Categories: Interviews

Date: Aug 11, 2011

Title: Interview with Alan Bass

Alan Bass is philosopher and psychoanalyst, a professor at the

New School for Social Research, and a Fellow at IPTAR. He the
author of two books, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of
Eros (2000) and Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness
of Care (2006), He is interviewed by Jared Russell, a senior
candidate at IPTAR.

Alan Bass is philosopher and psychoanalyst, a professor at the

New School for Social Research, and a Fellow at IPTAR. He the
author of two books, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of
Eros (2000) and Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness
of Care (2006), He is interviewed by Jared Russell, a senior
candidate at IPTAR.

JR: Your new book, Interpretation and Difference, fleshes out with
greater complexity the philosophical stakes of your previous
book, Difference and Disavowal, to which it appears as a
companion. It's recognizably more theoretical than clinical, more
philosophical than psychoanalytic. But my impression is that one
of your major concerns is the breakdown of these sorts of
oppositions, to show how philosophy and psychoanalysis fit
together. It would seem wrong or at least inadequate to consider it
simply more theoretical or more philosophical than the previous
book, although you're treating Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, who
are more readily considered philosophers. So, how does the new
book extend the previous work in ways that are still relevant to
clinical practice?

AB: The answer is clearly in the title. Difference and Disavowal

starts with the clinical problem of resistance to interpretation,
concrete patients. There are two basic points: concrete patients
have a defensive stance toward any differentiating process, and
in treatment, interpretation serves a differentiating function. Such
patients will bring to treatment their basic defenses, which will be
manifest against the interpretive process itself. However, I always
feel we learn the most from limit cases. And since these are limit
cases for interpretation, they force us to think about interpretation
in ways that we have not heretofore. Particularly about the
question I call the reality of difference. In Difference and
Disavowal I tried to make clear that one of the things that has to
change for analysts, if they are to work effectively with concrete
patients, is their own conception of reality. If the analyst has the
same concrete understanding of reality as the concrete patient,
[a-----a1 imaginary plane] he or she will never be able to
understand what the patient is defending against, how the patient
is using the presupposition that reality is what is objectively there,
to defend against something else, other aspects of reality. Nor will
the analyst be able to understand why interpretation itself is a
function of an expanded view of reality. In Interpretation and
Difference my aim is to look at those philosophers who have
reexamined interpretation along with metaphysical
presuppositions about reality. These are, most prominently,
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida.

JR: That was inherent to my question about the breakdown of the

opposition between psychoanalysis and philosophy, because
each of these thinkers you're working with considers himself to be
practicing something other than philosophy as it is traditionally
conceived.

AB: This has always been one of my basic ideas. Freud always
said psychoanalysis cannot be metaphysics. Yet Freud, I believe,
did not understand in depth what metaphysics really means. He
did not understand how he repeated metaphysical
presuppositions in some of his most basic thinking, including what
it means to practice interpretation. So yes, Nietzsche, Heidegger
and Derrida are the great line of thinkers who are trying to think
outside the constraints of metaphysics, all the while
understanding that metaphysics — as Derrida in particular
emphasizes — is not something we can just jump out of. It has to
be very carefully and rigorously understood, then deconstructed
and dismantled, to find other ways of thinking. So that indeed,
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are not philosophers in the
traditional sense, and there is a very strong psychoanalytic cast to
what they do.

JR: Perhaps Nietzsche most of all, who considered himself a

psychologist and genealogist — practicing on history by practicing
with force.

AB: And he uses interpretation as part of what he calls active

thinking and active interpretation, which is an entirely different
conception of interpretation than the reactive, identity-producing,
equality-producing interpretation of metaphysics. Heidegger, I
would say, is a reader of the history of metaphysics in terms of
"symptoms." He is always looking at how metaphysics is the
history of a repression — not repression in the psychoanalytic
sense, but the history of a forgetting of the question of being. But
then metaphysics itself becomes a set of symptoms that manifest
this forgetfulness. There is a kind of theory of compromise
formation in Heidegger, although if he were in the room with me
he wouldn't like to hear that! Derrida, in one of his earliest papers,
picks up on Nietzsche's two interpretations of interpretation:
the metaphysical one, that is always based on the idea of a lost
origin that cannot ever be recovered, (which in many ways has
been the psychoanalytic theory of interpretation), versus
Nietzschean interpretation as active intervention and
differentiating process not grounded in causality and
determinism.

JR: You write that working with concrete patients demands that
the analyst maintain an attitude of questioning. Interpretation
here, non-causally conceived, is not about providing information,
but about holding open a space for asking questions. Does this
mean inhabiting a certain philosophical position in relation to
clinical material, and could we think of philosophy then as an
intrinsically "clinical" project?

AB: "Philosophical" in the way you mentioned a moment ago, not

philosophical in the usual sense. Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Derrida are again not exactly philosophers. Heidegger talks about
a kind of thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science, which is
able to think the complex ways in which science itself is the
inevitable product of metaphysics, contrary to our usual
understanding of science and metaphysics as simply opposed.
That was Freud's problem, that he only saw it the usual way:
science over here, metaphysics over there. Nietzsche had already
understood this before Heidegger. He's very cogent about the
way in which the positivist thought that dominated the science of
his day "halts before the factual" — prevents the development of
a rigorously interpretive psychological discipline of unconscious
processes.

JR: I wanted to emphasize Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as

having practiced philosophy in a non-classical way, in order to
draw out the fact that Interpretation and Difference isn't purely or
"simply" philosophical. I imagine many readers, particularly
clinicians, risk picking it up and thinking, "Oh, this is philosophy,"
or, "It's just theory," as if to say what you're working on is
peripheral to clinical, "practical" concerns.

AB: These thinkers have everything to offer the clinician who gets
to the point of seeing that there are constraints within
psychoanalysis against understanding what it is we are doing
when we interpret.

JR: Putting together previous work that you've done on

Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and of course Derrida, this book
would seem to be the culmination of a large project for you. This
has been a long time coming.

AB: To say the very least! I started as a student of Derrida, and

then for all sorts of personal reasons decided I wanted to become
an analyst, which I did. And I found myself happy as an analyst.
My own orientation was strongly based in Freud, although there
are decades of important work after Freud that have influenced
me. All along I kept working on the philosophy, but it was a thing
apart, and not yet really integrated with my actual clinical work. Of
course Derrida has written a great deal about Freud, much of
which I had translated, so that was always there for me. But the
way in which this project has been so long in coming is the
following. I was in a study group at New York Psychoanalytic on
psychoanalysis and literature. At one point we started to read
Wallace Stevens. And we read one of his most famous poems:
"The Snow Man." I had a kind of light bulb moment, where the
things that Derrida had written about fetishism in Glas seemed to
provide a very good lever for a reading of this extremely profound
poem. I started to present my ideas to the study group, and was
enthusiastically received. I then wrote a paper called "Fetishism,
Reality and The Snow Man," in which the basic argument about
fetishism and the disavowal of difference was elaborated. But
there was still nothing clinical. What happened next was
something I can't quite pin down, but was in the context of
encountering the vexing patients we all encounter, the patients
who resist interpretation.

JR: Patients who resist interpretation, but who keep coming for
treatment.

AB: Exactly. And analysts have always worked with such

patients. I love to cite Karl Abraham's paper from 1919, in which
he describes this phenomenon to a "T." He doesn't have a good
theoretical grasp, but the patients he describes are exactly the
same. In Freud there are moments, for example when he throws
up his hands at patients who accept nothing but "the logic of
soup, with dumplings for arguments." I personally believe that one
of the problems in the Wolf-Man case, which Freud finally came to
understand in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," was that
there were very large pockets of concreteness. And there's a
major reference in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, when Freud
discusses patients who repeat the past, but without a sufficient
degree of aloofness to understand it. He's interested in patients
who repeat painful experiences, but who cannot link it to the past,
so they develop what he calls, in a very telling phrase, a "demonic
transference." I think this is very close to concreteness, but Freud
doesn't really tackle the problem.
Again tracing my own evolution, at one point I had a concrete
case of my own, and simultaneously was supervising the
treatment of a concrete patient in which the analyst was really
stuck. I wanted to help both of us. I don't know exactly how it
happened, but I came to think about these patients in terms of
fetishism as defense against differentiation. These patients have
a great problem differentiating fantasy from reality, they take
fantasy as reality.[as opposed to fetishism as denying sexual
difference] That's why we can't analyze the transference, and yet
as you say they keep coming. Why? That's when I began to think
through my revision of Freud on fetishism, and to see that the
central problem of fetishism as sexual difference could be
extended to fetishistic compromise formations in general.
I then found out that this idea is not original to me. There's a
fundamentally important article by Edith Jacobson, "Denial and
Repression" (1957), in which she very clearly sees the link
between patients who resist interpretation and fetishism. She
doesn't conceive fetishism the same way I do, but from within her
developmental framework she says that such patients reflect a
stage in which the child has differentiated between inner and
outer, but then acts as if that differentiation has not occurred. So
she really sees these patients as poised between differentiation
and non-differentiation. And what's so valuable about her idea is
that it's not a deficit theory of concreteness. There is a lot of
deficit-theorizing of concreteness, but hers is a theory of conflict,
even though she speaks developmentally. So as I say, there are
other people who have seen the link between fetishism and
concreteness: Owen Renik in "The Use of the Analyst as a
Fetish," John Steiner in Psychic Retreats. There's a literature on
concreteness, and a small literature on fetishism and
concreteness. But I found that in this literature, everyone comes
up against the question of differentiation. Some treat it as a major
theme, some don't, but they come up against it.
This is where I draw on my philosophical perspective. Given
everything I've learned from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, I
think that one reason analysts do not explore the question of
differentiation in depth, is because they don't have the tools to do
so. It takes them into a way of thinking about reality that they
haven't been prepared for. That was exactly Freud's problem. He
got embroiled in the famously oxymoronic phrase, "reality of
castration," because he could only think of sexual difference in
terms of phallic and castrated, presence and absence. He
couldn't think sexual difference in any non-concrete way.
[how can one think of sexual-differnce in a non-concrete way
then?]

JR: Not just Freud, also his critics. Psychologists are generally
unable to think beyond a classical, Cartesian framework:
presence and absence, subjects and objects.
AB: But it's about more than the "subject/object dichotomy,"
which has become a buzzword today. This is why I insist on the
question of reality. It's about the expansion of our thinking about
reality, a thinking you traditionally see in philosophy or in certain
branches of science, a thinking about space and time. You
mentioned, when we started to speak, holding open a certain
space. This is one of the big themes of the book: interpretation
and difference in relation to a non-metaphysical thinking of space
and time. This is what my chapter on Heidegger tries to spell out.
It is a huge theme in Derrida, whose concept of differance has to
do with space and time — the becoming-space of time and the
becoming-time of space — and certainly has everything to do with
his thinking about interpretation. I'm trying to link interpretation to
a non-metaphysical thinking of space and time. This is totally
necessary for analysts if they're going to understand what they do
when they interpret, especially in relation to the
environmental space of analysis, and to time in analysis.
[Lacan certainly thought of a different type of time in analysis, the
time of the dream—or the 3 times of logical time, or the pulsation
of the opening and closing of the unconscious]

JR: It's true that "subject/object dichotomy" is a buzzword these

days, but that's because the background most analysts are
trained in is cognitive psychology. Cognition describes a certain
relationship to reality, where I'm inside my head and the objective
world is out there, and I take in information through various
perceptual and mechanical processes. Two analysts — Winnicott
and Loewald — who try to think beyond this simplistic paradigm,
are also two thinkers most touched by philosophy, certainly
Loewald
AB: Certainly Loewald, who is a major presence in both books.
The idea that the basic phenomenological function of
interpretation — not the content of interpretation but, what
we're doing when we interpret — is a differentiating process —
that's Loewald's idea. Loewald's conception of the therapeutic
action of psychoanalysis is rooted in the internalization of the
differential between the patient and the analyst. Loewald is also
specific about his debt to Heidegger. You can hear Heidegger on
almost every page of Loewald. Now, Winnicott…Yes,
transitionality is about space and about time, what he calls the
"root of symbolism in time." Winnicott, in a potentially powerful
way, takes us into what he explicitly calls a "third area" thinking,
which is neither subjective nor objective, but which thinks about
space and about time as the possibilities of symbolization.

JR: You seem hesitant about something in Winnicott though.

AB: I'm hesitant about a lot in Winnicott. I'm hesitant about his
somewhat artificial separation of interpretation and setting. I think
he looks at interpretation only in the traditional way. Where he
innovates is in his conception of the setting, but I don't think he
sees what I would call, following Loewald, the differentiating
function of all interpretation as part of the space and time of the
setting. This leads to a clinical approach I don't agree with.

JR: A re-parenting model, where one is trying to kick-start once

again some arrested developmental process.

AB: Basically, yes.

JR: You describe fetishized transferences — the concrete patient
has a transference to the framework, to the clock, to various
objects in the room. But I wonder if the idea of a fetishized or
"desymbolized transference" isn't redundant. That is, isn't the
essence of transference a certain desymbolization, a defensive
refusal to witness what's going on in the symbolic dimension of
experience? Isn't transference in the end the paradigmatic case of
concreteness, [concreteness=Lacan’s Imaginary?] which is why
Freud describes transference as both the greatest resistance to
and the very possibility of an interpretive approach?

AB: I think one has to examine that question in depth. This is one
of the things I talk about in Difference and Disavowal. Take Freud,
who understands, as you cite him, transference as the greatest
ally and the greatest enemy of the treatment. There Freud is still
thinking in the usual terms of the symbolized transference, in
terms of the transference as potentially liberating the drives, and
transference as resistance to the drives. But, where this becomes
a complex and essential question, is in the idea of transference as
repetition. The question is: what is repetition? [It is one of the
Four Fundamental Concepts] This is one of the main topics of my
Derrida chapter. Derrida is a thinker for whom the concept of
difference is inseparable from that of repetition, and so the
question becomes: what is transference in relation to repetition of
difference? One of the things I'm particularly out to show,
particularly in the Derrida chapter, is something along of the lines
of what you just articulated. It is that we need an expanded
thinking of repetition, as well as of difference, in order to
understand how it is that transference inevitably becomes
concrete. This is due to what Derrida calls the constitutive
duplicity of repetition. He speaks of classical and non-classical
repetition. Non-classical repetition for Derrida has to do with the
same kind of thinking that addresses the reality of difference. He's
trying to think time and space, to use the Kantian phrase, as
conditions of possibility. For Derrida, there has to be a possibility
of repetition — iterability — for there even to be an encounter with
anything.
Now, transference can operate in either way. Our traditional
understanding of transference is that first there's the thing, then
there's the repetition. First I have my Oedipus complex, then I
repeat this with my analyst. Non-classical repetition, which
concerns conditions of possibility, has everything to do not with
content, but with process. Concrete patients are reacting to the
analytic environment, and to the differentiating function intrinsic to
it. They always encounter precisely what they defend against: the
repetition of difference. But remember that difference is not an
objectifiable thing, is not objectively present, comes from the
order of reality that one can't see, hear, touch, taste or smell, like
space and time themselves. What concrete patients, I think, are
really reacting to, is the relation between the actual structure of
analysis, (what's more repetitive than analysis?), and the function
of that repetition, which is the encounter with differentiation. [the
end of analysis in Lacan, the analyst embodies absolute
difference] What is being encountered is the repetition that is the
only possibility for change. Hence, I think that these patients are
defensively concrete: they insist that what is real is only what is
objectively present, because they are traumatized by the
nonobjective reality of difference. If you presume these patients
are repeating an objectifiable piece of mental content — again,
the Oedipus complex, for instance — interpretations will misfire.

JR: But the point being that, by talking about concrete patients in
the way you described them — as limit cases — that's to say that
this is not just a specific diagnostic entity. These patients are
reacting to something that's there in any analytic treatment, that's
intrinsic to an interpretive framework, and that is the condition of
possibility of transference as a clinical phenomenon.

AB: Yes, precisely. In Difference and Disavowal, I went to great

lengths to show the importance of Freud's astonishing change of
heart at the end of his life, that the basic model of compromise
formation is fetishism, his move from a repression model to a
splitting and disavowal model. Freud is trying to show how in both
neurosis and psychosis that is what we're seeing. I try to extend
Freud, to say that the basic question of compromise formation as
fetishism is primary disavowal of differentiation. My point about
certain philosophers is that they've already done this. When
Derrida talks about the constitutive duplicity of all repetition, he is
coming from the place to which we need to go. His essay
"Resistances of Psychoanalysis" [Freud wrote Resistances to
Psycho-analysis] is an examination of what analysis itself really
means. It's like what you're saying about transference: what
Derrida is trying to show, by a very close reading of Freud, is that
the very possibility of analysis emerges from something that is
always, in the traditional sense, unanalyzable. That's the
importance of Derrida's reading of Freud on the uninterpretable
navel of the dream. The project of analysis always has to
encounter something that is unanalyzable, [the bedrock of
castrastion?] and I think transference is an excellent example.
That's what's so befuddling about concrete patients: they do seem
to form transferences of the sort that should be interpretable, but
that are not. They show us where transference and interpretation
are an encounter with the unanalyzable.

JR: As Freud did at the end of his career, in his rethinking of the
basic nature of defense — turning from a classical psychology to
a more philosophical appreciation of the question of reality.

AB: Yes.

JR: So, to make a broad summary statement, we could say that

repression — defense at the level of unconscious fantasy as
representation — is concerned with psychological content;
disavowal — defense at the level of the trace of self-as-other — is
concerned with ontological structure.

AB: You're using the philosophical vocabulary, but still yes. That's
what I'm trying to show in Interpretation and Difference. When I
talk about the necessity of expanding our view of reality, I mean
expanding it into the areas akin to what Heidegger calls being.
For Derrida, this is always a question of trace. I'm trying to get
analysts to consider how and why these "ontological" questions
are necessary for analysis. You have the beginnings of that in
Winnicott; transitionality is an opening to that kind of thinking.

JR: I think the same resources can be drawn from the theory of
transitional phenomenality that you find in Loewald's theory of
primary narcissism. But getting back to Freud rethinking the entire
edifice of psychoanalysis as both a theoretical and a clinical
project at the end of his career —

AB: He starts to rethink it, it's only a bare beginning.

JR: But it's a bare beginning where the Freudian project for a
scientific psychology begins to coincide with, or at least to open
up toward, the Heideggerian project for a fundamental ontology —
an analytic thinking about being that is necessarily clinical.

AB: That is certainly the position I'm advocating in Interpretation

and Difference. But here you also need to know the specifics. The
early Heidegger of Being and Time, the Heidegger who rethinks
interpretation as a rethinking of space and time, who understands
anxiety as ontological or existential, offers tremendous resources
for expanding our conception of what interpretation is and how it
functions. There are similar resources in the later Heidegger, the
Heidegger who is so much more preoccupied with the question of
difference. The later Heidegger — and this is the interesting link
to Nietzsche — is always thinking about difference as relation,
separation, tension, opening, uncanniness. This is the lever for a
thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science in a traditional
sense.

JR: To me, this is what psychoanalysis closes itself off to by

confining itself to the mental health professions: psychology,
social work —

AB: And psychiatry!

JR: Psychiatry most of all! But would you go so far as to say that
there is a threat to the future of our discipline if we don't start
thinking outside these areas? Not to say that all analysts should
become philosophers, but there seems to be a refusal even to
consider questions like these. In my experience, this refusal is
prevalent today, and the result is a serious lack of creativity.

AB: There is a threat to the discipline. I'm not saying the only
potential source of creativity in psychoanalysis is of the kind that
I'm advocating. I think there are many possible others. But I would
say (with all due immodesty) that this one is necessary. It's
necessary because there has been more than a hundred years'
worth of thought, starting with Nietzsche, that has proceeded
along lines parallel to and converging with psychoanalysis,
thought that can provide analysts with the concepts that they
need. Just to come back to the basic understanding of
interpretation: is the function of interpretation to produce an
identity between past and present? Is the function of interpretation
to be true, either in terms of a coherence theory or a
correspondence theory of truth? Psychoanalysis has gone round
and round in this debate, and it has never come to any
conclusion. Why? Because it doesn't have the tools to come to a
conclusion. There is a revised conception of truth in Nietzsche, in
relation to interpretation. There is a revised conception of truth in
Heidegger, in relation to interpretation. Derrida is totally immersed
in Freud and goes even further, but in going further it is always in
relation to interpretation.

JR: The openness of these thinkers to psychoanalysis should

encourage a reciprocal openness of analysis itself.
AB: I'm glad you used that word. These have to be reciprocal
enterprises. I myself see no other way of thinking about
unconscious processes with the rigor that they deserve. I think
that is why, going back to your idea of a kind of degeneration of
psychoanalysis into a cognitive discipline, the rigor with which
Freud started in thinking about unconscious processes is being
lost. Some imagine that it's been exhausted. And there's the huge
clinical problem of whether our basic thinking about unconscious
processes is always therapeutically effective. And there the real
answer is: no. This is again what Freud was starting to think about
at the end of his life, switching his models away from repression
and toward splitting and disavowal.[from metaphor to
metonymy—which came first anyway?] Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Derrida would all explain why that would inevitably be so.

JR: Which is also to make a pitch for the necessity of an

interdisciplinary approach in psychoanalysis.

AB: Yes, absolutely. For Derrida certainly.

JR: But also for Freud, for whom resistance to lay analysis was
the greatest resistance psychoanalysis faced.

AB: But why did Freud say that? I think it's about specificity — the
specificity of psychoanalysis as a discipline that thinks rigorously
about unconscious processes. Freud was very clear that no
matter what the discipline — whether it's a traditional mental
health discipline, or philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology —
there's no particular discipline that has a claim to that. Only
psychoanalysis has a claim to that rigor. And then the question
becomes: are there people from other disciplines who, because
they have been trained with a similar rigor, and have understood
the specificity of psychoanalysis, can bring something to
psychoanalysis that can expand it, in what I believe are necessary
directions? Of course, I'm saying yes. I don't see how it could be
otherwise.

Three thoughts on Alan Bass and his endeavor:

Jamieson Webster pointed out to me the reason why the concrete
patient resists interpretations is because they are bombarded with
all kinds of interpretations
Disavowal is not an either/or oscillation, but a belief and non-
belief at the same time
That Alan Bass is a Derridean analyst goes hand in hand with
Derrida’s emphasis on metonymy. AB emphasizes a generalized
disavowal using Freud’s texts, Fetishism, Splitting of the Ego, and
Chapter VIII of Outline of Psychoanalysis. Lacan emphasizes
metaphor moves on in his late period to a theory of generalized
foreclosure as the basis of all clinical structures.