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From: John L Butters, Sydney, Aust
Date: 27 Jul 1997
Time: 07:21:20
Having recently commenced my training in self psychology I have found myself brimming with ideas, many unfinished, some unfurnished. My question comes from an idea regarding the similarity between Derrida's operation of "differance", and the intersubjective space. Can such a comparison be validly made? I think perhaps; and the answer has an amount to bear on the notion of the myth of analyst neutrality. The following idea is somewhat clumsy, and it goes something like this. Derrida's "differance" represents an attempt to gain a fuller understanding of the nature of meaning, of logos; how it arises, and how it might be mobilised. Rather than going into a measured reading and critique of this concept, I think it will be enough to say that for Derrida, meaning is not something that exists, a priori; it is necessarily something that arises through the evolutionary process of collision between subjectivities, between self and other. It might be said that meaning exists only for the participants of the collision; that the space created by a self and an-other in collision produces a context of meaning that is relevant only to the participants. In this way, meaning is both shared and personally bound, and available only through the space created by participating subjects. To state then that one participant denies subjective participation (neutrality) is to deny the mobilisation of the meaning inherant in the collision. The idea runs counter to Derrida's notion of differance which stresses the necessity of engaged subjectivities. Stemming from this, Stolorow's myth of neutrality offers a perspective that follows this derridean idea of meaning through collision. It seems plausible to state that there can be no meaning without subjective engagement; both Stolorow and Derrida's discussions ask us to consider this point Is there anyone out there who has considered this similarity, I am interested to hear.
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