Perhaps no one trait of patient-psychiatrist talk is more commonplace than this lay-science reversal, the patient Platonizing his sentences by a Good Housekeeping psychological jargon (“reacting negatively”), the therapist vulgarizing his (“who is beating up on who”) in the reverse expectation that the real is to be found in the common tongue. In a kind of minuet, patient and therapist change places. The question is, How does the switch work? What kind of a scientist does the layman become by his Platonizing? Does the common tongue bring the real closer for the therapist?
Freud was thinking about unresolved and disabling conflicts within the psyche. But what is beginning to dawn on us is that the very technique designed to probe and resolve such conflicts may in itself loom so large for the patient, be offered with such dazzling credentials, that he may fall prey to a technique and be further impoverished. In speaking of the earlier transaction, the Freudian slip, one is accustomed to using a traditional dyadic language: conflict, intrapsychic dynamism, repression, cathexis, resolution, etc. In the later transaction across the lay-science interface one finds oneself using such expressions as: falling prey to, impoverishment, loss of sovereignty, inauthentic, etc.
2.12. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the world to which it refers.
Thus it is not enough for the receiver to “know what the sentence means,” in the sense that a professor can write a sentence on the blackboard and every student can explain its syntax and semantics, that it is a declarative sentence, etc. One must also know whether it is a report, a story, an account of a dream, a joke, a quotation.
Salesman to boss: “There was this traveling salesman who met a farmer’s daughter—”
Boss: receives sentence as the beginning of a joke whereas in truth it is a report, the salesman’s seriocomic explanation of how he happened to lose an account.
By its very nature classical psychoanalysis with its encouragement of the analysand to “say what comes to mind” is peculiarly susceptible to sudden and uncued shifts of contexts and attendant misunderstandings. Miscouplings of sentences are more apt to occur here because parameters are more apt to become variables. The patient can shift “worlds” and communities at his pleasure. Indeed he is obliged to.
Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”
Patient: “The center does not hold.”
Is the patient misquoting Yeats, describing his mental health, talking about the state of the union, or doing all three? Is the sentence uttered seriously or in a playful allusive way? It is the analyst’s business to know — that is, to catch on to the world mode of the sentence.
2.13. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the placement of the utterer vis-à-vis the world of the sentence.
Scene: a room under the University of Chicago stadium in 1943, during the early days of the Manhattan Project.
Fermi’s assistant: “Dr. Fermi, the radiation count of the pile is two forty-two!”
Fermi: “Very good!”
The assistant is uttering an alarm, calling attention to danger to life and limb. The sentence calls for appropriate behavior: turn the pile off, let’s get out of here. Other such sentences, might be “Vesuvius is about to erupt,” or “The safety valve is stuck.”
Fermi, however, receives the sentence as having been uttered, not in the ordinary world of predicaments, but rather as a confirmatory report of a pointer reading.*
If one diagrammed each triadic event, Fermi’s coupling and his assistant’s coupling, one could depict the assistant speaking to Fermi within the world and calling his attention to an imminent threat from one sector of the world. Fermi’s reading of the sentence, however, would place both Fermi and the assistant outside this world in a transcending abstracted posture from which world events are read as data for theory.
Similarly:
Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”
Patient: “I’ve decided to break off the analysis.”
Therapist: “Tell me about it.”
Instead of replying, the patient rises, shakes hands, and leaves.
The therapist mistakes the placement of the patient vis-à-vis the world of the sentence I’ve decided to break off the analysis. He, the analyst, assumes that the patient has uttered one more sentence in the language game of analysis, i.e., a game where sentences are reports of data to be examined rather than announcements of actions to be taken. Whereas in truth the patient has shifted the world of discourse from the language game of analysis to the language of the everyday world, where, when one announces his departure, one departs.
2.14. A sentence can be mistaken in its normative mode, that is, by being received in a normative mode other than that in which it was uttered.
Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”
Patient (seeing the curtain at the window stir in the breeze): “There’s a rat behind the arras.”
Therapist: “Who’s the rat?”
Patient: “Polonius.”
Therapist: “Don’t forget that Hamlet mistook Polonius for the king.”
Patient (agitated): “You mean — it’s oedipal? Hm. No. Yes. It is!”
Note that it is impossible to characterize the sentence There’s a rat behind the arras by the conventional propositional norm of true-or-false. There is no rat behind the curtain. But neither patient nor analyst supposes that the sentence asserts anything about a rat. The sentence is rather, like so much of the talk in analysis, an allusive ambiguous assertion with more than one referent. It is, let us stipulate, (1) a playful allusion to the circumstance that both patient and analyst saw a performance of Hamlet the night before, (2) a reference to a dream, (3) a surfacing of unconscious oedipal feelings.
A mistake in the triadic sense can occur here if the therapist mistakes one of the parameters of the patient’s sentences, e.g., a normative parameter: suppose he had taken the sentence about the rat as a true-or-false proposition and gotten up to look for the rat. Or suppose he took the sentence as no more than an allusion to last night’s playgoing when in truth it may refer to far more serious matters.
Up to this point we have not diverged from the conventional analytical quest: the decoding of the patient’s sentence toward the end of identifying and resolving unconscious conflicts. One does not dispute the validity of this enterprise. But we have other fish to fry. We want to observe this conversation not through the analyst’s eyes, which see the patient as a psychic malfunction, but through a zoom camera which zooms back in order to see the encounter as it occurs, between two sentence couplers, in a world, in an office where a certain language game is played, next to a street where other language games are played.
Through such a zoomed-back camera, we fancy we can see things a bit differently. Thus, instead of seeing the patient through the analyst’s eyes as a dyadic creature whose distress may be traced to “repression” and “resistance” to the disclosure of unconscious contents, we see a certain sort of educated lay person who is very much aware of the language game being played here, very much aware of the analyst’s theories, very much aware of the difference between being in the world of the analyst’s office and being in the world of the street outside.
We suspect by the same token that the agitation manifested by the patient in the last sentence of the conversation may have a very different source than the dyadic distress ordinarily attributed to him. Conventionally the patient is supposed to resist the attribution to him of oedipal feelings. But is it not possible that in this case what was thought to be dyadic misery may turn out to be triadic delight? So that, far from being like one of Freud’s Victorian patients who “resisted” the disclosure of such unconscious contents, this patient may be a horse of an entirely different color, namely, late-twentieth-century man who likes nothing better than to exhibit the proper pathology, in this case the central pathology of the Master himself. “It’s oedipal!” exclaims the patient with every sign of delight.