Personal Stories and Psychotherapy
6.10 Methodological Turning Points
At this stage, we can freshly address each of the questions posed in the first para- graph of the present chapter by framing them within the overall view we have devel- oped so far. First of all, to what mode of relating with the other does therapeutic practice point to? Therapeutic practice is based on a relation which, as the etymol- ogy of the word (therapeuein) reveals, coincides with a connection between the idea of serving and that of searching or rather of serving as searching (Berti 2009). The therapist investigates the concrete situations in other people’s lives, searching for an access and hence a perspective that will provide the right direction for him to find the sense which the patients have lost. But what does it mean for the therapist to search, as he goes along with the patient in the process of re-enacting lost experience?
With regard to the content of memory, we have seen how the sense of self-famil- iarity within the context of present circumstances discloses an unmanifest sphere of meaning. Memory, broadly understood as an unprominent sphere of meaning, pro- vides immediate access to this dimension, albeit in a fragmentary way. For example, with regard to my trip to Egypt last year, I only retain the sense of the lived experi- ence, but the situations, people, and objects it comprised fluctuate, emerge in isola- tion, and become blurred with one another, even though they all indicate the same sense. Memory undoes the existential web in which multiple moments of sense were articulated as a feeling of self-familiarity (the “myness” of experience). In fact, ipseity no longer actualizes the bond that held together in the original experi- ence a range of different horizons, so that the content of the experience, while being directly available, requires a new sense and the renewal of one’s relation with ipseity. This sort of paradox of memory—whereby elements which present them- selves as being directly accessible are at the same time disconnected and distant—
takes a radical form in the case of a pathology, where the content of an experience becomes foreign to oneself and endures as such through the establishment of the mechanism at the basis of a symptom.
How can one access that sphere of unprominent content which the symptom has concealed? How can one newly articulate the various fragments and set out after what has slipped away or has been forgotten? After having disclosed the unmanifest sphere of meaning, the investigation is conducted by following those shreds of meaning, according to the indications they provide, which point toward a range of different prereflective trajectories. Different possible paths thus emerge and, with them, different appropriate or inappropriate solutions for the articulation of the orig- inal sense and the living appropriation of the past.
Questioning is therefore a methodical movement, as it is only through the posing of questions that analysis discovers what it was searching for and discards inappro- priate paths, tracing that unfolding of horizons of sense constituting the domain of the proper back to the original contexts. So as the perspective itself opens the inves- tigation up in an indeterminate form, it gradually finds the right possibility of deter- mination through the articulation and co-enactment of factical experiences, down to
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the origin of the sense of these experiences, enabling its appropriation and hence the renewal of the patient’s actual existence.
While the concrete and contextual meaning connected to enactment vanishes with the sedimentation of experience, the sedimented experience endures as a trace—pointing to other traces and disclosing more profound trails, down to the original contexts—that must be followed in order to regain the spheres and situa- tions in which the sense of the experience is concretely enacted. The search for and grasping of clues—which correspond to expressions of self—enable the posing of a series of question that allow the therapist to disclose concealed pathways and exam- ine the traces and marks left in the clusters of experiences that progressively come to light, so as to reorient the investigation.
One is reminded here of that remarkable passage of the Phoedrus (274b–275c) in which Socrates recounts the ancient tale of Theuth, the Egyptian god who pres- ents his inventions (technas) to King Thamus, in order for him to assess them before passing them down to the Egyptians. One of these inventions is writing: when intro- ducing the letters of the alphabet, Theuth explains to the king that writing was invented as a sort of drug for wisdom and memory, to make the Egyptians wiser and better at remembering things. But the king, according to Socrates’ account, replied that it is one thing to design a technique and quite another to assess its drawbacks or advantages. Although the sovereign realized that as the inventor of that technique Theuth would wish to defend it, he also realized that by limiting the exercising of memory, writing would only lead to oblivion: for those who would use it to recall things would no longer be drawing their knowledge from within themselves but only from exterior marks. This difference related to memory—understood as remembrance (anamimneschomenous)—is clarified a few lines later in the dialogue.
After emphasizing the fact that this drug is not useful for memory but only for bringing things to mind, Thamus concludes that it makes pupils only apparently wise (doxosophoi), not truly wise (anti sophon). What, then, makes writing so dis- turbing? What makes it a point of disagreement between a god and the king of kings?
The answer is not slow in coming, as Socrates warns his listeners against the real danger posed by written discourse: that of severing the connection between the liv- ing and animated discourse of he who knows (ton tou eidotos … logon zonta kai empsychon) and its author—the person who in shaping the discourse must tap into himself. What this attack on writing brings into relief, therefore, is the sensible ref- erence of each discourse to life, a relationship which writing breaks down.19
In this respect, the expression of experience in all its forms is a trace, a clue pointing to the contexts and situations in which sense is actually enacted. Freud argues that medical psychoanalysis “is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed figures, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our
19 This is no way conflicts with the fact that behind the attack on writing—and those who by using it seem to be omniscient but are in fact ignorant for the most part—there lies the major concern of the dialogue, namely, the vindication of the philosophical life against a life that merely seeks its (of writing) effects.
6.10 Methodological Turning Points
observation” (Freud 1955, p. 222)—an a priori which Freud masterfully confirms with a rather unlikely and exegetically flimsy analysis of the posture and possible movement of Michelangelo’s Moses. By contrast to this view, in our case clues are not deciphered by means of generalizing conjectures that aim to explain the invol- untary nature of the symptoms. Nor do symptoms point to a loss of control that allows incongruous acts to be performed as an indirect expression of one’s uncon- scious—as in the case of slips of the tongue and, more generally, all parapraxes that psychoanalysis has sought to trace back to underlying aspirations or forces. The clues originating from a movement of life which we retrace are interpreted accord- ing to the directions provided by the existence of the patient, who in newly under- standing them restores their flow together with the therapist. Hence, unlike in psychoanalysis, in our case “the capacity to trace apparently negligible experimen- tal data back to a complex reality that cannot be experienced directly” (1986, p. 166)—one of the ways in which Ginzburg defines the evidential or divinatory paradigm—is co-enacted with the patient who, so to speak, has lost the traces of where he passed, the traces of self (Arciero 2006).
In discussing the remarkable study on the topic produced by Ginzburg—“who bravely opposed the paradigm of Galilean science” (Ricoeur 2004, p. 534 modified translation)—Ricoeur identifies those elements which enable a range of different disciplines to embrace the evidential paradigm: the uniqueness of the deciphered object, the indirect character of the decipherment, and its conjectural nature. The extraordinary insight provided by Ginzburg traces the evidential or divinatory para- digm back “to what is perhaps the most ancient gesture in the intellectual history of the human race: that of the hunter squatting in the mud to examine traces of his prey” (p. 169)—a paradigm also implicit in Mesopotamian and Egyptian divinatory texts. These traditions were transmitted to ancient Greece, and in particular to the Pythagorean school and its great physicians—Alcmaeon, Philolaus and Empedocles—thereby opening up and developing the vast field of conjectural knowledge founded on the examination of circumstances and governed by the god- dess Metis (Vernant and Detienne 1974). This form of knowledge—centered on the opportune moment, on the capacity to seize the opportunity—is reminiscent, according to Philodemus, of the practice of medicine or sailing. Philodemus further associates it with parrhesia: a form of frank speaking which corresponds to a sort of therapeutic capacity characterized by the fact of telling the truth at the opportune moment to a given individual who is ready to accept it in relation to the condition which he finds himself in.20
This method of investigation, then, keeps to directly graspable phenomena with the aim of articulating the meaningfulness and contexts they disclose. The therapist sets out after lost traces together with the person who left them (Arciero 2006), in order to find their possible meaning. This relation of cooperation based on mutual trust coincides with the practice of serving another person, understood as the act of
20 In the Epicurean milieu to which Philodemus belonged, parrhesia was transmitted from master to disciple and practiced in a group setting, in the presence of an overseer (Foucault 2001).
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going along with him as he re-enacts his own experience, submitting to what it indicates.
This leads us to the second question: (2) to what particular mode of understand- ing does the therapeutic relationship correspond? This question is bound up with the first one because, if this therapeutic position with respect to the other consists in going along with him by re-enacting those prereflective domains that have been formally indicated, the method must ensure that the other’s experience is grasped without betraying its sense, i.e., by preserving the situationality of the other’s exis- tence without turning it into a thing through generalization. The method must there- fore be developed in such a way as to be co-originary with the content of the experience under investigation, and must therefore always unfold in a certain way, according to the life experience it seeks to clarify, by keeping to such experience.
In psychotherapy, the method (Vd. Table 6.2) we have been gradually articulat- ing usually starts with:
(a) The destructuring of the symptom, which brings out the experience trapped within it.
(b) The second movement consists in disclosing the thematic field on the basis of the experience just released, by shifting the focus of the investigation from the facts of the world to the unprominent connections of the person’s factical life.
This process consists in turning back to the original contexts and situations through formal indication. In the analysis of the problematic experience, this movement implies “siding with life,” that life which in encountering things remains intimate to the self—which in becoming involved with the world expe- riences itself. This change of perspective does not amount to the cognitive grasping of factically relevant modes of being as objects; rather, it consists in a disclosure of the field of investigation within which these modes of being can be grasped by going along with their sense of enactment and in which they can be explicated, in such a way that these modes of being will manifest themselves as the concrete involvement with this or that meaningful situation. If meaning is understood in terms of the sense of enactment starting from concrete life situa- tions, each meaning may be seen to provide the original meaningful direction and the possibility to explicate it as the factical involvement with this or that circumstance.
(c) The third methodological movement, therefore, consists in exploring together with the patient—and according to formal indication—the sphere of meaning which has been disclosed, in such a way as to “test” the experiential accounts provided by identifying their roots, grasping their ambiguities, and discarding or selecting the paths they trace, down to their prereflective sources. The destruction or deconstruction which distinguishes this third movement, together with reconstruction, consists in an act of discernment with respect to the situa- tional origin of meanings and the directions of sense they enclose. Starting from this disclosure of a formally indicated perspective, phenomenological destruc- tion/construction makes it possible to bring to light concealed meaningful moments that can provide an orientation. If the way in which one behaves
6.10 Methodological Turning Points
Table 6.2 The movements of the therapeutic method 1
1. Deconstructing the symptom and ensuring an access
This first step in the treatment is intended not just to define the composition of the symptom in such a way as to unravel its mechanism but to enable—through its deconstruction—an access to those prereflective meaningful structures that the symptom obscures and presupposes From the symptom to its origin 2 1
2. Tracing the symptom back to its temporal origin while establishing a context of inquiry
Formal indication “therefore discloses a sphere of content which is constituted by a range of directions of sense pertaining to the various situations it comprises”
From the origin of the symptom to a field of meaning to be investigated
2 1 3
3. An explicating understanding It is a matter of “exploring together with the patient […] the sphere of meaning which has been disclosed, in such a way as to ‘test’ the experiential accounts provided […] down to their prereflective sources [the co-originary giving itself of the sense of enactment/content/
reference].” “This passage […] brought about through the practice of questioning”
makes it possible to “methodically trace the patient’s experience back to the domain of the proper: the network of tendencies and motives which orient experience in advance and are transformed by it”
From a field of meaning to the actual remobilizing of meaningful trajectories
4
1 2
3
4. The progressive retrieval of meaning The “sphere of meaning, in its various articulations, progressively appears as, together with the patient, we retrace her prereflective trajectories starting from the situations at hand.” This discloses “a new possible interpretation of the various situations under investigation”
“which leads to the development of new trajectories and to a renewal of ipseity in the present”
From the remobilizing of meaningful trajectories to the progressive retrieval of the “meaning lost”
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toward others and in the world in a concrete situation and given moment is also essentially a way of behaving toward oneself, starting from this position, it is possible to explore sense relations, both according to the meaningfulness encountered within the world (the sense of content) and according to those motives and tendencies whose orientation the act of experiencing carries with it (the sense of reference). The patient’s capacity to grasp these indications pre- served by experience is not a technical or random matter—less still is it guided by an ideal of certainty established a priori; rather, it is the outcome of the fact of allowing oneself to be questioned by becoming involved in a search for meaning.
An intense participation in the investigation, then, is what enables the patient to gradually access the most invisible areas of life. The fact of following those traces makes it possible to clarify the patient’s experience by tracing its sense back to the original motives. This process of moving back through an enacting understanding, following the direction imposed by traces, discloses, explicates, and articulates those horizons, until the overall thematic sense is attained.
(d) The presentation and thematic articulation of the sense of content and its appro- priation represent the fourth movement of the method, which discloses a new possible interpretation of the various situations under investigation. The estab- lishment of this interpretative condition leads to the development of new trajec- tories and to a renewal of ipseity in the present—a renewal which cannot be confined to the task of acquiring knowledge detached from concrete being-there (according to the theoretical approach) but which rather co-constitutes ipseity itself.
(e) We have thus reached the last movement of the method: the renewal of ipseity, meaning the acquisition of a new mode of access to the sphere of one’s lived experience, and therefore—through the repetition of the movement—the pos- sibility of newly articulating one’s understanding. Thus every new interpreta- tive context becomes a platform and a renewed indication for repeating that
4 3
2 1
5
5. The renewal of ipseity in the present
“The fact of taking charge of what therapy has brought to light implies that what was meaningful for one’s own world becomes meaningful again through the opening up of existence to a renewed movement of understanding and, at the same time, to new horizons of
expectation. Taking charge of oneself, then, means acquiring a new position, taking the initiative, and setting out toward oneself”
From the retrieval of meaning to the taking up of a position with respect to oneself
Table 6.2 (continued)
6.10 Methodological Turning Points
circular movement which leads to an even more in-depth understanding of a life story. We are once again following Heidegger’s teaching: “The interpretation is only fully appropriated when by its ‘enactment’ it is understood that, turning back as it unfolds, it interpretatively informs what it has ‘left behind’ by in each case inserting it at the interpretative level reached; … this, then, is a re-forming and informing … which is nothing but a re-grasping inclusion of previous inter- pretations within the increasing strictness and simplicity of the interpretive coherence (in die zunehmende Straffheit und Vereinfachung des Interpretationszusammenhangs)” (GA 61 1985, p. 163).
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