Greenberg sets out what he regards as four tenets of the relational school (362). These tenets offer an alternative narrative about the creation, location and use of knowledge and its influence within the analytic relationship. Knowledge cannot be retained, nor suggestion avoided, to the extent the analyst might hope. The availability of other knowledge is problematised – contemporaneous knowledge and understanding of the analytic relationship, unilateral consistent technical knowledge on the part of the analyst and, of course, the analyst’s knowledge as access to objective knowledge, are all questioned. Greenberg also speculates as to the analysand’s motivation for pursuing analysis. The option of Freud’s ‘unobjectionable positive transference’ (Freud 1912(a)) as a motivation is problematised due to growing scepticism regarding the knowledge and authority of the analyst and the effectiveness of analytic work. Further, the relational critique of the classical school’s deference to the analyst’s authority and privileged access to reality raises the question of what relational school analysts believe motivates their analysands. Greenberg, with some scepticism, describes the trend for relocating the source of the analysand’s motivation in the
…ways in which the analyst can negotiate a way of being that meets an actual need of the patient’s. In the new model, the analyst’s ability to find and to satisfy crucial needs at crucial times makes analysis possible. Relatively little is said about the patient’s hope, or trust, or courage – the transferential and therefore private and internal side of the unobjectionable positive transference (369).
Greenberg expresses concern about an emerging trend in relational school case reports. That there should be a trend at all is an issue in itself, bearing in mind Greenberg’s emphasis on the unique, unpredictable, uncertain and co-created analytic work of the relational school. Worse yet, the theme is potentially one of therapeutic ‘excess’ dressed up as a ‘morality play.’ Greenberg offers a number of potential examples, including Irwin Hoffman’s description of a striking departure from orthodox analytic practice in acquiescing to his analysand’s demand that he obtain some Valium for her. As Greenberg describes:
The analyst takes a risk and puts him or herself on the line in a highly personal way. In more or less classical terms, the analytic frame is broken. But then the analyst, in a move that has no counterpart in classical descriptions, offers him- or herself, as a person (my italics), to contain the tensions and anxieties the patient is experiencing in consequence of being in treatment. This is the moral of so many relational case reports: they focus on periods in the analysis during which tensions around what is happening are becoming unbearable for both participants. Then, when the analyst behaves in some startling, unexpected, and highly personal way – when, in Irwin Hoffman’s terms (1994), he or she ‘throws away the book’ – the tension is broken. In reaction, the patient is able to relinquish some tie to an archaic internal object and to begin, or to resume, the work of analysis (364).
The Lacanian approach to clinical practice is distinguished from the Anglo-American approach by a different conception of the function of the ego, and the distinction of the ego and the imaginary register from the subject and the symbolic register, and their accompanying transferences. This distinction between the symbolic and imaginary transferences makes sense of Freud’s paradoxical description, in ‘Dynamics of Transference’ (Freud: 1912(a)), of the transference as both the motor of and the greatest obstacle to analysis. Freud attempted to address this paradox through his concept of the unobjectionable positive transference. As described by Bernstein:
The imaginary is the register that encompasses the dual relations between the ego and the specular image and accounts for our attractions, fascinations, and seductions – in particular, our need to synthesize and unify essentially fragmentary experiences. According to Lacan, the relationship between the ego and its specular counterpart is essentially narcissistic, rooted in the early encounter of the ego with its ego-ideal. In essence, the imaginary is the realm that structures our need for likeness and our desire for identification with an other. In contrast, the symbolic is the realm of differentiation and separation in which our most intimate desires unmask themselves to be structured and guided by language, the unconscious, and the social order, which place us in kinship relationships, sex roles, and preinscribed social obligations. It is the order of triadic structures – of the language and culture in which the person is unknowingly inscribed in his or her most private longings and is ‘spoken by’ (1999(a): 291).
The subject is not the same as the individual; it is not the same as a self or a person. A subject comes about through the acquisition of language in which it represents its own being to others. In the very process of representing itself, the subject accedes to a loss because, in selecting the pronoun ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘John’, it enters into a whole symbolic structure (i.e., language) that can only represent but no longer present the individual. More radically so, language that inhabits a whole set of differentiating structures and histories constitutes the individual in its very being. The way we think about ourselves or each other in 1998 as opposed to 1798 is radically different, and yet the pronoun ‘I’ has seemingly remained unchanged (1999(b), p320).