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From: William J. Coburn
Date: 06 May 1997
Time: 21:31:28
I enjoyed and found useful Stolorow's summary paper on neutrality, and I found Miller's response intriguing and important. Once again, we are shown an excellent example of how epistemology continually creeps if not barges into considerations of psychoanalytic concepts. What is it exactly that we "see" or experience in our patients, and to what degree can/should we elevate that experience to the privileged position of "truth" or "reality"? For me, I think that we are inextricably embedded in our own subjective stances. What I I have found useful, though, in addition to attempting to reflect upon my subjectivity, is to explore the attitudes that I hold toward and about my own subjectivity (i.e., how loosely or tenaciously do I hold onto my own epistemology, how embedded in my own subjectivity do I think I am?). These have been, for me, vital and useful questions to consider.
As far as Miller's reference to the Myth of Empathic Knowing, I feel this is a misreading of Stolorow's notion of sustained empathic inquiry. In Stolorow's theory/metaphor, the analyst IS "trying to juggle an understanding of his patient's subjectivity, his own subjectivity, and the interaction between them," to quote Miller. But it is a rather abrupt conceptual leap--one I do not think Stolorow makes--to assume that juggling subjectivities is tantamount to "truly know[ing] what is going on in another person." I do not think his (Stolorow's) theory/metaphor places any specific claims or assumes any privileged access to the Truth/Reality of a given patient.
Regarding Miller's conceptualization of the Myth of Decentering, he asks epistemologically and pragmatically useful questions (Is it possible actually to decenter oneself from one's subjectivity, and if so, what exactly does that mean?). Stolorow (1997, paper presented at the recent APA Div 39 Meeting in Denver) recently re-examined the meanings implicit in the Piagetian term, decentering, and offered some needed clarification. If memory serves, he suggested that in fact the term has become misconstrued in ways that have prompted the very conceptual conundrum to which Miller refers. He recommended that we perhaps return to the original spirit of Piaget's usage, since it is not reasonable to assume that one can actually place one's subjectivity aside to view "objectively" the patient's subjective experiential world with an unclouded, undistorted lens.
As far as purity of metaphor, be it Stolorow's, Miller's, or my own, I would agree with Miller that one metaphor is "no more logically pure than [another]." Even the word "pure" conjures, for me, an objectivist, positivist, and representationist epistemology--a perspective less clinically useful for me
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