form of things and the experience of things. And so my evidence, like, like when someone is consulting with me and they sort of have a question about something, it's sort of like, well, how did they respond when you said that? Or when you. Like that's where our evidence is by what happens. We have it inside of ourselves. There's an evidence base inside of ourselves from that we develop over time if we can be respectful of it. And then there's the evidence that happens with a particular person in terms of, well, what happens when we say this thing and how do they respond to it. And there's, I think, an increasing turn in psychoanalysis, at least in papers I wind up reading on what happens. Like syroise's paper on transference. It's like, well, what is actually happening in a given moment where I offer an idea to someone and how does it affect them? He talks about interpretations that touch and interpretations that say something that give a formulation. And then he talks about interpretations that enlighten, which is usually what we think of as interpretations. But the question is, do they enlighten or do they make us feel good? My experience of what people find useful from our sessions, it's always this moment where somebody says, I've been thinking about what you said. I'm always worried. I'm working with this young guy who got stuck in relation to a fixed delusion and so he's a little concrete but very hyper vigilant. And he, he came to me the other day and he said, been thinking about what you said. And then he looked at me and just grinned and he said, you're worried? I said, yeah. And it was a good thing that he was thinking about. But yeah, that's my first instinct, is to be worried. What did I do now? Because what people land on and what they find useful is rarely the thing that was exciting to us. But there's something that touches them in some way or says something that formulates something for them that gives them a little bit different angle, that invites them to think about things and it's not always user friendly. I had somebody say to me recently, you know, you, you said something and I was mad at you. And then I started thinking about the thing you said and why I was mad at you. And I was mad at you because it hurt, because it was true. So you know, that kind of person is a Gift because they're tracking what's happening in real time and figuring out their relationship to what's offered. And in the willingness to think about it gives us room. Because if you can say something, sometimes, you know somebody's not going to like what you're saying, or else you say something casually, and then you realize, oh, shit. But then the question becomes, can the person work with it? You know, sometimes we need to help them. We need to apologize for saying it badly or, you know, whatever it is, to sort of be willing to own the trauma that was attached to it or the discomfort that was attached to it. But, you know, there are some things that are hard to say, and people come to us to reckon with the things that they. Kind of like you were saying before, to reckon with the things that are difficult to reckon with but needing some help. So it's not so painful if something's too painful or too shameful. This fixed illusion guy, part of the problem is that the affective intensity is such that he hasn't been able to really think about things. And so then all the work we've been doing, and you can see how I'm going like this. This has been about trying to make space for there to be another idea, another way of looking at things, another reading of something, and he's finding it. But how we actually invite there to be space. And I say that very deliberately because make space is sort of in position. But how do we, you know, invite space into something that's become fixed and closed down and where there probably is a lot of fear and shame? And how do we be respectful of that so that the fact that we are free of it doesn't become one more thing to be ashamed? You know, if it's. We're acting like it's so easy when it's so hard.
- [61:56]
A
Right, right, right, right. Yeah. No, it really. I mean, because it's so complex and yet so simple. It's like if we can cut through to that place of naming, like you said just a couple moments ago, where the truth is a thing I don't like and that hurts. And I fear that if it were only ever always that easy. I think we have, like you. You make a powerful, I think, point of advocacy throughout the book and throughout your work to learn how to use ourselves as an instrument, by which. By. Through the sense of urgency of whether or not this is the moment to say the more hurtful thing or whether or not, you know, where this other human being is in relation to her,
- [62:40]
B
where we are teaching before And I think that what we're talking about is really important in terms of teaching or mentoring or fostering people in the field, where I find I do this supervision group with some of my former students, and I really. Sometimes they want to hear from me, but I really try to inhibit myself as much as I can to leave room for them to find their voices and offer things to one another, because they have very interesting insights and things to offer which are directly useful to one another. But it's also useful to each of them to be able to have their own authority and have their own useful perspective in a conversation and not to have the fact that they have transferences, to me, mean that there's a right or a wrong. One of the things, maybe the most profound thing I took away from graduate school was the disappointment in having no one to talk to because people were waiting to know what the right answer was in order to raise their hand. And I'll tell you, analytic training was not all that different.
- [64:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. As if there's a. Yeah.
- [64:08]
B
And so there's something about really being respectful of what moves toward and what inhibits development, which is true of the people we work with clinically, but also the people we try to shepherd, to invite them to take their own voices seriously rather than feeling like we would need to shape them.
- [64:41]
A
What is the shaping and how can we help that promoted towards this most ethical form? And I think it can happen in both ways, where some people might not say anything until they feel they can't have the right answer. Some people simply need the space to fulfill the very positive momentum they gain from the work that they've been immersing themselves into. I've loved working with students like that. Other people, I'm finding, especially in this, you know, outpost of. Of Santa Fe, where we don't have, you know, a lot of the culture of institutes or major universities and things here is where there's the desire for the structure, but it hasn't been here yet. And so that. That dialectic between knowing and not knowing and this really tricky thing where for me, I was wondering, what do you think about this? Like, if we can play with either end of the spectrum of if we need to reach the not knowing with supporting things like concepts like metacognition that people might not have ever heard of, for example, or if that's all that they've heard of, then introducing people like Winnicott to them and what he was talking about, or beyond and the con or Milner and so forth, versus people who seem to really be engaged in a deep process of finding their voice, just giving. Simply giving them the space and allowing them to dream that into being.
- [66:11]
B
Well, this is where I think psychoanalytic practice is. Is usefully informed by the developmental literature, because the developmental literature is all about how do you orient to the other person's needs in the moment. How do you sort of help somebody take the near step in a way that they can take it. You know, what's too much, what's too little? And there's no substitute for learning what a person does with what we offer, figuring out sort of who they are, where they are, what's useful to them, what's not, what they sort of say is helpful, but seems to shut them down, what seems to invite their actual thinking. And it depends on what you're looking for. People have different goals in clinical work, and it's important to know what your goals are and whether you're moving in that direction. I have very particular goals, but other people have different ones.
- [67:28]
A
What different goals as far as.
- [67:31]
B
Well, some people believe in ideas like cure, coping, healing, you know, which I'm very suspicious of. I really. I think in this way, Bien and Lacan were sort of unparalleled paths in terms of leaving a space for someone to learn in relation to their own experience of being a person. They did it in very different ways, but they very much did it. Like Jim Grossin said, he'd ask beyond something and beyond would push it right back at him. Like, what do you think? What do you feel? You know, don't turn to me to be the expert. That's not what this is about.
- [68:24]
A
There's a tremendous faith in the organismic forward incremental movement of the human experience or apparatus. Or like, in a way where, like, there's something. If we superimpose a sense of expertise, that's where a lot of these rejectifications that don't let that process happen. I think in whatever frame.
- [68:48]
B
And there's hated the term understanding. It took me a long time to understand it or to find other words to use. But what he was really trying to differentiate between which these states we understand a great deal is, you know, the learning that is about amassing information versus the learning as a more active process of integrating experience. And there is something about how psychoanalysis easily moves toward a sort of dogmatic, resting on the laurels of whoever decided, whatever they decided. Even Freud, rather than taking the method that was opened up. I do think that what Freud gave us was a method as opposed to you could quibble with any of his insights but the method. And he was true to the method. You know, whatever he says, if you look at his clinical work, you know, he had more problems with. But you know, fair enough. But he, he was open to amending his ideas in relation to, to what the other person was doing with him. And he was learning as he went along and that's the method and it's a good method. And he was also doing his own self analysis, which is a very good method.
- [70:40]
A
So there is humility there. And I think too we forget that the thing his turn of genius was to look at something that Breuer did kind of against his own better judgment. And just like rather than hypnotize her or institutionalize her or you know, give her suggestions or any of the other weird and extreme interventions that were thought of as normal back then, simply listen to her and allow that to be the chimney sweeping. Right. And then I think that Freud really struggled to, even though Boyer, I guess, burned out from that and couldn't keep doing it because there wasn't something containable like a method to put that into. That's the, the, the basis is Freud observed something at the side angle, chose to write about it. And I feel like that process of. It's just behind and just ahead. It's like we try too hard to keep it. Well, he said that here. So that's the thing that I'm here to wave my flag both for and against. I think we, we fall into these, these traps and, and I like you say in the book throughout and I think you're voicing now it has been bad for and the woman he treated. I mean, you know, the stories of Marie, Mona Part and Luann Dress Salame and a bunch of others are interesting, but there is something there that's a deeply, deeply unfulfilled component to this tradition.
- [72:06]
B
What I've been interested in lately is I found it in a thing on mysticism by. And I'm blocking on the person who wrote it. But there was a reference to a letter In I think 1926 that Freud wrote to Roman Roland about mysticism where he alludes to his deaf ear. And it was like, thank you, thank you, thank you. Because I've become very interested in what I experience as certain colleagues deaf ears, which is how I have talked about it. And it's an over reliance on sort of formula that doesn't touch the lived experience of the moment or the person. And so for me it's just profoundly pleasurable and relieving that Freud, who sort of illuminated the fact of the unconscious and primary process, didn't really know what to do with it.
- [73:16]
A
Right, right.
- [73:17]
B
In counterpoint, that's where I live. His puns and language things, those don't come to me. I can kind of, like you saw earlier, I did something with language. I was sort of like, is that intentional? No, it wasn't. It just is something I do and then maybe notice later, usually because somebody else notices it, because it sort of comes through my primary process, but it doesn't come through here. And so there's something about the work I've been doing increasingly that's partly on creativity, partly on being a woman, partly what it means to be an embodied person. But that really is about sort of the language of the unconscious and sort of the rhythms of meaning that are underneath everything that, you know, I think Freud and Lacambeau sort of recognized but couldn't quite get there, that the capital
- [74:30]
A
M master took something away from either of them. Because I feel like the thing that I think you do is you can feel what it's like to be a human suffering, and what the knowledge you gained throughout your studies have given you is just a broader structure and spectrum by which to make sense of that and offer something useful to the human being. But I think that by anchoring yourself more in the experience of it, rather than in the cleverness of what you can do with wordplay or make sense of a joke or what the meaning of the word mustard is. For example, it lets you move with the human being and not get stuck in any particular text.
- [75:11]
B
But again, it's character because it is the region that's most comfortable for me. So I've learned to speak from that place rather than trying to speak from the other. It's really funny. There was this period in my family, I was the artistic one, my sister was the scholar. And we came to a point where she sort of confessed to me that she was trying to write, but she felt like she was sort of in my territory, and I was in graduate school. And I said, you know, I have the same feeling. I really had the idea that I was channeling you in order to be a scholar, as though that made more sense to me than the fact that I could have these capacities. Because there was this line, right?
- [76:03]
A
Yeah.
- [76:05]
B
You know, so, you know, what is open to us, what is not open to us? How. How.
- [76:12]
A
How, like a character being the place, we get stuck, not knowing, like, what else of ourselves might be beyond.
- [76:19]
B
Yeah. You know, and clearly she and I are quite different in terms of our orientation toward the world, and which is fun because, you know, coming from different places, we bring different things, but we can both play in the same sandboxes at this one.
- [76:37]
A
That's lovely. That's great.
- [76:52]
B
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