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From: Giles Bixler, MA, RCC., Victoria, BC
Date: 5/23/98
Stolorow accused of making myths: Debunking the debunker! I'm sure he would enjoy it if it were well-done. Personally I'm still wrapping my head around his debunking of Kohut's concept of empathic immersion which S. reduced (or attempted to reduce) to a myth (the myth of "immaculate perception") during his recent April presentation in Seattle. I immediately cottoned to his notion that empathy is not a union engineered mystically by the therapist with the patient. Instead S. presented his alternative explanation for what happens in empathy: The therapist conducts an "analog search" for experiences in his or her life similar to that of the patient. If one is correct (enough) in interpretation based on this search for similar experience, the patient will feel seen, perceived. I like this explanation because it implies something universal about human experience, that despite each person's unique subjective experience, we have some common touchpoints, mainly our common biological heritage, our bodies, the ground of our feeling life. If Stolorow has a myth, based on my one experience with him in person, it's that myths can be reduced and debunked and ought to be. This is fine if it's not carried to an extreme. For example... Kohut's myth of empathic immersion: What does one make of the real subjective experience of having entered into the patient's world when an admitted shot in the dark (analog search) hits the mark and the patient recovers a portion of lost personhood? Is there not something transcendent going on here? Our patients take our offerings and they also run a kind of search, a search for the humanity of the therapist, a search for common ground. This is a two way street where the patient takes his or her perception of us based on experiences unintended by us, based on the myriad behavioral nuances we display, conscious and unconscious, and builds a person out of his or her own analog searches, a person to trust and relate to and with whom to re-experience dangerous moments which formed organizing principles which recapitulate these dangerous experiences. Can this complexity really be reduced to cybernetics? Is this not a form of magic? I suppose you can go on and on speeding up the brain as a processing agent, whizzing through somatic markers, scanning, revising organizing principles, constructing, re-constructing, guessing????, and making halting then stunning then confusing leaps of faith to fresh organizing principles (possibilities?) regressing and rebuilding [actually this herky-jery path we've all experienced does seem to support reductionism] without returning to at least intuition and mystery. I presume Bob has an explanation for this, too, or a debunking. That's OK. The thinking and feeling that's going on me since I've been chewing on intersubjectivity is very refreshing.
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