Every transference situation provokes a countertransference situation, which arises out of the analyst’s identification of himself with the analysand’s (internal) objects (this is the ‘complementary countertransference’). These countertransference situations may be repressed or emotionally blocked but probably they cannot be avoided; certainly they should not be avoided if full understanding is to be achieved. These countertransference reactions are governed by the laws of the general and individual unconscious. Among these the laws of talion is especially important. Thus, for example, every positive transference situation is answered by a positive countertransference; to every negative transference there responds, in one part of the analyst, a negative countertransference. It is important that the analyst is conscious of this law, for awareness of it is fundamental to avoid ‘drowning’ in the countertransference. If he is not aware of it he can avoid entering the vicious circle of the analysand’s neurosis, which will hinder or even prevent the work of therapy.
A simplified example: If the patient’s neurosis centres round a conflict with his introjected father, he will project the latter upon the analyst and treat him as his father; the analyst will feel treated as such-he will feel badly treated-and he will react internally, in a part of his personality, according to the treatment he receives. If he fails to be aware of this reaction, his behaviour will inevitably be affected by it, and he will renew the situation that, to a greater or lesser degree, helped to establish the analysand’s neurosis. Therefore, it is very important that the analyst develops within himself an ego observer of his countertransference reactions, which is, naturally, continuous. Perception of these countertransference reactions will help to become conscious of the continuous transference situations of the patient and interpret them rather than be unconsciously ruled by these reactions, as not as seldom to happen. A well-known example is the ‘revengeful silence’ of the analyst. If the analyst is unaware of these reactions there is danger that the patient will repeat, in his transference experience, the vicious circle brought about by the projection and introjection of ‘bad objects’ (in reality neurotic ones) and the consequent pathological anxieties and defences, but transference interpretation made possibly by the analyst’s awareness of his countertransference experience make it possible to open important breaches in this vicious circle.
To return to the previous example: If the analyst is conscious of what the projection of the father-imago upon him provokes in his own countertransference, he can more easily make the patient conscious of this projection and the consequent mechanisms. Interpretation of these mechanisms will show the patient that the present reality is not identical with his inner perceptions (for, it was, the analyst would not interpret and otherwise act as an analyst); the patient then introjects a reality better than his inner world. This sort of rectification does not take place when the analyst is under the sway of his unconscious countertransference.
Let us, least of mention, consider some application to these principles. To return to the question of what the analyst does during the session and what happens within him, one might reply, at first thought, that the analyst listens. Still, this is not completely true: He listens most of the time, or wishes to listen, but is variably doing so, Ferenczi refers to this fact and expresses the opinion that the analyst’s distractibility is unimportant, for the patient at such moments must intuitively be certainly in resistance. Ferenczi’s remark (which dates from the year 1918) sounds like an echo from the era wheen the analyst was mainly interested in the repressed impulses. Because now that we attempt to analyse resistance, the patient’s manifestations of resistance are as significant as any other of his productions. At any rate, Ferenczi here refers to a countertransference response and deduces from it the analysand’s psychological situation. He says “. . . we have unconsciously reacted to the emptiness and futility of the associations given now the withdrawal of the conscious charge.” The situation might be described as one of mutual withdrawal. The analyst’s withdrawal is a response to the analysand’s withdrawal-which, however, is a response to an imagined or really psychological position of the analyst. If we have withdrawn-if we are not listening but are thinking of something else-we may use this event in the service of the analysis like any other information we find. The quilt we may feel over such a withdrawal is just as utilizable analytically as any other countertransference reaction. Ferenczi’s next words, “the danger of the doctor’s falling asleep, . . . need not be regarded as grave because we awake at the first occurrence important for the treatment,” are clearly intended to appease this quilt. Nevertheless, to better than an allay than the analyst’s quilt would be to use it to promote the analysis-and so as to use the quilt would be the best way of alleviating it. In fact, we encounter here a cardinal problem of the relation between transference and countertransference, and of the therapeutic process in general. For the analyst’s withdrawal is only an example of how the unconscious of one person responds to the unconscious of another. This response seems in part to be governed, as far as we identify ourselves with unconscious objects of the analysand, siding the law of talion; and, as far as this; law unconsciously influences the analyst, there is danger of a vicious circle of actions between them, for the analysand as responds 'talionically' in his turn, and so on without end.
Looking more closely, we see that the 'talionic response' or 'identification with the aggressor' (the frustrating patient) is a complex process. Such a psychological process in the analyst usually starts with a feeling of displeasure or of some anxiety as a response to this aggression (frustration) and, because of this feeling, the analyst identifies himself with the 'aggressor'. By the term 'aggressor' we must designate not only the patient but also some internal object of the analyst (especially his own superego or the internal persecutor) now projected on the patient. This identification with the aggressor, or persecutor, causes a feeling of quilt; probably it always does so, although awareness of the quilt may be repressed. For what happens is, on a small scale, a process of melancholia, just as Freud described it: The object has partially abandoned us; we identify ourselves with the lost object, and then we accuse the introjected 'bad objects-in other words, we have quilt feedings. This may be sensed in Ferenczi’s remark quoted above, in which mechanisms are at work designed to protect the analyst against these quilt feelings: Denial of quilt (‘the danger is not grave’) and a certain accusation against the analysand for the 'emptiness' and 'futility' of his associations. Onto which this way becomes a vicious circle-a kind of paranoid ping-pong, has entered. The analytic situation.
Two situations will illustrate the frequent occurrence in both the complementary and the concordant identifications and the vicious circle that these simulations may cause.
(1). One transference situation of regular occurrences consists in the patient’s seeing in the analyst his own superego. The analyst identifies himself with the id and ego of the patient and with the patient’s dependence upon his superego. He also identifies himself with the same superego situation in which the patient places him-and experiences in this way the domination of the superego over the patient’s ego. The relation of the ego to the superego is, at bottom, as depressive and paranoid situations, the relation of the superego to the ego is, on the same plane, a manic one as far as this term may be used to designate the dominating, controlling, and accusing attitude of the superego toward the ego. In this sense we may broadly speak, that to a “depressive-paranoid” transference in the analysand there corresponds-as for the complementary identification-a “manic” countertransference in the analyst. This, in turn, may entail various fears and quilt feelings.
(2). When the patient, in defence against this situation, identifies himself with the superego, he may place the analyst in the situation of the dependent and incriminated ego. The analyst will not only identify himself with this position of the patient; he will experience the situation with the content the patient gives it; he will feel subjugated and accused, and may react to some degree with anxiety and quilt. To a “manic” transference situation (of the type called mania for reproaching) there corresponds, then-regarding the complementary identification-a “depressive-paranoid” countertransference situation.
The analyst will normally experience these situations with only a part of his being. Leaving another part free to take note of them in a way suitable for the treatment. Perception of such a countertransference situation by the analyst and his understanding of it as a psychological response to a certain transference situation will enable him the better to grasp the transference when it is active. It is precisely these situations and the analyst’s behaviour regarding them, and in particular his interpretations of them, that are important for the process of therapy, for they are the moments when the vicious circle within which the necrotic habitually move-by projecting his inner world outside and reintrojecting this world-is or is not interrupted. Moreover, at these decisive points the vicious circle may be re-enforced by the analyst, if he is unaware of having entered it.
A brief example: an analysand repeats with the analyst his “neurosis of failure,” closing himself up to every interpretation or repressing it at once, reproaching the analyst for the uselessness of the analysis, foreseeing nothing better in the future, continually declaring his complete indifference to everything. The analyst interprets the patient’s position toward him, and its origin, in its various aspects. He shows the patient his defence against the danger of becoming overly dependent, of being abandoned, or being tricked, or of suffering counter-aggression by the analyst, if he abandons his armour and indifference toward the analyst. He interprets to the patient his projection of bad internal objects and his subsequent sado-masochistic behaviour ion the transference; his need of punishment; his triumph and 'masochistic revenge' against the transferred patients; his defence against the 'depressive position' by means of schizoid, paranoid, and manic defences (Melanie Klein): And he interprets the patient’s rejection of a bond that in the unconscious has homosexual significance. Nevertheless, it may happen that all these interpretations, in spite of being directed to the central resistances and connected with the transference situation, suffer the same fate for the same reasons; they fall into the 'whirl in a void' of the 'neurosis of failure'. Now the decisive moments arrive. The analyst, subdued by the patient’s resistance, may begin to feel anxious over the possibility of failure and feel angry with the patient. When this occurs in the analyst, the patient feels it coming, for his own 'aggressiveness' and other reactions have provoked it; consequently he fears the analyst’s anger. If the analyst, threatened by failure, or to put in more precisively threatened by his own super-ego or by his owe archaic objects that have found an agent provocateur in the patient, acts under the influence of these internal objects and of his paranoid and depressive anxieties, the patient again finds himself confronting a reality like that of his real or fantasized childhood experiences and like that of his inner world. So the vicious circle continues and may even be re-enforced. Yet if the analyst grasps the importance of this situation, if, through his own anxiety or anger, he comprehends what is happening in the analysand, and if he overcomes, thanks to the new insight, his negative feelings and interprets what has happened in the analysand, being now in this new positive counter-transference situation, then he may have made a breach-be it large or small-in the vicious circle.
All the same, it continues to be considered that the phenomena of countertransference experiences are divided into two classes. One might be designed 'countertransference thought', the other 'transference positions' for example just cited may serve as illustration of this latter class: The essence of these example lies in the fact that the analyst feels anxiety and is angry with the analysand-that is to say, he is in a certain countertransference 'position'.
Further to explicate upon countertransference relations is that a potential patient is started of a session and wishes to pay his fees upfront. He gives the analyst a thousand-peso note and asks for change. The analyst happens to have his money in another room and goes out to fetch it, leaving the thousand pesos upon his desk. While between leaving and returning, the fantasy occurs to him that the analysand will take back the money and say that the analyst took it away with him. On his return he finds the thousand pesos where he left it. When the account has been settled, the analysand lies down and tells the analyst that when he was left alone he had fantasies of keeping the money, of kissing the note goodbye, and so on. The analyst’s fantasy was based upon what he already knew of the patient, who in previous sessions had expressed a strong distinction to pay up front. The identity of the analyst’s fantasy and the patient’s fantasy of keeping the money may be explained as springing from a connection between the two unconsciousness, a connection that might be regarded as a “psychological symbiosis” between the two personalities. To the analysand’s wish to take money from him (already expressed often), the analyst reacts by identifying himself both with this desire and with the object toward which the desire is directed. Hence appears his fantasy of being robbed. For these identifications to come about there must evidently exist a potential identity. One may presume that every possible psychological constellation in the patient also exists in the analyst, and the constellation that correspond to the patient’s is brought into play in the analyst. A symbiosis result, and now in the analyst spontaneously occur thoughts corresponding to the psychological constellation in the patient.
In fantasies of this type just described and in the example of the analyst angry with his patient, we are dealing with identifications with the id, with the ego, and with the object of the analysand: In both cases, then, it is a matter of Countertransference reactions. However, there is an important difference between one situation and the other, and this difference does not seem to lie only in the emotional intensity. Before elucidating this difference, it should be marked and noted that the Countertransference reaction that appears in the last example (the fantasy about the thousand pesos) should also be used as a means to further the analysis. It is, moreover, a typical example of those “spontaneous thoughts” to which Freud and others refer in advising the analyst to keep his attention “floating” and in stressing the importance of these thoughts for understanding the patient. The countertransference reactions exemplified by the story of the thousand pesos are characterized by the fact that they threaten no danger to the analyst’s objective attitude of an observer. That, the danger is rather than the analyst will not pay sufficient attention to these thoughts or will fail to use them for understanding and interpretation. The patient’s corresponding ideas are not always conscious, from his own Countertransference “thoughts” and feelings the analyst may guess what is repressed or rejected. Recalling again our usage of the term is important 'Countertransference', for many writers, perhaps the majority, means by not these thoughts of the analyst but rather than other class of reactions, the “Countertransference positions.” This is one reason that differentiating these two kinds of reaction is useful.
The outstanding difference between the two lies in the degree to which the ego is involved in the experience. In one case, the reactions are experienced as thoughts, free association, or fantasies, with no great emotional intensity and frequently as if they were moderately foreign to the ego. In the other case, the analyst’s ego is involved in the Countertransference experience. The experience is felt by him with greater intensity and as reality, and here danger of his “drowning” in this experience. In the former example of the analyst who gets angry because of the analysand’s resistances, the analysand is felt as really based by one part of the analyst (‘countertransference position’), although the latter does not express his anger. Now these two kinds of Countertransference reactions differ, because they have different origins. The reaction experienced by the analyst as thought or fantasy arises from the existence of an analogous situation in the analysand-that is, from his readiness in perceiving and communicating his inner situation (as happens with the thousand pesos)-whereas, the reaction experienced with great intensity, even as reality, by the analyst arises from acting out by the analysand (as with the ‘neurosis of failure’). Undoubtedly there are also the same analysts, he is a factor that helps to decide this difference. The analyst has, it seems, two ways of responding. He may respond to some situation by perceiving his reaction, while to others he responds by acting out (alloplastically or autoplastically). Which type of response occurs in the analyst depends partly on his own neurosis, on his inclination to anxiety, on his defence mechanisms, and especially on his tendencies to repeat (act out) instead of making conscious. It is here that we encounter a factor that determines the dynamics of countertransference. It is the one Freud emphasized as determining the special intensity of transference in analysis, and it is also responsible for the special intensity of countertransference.
The great intensity of certain countertransference reactions is to be explained by the existence in the analyst of pathological defences against the increase of archaic anxieties and unresolved inner conflicts. Transference, becomes intense not only because it serves as a resistance to remembering, as Freud says, but also because it serves as a defence against a danger within the transference experience itself. In other words, the “transference resistance” is frequently a repetition of defences that must be intensified lest a catastrophe is repeated in transference. The same is true of countertransference. Clearly, these catastrophes are related to becoming aware of certain aspects of one’s own instincts. Take, for instance, the analyst who becomes anxious and inwardly angry over the intense masochism of the analysand within the analytic situation. Such masochism frequently rouses old paranoid and depressive anxieties and guilt feelings in the analyst, who, faced with the aggression directed by the patient against his own ego, and faced with the effects of this aggression, finds himself in his unconscious confronted anew with his early crimes. It is often just this childhood conflict of the analyst, with their aggression, that led him into this profession in which he tries to repair the objects of the aggression and to overcome or deny his guilt. Because of the patient’s strong masochism, this defence, which consists of the analyst’s therapeutic action, fails and the analyst is threatened with the return of the catastrophe, the encounter with the destroyed object. In this way the intensity of the “negative countertransference” (the anger with the patient) usually increases because of the failure of the countertransference defence (the therapeutic action) and the analyst’s subsequent increase of anxiety over a catastrophe in the countertransference experience (the destruction of the object).
The 'abolition of rejection' in analysis determines the dynamics of transference and, in particular, the intensity of the transference of the 'rejecting' internal objects (in the first place, of the superego). The 'abolition of rejection' begins with the communication to the analysand, and here we have an important difference between his situation and that of the analysand and between the dynamics of transference and those of countertransference. However, this difference is not so great as might be at first supposed, for two reasons: First, because it is not necessary that the free associations be expressed for projections and transferences to take place, and secondly, because the analyst expresses of certain associations of a personal nature even when he does not seem to do so. These communications begin, one might say, with the plate on the front door that says Psychoanalysis or Doctor. What motive (about the unconscious) would the analyst have for wanting to cure if it were not he that made the patient ill? In this way the patient is already, simply by being a patient, the creditor, the accuser, the
'Superego' of the analyst, and the analyst is his debtor.
To what transference situation does the analyst usually react with a particular countertransference? Study of this question would enable one, in practice, to deduce the transference situations from the countertransference reactions. Next we might ask, to what imago or conduct of the object-to what imagined or real countertransference situation-does the patient respond with a particular transference? Many aspects of these problems have been amply studied by psychoanalysis, but the specific problem of the relation of transference and countertransference in analysis has received little attention.
The subject is so broad that we can discuss only a few situations and those incompletely, restricting ourselves to certain aspects. Therefore, we must choose for discussion only the most important countertransference situations, those that most disturb the analyst’s task and that clarify important points in the double neurosis, that arise in the analytic situation-a neurosis usually of very different intensity in the two participants.
1. What is the significance of countertransference anxiety?
Countertransference anxiety may be described in general and simplified terms as of depressive or paranoid character. In depressive anxiety the inherent danger consisted in having destroyed the analysand or made him ill. This anxiety may arise to a greater degree when the analyst faces the danger that the patient may commit suicide, and to a lesser degree when there is deterioration or danger of deterioration in the patient’s state of health. Yet the patient’s simple failure to improve and his suffering and depression may also provoke depressive anxieties in the analyst. These anxieties usually increase the desire to heal the patient.
In referring to paranoid anxieties differentiating it between is important “direct” and 'indirect' countertransference. In direct countertransference the anxieties are caused by danger of an intensification of aggression from the patient himself. Indirect Countertransference the anxieties are caused by danger of aggression from third parties onto whom the analyst has made his chief transference-for instance, the members of the analytic society, for the future of the analyst’s object relationship with the society is part determined by his professional performance. The feared aggression may take several forms, such as criticism, reproach, hatred, mockery, contempt, or bodily assault. In the unconscious it may be the danger of being killed or castrated or otherwise menaced in an archaic way.
The transference situations of the patient to whom the depressive anxieties of the analyst are a response are, above all, those in which the patient, through an increase in frustration (or danger of frustration) and in the aggression that it evokes, turns the aggression against himself. We are dealing, on one plane, with situations in which the patient defends himself against a paranoid fear of retaliation by anticipating this danger, by carrying out himself and against himself part of the aggression feared from the object transferred onto the analyst, and threatening to carry it out still further. In this psychological sense it is really the analyst who attacks and destroys the patient, and the analyst’s depressive anxiety corresponds to this psychological reality. In other words, the countertransference depressive anxiety arises, above all, as a response to the patient’s 'masochistic defence'-which also represents a revenge (‘masochistic revenge’)-and as a response to the danger of its continuing. On another plane this turning of the aggression against himself is carried out by the patient because of his own depressive anxieties; he turns it against himself to protect himself against re-experiencing the destruction of the objects and to protect these from his own aggression.
The paranoid anxiety in 'direct' countertransference is a reaction to the danger arising from various aggressive attitudes of the patient himself. The analysis of these attitudes shows that they are themselves defences against, or reactions to, certain aggressive imagos. These reactions and defences are governed by the law of talion or else, analogously to this, by identification with the persecutor. The reproach, contempt, abandonment, bodily assaults-all these attitudes of menace or aggression in the patient that causes countertransference paranoid anxieties-are responses to (or anticipation of) equivalent attitudes of the transferred object.
The paranoid anxieties in 'indirect' countertransference are of a more complex nature since the danger for the analyst originates in a third party. The patient’s transference situations that provoke the aggression of this “third party” against the analyst may be of various sorts. Commonly, we are dealing with transference situations (masochistic or aggressive) similar to those that provoke the 'direct' countertransference anxieties previously mentioned.
The common denominator of all the various attitudes of patients that provoke anxiety in the analyst is to be found, in the mechanism of 'identification with the persecutor', the experience of being liberated from the persecutor and of triumphing over him, implied in this identification, suggested our designating this mechanism as a manic one. This mechanism may also exist where the manifest picture in the patient is the opposite, namely in certain depressive states; for the manic conduct may be directed either toward a projected object or toward an introjected object, it may be carried out alloplastically or autoplastically. The 'identification with the persecutor' may even exist' in suicide, since this is a ‘mockery’ of the fantasized or real persecutors, by anticipating the intentions of the persecutors and by one’s own in what they wanted to do, as this ‘mockery’ is the manic aspect of suicide. The 'identification with the persecutor' in the patient is, then, a defence against an object felt as sadistic that tends to make the patient the victim of a manic feast. This defence is carried out either through the introjection of the persecutor in the ego, turning the analyst into the object of the 'manic tendencies', or through the introjection of the persecutor in the superego, taking the ego as the object of its manic trend. Still, what does this mean?
An analysand decides to take a pleasure trip to Europe. He experiences this as a victory over the analyst both because he will free himself from the analyst for two months and because he can afford this trip whereas the analyst cannot. He then begins to be anxious lest the analyst seeks revenge for the patient’s triumph. The patient anticipates this aggression by becoming unwill, developing fever and the first symptoms of influenza. The analyst feels slight anxiety because of this illness and fears, recalling certain experiences, a deterioration in the state of health of the patient, who still however continues to come to the sessions. Up to this point, the situation in the transference and countertransference is as follows. The patient is in a manic relation to the analyst, and his anxieties of preponderantly paranoid type. The analyst senses some irritation over the abandonment and some envy of the patient’s great wealth (feeling ascribed by the patient in his paranoid anxieties to the analyst), but while, the analyst feels satisfaction at the analysand’s real progress, which finds expression in the very fact that the trip is possible and that the patient has decided to make it. The analyst perceives a wish in part of his personality to bind the patient to himself and use the patient for his own needs. In having this wish he resembles the patient’s mother, and he is aware that he is in reality identified with the domineering and vindictive object with which the patient identifies him. Therefore, the patient’s illness seems, to the analyst’s unconscious, a result of the analyst’s own wish, and the analyst therefore experiences depressive (and paranoid) anxieties.
What object imago leads the patient to this manic situation? It is precisely this imago of a tyrannical and sadistic mother, to whom the patient’s frustrations constitute a manic feast. It is against these 'manic tendencies' in the object that the patient defends himself, first by identification (introjection of the persecutor in the ego, which manifests itself in the manic experience in his decision to take a trip) and then by using a masochistic defence to escape vengeance.
In brief, the analyst’s depressive (and paranoid) anxiety is his emotional response to the patient’s illness, and the patient’s illness is itself a masochistic defence against the object’s vindictive persecution. This masochistic defence also contains a manic mechanism in that it derides, controls, and dominates the analyst’s aggression. In the stratum underlying this, we find the patient in a paranoid situation in face of the vindictive persecution by the analyst-a fantasy that coincides with the analyst’s secret irritation. Beneath this paranoid situation, and causing it, is an inverse situation: The patient is enjoying a manic triumph (his liberation from the analyst by going on a trip), but the analyst is in a paranoid situation (he is in danger of being defeated and abandoned). Finally, beneath this we find a situation in which the patient is subjected to an object imago that wants to make of him the victim of its aggressive tendencies, but this time not to take revenge for intentions or attitudes in the patient, but merely to satisfy its own sadism of an imago that originates directly from the original suffering of the subject.
In this way, the analyst can deduce from each of his Countertransference sensations a certain transference situation, the analyst’s fear to deterioration in the patient’s health enabled him to perceive the patient’s need to satisfy the avenger and to control and restrain him, partially inverting (through the illness) the roles of victimizer and victim, thus alleviating his guilt feeling and causing the analyst to feel some of the guilt. The analyst’s irritation over the patient’s trip enabled him to see the patient’s need to free himself from a dominating and sadistic object, to see the patient’s guilt feelings caused by these tendencies, and to see his fear of the analyst’s revenge. By his feeling of triumph the analyst could detect the anxiety and depression caused in the patient by his dependence upon this frustrating, yet indispensable, object. Each of these transference situations suggested to the analyst the patient’s object imagoes-the fantasized or real Countertransference situation that determined the transference situations.
2. What is the meaning of countertransference aggression?
To what was previous, we have seen that the analyst may experience, besides countertransference anxiety, annoyances, recollection, desire for vengeance, hatred, and other emotions. What are the origin and meaning of these emotions?
Countertransference aggression usually arises in the face of frustration (or danger of frustration) of desires that may superficially be differentiated into “direct” and “indirect.” Both direct and indirect desires are principally wishes to get libido or affection. The patient is the chief object of direct desires in the analyst, who wishes to be accepted and loved by him. The object of the indirect desires of the analyst may be, for example, other analysts from whom he wishes to get recognition or admiration through his successful work with his patients, using the latter as means to this end. This aim to get love has, in general terms, two origins: An instinctual origin (the primitive needs of union with the object) and an origin of a defensive nature (the need of neutralizing, overcoming, or denying the rejections and other dangers originating from the internal objects, in particular from the superego). The frustrations may be differentiated, descriptively, into those of active type and those of passive type. Among the active frustrations is direct aggression by the patient, his mockery, deceit, and active rejection. To the analyst, active frustration means exposure to a predominantly “bad” object, the patient may become, for example, the analyst’s superego, which says to him “you are bad.” Examples of flustration of passive type are passive rejection, withdrawal, partial abandonment, and other defences against the bond with and dependence on the analyst. These signify flustrations of the analyst’s need of union with the object.
We may say then, that Countertransference aggression usually arises when there is frustration of the analyst’s desire that springs from Eros, both that arising from his “original” instinctive and affective drives and that arising from his need of neutralizing or annulling his own Thanatos (or the action in his internal ‘bad objects’) directed against the ego or against the external world. Owing partly to the analyst’s own neurosis (and to certain characteristics of analysis itself) these desires of Eros sometimes change the unconscious aim of bringing the patient to a state of dependence. Therefore countertransference aggression may be provoked by the rejection of this dependence by the patient who rejects any bond with the analyst and refuses to surrender to him, showing this refusal by silence, denial, secretiveness, repression, blocking, or mockery.
Taken to place next, we must establish what it is that induces the patient to behave in this way, to frustrate the analyst, to withdraw from him, to attack him. If we know this we might as perhaps know what we have to interpret when countertransference aggression arises in us, being able to deduce from the countertransference the transition of the transference situation and its cause. This cause is a fantasized countertransference situation or, more precisely, some actual or feared bad conduct from the projected object. Experience shows that, in meaningly general terms, this bad or threatening conduct of the object is usually an equivalent of the conduct of the patient (to which the analyst has reacted internally with aggression). We also understand why this is so: The patient’s conduct springs from that most primitive of reactions, the talion reaction, or from the defect by means of identification with the persecutor or aggressor. Sometimes, it is quite simple: The analysand withdraws from us, rejects us, abandons us, or derides us when he fears or suffers the same or an equivalent treatment from us. In other cases, it is more complex, the immediate identification with the aggression being replaced by another identification that is less direct. To exemplify: Some woman patients, upon learning that the analyst is going on holiday, remain silent a long while, she withdraws, through her silence, as a talion response to the analyst’s withdrawal. Deeper analysis shows that the analyst’s holiday is, to the patient, equivalent to the primal scene, and this is equivalent to destruction of her as a woman, and her immediate response must be a similar attack against the analyst. This aggressive (castrating) impulse is rejected and the result, her silence, is a compromise between her hostility and its rejection, it is a transformed identification with the persecutor.
The composite distribution accounted by ours, is the vertical mosaic: (a) The countertransference reactions of aggression (or, of its equivalent) occur in response to transference situations in which the patient frustrates certain desires of the analyst’s. These frustrations are equivalent to abandonment or aggression, which the patient carries out or with which he threatens the analyst, and they place the analyst, at first, in a depressive or paranoid situation. The patient’s defence is in one aspect equivalent to a manic situation, for he is freeing himself from a persecutor. (b) This transference situation is the defence against certain object imagoes. Existent associative objects persecute the subject sadistically, vindictively, or morally, or an object that the patient defends from his destructiveness by an attack against his own ego: In these, the patient attacks-as Freud and Abraham have shown in the analysis of melancholia and suicide-just when, the internal object and the external object (the analyst). The analyst who is placed by the alloplastic or autoplastic attacks of the patient in a paranoid or a depressive situation sometimes defends himself against these attacks by using the same identification with the aggressor or persecutor as the patient used. Then the analyst virtually becomes the persecutor, and to this the patient (insofar as he presupposes such a reaction from his internal and projected object) responds with anxiety. This anxiety and its origin are nearest to consciousness, and are therefore the first thing to interpret.
3. Countertransference guilt feelings are an important source of countertransference anxiety: The analyst fears his “moral conscience.” Thus, for instance, a serious deterioration in the condition of the patient may cause the analyst to suffer reproach by his own superego, and cause him to fear punishment. When such guilt feelings occur, but the superego of the analyst is usually projected upon the patient or upon a third person, the analyst being the guilty ego. The accuser is the one who is attacked, the victim of the analyst. The analyst is the accused, he is charged with being the victimizer. It is therefore the analyst who must suffer anxiety over his object, and dependence upon it.
As in other countertransference situations, the analyst’s guilt feeling may have either real causes or fantasized causes, or a mixture of the two. A real cause exists in the analyst who has neurotic negative feelings that exercise some influence over his behaviour, leading him, for example, to interpret with aggressiveness or to behave in a submissive, seductive, or unnecessarily frustrating way. Yet guilt feelings may also arise in the analyst over, for instance, intense submissiveness in the patient though the analyst had not driven the patient into such conduct by his procedure. Or he may feel guilty when the analysand becomes depressed or ill, although his therapeutic procedure was right and proper according to his own conscience. In such cases, the countertransference guilt feelings are evoked not by what procedure he actualizes by its use but by his awareness of what he might have done in view of his latent disposition. In other words, the analyst identifies himself in fantasy with a bad internal object of the patient’s and he feels guilty for what he has provoked in this role-illness, depression, masochism, suffering, failure. The imago of the patient then becomes fused with the analyst’s internal objects, which the analyst had, in the past, wanted (and perhaps managed) to frustrate, makes suffer, dominate, or destroy. Now he wishes to repair them. When this reparation fails, he reacts as if he had hurt them. The true cause of the guilt feelings is the neurotic, predominantly sado-masochistic tendencies that may reappear in countertransference: The analyst therefore quite rightly entertains certain doubts and uncertainties about his ability to control them completely and to keep them entirely removed from his procedure.
The transference situation to which the analyst is likely to react with guilt feelings is then, in the first place, a masochistic trend in the patient, which may be either of some 'defensives' (secondary) or of a 'basic' (primary) nature. If it is defensive, we know it to be a rejection of sadism by means of its 'turning against the ego', the principal object imago that imposes this masochistic defence is a retaliatory imago. If it is basic (‘primary masochism’) the object imago is ‘simply’ sadistic, a reflex of the pains (‘frustration’) originally suffered by the patient. The analyst’s guilt feelings refer to his own sadistic tendencies. He may feel as if he himself had provoked the patient’s masochism. The patient is subjugated by a ‘bad’ object so that it seems as if the analyst had satisfied his aggressiveness; now the analyst is exposed in his turn to the accusations of his superego. In short, the superficial situation is that the patient is now the superego, and the analyst the ego who must suffer the accusation, the analyst is in a depressive-paranoid situation, whereas the patient is, from one point of view, in a ‘manic’ situation (showing, for example, ‘mania for reproaching’). Nevertheless, on a deeper plane the situation is the reverse: The analyst is in a ‘manic’ situation (acting as vindictive, dominating, or ‘simply’ a sadistic imago), and the patient is in a depressive-paranoid situation.
4. Besides the anxiety, hatred, and quilt feelings in countertransference, most other countertransference situations may also be decisive points during analytic treatment, both because they may influence the analyst’s work and because the analysis of the transference situations that provoke such countertransference situations may represent the central problem of treatment, clarification of which may be indispensable if the analyst is to exert any therapeutic influence upon the patient.
Before closing, let us consider briefly two doubtful points. How much confidence should we place in countertransference as a guide to understanding the patient? As to the first question, I intuitively think by means of its existing certainty, by which is founded the mistake initiated of the countertransference reactions as an oracle, with blind faith to expect of them the pure truth about the psychological situations of the analysand. It is plain that our unconscious is a very personal ‘receiver’ and ‘transmitter’ and we must reckon with frequent distortions of objective reality. Still, it is also true that our unconscious is nevertheless “the best we have of its kind.” His own analysis and some analytic experience enable the analyst, as a rule, to be conscious of this personal factor and know his ‘personal equation.’ According to experience, the danger of exaggerated faith in the message of one’s own unconscious is, even when they refer to very ‘personal’ reactions. Less than the danger of repressing them and denying them any objective value.
It seems necessary that one must critically examine the deductions one makes from perception of one’s own countertransference. For example, the fact that the analyst feels angry does not simply mean (as is sometimes said) that the patient wishes to make him angry. It may mean rather than the patient has a transference feeling of guilt. What has been said concerning Countertransference aggression is relevant here.
The second question-whether the analyst should or should not ‘communicate’ or ‘interpret’ aspects of his countertransference to the analysand-cannot be considered fully at present. Much depends, of course, upon what, when, how, to whom, for what purpose, and in what conditions the analyst speaks about his countertransference. Probably, the purposes sought by communicating the countertransference might often (but not always) be better attained by other means. The principal other means is analysis of the patient’s fantasies about the analyst’s countertransference (and of the related transference) sufficient to show the patient the truth (the reality of the countertransference of his inner and outer objects): and with this must also be analysed the doubts, negations, and other defences against the truth, intuitively perceived, until they have been overcome. Nevertheless, the situations in which communication of the countertransference is of value for the subsequent course of the treatment. Without doubt, this aspect of the use of countertransference is of great interest: We need an extensive and detailed study of the inherent problems of communication of countertransference. Much more experience and study of countertransference need to be recorded.
Some discussion of a working definition of the term countertransference is necessary, since it is by no means agreed upon by analysts that it can be correctly considered the converse of transference. D. W. Winnicott, for instance, has recently written about the importance of attitudes of hate from an analyst too patient, particularly in dealing with psychotic and antisocial patients. He speaks mainly of ‘objective countertransference’. Meaning ‘the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behaviour of the patient based on objective observation. However, he also mentions countertransference feelings that are under repression in the analyst and need countertransference feelings that are under repression in the analyst and need more analysis. His concept of ‘objective Countertransference’ will not be included under the term Countertransference if the latter are used as the converse of transference. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann has separated the reconverse of the psychoanalyst to the patient into those of a private and those responses of the psychoanalyst to the patient into those of a private and those of a professional person and recognizes the possibility of countertransference distortions occurring in both aspects. Franz Alexander has used the term to mean all of the attitudes of the doctor toward the patient, while Sandor Ferenczi has used it to cover the positive, affectionate, loving, or sexual attitudes of the doctor toward the patient. Michael Balint, looking at a different aspect, calls attention ti the fact that every human relation is libidinous, not only the patient’s relation to his analyst, but also the analyst’s relation to the patient. He says that no human being can in the end tolerate any relation that brings only frustration and that it is as true for the one as for the other. “The question is, therefore, . . . how much. What kind of satisfaction is needed by the patient on the one hand and by the analyst on the other, to keep the tension in the psycho-analytical situation as or near the optimal level.”
In developing his theory of interpersonal relations, Harry Stack Sullivan has defined the psychotherapeutic effort of the analyst as carried on by the method of participant observation. He says, “The expertness of the psychiatrist refers to his skill in participant observation of the unfortunate patterns of his own and the patient’s living, in contrast too merely participating in such unfortunate patterns with the patient.” In the use of the term unfortunate patterns Sullivan includes the concept of countertransference, or in his words 'parataxic distortions'.
In several important recent papers, Leo Berman, Paula Heimann, Annie Reich, Margaret Little, and Maxwell Gitelson have made a beginning in the attempt to clarify the concept and to formulate some dynamic principles regarding the phenomena included in this category. Berman is mainly concerned with defining the optimal attitude of the analyst to the patient, an attitude that he characterizes as “dedicated.” This description is based on the assumption that the analyst’s emotional responses to the patient will be quantitatively less than those of the average person and of shorter duration, as the result of being quickly worked through by self-analysis. This, then, would represent an ideal goal of minimizing and an easily handled countertransference response.
Heimann takes a step forward when she states that the analyst’s emotional response to his patient within the analytic situation represents one of the most important tools for his work, and that the analyst’s countertransference is an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious. This important formulation is the basis upon which the study of the analyst’s part of the interaction with the patient should be built. Previously, the statement has frequently been made that the analyst’s unconscious understands the patient’s unconscious. However, it is presumed that much is already unconscious material as becoming available to awareness after a successful analysis, so that the understanding should theoretically not be only on an unconscious level but should be errorless in words.
Reich has classified most of countertransference attitudes of the analyst’s. She separates them into two main types: Those where the analyst acts out some unconscious need with the patient, and those where the analyst defends against some unconscious need. On the whole, countertransference responses are reflections of permanent neurotic difficulties of the analyst, in which the patient is often not a real object but is rather used as a tool by means of which some need of the analyst is gratified. In some instances, there may be sudden, acute countertransference responses that do not necessarily arises from neurotic character difficulties of the analyst. However, Reich points out that the interest in becoming an analyst is itself partially determined by unconscious motivation, such as curiosity about other people’s secrets, which is evidence that countertransference attitudes are some prerequisites for an analyst. The contrast between the healthy and neurotic analyst is that in the one the curiosity is desexualized and sublimated in character, while in the other it remains a method of acting out unconscious fantasies.
Margaret Little continues the search for an adequate definition of countertransference, concluding that it should be used primarily to refer to 'repressed elements', inasmuch as far as the unanalysed well-situated analyst, he attaches himself to the patient in the same way as the patient ‘transfers’ to the analyst effects, etc., belonging to his parents or to the object of his childhood: i.e., the analyst regards the patient (temporarily and varyingly) as he regarded his own parents. Even so, it is, Little who thinks that other aspects of the analyst’s attitudes toward the patient, such as some specific attitude or mechanism with which he meets the patient’s transference, or some of his conscious attitudes, should be considered Countertransference responses. She confirms Heimann’s statement that the use of countertransference may become an extremely valuable tool in psychoanalysis, comparing it in importance with the advances made when transference interpretations began to be used therapeutically. She sees transference and Countertransference as inseparable phenomena; both should become increasingly clear to both doctor and patient as the analysis progresses. To that end, she advocates judicious use of Countertransference interpretation by the analyst. “Both are essential to Psychoanalysis, and countertransference is no more to be feared or avoided than is transference: In fact it cannot be avoided it can only be looked out for, controlled to some extent, and perhaps ill-used.
Gitelson, in a comprehensive paper, continues to clarify the phenomena, he goes back to the original definition of countertransference used by Freud-the analyst’s reaction to the patient’s transference-and separates this set of responses from another set that he calls the transference attitudes of the analyst. These transference attitudes, which are the result of ‘’surviving neurotic transference potential’ in the analyst. Involve ‘total’ reactions to the patient -that is, overall feelings about and toward the patient-while the countertransference attitudes are ‘partial’ reactions to the patient-that is, emergency defence reactions elicited when the analysis touches upon unresolved problems in the analyst.
This classification, while valid enough, does not seem to forward investigation to any great extent. For example, Gitelson feels in general that the existence of ‘total’ or transference attitudes toward a patient is a contradiction for the analyst to work with that patient, whereas the partial responses are more amendable to working through the continuity of inertial momentum whereby the processes of a self-analysis. Yet, it seems extremely sceptical whether avoiding is possible for one ‘total’ reaction to a patient-that is, general feelings of liking for, dislike of, and responsiveness toward the patient, and so on, is present from the time of the first interview. These do vary in intensity; when extreme, they may indicate that a non-therapeutic relationship would result should be the two persons attempt working together. On the other hand, their presence in awareness may permit the successful scrutiny and resolution of whatever problem is involved, whereas their presence outside awareness would render this impossibly. In other words, it is not so much a question whether ‘total’ responses are present or not, but rather a question as to their amenability to recognition and resolution. Therefore, another type of classification would, in any case, be more useful for investigative purposes.
Least of mention, this by no mean a harbouring dispute over the validity of Gitelson’s criticism of the rationalization of much Countertransference acting-out under the heading of ‘corrective emotional experience’. He emphasizes that motherly or fatherly attitudes in the analyst are often character defences unrecognized as such by him. Although the analyst, according to Gitelson, to facilitate . . . can deny neither his personality nor its operation in the analytic situation as a significant factor, this does, however, mean that his personality is the chief instrument of the therapy. He also reports the observation that when the analyst appears as himself in the patient’s dreams, it is often the herald of the development of an unmanageably intenser transference neurosis, the unmanageability being the difficulty of the analyst’s situation. Similarly, when the patient appears as himself in the analyst’s dream, but it is often a signal of unconscious countertransference processes going on.
So then, we have seen that in recent studies on countertransference have included in their concepts attitudes of the therapist that are both conscious and unconscious; attitudes that are responses both too real and to fantasied attitudes of the patient; attitudes stimulated by unconscious needs of the analyst and attitudes stimulated by sudden outbursts of effect for the patient; attitudes that arise from responding to the patient as though he were some previously important person in the analyst’s life; and attitudes that do not use the patient as a real object but as a tool for the gratification of some unconscious requisite. This group of responses covers a tremendously wide territory, yet it does not include, of course, all of the analyst’s responses to the patient. On what common ground is the above attitudes singled out to be called countertransference?
It seems, nonetheless, that the common factor in the above responses is the presence of anxiety in the therapist-whether recognized in awareness or defended against and kept of our awareness. The contrast between the dedicated attitude described as the ideal attitude of the analyst-or the analyst as an expert on problems of living, as Sullivan puts it-and the so-called countertransference responses, is the presence of anxiety, arising from the variety of sources in the whole field of patient-therapist interrelationships.
If countertransference attitudes and behaviour were to be thought of as determined by the presence of anxiety in the therapist, we might have an operational definition that would be more useful than the more descriptive one based on identifying patterns in the analyst derived from importantly past relationships. The definition would, of course, have to include situations both or felt discomfort and those where the anxiety was out of awareness and replaced by a defensive operation? Such a viewpoint of countertransference would be useful in that it would include all situations where the analyst was unable to be useful to the patient because of difficulties with his own responses.
The definition might be precisely stated as follows: When, in the patient-analyst relationship, anxiety is aroused in the analyst with the effect that communication between him and is interfered with by some alternation in the analyst’s behaviour (verbal or otherwise), then Countertransference is present.
The question might be asked, if countertransference were defined in this way, would the definition hold well for transference responses also? It seems that on a very generalized level this might be so, but on the level of practical therapeutic understanding such a statement would not be enlightening. While it could safely be said of every patient that he appearance of his anxiety or defensive behaviour in the treatment situation was due to an impairment of communication with the analysts that in turn was due to his attributing to the analyst some critical or otherwise disturbing attitude that in its turn was originally derived from his experience with his parents-still this would disregard the fact that the patient’s whole life pattern and his relation to all of the important authority figures in it would show a similar stereotyped defensive response. So that the early stages of treatment and to a lesser extent in later stages, the anxiety responses of the patient are for the most part generalized and stereotyped than explained with special reference to his relationship with the analyst.
This, however, is not true of the analyst. Having been analysed himself, most of such anxiety-laden responses as he has experienced with others have entered awareness and many of them have been worked through and abandoned in favour of more mature and integrated responses. What remains, then, not automatically represent sibling rivals? While it is possible that a particular, unusually competitive patient may still represent a younger sibling to an analyst who had some difficulties in his own life with being the elder child.
To speak of the same thing from another point of view, the analyst is not working on his problems in the analysis; he is working on the patient’s. Therefore, while the patient brings his anxiety responses to the analysis as his primary concern, the fact that the analyst’s problems are not under scrutiny permits him a greater degree of detachments and objectivity. This is, to be sure, only a relative truth, since the analyst at times and under certain circumstances is bringing his problems into the relationship, and at times, at least in some analyses, the attention of both the patient and the analyst are directed to the analysts' problems. However, it is on the whole valid to describe the analytic situation as one designed to focus attention on the anxieties of the patient and to leave in the background the anxieties of the therapist, so that when these do appear they are of particular significance as for the relationship itself.
The associative set classifications of countertransference responses are to classify the situation in analysis when anxiety-tinged processes are operating in the analyst. This is to the set classification as not as clear-cut separation of situational anxieties, nor are any of the responses to be thought of as entirely free of necrotic attitudes of the therapist. Even in the most extremer examples of situational stress (where ordinarily the analyst’s response is thought of as an objective response to th stress rather than a neurotic response), personal, characterological factors will colour his response, as will also the nature of his relationship with the patient. Take, for instances, the situation where the analyst comes to his office in a state of acute tension as the result of a quarrel with his wife. With one patient he may remain preoccupied with his personal troubles throughout the hour, while with another he may be able shortly to bring hid attention to the analytic situation. Something in each patient’s personality and method of production, and in the analyst’s response to each, has affected the analyst’s behaviour.
Anxiety-arousing situations in the patient-analyst interaction have been classified as follows: (1) situational factors-that is, reality factors such as intercurrent events in the analyst’s life, and, social factors such as need for success and recognition as a competent therapist (2) unresolved neurotic problems of the therapist, and (3) communication of the patient’s anxiety to the therapist.
The response to situational factors is, of course, very much influenced by the character make-up of the doctor. How much has the quality of being necessitated for conformity to convention he retains will influence his response to the patient who shouts loudly during an analytic session? Nevertheless, the response will always be affected by the degree of which his office is soundproof, whether there is another patient in the waiting room, whether a colleague in an adjoining office can overhear, and so on. So that, even leaving out the private characterological aspect of the situation for the therapist, there remains a sizable set of reality needs that, if threatened, will lead to unanalytic behaviour on his part.
The greatest number of these relates to the physician’s role in our culture. There is a high value attached to the role of a successful physician. This is not, of course, confined to the vague group of people known as the public, it is also actively present in the professional colleagues. There is a reality need for recognition of his competence by his colleagues, which has a dollars and cents value and an emotional one. While it is true that his reputation will not be made or broken by one success or failure, it does not follow that a suicide or psychotic breakdown in the patient does not represent a reality threat to him. Consequently, he cannot be expected to handle such threatening crises with complete equanimity. Besides, some realities need to be known as competent by his colleagues and the public, there is potent and valid need on the doctor’s part for creative accomplishment. This appears in the therapeutic situation as an expectation of and a need to see favourable change in the patient. It is entirely impossible for a therapist to participate in a treatment situation where the goal is improvement or cure without suffering frustration, disappointment, and at times anxiety when his efforts result in no apparent progress. Such situations are at times handled by therapists with the attitude: “Let him stew in his own juices until he sees that he should change,” or by the belief that he, the doctor, must be making an error that he dies not understand and should redouble his efforts. Frequently, the resolution of such a difficulty can be achieved by the realization by the therapist that his reality fear of failure is keeping him from recognizing an important aspect of the patient’s neurosis having done with making the responsibility for his welfare on another’s shoulders. The reality fear of failure can . . . neither be ignored nor put up with, so to speak, since an attempt by the therapist to remove it by ‘making’ the patient gets well is bound to increase the chances of failure.
Further difficulties are introduced by the traditional cultural definition of the healer’s role-that is, according to the Hippocratic oath. The physician-healer is expected to play a fatherly or even god-like role with his patient, in which he both sees through him-knows mysteriously what is wrong with his insides-and takes responsibility for him. This magic-healer role has heavy reinforcement from many personal motivations of the analyst for becoming a physician and a psychotherapist. These range from need to know other people’s secrets, as mentioned by Reich, to needs to cure oneself vicariously by curing others, needs for magical power to cover up one’s own feedings of weakness and inadequacy, needs to do better than one’s own analyst. Unfortunately, some aspects of psychoanalytical educating have a tendency to reinforce the interpretation of the therapist as a magically powerful person. The admonition, for instance, to become a ‘mature character’, while excellent advice, still carries with it a connotation of perfect adjustment and perhaps bring pressure to bear on the trainee not to recognize his immaturites or deficiencies. Even such precepts as ti is a ‘mirror’ or a ‘surgeon’ or ‘dedicated’ emphasize the analyst’s moral power in relation to the patient and, still worse, makes it as good technique. Since the analyst’s power, it is regrettably easy for both persons to participate in a mutually gratifying relationship that satisfies the patient’s dependency and the doctor’s need for power.
The main situation in the patient-doctor relationship that undermines the therapeutic role and therefore may result in anxiety in the therapist can be listed as follows: (1) when the doctor is helpless to affect the patient’s neurosis, (2) when the doctor is treated consistently as an object of fear, hatred, criticism, or contempt, (3) when the patient calls on the doctor for advice or reassurance as evidence of his professional competence or interest in the patient, (4) when the patient attempts to establish a relationship of romantic love with the doctor, and (5) when the patient calls on the doctor for other intimacy.
Unresolved neurotic problems of the therapist are a subject on which it is very difficult to generalize since such problems will be different in every therapist. To be sure, there are large general categories into which most therapists can be classified, and so certain overall attitudes may be held in common, as for instance the categories of the obsessional therapists who retain remnants of a compulsive need to be in control, or the masochistically overcompensated therapist who compulsively makes reparation to the patient, as described by Little.
One may scrutinize all analysts, from the top of the ladder to the bottom, and, as is obvious, will find characteristic types of patients chosen and characteristic courses of analytic treatment in each case. Gitelson seems to undervalue this factor when he says that the analyst “can no longer . . . grow to worsen of neither his personality nor its operation in the analytic situation as a significant factor . . . This is far from saying, however, that his personality is the chief instrument of the therapy that we call psychoanalysis. There is a great difference between the selection and playing of a role and the awareness of the fact that ones' own person has found himself cast for a part. Conducting himself is important for the analyst so that the analytic process proceeds by what the patient brings to it.”
It is not the selection. Playing of a role that creates the Countertransference problem of the average, and healthy analyst, but the fact that one habitually and incessantly plays a role determined by one’s character structure, so that one is at times hindered from seeing and dealing with the role in which one is cast by the patient.
It does, however, seem apparent that, to deal with the distortions introduced by the patient, the doctor needs to be aware of the following things: (1) that he has an unambiguous expression on his face when the patient arrives five minutes late for the first hour of therapy, and (2) that he annoyed (made anxious) by the patient’s imputation of malice to him. If he were aware of (1), he would. Perhaps, can interpret the fearful apologies of the patient with a question about why the patent thinks he is angry. If he were unaware of (1) or did not think it wise to interpret, still if he were aware of his anxiety reaction (2), he can probably recognize that his annoyance at being apologized to was leading to a sulky silence on his part. Once this was within awareness, the annoyance could be expected to lift and the therapeutic needs of the situation could be handled on their own merits.
Communication of the patient’s anxiety to the therapist proves most interesting and some mysterious phenomenons exhibited on occasion-and perhaps more frequently than we realize-by both analyst and patient. It seems to have some relationship to the process described as empathy. It is a well-known fact that certain types of persons are literally barometers for the tension level of other persons with whom they are in contact. Apparently cues are picked up from small shifts in muscular tension plus changes in voice tone. Tonal changes are more widely recognized to provide such cues, as evidenced by the common expression, “It wasn’t what he said but the way he said it.” Yet there are numbers of instances where the posture of a patient while walking into the consulting room gave the cue to the analyst that anxiety was present, although there was no gross abnormality but merely a slight stiffness or jerkiness to be observed. A similar observation can be made in supervised analyses, where the supervised communicate to the supervisor that he is in an anxiety-arousing situation with the patient, not by the material he related, but by some appearance of increased tension in his manner of reporting.
It is a mood point whether anxiety responses of therapists in situations where the anxiety is ‘caught’ from the patient can be considered entirely free of personal conflict by the analyst. Probably, habitual alertness to the tension level of others, however desirable a trait in the analyst, must have had its origins in tension-laden atmospheres of the past, and therefore must have specific personal meaning to the analyst.
The contagious aspects of the patient’s anxiety have been most often mentioned concerning the treatment of psychotics. In dealing with a patient whose defences are those of violent counter-aggression, not of an analyst experience of both fear and/or anxiety. The fear is on a relatively rational basis-the danger of suffering physically hurt. The anxiety derives from (1) retaliatory impulses toward the attacker,
(2) wounded self-esteem that one’s helpful intent is so misinterpreted by the patient, and (3) a sort of primitive envy of or identification with the uncontrolled venting of violent feelings. It has been found by experience in attempting to treat such patients that the therapist can function at a more effective level if he is encouraged to be aware of and handle consciously his irrational responses to the patient’s violence.
A milder variant of this response can frequently be found in office practice. It can be marked and noted that when the affect of more than usual intensity enters a treatment situation the analyst tends to interpret the patient. This interpretation may take any one of a variety of forms, such as a relevant question, an interpretative remark, a reassuring remark, a change of subject. Whatever its content, it dilutes the intensity of feeling being expressed and/or shifting the trend of the associations. This, of course, is technically desirable in some instances, but when it occurs automatically, without awareness and therefore without consideration of whether it is desirable or not, its occurrence must be attributed to uneasiness in the analyst. Ruesch and Prestwood have studied the phenomenon of communication of patients’ anxiety to the therapist, in which they proved that the communication is much more positively correlated with the tonal and expressive qualities of speech than with the verbal content. Such factors as rate of speech, frequently of use of personal pronouns, frequently of expressions of feeling. So on, showed significant variations in the anxious parent as contrasted with either the relaxed or the angry patient. In this study, the subjective responses of most psychiatrists while listening to sections of recorded interviews varied significantly according to the emotional tone of the material. A relaxed interview elicited a relaxed response in the listening psychiatrist; the anxious interviews were responded to with a variety of subjective feelings, from being ill-at-ease to being disturbed or angry.
These uncomfortable responses, coupled with many types of avoidance behaviours by the analyst, such as those mentioned in another place, appear to occur much more frequently than has been previously realized. Detecting it is difficult then by an ‘ear witness’, since the therapist himself will usually be unable to report them following through its intermittence of time. They were noticed to occur frequently in a study of intensive psychotherapy by experienced analysts carried out by means of recorded interviews.
If one accepts the hypothesis that even successfully analysed therapists are still continually involved in countertransference attitudes toward their patients, the question arises: What can be done with such reactions in the therapeutic situation? Experience suggests that the less intense anxiety responses, where the discomfort is within awareness, can be quickly handled by an experienced but not to of a neurotic analyst. These are probably chiefly the situational or reality stimuli to anxiety. Nevertheless, where awareness is interfered with by the occurrence of a variety of defensive operations, is there anything to be done? Is the analyst capable of identifying such anxiety-laden attitudes in himself and proceeding to work them out? Certainly there are such extreme situations that the unaided analyst cannot handle them and must seek discussion with a colleague or further analytic help for himself. However, there is a wide intermediate ground where alertness to clues or signals that all is not well may be sufficient to start the analyst on a process of self-resolution of the difficulty.
The following is a tentative and necessarily incomplete list of situations that may provide a clue to the analyst that he is involved anxiously or defensively with the patient. It includes signals that have been found useful in a basic supervision that it probably could be added to by others according to their particular experience, as (1) The analyst has a reasoning dislike for the patient, (2) The analyst cannot identify with the patient, who seems unreal or mechanical. When the patient reports that he is upset, the analyst feels no emotional response. (3) The analyst becomes overemotional as for the patient’s troubles. (4) The analyst likes the patient excessively, feels that he is his best patient. (5) The analyst dreads the hours with a particular patient or is uncomfortable during them. (6) The analyst is preoccupied with the patient to an unusual degree in intervals between hours and may find himself fantasying questions or remarks to be made to the patient. (7) The analyst finds it difficult to pay attention to the patient. He goes to sleep during hours, becomes very drowsy, or is preoccupied with personal affairs. (8) The analyst is habitually late with a particular patient or shows other disturbance in the time arrangement, such as always running over the end of the hour. (9) The analyst gets into arguments with the patient. (10) The analyst becomes defensive with the patient or exhibits unusual vulnerability to the patient’s criticism. (11) The patient seems to misunderstand the analyst’s interpretations consistently or never agrees with them. This is, of course, quite correctly interpreted as resistance of the patient, but it may also be the result of a countertransference distortion by the analyst such that his interpretations are wrong. (12) The analyst tries to elicit effect from the patient-for instance, by provocative or dramatic statements. (14) The analyst is angrily sympathetic with the patient regarding his mistreatment by some authority figure. (15) The analyst feels impelled to do something active, and (16) The analyst appears in the patient’s dreams as himself, or the patient appears in the analyst’s dreams. No sooner that apparently to broaden the scope of psychoanalytic therapy, to expedite and make more efficiently the analytic process, and to increase our knowledge of the dynamics of interaction, methods of studying the transference-countertransference aspects of treatment need to be developed. In that this can best be accomplished by setting up the hypothesis that countertransference phenomena are present in every analysis. This agrees with the position of Heimann and Little. These phenomena are probably frequently either ignored or repressed, partly because of a lack of knowledge of what to do with them, partly because analysts are accustomed to dealing with them in various nonverbal ways, and partly because they are sufficiently provocative of anxiety in the therapist to produce one or another kind of defence reaction. However, since the successfully analysed psychotherapists have tools at his command for recognizing and resolving defensive behaviour via the development of greater insight. The necessity for suppressing or repressing countertransference responses is not urgent. Where the analyst deliberately searches for recognition and understanding of his own difficulties in the interrelationship, his first observation is likely to be that he has an attitude similar to one of those aforementioned. With this as a signal, he may then, by further noticing in the analytic situation what particular aspects of the patient’s behaviour stimulate such responses in him, eventually find a way of bringing such behaviour out into the open for scrutiny, communication, and eventual resolution. For instance, sleepiness in the analyst is very frequently an unconscious expression of resentment at the emotional bareness of the patient’s communication, perhaps springing from a feeling of helplessness by the analyst. When the analyst recognizes that he is sleepy as a retaliation for his patient’s uncommunicativeness, and that he is making this response because, up too now, he has been unable to find a more effective way of handling it, the precipitating factor-the uncommunicativeness-can be investigated as a problem.
Beyond this use of his responses as a clue to the meaning of the behaviour of the patient, the analyst is also constantly in need of using his observations of himself as a means to further resolution of his own difficulties. For instance, an analyst who had doubts of his intellectual ability habitually overvalued and competed with his more intelligent patients. This would become particularly accentuated when he was trying to treat patients whom they used intellectual achievement as protection against fears of being overpowered. Thus the analyst, as the result of these overestimations of such a patient’s capacity, would fail to make ordinary, garden-variety interpretations, believing that there must be obvious to such a bright person. Instead, he would exert himself to point out the subtle manifestations of the patient’s neurosis, so that there would be much interesting talk but little change in the patients.
This type of error can go unnoticed while the analyst learns eventually that he is unable to treat successfully certain types of patients. However, it can also be slowly and gradually rectified as the result of further experience. In such a case, the analyst is learning on a nonverbal level. Even so, some such signal as finding himself fantasying questions or remarks to put to the patient in the next session is noted by the analyst, he then has the means of expediting and bringing into full awareness the self-scrutiny that can lead to resolution.
It will be noted that the focus of attention of these remarks is on the analyst’s own self-scrutiny, both of his responses to the patient’s behaviour and of his defensive attitudes and actions. Much has been said by others (Heimann, Little, and Gitelson) regarding the pros and cons of introducing discussion of countertransference material into the analytic situation itself. That, however, is a question that is not possible to answer in the present state of our knowledge. Its intentional means are to improving the analyst’s awareness of his own participation in the patient-analyst interaction and of improving his ability to formulate this to himself (or to an observer) clearly. Devising techniques for using such material in the therapeutic situation seems more feasible after the area has been more precisely explored and studied-or, concurrently with further study and explanation.
One further point might be added regarding the contrast between the subjective experience of the analyst when anxiety is not present and when it is. When anxiety is not present, he may experience a feeling of being at ease, of accomplishing something, of grasping what the patient is trying to communicate. Certainly in periods when progress is being made, something of the same feeling is shared by the patient, although he may at the same time be working through troubled areas. Perhaps the loss of the feeling that communication is going in the most commonly used signal that starts the analyst on a search for what is going wrong.
In daily life and the early phases of the analysis, the transference is usually integrated with the actual total personality relationship. However, in the sense of something complex, thinking of it separately is better, unless specifically qualified, whether as a latent potentiality, or as an actual emergent ego-dystonic, or objectively inappropriate phenomena (Anna Freud, 1954). For, as far as the phenomenon is true transference, it retains unmistakeably its infantile character. However, much of the given early relationship may have contributed to the genuine adult pattern of relationship (via identification, imitation, acceptance of teaching for example), its transference derivative differs from the latter, approximately in the sense that Breuer and Freud (1895) assigned to the sequella of the pathogenic traumatic experience, which was abreacted neither as such nor associatively absorbed in the personality. Given an object who has a special transference valence, in a situation that provides a unique mixture of deprivation, intimacy and deprivation, with (obligatory!) unilateral communicative freedom, minimization of actual observation, and with certain elements of form and mechanics reminisce of the infantile state, the tendency to pristine re-emergence of talent transference drives, until now incorporated in everyday strivings, in symptoms, or in character structure, is enormously heightening. That the transference is treated in a unique way in the analytic process are assuredly true, and remains of prime significance. However, at one time, this ment of the analytic situation on the transference, as if its emergent integrated form in relation to any other physician would be essentially the same phenomenon. Considered as an actual functional phenomenon, as different from a latent potentiality (in a sense, Metapsychological concept), this is rarely the case. The unique emotional vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic situation plus the de-integrated effect of free association and the interpretative method restore an infantile quality and intensity to the psychoanalytic transference, which lead to the development of the transference neurosis. Thus, to turn Freud’s original reservations and admonitions in an affirmative direction: The question of what is the optimum transference neurosis, or whether and how nearly is much more as the optimal type of transference neurosis can be caused, has always been, and remains, an important and general problem of psychoanalytic technique. This is, to be sure, no simple matter. The modest hope implicit of our topic, in that it may offer a rationale and some suggestions toward the avoidance of spurious and unduly tenacious intensities. The transference neurosis, like other (simpler) elements in the psychoanalytic situation, has an intrinsically dialectical character and position (Free association, for example, facilitates both exposure and concealment, can occasion either gratification or suffering.) This dialectical quality can (in part) be explained by the concept of two separate, although potentially confluent streams of transference origin. In relation to the equivocal factor of intensity in the transference neurosis, in that there is a certain deductibility to reasonableness in the conception that the elements of abstinence augmenting transference intensity should derive preponderantly from the formal, i.e., explicitly technical factors (which include non-response to primitive transference wishes) rather than from excessively rigorous deficits in human response, which the patient may reasonably except or require, and where the technical valence of such deprivation may be minimal or altogether dubious as to demonstrability.
It is now all but axiomatic that the transference is the indispensable power of the analytic process, and the phenomenon on whose evolution the potentiality for ultimate therapeutic change rests in analysis. As distinguished from other psychotherapies, and resolution of the transference neurosis, and the dissolution or minimization of the transference(s) as such, is one of the distinctive final goals of the interpretative method, it's of the essence because it might be said that insights into dynamic and genetic elements in the unconscious, or the functional extension of the ego’s hegemony in relationship to the id and superego, or other germane concepts, are ultimately more important. Still, these are all, certainly in an operational sense, largely if not exclusively, contingent on the thorough analysis of the transference neurosis.
The term ‘minimization of the transference(s) is used here because of the amounting scepticism regarding the likelihood of complete dissolution or extinction of the transference. The specific personal misidentifications and the specific personally directed wishes and attitudes that usually occupy us in the analytic process (i.e., ‘the transference’) can, in a practical clinical sense, usually be brought to adequate resolution. However, at this point, it should be made to emphasize that pathogenic component of the transference complex that underlies and is anterior to these clinical phenomena. The ‘adequate resolution’ of the clinically significant aspect or fraction of the transference frees the basic practically universal element, if it is not itself severely distorted, for integration in socially acceptable enthusiasms held in common with most other human beings and thus, in a sense, a part of the individual’s environmental reality. The particularity of mind is the general latent craving for an omnipotent parent, renewed and specifically coloured with, indeed given form, by, the conflicts and vicissitudes of each phase of development and developmental separation, a craving of such primitive power that it can produce the profound physiologic alterations of hypnosis, or bring into abeyance an individual’s own perceptual capacities or capacities for rational inference, even based on fewer spectacular vehicles for suggestion. For clarity of a statement, as in the ‘primary transference’ presupposes the accomplished shift to an object, as opposed to Freud’s other [germane] use of the term, frequently elaborated by Loewald ([1960]). This phenomenon is already dramatically evident in the young (three to six-month) infants' reaction to any moving bearer of a face as mother
(‘ . . . the representative of that infant’s security’ [Spitz. 1956]). It permeates our whole social organization, is obvious in religious attitudes, in charismatic ideologists of any type. In its narrowest stronghold, in the intellectual avant-garde, it invests questions of scientific validity and rational or empirical demonstration, facilitating irrational and inappropriate attitudes of loyalty or antagonism toward scientific leaders. Human infallibility is attributed to others than the Popes, and the Anti-Christ have parallels in the world of science. Our own field has often been a conspicuous example of this tendency. In the end, scientific perceptual striving, whose autonomy is always relative at best, becomes secondarily burdened, and inevitably suffers, because of this type of ambivalent group euphoria.
If it is the entanglement with early objects that elicits the infantile neurosis and lays the ground for its later representation in the transference neurosis, it is the clinical neurosis, the usual motivation for treatment, that lies between them, and is related to both, in a sense a ‘resistance’ both to genetic reconstruction of the former, or to current involvement on the latter. This is, a variation of Freud’s statement regarding the transference neurosis as an accessible ‘artificial illness’. Perhaps suggesting that unconscious recognition of the unique transference potentiality of the psychoanalytic situation is intimately connected both with the violent irrational struggle against is not extravagant, and the sometimes fanatical acceptance of, analysis as therapy (i.e., the general and intrinsic fascination of a relationship to ‘the doctor who gives no medicine’) by the patient to whom it is recommended (and by many, before the fact). What is always fundamentally wanted, in the sense of a primal transferee, with rare (relative) exceptions, is the original physician, who most closely resembles the parent of earliest infancy. The ‘doctor who gives no medicine’ is in unconscious deductibility may be that the parent of the repetitive phases of separation. To what extent this unconscious constellation participated in the discovery or creation of psychoanalysis as such would be pure speculation. However, Freud’s capacity for transference in the attachments of daily life was abundantly evident (Freud 1887-1902, Jones 1953-1957), and the importance of the relationship with Fliess in his self-analysis was explicitly stated (Freud, 1887-1902) That it plays an important part in the emotional life of many contemporary working analysts is very likely, since all (at this time) have experienced the role of analysand (or analytic patient): The vast majority are physicians, all have been physicians’ patients in a traditional sense, and, certainly, all have been dependent and helpless children. Ferenczi (1919) described the evolution of the general psychoanalytic countertransference as for initial excessive sympathy, through reactive coldness (‘the phase of resistance against the counter-transference’), to mature balance. Lewin (1946) in referring to this formulation (to contrast it with the sequence of traditional medical training) attributes the first phase to the first of the analyst’s having only recently been a patient himself. While Lewin carefully separates the cadaver (the student’s first ‘patient’) as an ‘object’ (psychoanalytic sense) from its qualities, we may speculate that a species of retaliatory mastery of the parental object (perhaps in contrast with the role of a helpless child) is sometimes involved in this gratification, and that something of this quality was carried into the dialectic genesis of the psychoanalytic situation. When referring to the ‘dialectic genesis’ of the psychoanalytic situation, it is to infer to its genesis largely in the genius of a physician who experienced the training to which Lewin refers. The dialectic is epitomized exquisitely in the role of speech, the bridge for personal separation, rejected or distorted by children in their desperate clinging to more gratifying or more violent object drives, or, on the other hand, sought eagerly as the indispensable vehicle for alterative ego-syntonic development aspirations (Nunberg [1951], regarding the ‘Janus’ quality of transference.)
The transference neurosis, as distinguished from the initial transference, usually supervenes after the treatment has lasted for a varying length of time. Its emergence depends on the combined stress of the situational dynamics, and the pressure of the interpretative method. The latter tend to close off habitual repetitive avenues of expression, such as new symptom formation, acting out, flight from treatment, etc. the neurosis differs from the initial transference, in the sense that it tends to reproduce in the analytic and germane extra-analytic setting an infantile dramatis personae, a complex of transference, with the various conflicts and anxieties attendant on the restoration of attitudes and wishes parallelling their infantile prototypes. The initial transference (akin to the ‘floating’ transference of Glover [1955]?) is a relatively integrated phenomenon, allied to character traits, an amalgam or compromise of conflicting forces, that has become established as a habitual attitude, the best resultant of ‘multiple function’ of which the personality is capable, in the general type of relationship that now confronts it? It differs from its everyday counterpart only in its relative separation from its usual or substantiation, and-eventually-in the failure of elicitation of the gratifications or adaptive goals to which it is devoted. As time goes on, varying as to intervals before, and character of, emergence, with the nuances of the patient’s personality organization and the analyst’s technical and personal approach, the unconscious specific transference attitude will press free expression against the defences with which they have been previously integrated, in varying mixtures of associational derivatives, symptomatic acts, dreams, often ‘acting out’, and manifest feelings. At this point (or better, in this zone of a continuum), conflict involving the psychoanalytic situation becomes quasi-manifest, and the transference neurosis as this is incipient. If there be but a brief and over simply outline illustration it is only because there are various interpretations of these terms.
A male patient may adopt a characteristically obsequious although subtly sarcastic attitude toward his older male analyst, quite inappropriate to the situation, but thoroughly habitual in all relations with older men. As time goes on, his wife and business partner becomes connected in his dreams with the analytic situation, his wife in the role of mother, the analyst as father, his business partner as older brother, with corresponding and related anxieties and frustrations of functionally dynamic contributions, in his business and sexual life. Violently hostile or sexually submissive or guilty attitudes may appear in direct or indirect relation to the analyst, in the patient’s manifest activities, or in the analytic material, in dynamic and economic connection with changes in the patient’s other relationships. The entire development is not equally particular to be announced in diffuse resistance phenomena in the analytic situation and processes (Glover, 1955). The transference neurosis as such can, of course, is endlessly elaborated; when extended beyond the point of effectively demonstrable relevance to the central transference, its resistance function may be in the foreground. It must be remembered that the whole array of strongly cathected persons in the individual’s development, and the related variety of attitudes, is all distributed, so to speak, from a single original relationship, the relationship with a mother in earliest infancy. In all of them, there are elements of ‘transference’ from this relationship, most conspicuously and decisively, of course, the shifting of hostile or erotic drives from the mother to the father. In a sense, then, the entire complex of the transference neurosis is a direct, although paradoxically opposed derivative of the basic attachment and unrenounced craving, which arises in relation to the primal object, the more complicated drama having a relation to the original object attachment like that which Lewin (1946) assigns to the elements of the manifest drama in relation to the dream screen. (This is, of course, related to Lewin’s interpretation [1955] of the analytic situation in terms of dream psychology.) Because in the analytic situation, the patient is again confronted with a unique relationship, on which, via the instrumentality of communication by speech, all other relationships and experiences tend to converge, emotionally and intellectually. In this convergence, however, there is a conspicuous differential, due to the intellectual or cognitive lag. In the latter sphere, the analyst’s autonomous ego functions play a decisive operational role, via his interpretations. In the genesis of this lag, an important role must be assigned to the original (reverse) differentially. Which may establish itself between the centrifugal distribution of primal object libido and aggression and the relatively autonomous energies of perception (the ego’s ‘activity?’). The detachment of libido and aggression from the primal object will have the course be contingent not only on their original intensities but on the special vicissitudes of early gratifications. If we consider the limitless panpsychic scope and potentiality of free association, we must assume that some shaping tendency gives the associations a form or pattern reasonably accessible to our perceptive and interpretative skill. It seems likely that this is the latent inner preoccupation with the elements of the transference neurosis, the original transference of which it is self composed, and finally the derivative vicissitudes of the primal object relationship itself, the primal transference.
Insofar as an individual has achieved more than a physical-perceptual linguistic separation from the primal object, the latter elements (i.e., the actual manifestations of primal transference) may play little or no important role in the empirical realities of a given analysis. Except in certain ‘borderline’ (and allied) problems, they are of Metapsychological importance. The problems of the derivative phase and structural conflicts largely occupy us in the analysis of the neurosis. In an individual of unusually fortunate neurosis (!), the transference neurosis (thus the analysis) may not require deeper penetration than the relatively integrated conflict phenomena of the Oedipus complex. In speech, of course, there is at one time a powerful and versatile vehicle of direct object relationship, and at the same time the marvellously elaborated communicative-referential instrumentality that can convey from one individual to another the subjectively experienced parts or whole of an inner and outer world of endlessly multiplied things, persons, qualities, and relationships, in intelligible code. This code, furthermore, is one whose mastery was originally of profound importance (in conjunction with other crucial maturational phenomena, such as an independent locomotion) in enabling the physical separation from the first object (in continuing relationship), and the gradual physical and mental mastery of the rest of the environment.
With regard to the countertransference, is that it has the same important and narrowing distinction from the other aspects of the current relationship and should be made as in the case of the patient’s transference: For here, too, an individual is involved in a complicated relationship with another human being in which a triplet of separate but constantly interacting and sometimes integrated modalities can be discerned. In a sense, since the patient has at least a considerable freedom of verbal and emotional expression, the analyst’s emotional burden is a heavier one. This, however, is like saying that the patient’s responsibility is greater than the child’s, or (to turn back to an earlier page!) That the surgeon carries a greater burden than his comfortably anaesthetized patiently. The analyst is, or should be, better prepared for this burden than his patient. Still, if we remove this entire question from the realm of professional moralism, self-debasement, or self-pity, we can all the more genuinely appreciate the essential message of the frequently contributions on the countertransference in recent years, i.e., the reminder that no one is ‘completely; (or, as Freud [1937] preferred, ‘perfectly’) analysed, that even those who may have approximately this as closely as may reasonably be expected, have specific vulnerabilities to certain individuals or situations, that these may appear in milder form or ephemerally, but nonetheless importantly with others; that, in fact, a self-analysis for the specific ‘counter-transference neurosis’ (Tower, 1956) with each case is, to varying degrees, as silent counterpoint, an integral part of all good analytic work. This would be true whether the counter-transference played its traditional impeding role or its more subtle favourable (i.e., ‘catalytic’) role (Tower, 1956) in a given analysis. One never knows where the usefulness of an unanalyzed reaction may end, and difficulties begin. Another important contribution, not separate, except in terms of emphasis, is the growing appreciation of the countertransference as an affirmative instrument facilitating perception, whereby a sensitive awareness of one’s incipient reactions to the patient, fully controlled and appropriately analysed in an immediate sense, leads to a richer and more subtle understanding of the patient’s transference strivings (Racker 1957, Weigert 1954). This would be opposite yet cognate to the understanding by transitory empathic identification (Reich, 1960). There is also the important attention (Money-Kyrle, 1956) to the specific vicissitudes of the analyst’s peculiarly constricted and emotionally inhibited therapeutic effort, and the mutual projective and introjective identification that may occur between analyst and patient in crises of technical frustration, i.e., frustration of the analyst’s understanding. The operational primacy of the latter function must be stressed. That is, that this function and the germane emotional attitude constitute central and essential ‘gratification’ for the patient’s ‘mature transference’ strivings, enabling his toleration, even positive unitization of the principle of abstinence, in relation to primitive transference demands. Loewald’s views (1960) are importantly related to these, perhaps, in a sense, complementary to them. An important connotation of these countertransference studies is the diminution of the rigid status barrier between analyst and analysand. They point to the patient in the physician, the child in the parent (a sort of latent or potential ‘seesaw’, to modify Phyllis Greenacre’s [1854] ‘titled relationship’!). This intellectual tendency can be, and is often, overdone, just as the magical power of the countertransference to determine the course of treatment has become an almost euphoric overwrought mystical belief among certain younger therapists, and, as a concept, a formidable source of resistance in the technically informed patient. Such exaggerated views, when not of specific and immediate emotional geneses, or due to ignorance, may be connected with a general lack of conviction regarding the efficacy of the therapist’s own analysis, or os the effectiveness of the interpretative method. There may be of a general lack of awareness or acceptance of the power that the original ‘tilt’ lens to the patient’s transference. Finally it is this ‘tilt’ in the situation, and (very importantly) the actuality of its representation in the respective emotional and intellectual states of the participants, on which we must rely. If temperately considered, a view of the relationship that gives great weight to the countertransference, is productively important. It places the operational attitude and technique of the analysis in better perspective, as an integration of several important factors that always include the Countertransference, and it permits an examination of nuances of technical decision on a much more illuminating and genuinely dependable basis than pure precedent, or rule-of-thumb, or pseudo-mathematical certainty. Thus, too foreign a patient in pain some aspirin or not, to inspect his eye for a foreign body or not, to tell him promptly where one ids going on vacation or not, may be right or wrong in either alterative, depending on the analyst’s own specific motivation or anxiety, compared with the patient’s actual need, or their objective clinical indications of the moment, weighted against the continuing and rationally interpreted convenience of technique. It is less likely that any manoeuver, assuming the adherence to basic broad technical principles, will create significant analytic distortion, if executed with genuine and exclusively therapeutic intentions’ appropriate to the need, than a manoeuver or default of manoeuver, based entirely or largely on exhibitionistic or seductive or anxious or compulsive reasons, however respectable the latter may seem. These principles, of course, assume the general analytic framework, and the maintenance of the principle of abstinence, insofar as it does not conflict with overriding human requirements, or does not reach beyond the subtle limits that have been sought to earlier discussion (Scheunert’s, 1961). The issue of the increment of unanswered innocuous questions, of injudiciously withheld expressions of reasonable human interest, where the human relationship requires them. Still it is related to the emotional opposition of the analyst, for a ‘rule’ obviously has a different meaning to an anxious or sadistic or compulsive person than to an individual not thus burdened. The general problem is germane to the perennial interest in why (beyond the usual verities or clichés) an individual becomes a physician, and specifically why he then chooses this physically and emotionally inhibited specialty, which depends do largely on benignly purposive frustration of the patient, on occasional informed talking, and possibly even more on extended and perceptive listening. Assuming that is reasonable, with the myriad individual factors, some general or common countertransference element enters the over determination both of choice of the medical profession and of the specialty that holds a unique position in the minds of medical men and patients alike. The uniqueness of this position is perhaps best suggested by the remarkably frequent query of the naive patient: “Are you really an MD.?” or “Are you a medical doctor too?” This is in a different intellectual realm, but surely related to the more informed discussion as to whether analysis is a brach of medicine, or a special development in psychology, or an entirely independent discipline. It is to suggest that, apart from more usual considerations the fascination and strain of analytics works are related to the same phenomenon that evokes the deductibility of which the patient reaction to it. Having to a mindful purpose in that the state of separation and of infantile deprivations that are integral in the situation, and the effort to utilize these toward solutions more favourable than those originally evolved. Setting aside the specific phase problems and other quantitative aspects of individual Countertransference, there will still be quantitative individual variations, tending toward excessive deprivation or overindulgence (for example), revolving about the central and necessary principle of abstinence in the psychoanalytic situation, whose skilful administration is a part of the basic occupational commitment. Insofar as ‘weaning’ is the great focal prototype of abstinence or deprivation, bringing to our attention to the historical vicissitudes of the word wean (Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 12 [1933]) in which even a secondary (non-etymologic) developments of the alternative meaning ‘deprivingly of one's sanctity' has become obsolete. This is no doubt intertwined with cultural consideration far beyond out present scope of interest. However, it is also symbolically related to the (obsolescent?) Technical moods, which are felt to be restored to analytic work, with advantage.
In addition, on the interface of the analyst-patient interaction is not yet as to have become as focussing on the patient or the analyst. It is the nature of the integration, the quality of contact, what goes on between, including what is enacted. What is communicated effectively and/or unconsciously, that is addressed.
The apparent edge-horizon that is to form a resolution about that which ideally becomes the point of maximum and acknowledged contact at any given moment in a relationship without fusion, without violation of the separateness and integrity of each participant. Attempting to relate at this point requires ceaseless sensitivity to inner changes in oneself and in the other, as well as to changes at the interface of the interaction as these occur in the context of the spiral of reciprocal impact. This kind of effort has a reflexive impact on both participants, and this in turn influences what goes on between them in a dialectical way.
The interchanging edge thus is never static but becomes the trace of a constantly moving locus. Each time this is identified it is also changed, and as it is re-identified it changes again. The analytic expanse is enlarged significantly as aspects of the relationship that are generally not explicitly acknowledged or addressed, as well as their vicissitudes over time, are identified and explored in an analytic way. The emphasis is on process, on engaging live experience, and on generating a new kind of live experience by so doing, in an ever expanding way.
In some ways the focus is on what Winnicott (1971) refers to as the “continuity-contiguity moment” in relatedness. What distinguishes the conceptualized necessity for acknowledgement and explicitness seems the process of acknowledgement for increases the moment’s dimensional change to natures experiential obtainability. What is? , However, achieved is not simply greater insight into what or was, but what should be, as but a new kind of evidential experience.
Working at the circumferential horizon soon creates a unique contest of safety and allows for maximum closeness precisely because it protects against the threat of intrusion or violation. Attending to the most elusive interactive subtleties and ‘opening the moment’ and thus actualizes upon a natural way to detoxify and subjectively field, every bit as dangers of mystification, seduction. Coercion, manipulation, or collusion is minimized (Levenson 1972, 1983; Ehrenberg 1974, 1982; Feiner 1979, 1983; Gill 1982, 1983; Hoffman 1983). In some instances this makes it possible for both participants to engage aspects of experience and pathology that otherwise might be threatening, even dangerous.
The protection of the kind of analytic rigour that attending to interactive subtleties provides allows for more intense levels of effective engagement without the kind of risk this might otherwise entail.
In its gross effect, the apparent circumferential horizon is not simply art the boundary between self and other, but the given directions developing interpersonal closeness in the relationship, it is also at the boundary of self-awareness. It is a particular point as occupying a positional state in space and time of self-discovery, at which one can become more ‘intimate’ with one’s own experience through the evolving relationship with the other, and then more intimates with the other as one becomes more attuned to self. Because of this kind of dialectical interplay, the apparent favourable boundary becomes the undergoing maturation of the relationship.
As moment-by-moment change over in quality, that the relatedness and experience between analyst and patient are studied, individual patterns of reaction and reason-sensitivities can be identified and explored. This allows for the sparking awareness of choice, as existential decisions to become increasingly involved, or to withdraw, as well as the persuasive influences may be responsively ado, in that they can be studied in process, and the feelings surrounding these can be closely scrutinized. The patient’s spontaneous associations to the immediate experience often not only become an avenue to effectively charged memories of past experiential encounters that might not have been previously accessible but also allow for the metaphoric articulation of unconscious hopes, fears, and expectations, least of mention, few than there are less, have to no expectation whatsoever, or as even not to expect from expectation itself.
Even when the circumferential edge horizon is missed and there is some kind of intrusion or some failure to meet due to overcautiousness, the process of aiming for it, the marginal but mutual focuses on the difficulties involved, can facilitate its obtainable achievement. The effort to study the qualities of mutually spatial experiences in a relationship, the interlocking of both participants, including an interchangeable focus on the failure to connect or inauthenticate, or perhaps into a collusion, can thus become the bridge to a more approximative encounter.
The circumferential edge horizon is, therefore. Not a given, but an interactive creation. It is always unique to the moment and for reason-sensitivities to posit of themselves the specific participants in relation to each other and reflects the participant’s subjective sense of what is most crucial or compelling about their interaction at that present of moments.
Focussing on the interactive nuances in this way often requires a shift in perspective as to what is a figure and what is ground. For example, where a patient drifts into a fantasy that figuratively takes him or her out of the room, perhaps the affirmation to what is in Latin projectio, yet the interactive meaning is as important as the actual content (if not more so). Exploring what triggered the fantasy, and what its immediate interactive function might be, may help the patient grasp some of the subtler patterns of his or her own experiential flame, inasmuch as to grasp to its thought. While the content of the fantasy can provide useful clues to its distributive contribution of its dynamical function, staying with content may be a way for both patient and analyst to collude in avoiding engaging the anxieties of the moment.
Where some form of collusion does occur, as at times it inevitably will, demystifying the collusion has internal repercussions as well. The clarification of patterns of self-mystification (Laing 1965) that this makes it a possibly that being often liberating. It can facilitate a shift on the part of the patient from feeling victimized or helpless, stuck without any options, too freshly experiencing his or her own power and responsibility in relation to multiple choices.
For example, one patient who had difficulty defining where she ended and the other began was invariable in a constant state of anger with others for what she perceived as their not allowing her feelings, as how this operated between us, she realized that no one could control her feelings and that it was her inordinate need for the approval of others that were controlling her. It was her need to control the other, to control the other’s reaction to her, that was defining her experience. The result was that she began to feel less threatened and paranoid. She also was able to begin to deal analytically with the unconscious dynamics of her needs for approval and for control, and to focus on her anxieties in a way not possibly earlier.
We must then, ask of ourselves, are the afforded efforts to control the given as the ‘chance’ to ‘change’, or the given ‘change’ to ‘chance’? As a neutral type of the therapist participation proves to be essential to the resolution of the schizophrenic patient’s basic ambivalence concerning individuation-his intense conflict, that is, between clinging and a hallucinatory, symbiotic mode of existence, in which he is his whole perceived world, or on the other hand relinquishing this mode of experience and committing himself to object-relatedness and individuality-too becoming, that is, a separate person in a world of other persons. Will (1961) points out that just as ‘In the moves toward closeness the person finds the needed relatedness and identification with another, in the withdrawal (often marked by negativism) he finds the separateness that favours his feelings of being distinct and self-identified, and Burton (1961) says that “In the treatment, the patient’s desire for privacy is respected and no encroachment is made. The two conflicting needs war with each other and it is a serious mistake for the therapist to take sides too early.” The schizophrenic patient has not as to the experience that commitment too object-relatedness still allows for separateness and privacy, and where Séchehaye (1956) recommends that one “make oneself a substitute for the autistic universe that helped to offer as of a given choice that must rest in the patient’s hands.” This regarded primeval area of applicability of a general comment by Burton (1961) that ”In the psychotherapy of every schizophrenic a point is reached where the patient must be confronted with his choice. . . .” Of Shlien’s (1961) comment that “Freedom means the widest scope of choice and openness to experience . . . .”
Only in a therapeutic setting where he finds the freedom to experience both these modes of relatedness with one and the same person can the patient become able to choose between psychosis and emotional maturity. He can settle for this later only in proportion as he realizes that both object-relatedness and symbiosis are essential ingredients of healthy human relatedness-that the choice between these modes amounts not to a once-for-all commitment, but that, to enjoy the gratification of human relatedness he must commit himself to either object-relatedness or symbiotic relatedness, as the chancing needs and possibilities that the basic therapeutics requires and permit.
Such, as to say, the problem is to reconcile our everyday consciousness of us as agents, with the best view of what science tells us that we are. Determinism is one part of the problem. It may be defined as the doctrine that every event has a cause. More precisely, for any event as ‘e’, there will be some antecedent state of nature ‘N’, and a law of nature. ‘L’, such that given to ‘L’, ‘N’, will be followed by 'e'. Yet if this is true of every event, it is true of events such as my doing something or choosing to do something. So my choosing or doing something is fixed by some antecedent state ‘N’ and the laws. Since determinism is universal these in turn are fixed, and so backwards to events, for which I am clearly not responsible (events before my birth, for example). So no events can be voluntary or free, where that means that they come about purely because of free willing them, as when I could have done otherwise. If determinism is true, then there will be antecedent states and laws already determining such events? : How then can I truly be said to be their author, or be responsible for them? Reactions to this problem are commonly classified as: (1) hard determinism. This accepts the conflict and denies that you have real freedom or responsibility. (2) Soft determinism or compatibility. Reactions in this family assert that everything you should want from a notion of freedom is quite compatible with determinism. In particular, even if your action is caused, it can often be true of you that you could have done otherwise if you had chosen, and this may be enough to render you liable to be held responsible or to be blamed if what you did was unacceptable (the fact that previous events will have caused you to choose as doing so and deemed irrelevant on this option). (3) Libertarianism. This is the view that, while compatibilism is inly an evasion, there is a more substantive, real notion of freedom that can yet be preserved in the face of determinism (or of in determinism). While the empirical or phenomenal self is determined and not free, the noumenal or rational self is capable of rational, free action. Nevertheless, since the noumenal self exists outside the categories of space and time, this freedom seems to be of doubtful value. Other libertarian avenues include suggesting that the problem is badly framed, for instance because the definition of determinism breaks down, or postulating a special category of uncaused acts of volition, or suggesting that there are two independent but consistent ways of looking at an agent, the scientific and humanistic. It is only through confusing them that the problem seems urgent. None of these avenues accede to exist by a greater than is less to quantities that seem as not regainfully to employ to any inclusion nontechnical ties. It is an error to confuse determinism and fatalism. Such that, the crux is whether choice, is a process in which different desires, pressures, and attitudes fight it out and eventually result in one decision and action, or whether in attitudinal assertions that there is a ‘self’ controlling the conflict, in the name of higher desires, reasons, or mortality? The attempt to add such a extra to the more passive picture (often attributed to Hume), and is a particular target not only of Humean, but also of much feminist and postmodernist writing.
Thus and so, the doctrine that every event has a cause infers to determinism. The usual explanation of this is that for every event, there is some antecedent state, related in such a way that it would break a law of nature for this antecedent state to exist, and as yet the event not to happen. This is a purely metaphysical claim, and carries no implications for whether we can in a principal product the event. The main interest in determinism has been in asserting its implications for ‘free will’. However, quantum physics is essentially indeterministic, yet the view that our actions are subject to quantum indeterminacies hardly encourages a sense of our own responsibility for them.
As such, these reflections are simulated by what might be regarded as naive surprise at the impact of the renewed emphasis on the ‘here-and-now’ in our technical work during the last few years, including the early interpretations of the transference. This emphasis has been argued most vigorously by Gill and Muslin (1976) and Gill (1979). It has at times been reacting to, as if it were a technical innovation, and, of course, making it clear, all the same, from the persistence and reiteration that characterize Gill’s contributions, that he believes the “resistance to the awareness of transference” to be a critically important and neglected area in psychoanalytic work, this may deserve further emphasis. In Gill’s latest contribution of which as before, he concedes that the recall or reconstruction of the past remains useful but that the working out of conflict in the current transference is the more important, i.e., should have priority of attention. In view of the centrality of issues and its interesting place in the development of psychoanalysis, the contributory works of Gill and Muslin (1976). Gill (1979) presents a subtle and searching review and analysis of Freud’s evolving views on the interrelationship between the conjoint problems of transference and resistance and the indications for interpretation. Repeating this painstaking work would therefore be superfluous. Our’s is for a final purpose to state for reason to posit of itself upon the transference and non-transference interpretation and beyond this, to sketch a tentative certainty to the implications and potentialities of the ‘here-and-now’.
In a sense, the current emphasis may be the historical ‘peaking’ of a long and gradual, if fluctuating, development in the history of psychoanalysis. We know that Freud’s first re-counted with the transference, the ‘false connection’, was its role as a resistance (Breuer and Freud 1893-1895). While Freud’s view of this complex phenomenon soon came to include its powerfully affirmative role in the psychoanalytic process, the basis importance of the ‘transference resistance’ remained. In the Dynamics of Transference (1912) stated in dramatic figurative terms the indispensable current functions of the transference: “For when all is said and done, destroying anyone in absentia or in effigies is impossible.” In fact, to some of us, the two manifestly opposing forces are two sides of the same coin. As, perhaps, the relationship is eve n more intimate, in the sense that the resistance is mobilized in the first place b the existence of (manifest or-often-latent) transference. It is spontaneous protective reaction against loss of love, or punishment, or narcissistic suffering in the unconscious infantile context of the process.
Historically, the effective reinstatement of his personal past into the patient’s mental life was thought to be the essential therapeutic vehicle of analysis and thus its operational goal. This was, of course, modified with time, explicitly or in widespread general understanding. The recollection or reconstruction of an experience, however critical its importance, evidently did not (except in relatively few instances) immediately dissolve the imposing edifice of structuralized reaction patterns to which it may have importantly y contributed, this (dissolution) might indeed occur-dramatically-in the case of relatively isolated, encapsulated, and traumatic experiences, but only rarely y in the chronic psychoneuroses whose genesis was usually different and far more complex. Freud’s (1914) discovery of the process of ‘working through’, along with the emphasis on its importance, was one manifestation of a major process of recognition of the complexity, persuasiveness, and tenacity of the current dynamics of personality, in relation to both genetic and dynamic factors of early or origin. Perhaps Freud’s (1937) most vivid figurative recognition of the pseudoparadoxical role of early genetic factors, If not understood as part of a complex continuum, was in his “lamp-fire” critique of the technical implications of Rank’s (1924) Trauma of Birth. The term pseudoparadoxical is used because the recovery of the past by recollection or reconstruction-if no longer the sole operational vehicle and goal of psychoanalysis-retains a unique intimate and individual explanatory value, essential to genuine insight into the fundamental issues of personality development and distortion.
When Ferenczi and Rank wrote The Development of Psychoanalysis in 1924, they proposed an enormous emphasis on emotional experience in the analytic process, as opposed to what was thought to be the effectively sterile intellectual investigation the n in vogue. Instead of the speedy reduction of disturbing transference experience by interpretation, these authors, in a sense, advised the elucidation and cultivation of emotional intensities. (As Alexander pointed out in 1925, however, the method was not clear.) These alone could lend a vivid sense of reality and meaningfulness to the basic dynamism of personality incorporated in the transference. Now it is to be masted and marked that in this work, too, there is no ‘repudiation’ of the past. Ultimately genetic interpretations were to be made. The intense transference experience, as mentioned, was intended to give body, reality, to the living past. Yet, the ultimate significance of construction was invoked, in the sense of ‘supplying’ those memories that might not be spontaneously available. It was felt that the crucial experiences of childhood had usually been promptly repressed and thus not experiences in consciousness in any significant degree. Therapeutic effectiveness of the process was attributed largely to the intensity of emotional experience, than to the depth and ramifications of detained cognitive insight. The fostering in of transference intensity, as, we can infer, was rather by withholding or scantiness of interpretations (as opposed to making facilitating interpretations) and, at times (as specifically stared), by mild confirming responses or attitudes in the affective sphere: These would tend to support the patient’s transference affects in interpersonal reality (Ferenczi and Rank 1024).
This is, of course, different from the recent emphasis on ‘early interpretation of the transference (Gill and Muslin 1976), which in a process in the cognitive sphere designed to overcome resistance to awareness of transference and thuds to mobilize the latter as an active participant in the analysis as soon as possible. What they have in common is an undeniable emphasis on current experience, explicitly in the transference. Also, in both tendencies there is an implicit minimization of the vast and rich territories of mind and feeling, which may become available and at times uniquely informative if fewer tendentious attitudes govern the analyst’s initial approach. Correspondingly, in both there is the hazard of stimulating resistance of a stubborn, well-rationalized maturity by the sheer tendentious of approachment, and similarly transference tendency pursued assiduously by the analyst.
The question of the moments entering a sense of conviction in the patient (a dynamically indispensable state) is, of course, a complex matter. However, if one is to think that few would doubt that immediate or closely proximal experience (‘today’ or ‘yesterday’) occasions grater vividness and sense of certainty than isolated recollection or reconstruction of the remote past. Thus the “here-and-now” in analytic work, the immediate cognitive exchange and the important current emotional experiences, and, under favourable conditions, contributes to other elements in the process, i.e., recovery or reconstruction of the past, a quality of vividness deriving from their own immediacy, which can infuse the past with life. Obviously, it is the experience of transference affect that largely engages our attention in this reference. However, we must not ignore the contrapuntal role of the actual adult relationship between patient and analyst. Corresponding is indeed the actual biological constellation that bings the transference itself into being. At the very least, a minimal element of ‘resemblance’ to primary figures of the past is a sine quo non for its emergence (Stone 1954).
Nonetheless, this contribution up to and including Gill’s, Muslin’s (1976) and Gill’s (1979) are highly-developed. However, did not introduce alternations in the fundamental conceptions of psychopathology and its essential responses to analytic techniques and process. Yet, there are, of course, varying emphases-namely quantitative-and corresponding positions as to their respective effectiveness. As Strachey states, "there is an approach to actual substantive modification in the keystone position assigned to introjective super-ego change as the essential phenomenons of analytic process-and possibly in the exclusive role assigned to transference interpretations as ‘mutative’.
A related or complementary tendency may be discerned in Gill’s (1979) proposal that “analytic situation residues” from the patient’s ongoing personal life, insofar as they are judged transferentially significant in free association, is brought into relation with the transference as soon as possible, even if the patient feels no prior awareness of such a relationship. It is as if all significant emotional experience, including extra-analytic experiences, could be viewed as displacement or mechanisms of concealed expression of his transference. That this is very frequently true of even the most trivial-seeming actual allusions to the analytic would, in that, the thoroughly extra-analytic references constitute a more subtle and different problems, ranging from dubiously interpretably minor issues to massive forms of destructive acting out connected with extreme narcissistic resistances and utterly without discernible 'analytic situation residues'. The massive forms are, of course, analytic emergencies, requiring interpretation. Still, such interpretation would usually depend on the awareness of the larger ‘strategic situations (Stone 1973), rather than on a detail of the free association communication (granting the latter’s usefulness, if present-and recognizable). However, the fact of the past or the historical as never entirely abandoned or nullified, becoming more even, the role assigned to it may be pale or secondary. That the preponderant emphasis on concealed transference may ultimately, constitute an “actually existing” change in technique and process, with its own intrinsic momentum.
The Ferenczi and Rank technique included, in effect, a deliberate exploitation of the transference resistance, especially in the sense of intense emotional display and discharged. While the polemical emphases of these authors are on (affective) experiences as the sine non of true analytic process-the living through of what was never fully experienced in consciousness in the past (with ultimate translation into ‘memories’, i.e., constructions)-the actual techniques (with a few exceptions) are not clearly specified in their book. For a detailed exposition of the techniques learned from Ferenczi, with wholehearted acceptance, as in the paper of De Forest (1942), which includes the deliberate building up of dramatic transference intensities by interpretative withholding and the active participation of the analyst as a reactive individual. Also included is the active directing of all extra-therapeutic experience into the immediate experiential stream if the analysis. The extreme emphasis on affective transference experience became at one time a sort of vogue, appearing almost as an end and measured by the vehemence of the patient’s emotional displays. In Gill’s own revival of and emphasis on a sound precept of classical techniques (preceded by the 1976 paper of Gill and Muslin), fundamentally different from that of Ferenczi and Rank in its emphasis, one discerns an increment of enthusiasm between the studied, temperate, and well-argued paper of (1979) and the later paper of the same year (1979), which includes similar ideas greatly broadened and extended ti a degree that is, in it's difficultly to accept.
Now, what is it that may actually be worked out in the present-(1) as a prelude to genetic clarification and reduction of the transference neurosis or (2) as a theoretical possibility in its own right without reliance on the explanatory power or specific reductive impact of insight into the past? First some general considerations of whether or not one is an enthusiastic proponent of ‘object relations theory’ in any of its elaborate forms, seems self-evident that all major developmental vicissitudes and conflicts have occurred in the context of important relations with important objects and that they or their effects continue to be reflected in current relationships with persons of similar or parallel importance. That we assume that the psychoanalytic situation (and its adjacent ‘ extended family’) provides a setting in which such problems may be reproduced in their essentials, both effectively and cognitively.
There is something deductively engaging in the idea that an individual must confront and solve his basic conflicts in their immediate setting in which they arise, regardless of their historical background. Certainly this is true in the patient’s (or anyone else’s) actual life situation. Some possible and sometimes state corollaries of this view would be that the preponderant resort to the past, whether by recollection or reconstruction, would be largely in the service of resistance, in the sense of a devaluation of the present and a diversion from its ineluctable requirements. It would be as if the United Kingdom and Ireland would undertake to solve the current problems in Ulster essentially by detailed discussion of Cromwell’s behaviour a few centuries ago. Granted that the latter might indeed illuminate the historical contribution of some aspects of the current sociopolitical dilemma, there are immediate problems of great complexity and intensity from which the Cromwell discussion might indeed by a diversion, if it were magnified beyond it's clear but very limited contribution, displacing in importance the problematical social-political-economic altercation of the present and the recent clearly accessible and still relevant past. As with so many other issues, Freud himself was the first to note that resort to the past may be involved by the patient to evade pressing and immediate current problems. In conservative technique, it has long been noted that some judicious alternations of focus between past and present, according to the confronting resistances trend, may be necessary (for example, Fenichel 1945). However, it was Horney (1939) who placed the greatest stress on the conflict and the greatest emphasis on the recollection trend as supporting resistance.
Now, from the classical point of view, the emphasis is quite different. The original conflict situation is intrapsychic, within the patient, though obviously engaging his environment and ultimately-most poignantly and productively-his analyst. This culminates in a transference neurosis that reproduces the essential problems of the object relationships and conflicts of his development. Thus, in principle, the vicissitudes of love or hate or fear, etc., do not require, or even admit of, ultimate solution in the immediate reality, perceived and construed as such. The problem is to make the patient aware of the distortions that he has carried into the present and of the defensive modes and mechanisms that have supported them. Obviously, the process (‘tactical’) resistances present themselves first for understanding; later there are the ‘strategic’ resistances (i.e., those not expressed in manifest disturbances of free association) (Stoner 1973). Insofar as the mobilization of the transference and the transference neurosis is accorded a uniquely central holistic role in all analyses, the ‘resistance to the awareness of transference’, becomes a crucial issue, the problem of interpretive timing on which a controversial matter from early. Ultimately the bedrock resistance, the true ‘transference resistance’, must be confronted and dissolved or reduced to the greatest possible degree. Such a reduction is construed as largely dependent on the effective reinstatement of the psychological prototype of current transference illusions, with an ensuing sense of the inappropriateness of emotional attitudes in the present and the resultant tendency toward their relinquishment. In a sense, the neurosis is viewed as an anachronistic but compelling investitures of the current scene within unresolved conflict of the past. When successfully reduced, this does appear to have been the accessibly demonstrable phenomenology.
What then may be carried into the analytic situation from the ‘hard-nosed’ paradigm of the struggle with every day, current reality, with advantage to the process? We have already made mention, in that the sense of conviction, or ‘sense of reality’-affective and cognitive-which originates in th immediacy of process experience. It is our purpose and expectation that, with appropriate skill and timing, this quality of conviction may become linked too other, fewer immediate phenomena, at least in the sense of more securely felt perceptions, including first the fact of transference and ultimately its accessible genetic origins. What furthers? Insofar as the transference neurosis tends toward organic wholeness, a sort of conflict ‘summary’ by condensation, under observation in the immediate present, one may seek and find access in it, not only to the basic conflict mentioned, but to uniquely personal mode of defence and resistance, revealed in dreams, habits of free association, symptomatic acts, parapraxes, and the more direct modes of personal address and interaction that are evident in every analysis. Further, in this view, although not always as transparent as one would wish, this remarkable condensation of effect, impulse, defence, and temporary conflict solution adumbrates more dependably than any other analytic element (or grouping of elements) the essential outlines of the field of obligatory analytic work of a given period of the patient’s life. In it is the tightly knotted tangle deprived from the patient’s early or prehistoric life enmeshed in him actualities of the analytic situation and his germane and contiguous ongoing life situations.
Also, in the sphere of the “here-and-now,” and of extensive importance, is the role of actualities in the analytic situation. Whether in the patent’s everyday life or in the analytic relationship, the even-handed, open-minded attention to the patient’s emotional experience (especially his suffering or resentment) as to what may be actual, as opposed too ‘neurotic’ (i.e., illusory or unwittingly provoked) or specifically transferential, is not only epistemologically deductive for reason that is also a contribution to the affective soundness of the basic analytic relationship and thus of inestimable importance. At the risk of slight-very slight-exaggeration, in that with excepting instances of pathological neurotic submissiveness, as a patient who wholeheartedly accepted the significance his neurotic or transference-motivated attitudes or behaviour if he felt that ‘his reality’ was not given just due. Furthermore, even the exploration and evaluation of complicated neurotic behaviour must be exhaustive to the point where a spontaneous urge to look for irrational motivations is practically on the threshold of the patient ‘s awareness. Once, again, one must stress the impact of such a tendency on the total analytic relationship. For, not only are the quality and mood of utilization of interpretations, but ultimately the subtleties of transition from a transference relationship to their realities of the actual relationship depend, on a greater degree than has been made explicit, on the cognitive and emotional aspects of the ongoing experience in the actual sphere. Greenson (1971, 1972. Wexler 1969) devoted several of his last papers to this important subject. The subject, of course, includes the vast spheres of the analyst’s character structure and his countertransference. However, more than may be at first apparency, can reside in the sphere of conscious consideration of technique e and attitude in relation to a basic rationale.
However, apart from the immediate function of painstaking discrimination of realities and the impact of this attitude on the total situation, there remains the important question of whether important elements of true analytic process may not be immanent in such trends of inquiry. The vigorous exploration and exposure of distortions in object relations, via the transference or in the affective and behavioural patterns of everyday life, including defence functions, can conceivably catalyse important spontaneous changes in their own right. To further this end, the traditional techniques of psychoanalysis will, of course, be utilized. As an interim phenomenon, however, the patient struggle to deal with distortions, as one might with other error subject to conscious control or pedagogical correction. It is to reasons of conviction that such a tendency may be productive (both as such, and in its intrinsic c capacity to highlight neurotic or conflictive fractions) and has been insufficiently exploited. Nonetheless, there is no reason that the specific dynamic impact of th past is lost or neglected in its ultimate importance, in giving attention to a territory that is, in itself, of a great technical potentiality.
Practitioners and theorists such as Horney (1939) or Sullivan (1953) did not reject the significance of the past, even though its role and proportionate position, both in process and theoretical psychodynamics, was viewed differently. The persisting common features in these views would be a large emphasis on sociological and cultural forces and the focussing of technical emphasis on immediate interpretation transactions.
Granted that various technical recommendations of both dissident and ‘classical’ origin, including those on the nature and reduction of the transference, sometimes appear to devaluate the operational importance of the genetic factor, this devaluation is not supported by the clinical experience of most of those that were indeed of closely scrutinizing it as part of the confessio fidei of major deviationists. Certainly, both in theoretical principle and in empirical observation, this essential direction of traditional analytic process remains of fundamental importance. Conceding the power and challenge of cumulative developmental and experiential personality change and the undeniable impact of current factors, it remains true that the uniquely personal, decisive elements in neurosis, apart from constitution, originate in early individual experience. How to mobilize elements into an effectively mutual function is largely a technical problem and-in seeming paradox-relies to a considerable degree on the skilful handling of the “here-and-now.” The purposive technical pursuit of the past has not been clinically rewarding. That the ultimate effort to recover an integrated early material in dynamic understanding may not always be successful, especially in severe cases of early pathogenesis is, of course, evident (for example, Jacobson 1971). In such instances, while our preference would be otherwise, we may have to remain largely content with painstaking work in the “here-and-now,” illuminated to whatever degree possible by reasonable and sound, if necessarily broad, constructions dealing largely with ego mechanisms than primitive anatomical fantasies. In other events, sometimes after years of painstaking work, even large and challenging characterological behavioural trends that have been viewed, clarified, and interpreted in a variety of current transference, situational (even cultural) references will show striking rottenness in earl y experience, conflict, and conflict solution whose explanatory value then achieves a mutative force that remains uniquely among interpretative manoeuvres or spontaneous insights. To this end, the broader aspects of ‘strategic’ resistance (Stone 1973) must be kept in mind, a much subtle element of countertransference and counterresistance.
It would seem proper that at this point of giving to a summation of the current ferment regarding the “here-and-now” of which any number of valuable critique and theoretical and technical suggestions that may help us to improve the analytic effectiveness, it would seem that the emphasis on the “here-and-now” interpreting not only consistently with but also ultimately indispensable for genuine access to the critical dynamism deriving from the individual’s early development. Nor is this reflexive, assuming the technical sophistication-inconsistent with the understanding and analysis of continuing developmental problems, character crystallization and the influence of current stresses as such. Adequate attention to the character as a complex interpretational group permits the clear and useful emergence in or the analytic field of significant early material, as defined by the transference neurosis between the technical approaches and that of Gill (1979, 1979), apart from certain larger issues. Whereas Gill would apparently recommend searching out ‘day residues’ of probable transference in the patient’s responses to the analysis or analyst and in his account of his daily life and offer possible alternative explanations to the patient’s direct and simple responses to them as self-evident realities, first relying on the acceptance and exploration of the patient’s ‘reality’, with the possibility that this will incidently favour the relatively spontaneous precipitation of more readily available transference materials, this general Principle does not, of course, obviate or exclude the other alternatives as something preferable?
Consideration of the interaction between the two adult personalties in the analytic situation requires a mixture of common sense and interest in self-evident (although often ignored) elements, on the one hand, and abstrusely psychological and Metapsychological considerations, on the other.
Thus, if we set aside from immediate consideration questions regarding the ‘real relationship’ and accept as a given self-evident fact that the entire psychoanalytic drama occurs (without our question or permission) between two adults in the “here-and-now” the residual is due becomes the management of the transference, which has been a challenging problem since the phenomenon was first described. Let us assume, for purposes of brevity, that few would now adhere to the principle that the transference is to be interpreted only when it becomes a manifest resistance (Freud 1912). It is in fact always a resistance and at the same time a propulsive force (Stone 1962, 1967, 1073). It has long since been recognized that an undue delay of well-founded transference interpretations (regardless of the state of the patient’s free association) can seriously hinder progress in analysis, and further, it cas augment the dangers of acting out or neurotic flight from the analysis by the patient. The awareness of such danger has been clearly etched in psychoanalytic consciousness since e Freud’s (1905) insight into the end of the Dora case.
Apart from the hazzards inherent in technical default, nonetheless, there has developed over the years with increasing momentum, perhaps in some relations of the increasing stress on the transference neurosis as a nuclear phenomenon of process. The affirmative active address to the transference, i.e., to the analysis-or some by time is the active interpretative bypassing-of the ‘resistances to the awareness of transference
. . . operational emphasis on the countertransference, the tendency-in rational for a proportion-must be regarded as an important integral component of a progressively evolving psychoanalytic method. That individuals vary in their acceptance of technical devotion to this tendency is to be note (as indicated earlier), but its widespread practice by thoughtful analysts cannot be ignored, by the importance of its disregarded note of countransference among analysts, which would tend to restore n earlier emphasis digestedly approach to historical material and avoidance of early or excessive; transference historical material and the avoidance of earlier excessive’ transference interpretation.
A few words about our view on th relatively a circumscribed problem of transference interpretation. It is of the belief of longstanding conviction that the economic aspects of transference distribution are critically important, although largely ignored the seeking utilization of this consideration, a broad directional sense, by distinguishing between the potential transference of the analytic situation and those of the typical psychotherapeutic situation (as beyond that, the transference of everyday life. These varying their degree of emergence and their special investment of transference objects with the intensiveness of contact, with the structural emends of deprivation, and with the degree of regressive attention the operation of the rule of abstinence, which is, of course, most highly developed and consistently maintained in the traditional psychoanalytic situation (Stone 1961). Thus although subject to constant infirmed monitoring, the transference can be as medical, at least latently directed ultimately toward the analyst (compared with the cooperated persons in their environment).
Now, under what conditions and with what provisions should the awareness of such transference potentialities be actively mobilized? Obviously, the original precept regarding its emergence as resistance still trued in its implied affirmative aspect but is no longer exclusive. Further, there are, without question, early transference ‘emergences’ that must be dealt with by an active interpretive approach: For example, the early rapid and severe transference regression of borderline patients or the less common some timely seriously impeding erotic transference fulminations in neuronic patients. These are special instances in which the indications seem clear and obligatory.
The central situation, nonetheless, is the ‘average’ analysis (with apologies!), where the latent transferences tend to remain ego-dystopia, warded off, deploring slowly over periods, and manifesting themselves by a variety of derivative phenomena of variable intensity. Surely, dreams, parapraxes, and trends of free association will reveal basic transference directions very early. However, when should these be interrelated to the patient if he is effectively unaware of them? Again, ‘all things' being equal’, an old principle of Freud’s suggested for all interpretative interventions (as opposed, for example, to clarification), is applicable: That unconscious elements are interpreted only when the patient evidences a secure positive attachment the analyst. Yet, this would not obtain in the fact of the ‘emergencies’ of growing erotic or aggressive intensities, certainly of ‘acting out’ is incipient. The disturbing compilations (even in the ‘erotic’ sphere) occur most often when basic transferences are ambivalent (largely hostile) or coloured by intense narcissism. Therefore, in relation to Freud’s valuable precept, it may be understood that in certain cases, the interpretation of ambivalent hostile transferences may be obligatory prerequisite to the establishment o f the genuinely positive climate that required. In such instances of obligatory intervention, the manifestations that require them are usually quite explicit,
Again, then, what about the relatively uncomplicated case, the chronic neurotic, potentially capable of relatively mature relations to objects? Still, the coping with complications do not seem as in question. There are, a few essential conditions and one cardinal rule. First the patient’s sense of reality and his common sense must not be abruptly or excessively tax, lest, in untoward reaction, his constructive imaginative capacities become unavailable. Preliminary explanations and tentative preparatory ‘trail’ interventions should be freely employed to accustom him to a new view of the world. The traditional optimum for interpretation (when the patient is on the verge of perceiving its content himself [Freud 1940] is indeed best, although it must sometimes be neglected in favour of an active interpretative approach. Second, the patient’s sense that the vicissitudes and exigencies of his actual situation are understood and respected must be maintained
Beyond these considerations, the essential principle is quite simple. If it is assumed that-in the intensive, abstinent, traditional psychoanalytic situation (as differentiated from most psychotherapeutic situations)-the transference (ultimately the transference neurosis) is ‘pointing’ toward the unconscious trend is heavily weighted in this direction, there is still a manifest element of movement toward other currently significant objects. Thus, a latent economic problem assumes clinical form: Essentially, the growing magnitude of transference cathexes of the analyst’s person, as withdrawn to varying degree from important persons in the environment with whom most of the patient’s associations usually deal. There is a point, or a phase, in the evolution of transference in which analytic material (often priori to significant subjective awareness) indicates the rapidly evolving shift from extraanalytic objects to the analyst. In this interval (early in some, later in others) the analyst’s interventions, whether in direct substantive form or aimed at resistances to awareness of transference, often become obligatory and certainly most often successful in mobilizing affective emphasis into the “here-and-now” of the analytic situation. The vigorous anticipatory interpretations suggested by some may be helpful in many instances (at least as preparatory manoeuvres) if (1) the analyst is certain of his views, in terms of not only the substance but the quantitative (i.e., economic) situation (2) the patient’s state soundly receptive (according to well-established criteria) (3) neither the patient’s realities nor his sense of their realities are put to unjustified questions or implicit neglect (4)a sense of proportion regarding the centrality of issues, largely as indicated by the outline of the transference neurosis (of their adumbration), are maintained in a real consideration. This will avoid the superfluous multiplication of transference references that like the massing of scatted genetic interpretations (familiar in the past), can lead to a ‘chaotic situation’ resembling that against which Wilhelm Reich (1933) inveighed. This will be more striking with a compliant patient who can as readily become bemused with his transference as with his ‘Oedipus’ or his ‘anality.’
Once the affective importance of the transference is established in the analysis, a further (hardly new) question arises, with which some of us have sought to deal in a therapist. Even if some agrees that transference interpretations have a uniquely mutative impact, how exclusively must we concentrate on them? Moreover, to what degree and when are extraanalytic occurrences and relationships of everyday life to be brought into the scope of transference interpretation? With regard to the concentration of transference interpretation alone: a large, complex, and richly informative worlds of psychological experience are obviously attention if the patient ‘s extra therapeutic life is ignored. Further, if the transference situation is unique in an affirmative sense, it is also unique by deficit. To revile at the analyst, for example, is a different experience from reviling at an employer who might ‘fire’ the patient or from being snide to a co-worker who might punch him (Stone 1067 and Rangell 1979). Such experiences are also components if the “here-and-now” (granted that the “here”aspect is significantly vitiated), and they do merit attention and understanding in their own right, specially in the sphere of characterology. Certain complex reaction pasterns cannot become accessible in the transference context alone.
At the time of speaking it is true that many spectacular extraanalytic behaviours can, and should be seen as displacements (or ‘acting out’) of the analytic transference or in juxtaposed ‘extended family’ relation to it, especially where they involve consistent members of an intimate dramatis personae? While such ‘extra-therapeutic’ transference interpretations (often clearly Germaine to the conflicts of the transference neurosis) can be indispensable, the confronting vigour and definiteness with which they are advanced (as opposed to tentativeness) must always depend on the security of knowledge of preceding and current unconscious elements that invest the persons involved.
Finally, there are incidents, attitudes, and relationships to persons in the patient’s life experience who are not demonstrably involved in the transference neurosis, yet evoke importantly and characteristic responses whose clarification and interpretation may contribute importantly to the patient’s self-knowledge of defences, character structure, and allied matters. Nonetheless, such data may occasionally show a vitalizing direct relationship to historical materials. It would not seem necessary or desirable that such material be forced into the analytic transference if the patient does not respond to a tactful tentative trail in this connection, for example, the ‘alternative’ suggestion proposed by Gill (1979). For the economic considerations that often obtain, and it may be that certain concurrent transference cluster, not readily related to the mainstream of transference neurosis, retain their own original extra-therapeutic transference investment. In some instances, a closer, more available e relationship to the transference mainstream may appear later and lend itself to such interpretative integration. In so doing, happening is likely if obstinate resistances have not been simulated by unnecessary assault on the patients' sense of immediate reality, or his sense of his actual problems. As for metapsychology, one may recall also that all relationships, following varying degrees of development and conflict vicissitudes, are derived greatly from the original relationship to the primal object (Stone 1967), even if their representations are relatively free of the unique ‘unneutralized’ cathexes that characterize active transference (‘transfer’ verus ‘transference’: Stern 1957).
Caring for a better understanding, to what the concerning change, as seen in the psychotherapy of schizophrenic patient, and particularly in reference to the sense of personal identity, may to this place be clearly vitiated in material that relates to extra-therapeutic experience, whether this is seen ‘in its own right’ or as displaced transference. The direct transference experience occurs in relations an individual who knows his own position, i.e., knows ‘both sides’ as in no other situation. (Even where there are interposing countertransference. There are at least susceptible to a self-analysis). This can never be true in the analysis of an extra-therapeutic situation, as there is no inevitable cognitive deficit. For this we must try to compensate by exercising maximal judgement, by exploiting what is revealed about the patient himself in sometimes unique situations, and by being sensitive to the growing accuracy of his reporting as the analyst progresses. Epistemologic deficits' are intrinsic in the very nature of analytic work. This is but one important example.
We need to be alert to the respects in which the concepts and technique of our particular science may lend themselves to the repression, in us and our patients, of anxiety concerning change.
Our necessary delineation of the repetitive patterns between the transference and countertransference tends to become so preoccupying as to obscure the circumstance that, as Janet M. Rioch phrases it, “What is curative in the [analytic] process is that in tending to reconstruct in which the analyst that an atmospheric state that obtained in childhood, the patient effectively achieves something new” (Rioch 1943).
Our necessarily high degree of reliance upon verbal communication requires us to be aware of the extent to which grammatical patterns having a tendency to segment and otherwise render static our ever-flowing experience; this has been pointed out by Benjamin (1944); Bertrand Russell (1900), Whorf (1956) and others. The tendency among us to regard prolonged silence for being given to disruptiveness in the analytic process, or evidence per se of the patient’s resistance to it, may be due in part to our unconscious realization that profound personalty-change is often best simplified by silent interaction with the patient; therefore, we have an inclination to press forward toward the crystallization of change-inhibiting words.
What is more, our topographical views of the personality a being divisible into the area’s id, ego, and superego, are so inclined to shield us from the anxiety-fostering realization that, in a psychoanalytic cure, change is not merely quantitative and partial
as of “Where id was, there shall Ego be,” in Freud’s dictum, but qualitative and all-pervasive. Apparently such data system in a passage is to provide accompaniment for Freud, as he gives a picture of personality-structure, and of maturation, which leaves the inaccurate but comforting impression that at least a part of us-namely, a part of the id-is free from change. In his paper entitled Thought for the Times on War and Death. In 1915, he said, "the evolution of the mind shows a peculiarity that is present in no other process of development." When a village grows into a town, a child into a man, the village, and the child become submerged in the town and the man. . . . It is in other considerable levels that the accompaniment with the development of the mind . . . the primitive stage [of mental development] can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable (Freud 1915).
In Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he says that “in psychoanalytic treatment. . . . By means of the work of interpretation, which transform what is unconscious into what is conscious, the ego is enlarged at the expense of this unconscious.” In the Ego and the Id, he said that, " . . . the ego is that part of the id modified by the direct influence of the external world . . . the pleasure-principle . . . reigns unrestricted by the id. . . . The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (Freud 1923).
Glover, in his book on Technique published in 1955, states similarly that, . . .” A successful analysis may have uncovered a good deal of the repressed . . . [and] have mitigated the archaic censoring functions of the superego, but it can scarcely be expected to abolish the id” (Glover 1955).
Favorably to have done something to provide by some measure, conviction, feeling, mind, persuasion, sentiment used to form or be expressed of some modesty about the state of development of our science, and about our own individual therapeutic skills, should not cause us to undertake the all-embracing extent of human personality growth in normal maturation and in a successful psychoanalysis. Presumably we have all encountered a few fortunate instances that have made us wonder whether maturation really leaves any area of the untouched personality, leaves any steel-bound core within which the pleasure principle reigns immutably, or whether, instead, we have a genuine metamorphosis, from a former hateful and self-seeking orientation to a loving and giving orientation, quite as wonderful and thoroughgoing as the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog or that of the caterpillar into the butterfly.
Freud himself, in his emphasis upon the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (1923), the repetition compulsion, and the resistance to analytic insight that he discovered in his work with neurotic patients, has shown the importance, in the neurotic individual, of anxiety concerning change, and he agrees with Jung’s statement that ‘a peculiar psychic inertia, hostile to change and progress, is the fundamental condition of neurosis’ (Freud 1915). This is, even more true of the psychosis-so much so that only in very recent decades have psychotic patients achieved full recovery through modified psychoanalytic therapy. Also, it has instructively to explore and deal the psychodynamics of schizophrenia as for the anxiety concerning change which one encounters, in a particular intense degree, at work in these patients, and of ones own, inasmuch as for treating them. What the therapy of schizophrenia can teach us of the human being’s anxiety concerning change, can broaden and deepen our understanding of the non-psychotic individual also.
Further, we see that during his development years he lacks adequate models, in his parents or other parent-figures, with whom to identify about the acceptance of outer changes and the integration of inner change as personality-maturation throughout adulthood. Alternatively, these are relatively rigid persons who, over the years, either/or tenaciously resist change, if anything becomes progressively constricted, fostering him in the conviction that the change from a child into adult is more loss than gain-that, as one matures, fewer feelings and thoughts are acceptable, until finally one is to attain, or be confined to, the thoroughgoing sterility of adulthood. The sudden, unpredictable changes that puncture his parent’s rigidity, due to the eruption of masses of customarily-repressed material in themselves, make them appear to him, for the time being, like totally different persons from their usual selves, and this adds to his experience that personality-change is something that is not to be striving for, but avoided as frighteningly destructive and overwhelming.
We find evidence that he is reacting to, by his parents during his upbringing, predominantly concerning transference and projection, for being the reincarnation of some figure or figures from their own childhood, and the personification of repressed and projected personality-traits in themselves. Thus he is called upon by them, in an often unpredictably changing fashion, to fill various rigid roles in the family, leaving him little opportunity to experience change as something that can occur within himself, as a unique human individual, in a manner beneficial to himself.
When the parents are not relating to him in such a transference fashion they are, it appears, all too often narcissistically absorbed in them. In either instance, the child is left largely in a psychological vacuum, in that he has to cope essentially alone with his own maturing individuality, including the intensely negative emotions produced by the struggle for individuality in such a setting. Because his parents are afraid of the developing individual in him, he too fears this inner self, and his fear of what is heightening parenthetical parents within investing him with powers, based upon the mechanisms of transference and projection that by it's very nature does not understand, powers that he experiences as somehow flowing from himself and yet not an integral part of himself nor within his power to control. As the years bring tragedies to his family, he develops the conviction that he somehow possesses all ill-understood malevolence that is totally responsible for these destructive changes.
In as far as he does discover healthy maturational changes at work in his body and personality, changes that he realizes to be wonderful and priceless, he experiences the poignant accompanying realization that there is no one there to welcome these changes and to share his joy. The parents, if sufficiently free from anxiety to recognize such changes at all, have a tendency to accept them as evidence that their child is rejecting then by growing functionally. Also to be noted, in this connexion, is their lack of trust in him, their lack of assurance that he is elementally good and can be trusted to maturational bases of a good healthy adult. Instead they are alert to find, and warn him against, manifestations in him that can be construed as evidence that he is on a predestined, downward path into an adulthood of criminality, insanity, more at best ineptitude for living.
Moreover, he emergences change not as something within his own power to wield, for the benefit of himself and others but as something imposed from without. This is due not only to structures that the parents place upon his autonomy, but also to the process of increasing repression of his emotions and life as, such that when this latter manifest themselves, they do so in a projected expressive style, for being uncontrollable changed, inflicted upon him from the surrounding world? We see extreme examples of this mechanism later on. In the full-blown schizophrenic person who experiences sexual feelings not as such but as electric shocks sent into him from the outside world, and who experiences anger not as an emerging emotion directorially fittingly as in a way up from within, but a massive and sudden blow coming somehow from the outer world. In fewer extreme instances, in the life of the yet-to-become-schizophrenic youth, he finds repeatedly that when he reaches out to another person, the other suddenly undergoes a change in demeanour, from friendliness to antagonism, in reaction to an unwitting manifestation of the youths’ unconscious hostility. The youth himself, if unable to recognize his own hostility, can only be left feeling increased helplessness in face of an unpredictably changeable world of people.
The final incident that occurs before his admission to the hospital, giving him still further reason for anxiety as for change, is his experience of the psychotic symptoms as an overwhelming anxiety-laden and mysterious change. His own anxiety about this frightened away by the seismic disturbance and horror of the members of his family who finds hi ‘changed’ by what they see as an unmitigated catastrophe, a nervous or mental ‘breakdown’. Although the therapist can come to see, in retrospect, a potential positive element via this occurrence-namely, the emergence of onetime-repressed insights concerning the true state of affairs involving the patient and his family, none of those participants can integrate so radically changed a picture at that time. Over the preceding years the family members could not tolerate their child’s seeing himself and them with the eyes of a normally maturing offspring, and when repressed percepts emerge from repression in him, neither they nor he possesses the requisite ego-strength to accept them as badly needed changes in his picture of himself and of them. Instead, the tumult of depressed percepts foes into the formation of such psychotic phenomena as misidentifications, hallucinations, and delusions in which neither he nor the member of his family can discern the links to reality that we, upon investigation in individual psychotherapy with him, can find in these psychotic phenomena-links, that is, to the state of affairs that has really held sway in the family. Paretically, it should be marked and noted that the psychotic episode often occurs in such ac way as to leave the patient especially fearful of sudden change, for in many instances the de-repressed material emerges suddenly and leads him to damage, in the short space of a few hours or even moments, his life situation so grievously that repair can be affected only very slowly and painfully, over many subsequent months of treatment in the confines of a hospital.
It should be conveyed, in that the regression of the thought-processes, which occurs as one of the features of the developing schizophrenia, results in an experience of the world so kaleidoscopic as to make up still another reason for the individual’s anxiety concerning change. That is, as much as he has lost thee capacity to grasp the essentials of a given whole-to the extent that he has regressed to what Goldstein (1946) terms the ‘concrete attitude’-he experiences any change, even if it is only in an insignificant (by mature standards) detail of that which he perceives, as a metamorphosis that leaves him with no sense of continuity between the present perception and that immediately preceding. This thought disorder, various aspects of which have been described also by Angyal (1946), Kasanin (1946), Zucker (1958), and others, is compared by Werner with the modes of thought that are found in members of so-called primitive cultures (and in healthy children of our own culture): . . . in the primitive mentality, particulars often as self-subsisting things that do not necessarily become synthized into larger entities. . . . The natives of the Kilimanjaro region do not have a word for the whole mountain range that they inhabit, only words for its peaks. . . . The same is reported of the aborigines of East Australia. From each twist and turn of a river has a name, but the language does not permit of a single all-embracing differentiation for the whole river. . . . [He] quotes Radin (1927) as saying that for the primitive man: “A mountain is not thought of as a unified whole. It is a continually changing entity’ . . . [and, Radin continues, such a man lives in a world that is] ‘dynamic and ever-changing . . . Since he sees the same objects changing in their appearance from day to day, the primitive man regards this phenomenon as definitely depriving them of immutability and self-subsistence’ (Werner 1957).
Langer (1942) has called the symbolic-making function ‘one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking, or moving about. It is the fundamental process of his mind’, she says, as she terms the need of symbolization ‘a primary need in man, which other creatures probably do not have’. Kubie (1953) terms the symbolizing capacity ‘the unique hallmark of man . . . capacities’, and he states that it is in impairment of this capacity to symbolize that all adult psychopathology essentially consists.
As for schizophrenia, we find that since 1911 this disease was described by Bleuler (1911) as involving an impairment of the thinking capacities, and in the thirty years many psychologists and psychiatrists, including Vigotsky (1934) Hanfmann and Kasanin (1942) Goldstein (1946) Norman Cameron (1946) Benjamin (1946) Beck (1946) von Domarus (1946) and Angtal (1946)-to mention but a few-has described various aspects of this thinking disorder. These writers, agreeing that one aspect of the disorder consists in over -concreteness or literalness of thought, have variously described the schizophrenic as unable to think in figurative (including metaphorical) terms, or in abstractions, or in consensually validated concepts and symbols, mor in categorical generalizations. Bateson (1956) described the schizophrenic as using metaphor, but unlabelled metaphor.
Werner (1940) has understood this most accurately matter of regression to a primitive level of thinking, comparable with the found in children and in members of so-called primitive cultures, a level of thinking in which there is a lack of differentiation between the concrete and the metaphorical. Thus we might say that just as the schizophrenic is unable to think in effective, consensually validated metaphor, as too as he is unable to think in terms that are genuinely concrete, free from an animistic forbear of a so-called metaphorical overlay.
The defensive function of the dedifferentiation that in so characterized of schizophrenic experience, and one find that this fragmentation o experience, justly lends itself to the repression of various motions that are too intense, and in particular too complex, for the weak ego to endure, which must be faced as one becomes aware of change as involving continuity rather than total discontinuity.
That is, the deeply schizophrenic patient who, when her beloved therapist makes a unkind or stupid remark, experiences him now for being a different person from the one who was there a moment ago-who experiences that a Bad Therapist has replaced the Good Therapist-is by that spared the complex feeling of disillusionment and hurt, the complex mixture of love and anger and contempt that a healthier patient would feel then. Similarly, if she experiences it in tomorrow’s session-or even later in the same session-that another good therapist has now come on the scene. The bad therapist is now totally gone, she will feel none of the guilt and self-reproach that a healthier patient would feel at finding that this therapist, whom she has just now been hated or despising, is after all a person capable of genuine kindness. Likewise, when she experiences a therapist’s departure on vacation for being a total deletion of him from her awareness, this bit of discontinuity, or fragmentation, in her subjective experience spars her from feeling the complex mixture of longing, grief, separation-anxiety, rejection, rage and so on, which a less ill patient feels toward a therapist who is absent but of whose existence he continues to be only too keenly aware.
Finally, such repressed emotions as hostility and lust may readily be seen, as these feelings not easy to hear expressed, as, for instance, the woman, who, at the beginning of her therapy, had been encased for years I flint lock paranoid defenses, become able to express her despair by saying that “If I had something to get well for, it would make a difference,” her grief, by saying, “The reason I am afraid to be close to people is because I feel so much like crying”: Her loneliness, by expressing a wish that she would turn an insect into a person, so then she would have a friend. Her helplessness in face of her ambivalence by saying, to her efforts to communicate with other persons, “I feel just like a little child, at the edge of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, trying to build a castle-right next to the water. Something just starts to be gasped [by the other person], and then bang! It has gone-another wave. As joining the mainstream of fellow human beings.
In the compliant charge of bringing forward three hypotheses are to be shown, they're errelated or portray in words as their interconnectivity, are as (1) in the course of a successful psychoanalysis, the analyst goes through a phase of reacting to, and eventually relinquishing, the patient as his oedipal love-object, (2) in normal personality development, the parent reciprocates the child's oedipal love with greater intensity than we have recognized before, and (3) in such normal developments, the passing of the Oedipus complex is at least important a phase in ego-development as in superego-development.
While doing psycho-analysis, time and again patients who have progressed to, or very far toward, a thorough going analysis to cure, become aware of experiential romantic and erotic desires and fantasies. Such fantasizing and emotions have appeared in a usual but of late in the course of treatment, have been preset not briefly but usually for several months, and have subsided only after having experienced a variety of feelings-frustration, separation anxiety, grief and so forth-entirely akin to those that attended as the resolution of an Oedipus complex late in the personal analysis.
Psycho-analysis literature is, in the main. Such as to make one feel more, rather than less, troubled at finding in oneself such feelings toward one's patient. As Lucia Tower (1956) has recently noted, . . . Virtually every writer on the subject of countertransference . . . states unequivocally that no form of erotic reaction to a patient is to be tolerated . . .
Still, in recent years, many writers, such as P. Heimann (1950), M. B. Cohen (1952) and E. Weigert (1952, 1954), have emphasized how much the analyst can learn about the patient from noticing his own feelings, of whatever sort, in the analytic relationship. Weigert (1952), defining countertransference as emphatic identification with the analysand, has stated that . . . "In terminal phases of analyses the resolution of countertransference goes hand in hand with the resolution of transference."
Respectfully, these additional passages are shown in view of countertransference, in the special sense in which defines the analyst for being innate, inevitable ingredients in the psycho-analytic relationship, in particular, the feelings of loss that the analyst experiences with the termination of the analysis. However, case in point, that the particular variety of countertransference with which are under approach is concerned that of the analyst's reacting as a loving and protective parent to the analysand, reacted too as an infant: There are plausible reasons why in the last phase it is especially difficult to achieve and maintain analytic frankness. The end of analysis is an experience of loss that mobilizes all the resistances in the transference (and in the counter-transference too), for a final struggle. . . . Recently, Adelaide Johnson (1951) described the terminal conflict of analysis as fully reliving the Oedipus conflict in which the quest for the genitally gratifying parent is poignantly expressed and the intense grief, anxiety and wrath of its definitive loss are fully reactivated. . . . Unless the patient dares to be exposed to such an ultimate frustration he may cling to the tacit permission that his relation to the analyst will remain his refuge from the hardships of his libidinal cravings to an aim-inhibited, tender attachment to the analyst as an idealized parent, he can get past the conflicts of genital temptation and frustration.
. . . . The resolution of the counter-transference permits the analyst to be emotionally freer and spontaneous with the patient, and this is an additional indication of the approaching end of an analysis.
. . . . When the analyst observes that he can be unrestrained with the patient, when he no longer weighs his words to maintain as cautious objectivity, this empathic countertransference and the transference of the patient are in a process of resolution. The analyst can treat the analysand on terms of equality; he is no longer needed as an auxiliary superego, an unrealistic deity in the clouds of detached neutrality. These are signs that the patient's labour of mourning for infantile attachments nears completion.
In stressing the point, which before an analysis can properly bring to an end, the analyst must have experienced a resolution of his countertransference to the patient for being a deep beloved, and desired, figure not only on this infantile level that Weigert has emphasized valuably, but also on an oedipal-genital level. Weigeret's paper, which helped to formulate the views that are set down, that is, as expressing the total point that a successful psycho-analysis involves the analyst's deeply felt relinquishment of the patient both as a cherished infant, and for being a fellow adult who is responded to at the level of genital love?
The paper by L. E. Tower (1956) comes similarly close to the view that, unlike Weigert, limits the term counter-transference to those phenomena that are transferences of the analyst to the patient. It is much more striking, therefore, that she finds even this classification defined countertransference to be innate to the analytic process: . . . . That there is inevitably, naturally, and often desirable, many countertransference developments in every analysis (some evanescent-some sustained), which is a counterpart of the transference phenomena. Interactions (or transactions) between the transference of the patient and the countertransference of the analyst, going on at unconscious levels, may be-or perhaps are always-of vital significance for the outcome of the treatment. . . .
. . . . Virtually every writer on the subject of countertransference. States unequivocally that no form of erotic reaction to a patient is to be tolerated. This would suggest that temptations in this area are great, and perhaps ubiquitous. This is the one subject about which almost every author is very certain to state his position. Other 'counter-transference' manifestations are not routinely condemned. Therefore, it must be to assume that erotic responses to some extent trouble nearly every analyst. This is an interesting phenomenon and one that call for investigation; nearly all physicians, when they gain enough confidence in their analysts, report erotic feelings and imply toward their patients, but usually do so with a good deal of fear and conflict. . . .
Of our tending purposes, we are to pay close attention to the libidinal resources that are of our applicative theory, in that large amounts of resulting available libido are necessary to tolerate the heavy task of many intensive analyses. While, we deride almost every detectable libidinal investment made by an analyst in a patient . . . various forms of erotic fantasy and erotic countertransference phenomena of a fantasy and of an affective character are in some experiential ubiquitous and presumably normal. Which lead to suspect that in many-perhaps every-intensive analytic treatment there develops something like countertransference structures (perhaps even a 'neurosis') which are essential and inevitable counterparts of the transference neurosis. These countertransference structures may be large or small in their quantitative aspects, but in the total picture they may be of considerable significance for the outcome of the treatment. They function in the manner of a catalytic agent in the treatment process. Their understanding by the analyst may be as important to the final working through of the transference neurosis as is the analyst's intellectual understanding of the transference neurosis itself, perhaps because they are, so to speak, the vehicle for the analyst's emotional understanding of the transference neurosis. Both transference neurosis and countertransference structure seem intimately bound together in a living process and both must be considered continually in the work that is the psychoanalysis. . . .
. . . . Seemingly questionable, is any thorough working through a deep transference neurosis, in the strictest sense, which does not involve some form of emotional upheaval in which both patient and analysts are involved. In other words, there are both a transference neurosis and a corresponding Countertransference 'neurosis' (no matter how small and temporary) which are both analyzed in the treatment situation, with eventual feelings of a new orientation by both one another toward any other but themselves.
Freud, in his description of the Oedipus complex (1900, 1921, 1923), tended largely to give us a picture of the child as having an innate, self-determined tendency to experience, under the conditions of a normal home, feelings of passionate love toward the parent of the opposite sex; we get little hints, from his writings, that in this regard the child enters a mutual relatedness of passionate love with that parent, a relatedness in which the parent's feelings may be of much the same quality and intensity as those in the child (although this relatedness must be very important in the life of the developing child than it is in the life of the mature adult, with his much stronger, more highly differentiated ego and with his having behind him the experience of a successfully resolved oedipal experience during his own maturation).
Nevertheless, in the earliest of his publications concerning the Oedipus complex, namely The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud makes a fuller acknowledgements of the parent's participation in the oedipal phase of the child's life than does in any of his later writings on the subject". . . a child's sexual wishes-if in their embryonic stage they deserve to be so described-awaken very early. . . . A girl's first affection is for her father and boy's first childish desires are for his mother. Accordingly, the father becomes a disturbing rival to the boy and the mother to the girl. The parents too give evidence as a rule of sexual partiality: A natural predilection usually sees to it that a man tends to spoil his little daughters, while his wife takes her sons' part; though both of them, where their judgement is not disturbed by the magic of sex, keep a strict eye upon their children's education. The child is very well aware of this patriality and turns against that one of his parents who is opposed to showing it. Being loved by an adult does not merely bring a child the satisfaction of a special need; it also means that he will get what he wants in every other respect as well. Thus, he will be following his own sexual instinct and while giving fresh strength to the inclination shown by his parents if his choice between them falls in with theirs (1900).
Theodor Reik, in his accounts of his coming to sense something of the depths of possessiveness, jealousy, fury at rivals, and anxiety in the face of impending loss, in himself regarding his two daughters, conveys a much more adequate picture of the emotions that genuinely grip the parent in the oedipal relationship than is conveyed by Freud's sketchy account, as Reik's deeply moving descriptions occupy a chapter in his Listening with the Third Ear (1949), written at the time when his daughters were twelve and six years of age; and a chapter in his The Secret Self (1952), when the oldest daughter was now seventeen.
Returning to a further consideration of the therapist's oedipal-love responses to the patient, it seems that these response flows from four different sources. In actual practice the responses from these four tributaries are probably so commingled in the therapists that it is difficult of impossible fully to distinguish one kind from another; the important thing is that he is maximally open to the recognition of these feelings in himself, no matter what their origin, for he can probably discern, in as far as is possible, from where they flow they signify, therefore, concerning the patient's analysis.
First among these four sources may be mentioned the analyst's feeling-responses to the patient's transference. This, when, as the analysis progresses and the patient enter an experiencing of oedipal love, ongoing, jealousy y, frustration and loss as for the analyst as a parent in the transference, the analyst will experience to at least some degree, response's reciprocally th those of the patient-responses, that is, such for being present within the parent in questions, during the patient's childhood and adolescence, which the parent presumably was not ably to recognize freely and accept within himself. Some writers apply the term 'counter-transference' to such analyst-responese to the patient's transference, unlike others some do not do so.
The second source consists in the countertransference in the classical sense in which this term is most often used: The analyst's responding to the patient about transference-feelings carried over from a figure out of the analyst 's own earlier years, without awareness that his response springs predominantly from this early-life, rather than being based mainly upon the reality of the patient analyst-patient relationship. It is this source, of course, which we wish to reduce to a minimum, by means of thoroughgoing personal analysis and ever-continuing subsequent alertness for indications that our work with a patient has come up against, in us, unanalyzed emotional residues from our past. This source is so very important, in fact, as to make the writing of such a paper as a somewhat precarious venture. Must expect that some readers will charge him with trying to portray, as natural and necessary to the annalistic process generally, certain analyst-responese that in actuality is purely the result of an unworked-through? Oedipus' complex in himself, which are dangerously out of place in his own work with patients that have no place in the well-analysed analyst's experience with his patient.
It can only be surmised that although this source may play an insignificant role in the responses of a well-analysed analyst who has conducted many analyses through to completion-to an intensified inclusion as a thoroughgoing resolution of the patient's Oedipus complex-it is probably to be found, in some measure, in every analyst. This is, it seems that the nature and conflictual feeling-experience in this regard-a fostering of his deepest love toward the fellow human being with whom she participates in such prolonged and deeply personal work, and a simultaneous, unceasing, and rigorous taboo against his behavioural expression of any of the romantic or erotic components of his love-as to require almost any analyst's tending to relegate the deepest intensities of these conflictual feelings to his own unconscious mind, much as were the deepest intensities of his oedipal strivings toward a similar beloved, and similarly unobtainable and rigorously tabooed, parent in particular, and in the hope of the remaining in the analyst's unconscious. That is hoping that this will help analysts-in particular, to a lesser extent-experienced analyst-whereas to some readers awareness, and by that diminution, of this countertransference feeling, as justly dealing with other kinds of countertransference feelings, by such as those wrote by P. Heumann (1950, M. B., Cohen (19520 and E. Weigert (1952?)
A third source is to be found in the appeal that the gratifyingly improving patient makes to the narcissistic residue in the analyst's personality, the Pygmalion in him. He tends to fall in love with this beautifully developing patient, regarded at this narcissistic level as his own creation, just as Pygmalion fell in love with the beautiful statu e of Galatea that he had sculptured. This source, like the second one that we can expect to holds little sways in the well-analysed practitioner of long experience, but it, too, is probably never absent of great experience and professional standing, than we may like to think. Particularly in articles and books that describe the author's new technique or theoretical concept as an outgrowth of the work with a particular patient, or a very few patients, do we see this source very prominently present in many instances.
The fourth source, based on the genuine reality of the analyst-patient situation, consists in the circumstance that nearly becomes, per se, a likeable, admirable and insightfully speaking lovable, human being from whom the analyst will soon become separated. If he is not himself a psychiatrist, the analyst may very likely never see him again. Even if he is a professional colleague, the relationship with him will become in many respects far more superficial, far less intimate, than it has been. This real and unavoidable circumstance of the closing analytic work tends powerfully to arouse within the analyst feelings of painfully frustrated love that deserve to be compared with the feelings of ungratifiable love that both child and parent experience in the oedipal phase of the child's development. Feelings from this source cannot properly be called countertransference. They may flow from the reality of the present circumstances but they may be difficult or impossible e to distinguish fully from countertransference.
There are, then four essentially powerful sources having to promote of the tendency toward the feelings of deep love with romantic and erotic overtones, and with accompanying feelings of jealousy, anxiety, frustration-rage, separation-anxiety, and grief, in the analyst about the patient. These feelings come to him, like all feelings, without tags showing from where they have come, and only if he is open and accepting to their emergence into his awareness does he have a chance to set about finding out their origin and thus their significance in his work with the patient.
Finally, with which the considerations have been presented so far, a few remarks concerning the passing of the Oedipus complex in normal development and in a successful psycho-analysis.
In the Ego and the Id (1923) we find italicized a passage in which Freud stresses that the oedipus phase results in the formation of the superego; we find that he stresses the patient's opposition to ther child's oedipal swosh, and lastly, we see this resultant suprerego to be predominantly a severe and forbidding one: The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitating in the ego . . . This modification of the ego
. . . comforts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego.
. . . . The child's parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to verbalizations of his Oedipus wishes, so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by building this obstacle within itself. It borrowed the strength to do this, so to seek, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily nonentous act. The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapid succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teachings, schooling and reading), this strictly will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on-as conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt. . . .
The subject dealt within the subjective matter through which generative pre-oedipal origins are to be found of the superego, on which has been dealt by M. Klein (1955). E. Jacobson (1954) and others, also apart from that subject, a regard for Freud's above-quoted description as more applicable to the child who later becomes neurotic or psychotic, than to the 'normal'; child. Since we can assume that there is virtually a wholly complimentary neurotic difficulty, we may then have in assuming that Freud's formation holds true to some degree in every instance. Still, to the extent that a child's relationships with his parents are healthy, he finds the strength to accept the unrealizibilityy of his oedipal strivings, not mainly through the identification with the forbidding rival-parent, but mainly, as an alternative, the ego-strengthening experiences of finding the beloved parent reciprocate his love-responds to him, that is, for being a worthwhile and loveable individual, for being, a conceivably desirable love-partner-and renounces him only with an accompanying sense of loss on the parent's own part. The renunciation, again, something that is mutual experience for the chid and parent, and is made in deference to a recognizedly greater limiting realty, a reality that includes not only the taboo maintained by the rival-parent, but also the love of the oedipal desired parent toward his or her spouse-a love that undeterred the child's birth and a love to which, in a sense, he owes his very existence?
Out of such an oedipal situation the child emerges, with no matter how deep and painful sense of loss at the recognition that he can never displace the rival-parent and posses the beloved on e in a romantic-and-erotic relationship, in a state differently from the ego-diminished, superego-domination state that Freud described. This child that his love, however unrealized, is reciprocated. Strengthened, too, out of the realization, which his relationship with the beloved parent has helped him to achieve, that he lives in a wold in which any individual's strivings are encompassed by a reality much larger than he: Freud, when he stressed that the oedipal phase normally results mainly in the formations of a forbidding superego, and if it is resulting mainly in enchantments of the ego's ability to test both inner and outer reality.
All experiences with both neurotic and psychotic patients had shown that, in every individual instance, in as far as the oedipal phase was entered the course of their past elements, it led to ego impairment rather than ego functioning as primarily because the beloved parent had to repress his or her reciprocal desire for the child, chiefly through the mechanism of unconscious denial of the child's importance to the parent. More often than not, in these instancies, that suggested that the parent would unwittingly act out his or her repressed desires in the unduly seductive behaviour toward the child; yet whenever the parents come close to the recognition of such desires within him, he would unpredictably start reacting to the child as unlovable-undesirable.
With many of these parents, appears that, primarily because of the parent's own unresolved Oedipus complex, his marriage proved too unsatisfying, and his emotional relationship to his own culture too tenuous, for him to dare to recognize the strength of his reciprocal feelings toward his child during the latter's oedipal phase of development. The child is reacting too as a little mother or father transference-figure to the parent, a transference-figure toward whom the parent's repressed oedipal love feelings are directed. If the parent had achieved the inner reassurance of a deep and enduring love toward his wife, and a deeply felt relatedness with his culture including the incest taboos to which his culture adheres, he would have been able to participate in as deeply felt, but minimally acted out, relationship with the chid in a way that fostered the healthy resolutions of the child's Oedipus complex. Instead, what usually happens in such instances, in that the child's Oedipus complex remains unresolved because the child stubbornly-and naturally-refuses to accept defeat within these particular family circumstances, whereas the acceptance of oedipal defeat is tantamount to the acceptance of irrevocable personal worthlessness and unlovability.
It seems much clearer, then this former child, now neurotic or psychotic adult, requires from us for the successful resolution to his unresolved Oedipus complex: Not such a repression of desire, acted-out seductiveness, and denial of his own worth as he met in the relationship with his parent, but a maximal awareness on our part of the reciprocal feelings while we develop in response to his oedipal strivings. Our main job remains always, of course, to further the analysis of his transference, but what might be described seems to be the optimal feeling background in the analyst for such analytic work.
Formidably, when applied not to a moderate degree found in the background of the neurotic person but invested with all the weight of actual biological attributes, have much ado with the person's unconscious refusal to relinquish, in adolescence and young adulthood, his or her fantasied infantile omnipotence in exchange for a sexual identity of-in these-described terms-a 'man' or a 'woman'. It would be like having to accept only certain dispensations as well as salvageable sights, if ony to see the whole fabric ruined into the bargin. A person cannot deeply accept an adult sexual identity until he has been able to find that this identity can express all the feeling-potentialities of his comparatively boundless infancy. This implies that he has become able to blend, for example, his infantile-dependent needs into his more adult erotic strivings, than regard these as mutually exclusive in the way that the mother of the future patient or the persons infant frighteningly feels that her lust has been placed in her mothering. Another difficult facet of this situation resides in a patient's youngful conviction, based on his intrafamiliar experiences, which he can win parental love only if he can become or, perhaps, at an unconscious level remain-a girl; accepting her sexuality as a woman is equated with the abandonment of the hope of being loved.
Concerning the warped experiences their persons have and with the oedipal phase of development, calls to our attention of two features. First, the child whose parents are more narcissistic than truly object-related in faced with the basically hopeless challenge of trying to compete with the mother's own narcissistic love for herself, and with the father's similar love for himself, than being presented with a competitive challenge involving separate, flesh-and-blood human beings. Secondly, concerning warped oedipal experiences, in, as far as the parents succeeded in achieving object-relatedness, this has often become only weakly established as a genital level, so that it remains much more prominently at the mother-infant level of ego-development. Thus, the mother, for example, is much more able to love her infant son than her adult husband, and the oedipal competition between husband and son are in terms of who can better become, or remain, the infant whom the mother is capable of loving. When the infant becomes chronologically a young man, having learned that one wins a woman not through genial assertiveness but through regression, he is apt to shy away from entering into true adult geniality, and is tempted to settle for what amounts to 'regressive victory' in the oedipal struggle
We write much about the analyst’s or therapist’s being able to identify or empathize with the patient for helping in the resolution of the neurotic or psychotic difficulties. Such writings always portray a merely transitory identification, an empathic sensing of the patient’s conflicts, an identification that is of essentially communicative value only. However, it should be seen that we inevitably identify with the patient another fashion also, we identify with the healthy elements in him, in a way that entails enduing, constructive additions to our own personality. Patients-above all schizophrenic patients-need and welcome our acknowledgement, simply and undemonstratively, that they have contributed, and are contributing, in some such significant way, to our existence.
Increasing maturity involves increasing ability not merely to embrace change in the world around one, but to realize that one is oneself in a constant state of change. By contrast, the recovering, maturing patiently becomes less and less dependent upon any such sharply delineated, static self-image or even a constellation of such images, the answer to the question, “Who are you?” is almost as small, solid, and well defined as a stone, but is a larger, fluid, richly-laden, and sniffingly outlined as an ocean? As the individual becomes well, he comes to realize that, as Henri Bergson (1944) outs it, “reality is a perpetual growth, a creation pursued without end. . . . A perpetual becoming,” and to the extent that he can actively welcome change and let it become part of him, he comes to know that-again in Bergson’s phrase-“to exist is to change, to change is too mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
a dramatic quality that does not rest exclusively on the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. Perhaps, the most startling and potentially revolutionary of implications in human terms is a new perspective on the It amounts to saying merely that if we reason in this way, we can correctly call ourselves ‘reasonable’ and our evidence ‘strong’, according to our accepted community standards. Nevertheless, to the undersealing of issue of wether following these standards is a good way to find the truth, the ordinary language response appears to have nothing to say.
(3) The main attempts to show that induction can be justified inductively have concentrated on showing that such as a defence can avoid circularity. Skyrms (1975) formulate, perhaps the clearest version of this general strategy. The basic idea is to distinguish different levels of inductive argument: A first level in which induction is applied to things other than arguments: A second level in which it is applied to arguments at the first level, arguing that they have been observed to succeed so far and hence are likely to succeed in general: A third level in which it is applied in the same way to arguments at the second level, and so on. Circularity is allegedly avoided by treating each of these levels as autonomous and justifying the argument at each level by appeal to an argument at the next level.
One problem with this sort of move is that even if circularity is avoided, the movement to higher and higher levels will clearly eventually fail simply for lack of evidence: A level will reach at which there have been enough successful inductive arguments to provide a basis for inductive justification at the next higher level, and if this is so, then the whole series of justifications collapses. A more fundamental difficulty is that the epistemological significance of the distinction between levels is obscure. If the issue is whether reasoning in accord with the original schema offered above ever provides a good reason for thinking that the conclusion is likely to be true, then it still seems question-begging, even if not flatly circular, to answer this question by appeal to anther argument of the same form.
(4) The idea that induction can be justified on a pure priori basis is in one way the most natural response of all: It alone treats an inductive argument as an independently cogent piece of reasoning whose conclusion can be seen rationally to follow, although perhaps only with probability from its premise. Such an approach has, however, only rarely been advocated (Russell, 19132 and BonJour, 1986), and is widely thought to be clearly and demonstrably hopeless.
Many on the reasons for this pessimistic view depend on general epistemological theses about the possible or nature of anticipatory cognition. Thus if, as Quine alleges, there is no a prior justification of any kind, then obviously a prior justification for induction is ruled out. Or if, as more moderate empiricists have in claiming some preexistent knowledge should be analytic, then again a prevenient justification for induction seems to be precluded, since the claim that if an inductive premise ids truer, then the conclusion is likely to be true does not fit the standard conceptions of ‘analyticity’. A consideration of these matters is beyond the scope of the present spoken exchange.
There are, however, two more specific and quite influential reasons for thinking that an early approach is impossible that can be briefly considered, first, there is the assumption, originating in Hume, but since adopted by very many of others, that a move forward in the defence of induction would have to involve ‘turning induction into deduction’, i.e., showing, per impossible, that the inductive conclusion follows deductively from the premise, so that it is a formal contradiction to accept the latter and deny the former. However, it is unclear why a prior approach need be committed to anything this strong. It would be enough if it could be argued that it is deductively unlikely that such a premise is true and corresponding conclusion false.
Second, Reichenbach defends his view that pragmatic justification is the best that is possible by pointing out that a completely chaotic world in which there is simply not true conclusion to be found as to the proportion of ‘A’s’ in addition that occurs of, but B’s’ is neither impossible nor unlikely from a purely a prior standpoint, the suggestion being that therefore there can be no a prior reason for thinking that such a conclusion is true. Nevertheless, there is still a substring wayin laying that a chaotic world is a prior neither impossible nor unlikely without any further evidence does not show that such a world os not a prior unlikely and a world containing such-and-such regularity might anticipatorially be somewhat likely in relation to an occurrence of a long-run patten of evidence in which a certain stable proportion of observed ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s’ ~. An occurrence, it might be claimed, that would be highly unlikely in a chaotic world (BonJour, 1986).
Goodman’s ‘new riddle of induction’ purports that we suppose that before some specific time ’t’ (perhaps the year 2000) we observe a larger number of emeralds (property A) and find them all to be green (property B). We proceed to reason inductively and conclude that all emeralds are green Goodman points out, however, that we could have drawn a quite different conclusion from the same evidence. If we define the term ‘grue’ to mean ‘green if examined before ’t’ and blue examined after t ʹ, then all of our observed emeralds will also be gruing. A parallel inductive argument will yield the conclusion that all emeralds are gruing, and hence that all those examined after the year 2000 will be blue. Presumably the first of these concisions is genuinely supported by our observations and the second is not. Nevertheless, the problem is to say why this is so and to impose some further restriction upon inductive reasoning that will permit the first argument and exclude the second.
The obvious alternative suggestion is that ‘grue. Similar predicates do not correspond to genuine, purely qualitative properties in the way that ‘green’ and ‘blueness’ does, and that this is why inductive arguments involving them are unacceptable. Goodman, however, claims to be unable to make clear sense of this suggestion, pointing out that the relations of formal desirability are perfectly symmetrical: Grue’ may be defined in terms if, ‘green’ and ‘blue’, but ‘green’ an equally well be defined in terms of ‘grue’ and ‘green’ (blue if examined before ‘t’ and green if examined after ‘t’).
The ‘grued, paradoxes’ demonstrate the importance of categorization, in that sometimes it is itemized as ‘gruing’, if examined of a presence to the future, before future time ‘t’ and ‘green’, or not so examined and ‘blue’. Even though all emeralds in our evidence class grue, we ought must infer that all emeralds are gruing. For ‘grue’ is unprojectible, and cannot transmit credibility form known to unknown cases. Only projectable predicates are right for induction. Goodman considers entrenchment the key to projectibility having a long history of successful protection, ‘grue’ is entrenched, lacking such a history, ‘grue’ is not. A hypothesis is projectable, Goodman suggests, only if its predicates (or suitable related ones) are much better entrenched than its rivalrous past successes that do not assume future ones. Induction remains a risky business. The rationale for favouring entrenched predicates is pragmatic. Of the possible projections from our evidence class, the one that fits with past practices enables ‘us’ to utilize our cognitive resources best. Its prospects of being true are worse than its competitors’ and its cognitive utility is greater.
So, to a better understanding of induction we should then term is most widely used for any process of reasoning that takes ‘us’ from empirical premises to empirical conclusions supported by the premises, but not deductively entailed by them. Inductive arguments are therefore kinds of applicative arguments, in which something beyond the content of the premise is inferred as probable or supported by them. Induction is, however, commonly distinguished from arguments to theoretical explanations, which share this applicative character, by being confined to inferences in which he conclusion involves the same properties or relations as the premises. The central example is induction by simple enumeration, where from premises telling that Fa, Fb, Fc . . . ‘where a, b, c’s, are all of some kind ‘G’, it is inferred that G’s from outside the sample, such as future G’s, will be ‘F’, or perhaps that all G’s are ‘F’. In this, which and the other persons deceive them, children may infer that everyone is a deceiver: Different, but similar inferences of a property by some object to the same object’s future possession of the same property, or from the constancy of some law-like pattern in events and states of affairs ti its future constancy. All objects we know of attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, so perhaps they all do so, and will always do so.
The rational basis of any inference was challenged by Hume, who believed that induction presupposed belie in the uniformity of nature, but that this belief has no defence in reason, and merely reflected a habit or custom of the mind. Hume was not therefore sceptical about the role of reason in either explaining it or justifying it. Trying to answer Hume and to show that there is something rationally compelling about the inference referred to as the problem of induction. It is widely recognized that any rational defence of induction will have to partition well-behaved properties for which the inference is plausible (often called projectable properties) from badly behaved ones, for which it is not. It is also recognized that actual inductive habits are more complex than those of similar enumeration, and that both common sense and science pay attention to such giving factors as variations within the sample giving ‘us’ the evidence, the application of ancillary beliefs about the order of nature, and so on.
Nevertheless, the fundamental problem remains that ant experience condition by application show ‘us’ only events occurring within a very restricted part of a vast spatial and temporal order about which we then come to believe things.
Uncompounded by its belonging of a confirmation theory finding of the measure to which evidence supports a theory fully formalized confirmation theory would dictate the degree of confidence that a rational investigator might have in a theory, given some-body of evidence. The grandfather of confirmation theory is Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1718), who believed that a logically transparent language of science would be able to resolve all disputes. In the 20th century a fully formal confirmation theory was a main goal of the logical positivist, since without it the central concept of verification by empirical evidence itself remains distressingly unscientific. The principal developments were due to Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), culminating in his “Logical Foundations of Probability” (1950). Carnap’s idea was that the measure necessitated would be the proportion of logically possible states of affairs in which the theory and the evidence both hold, compared ti the number in which the evidence itself holds that the probability of a preposition, relative to some evidence, is a proportion of the range of possibilities under which the proposition is true, compared to the total range of possibilities left by the evidence. The difficulty with the theory lies in identifying sets of possibilities so that they admit of measurement. It therefore demands that we can put a measure on the ‘range’ of possibilities consistent with theory and evidence, compared with the range consistent with the evidence alone.
Among the obstacles the enterprise meets, is the fact that while evidence covers only a finite range of data, the hypotheses of science may cover an infinite range. In addition, confirmation proves to vary with the language in which the science is couched, and the Carnapian programme has difficulty in separating genuinely confirming variety of evidence from less compelling repetition of the same experiment. Confirmation also proved to be susceptible to acute paradoxes. Finally, scientific judgement seems to depend on such intangible factors as the problems facing rival theories, and most workers have come to stress instead the historically situated scene of what would appear as a plausible distinction of a scientific knowledge at a given time.
Arose to the paradox of which when a set of apparent incontrovertible premises is given to unacceptable or contradictory conclusions. To solve a paradox will involve showing either that there is a hidden flaw in the premises, or that the reasoning is erroneous, or that the apparently unacceptable conclusion can, in fact, be tolerated. Paradoxes are therefore important in philosophy, for until one is solved it shows that there is something about our reasoning and our concepts that we do not understand. What is more, and somewhat loosely, a paradox is a compelling argument from unacceptable premises to an unacceptable conclusion: More strictly speaking, a paradox is specified to be a sentence that is true if and only if it is false. A characterized objection lesson of it would be: “The displayed sentence is false.”
Seeing that this sentence is false if true is easy, and true if false, a paradox, in either of the senses distinguished, presents an important philosophical challenger. Epistemologists are especially concerned with various paradoxes having to do with knowledge and belief. In other words, for example, the Knower paradox is an argument that begins with apparently impeccable premisses about the concepts of knowledge and inference and derives an explicit contradiction. The origin of the reasoning is the ‘surprise examination paradox’: A teacher announces that there will be a surprise examination next week. A clever student argues that this is impossible. ‘The test cannot be on Friday, the last day of the week, because it would not be a surprise. We would know the day of the test on Thursday evening. This means we can also rule out Thursday. For after we learn that no test has been given by Wednesday, we would know the test is on Thursday or Friday -and would already know that it s not on Friday and would already know that it is not on Friday by the previous reasoning. The remaining days can be eliminated in the same manner’.
This puzzle has over a dozen variants. The first was probably invented by the Swedish mathematician Lennard Ekbon in 1943. Although the first few commentators regarded the reverse elimination argument as cogent, every writer on the subject since 1950 agrees that the argument is unsound. The controversy has been over the proper diagnosis of the flaw.
Initial analyses of the subject’s argument tried to lay the blame on a simple equivocation. Their failure led to more sophisticated diagnoses. The general format has been an assimilation to better-known paradoxes. One tradition casts the surprise examination paradox as a self-referential problem, as fundamentally akin to the Liar, the paradox of the Knower, or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. That in of itself, says enough that Kaplan and Montague (1960) distilled the following ‘self-referential’ paradox, the Knower. Consider the sentence:
(S) The negation of this sentence is known (to be true).
Suppose that (S) is true. Then its negation is known and hence true. However, if its negation is true, then (S) must be false. Therefore (s) is false, or what is the name, the negation of (S) is true.
This paradox and its accompanying reasoning are strongly reminiscent of the Lair Paradox that (in one version) begins by considering a sentence ‘This sentence is false’ and derives a contradiction. Versions of both arguments using axiomatic formulations of arithmetic and Gödel-numbers to achieve the effect of self-reference yields important meta-theorems about what can be expressed in such systems. Roughly these are to the effect that no predicates definable in the formalized arithmetic can have the properties we demand of truth (Tarski’s Theorem) or of knowledge (Montague, 1963).
These meta-theorems still leave ‘us; with the problem that if we suppose that we add of these formalized languages predicates intended to express the concept of knowledge (or truth) and inference-as one mighty does if a logic of these concepts is desired. Then the sentence expressing the leading principles of the Knower Paradox will be true.
Explicitly, the assumption about knowledge and inferences are:
(1) If sentences ‘A’ are known, then “a.”
(2) (1) is known?
(3) If ‘B’ is correctly inferred from ‘A’, and ‘A’ is known, then ‘B’ id known.
To give an absolutely explicit t derivation of the paradox by applying these principles to (S), we must add (contingent) assumptions to the effect that certain inferences have been done. Still, as we go through the argument of the Knower, these inferences are done. Even if we can somehow restrict such principles and construct a consistent formal logic of knowledge and inference, the paradoxical argument as expressed in the natural language still demands some explanation.
The usual proposals for dealing with the Liar often have their analogues for the Knower, e.g., that there is something wrong with a self-reference or that knowledge (or truth) is properly a predicate of propositions and not of sentences. The relies that show that some of these are not adequate are often parallel to those for the Liar paradox. In addition, on e c an try here what seems to be an adequate solution for the Surprise Examination Paradox, namely the observation that ‘new knowledge can drive out knowledge’, but this does not seem to work on the Knower (Anderson, 1983).
There are a number of paradoxes of the Liar family. The simplest example is the sentence ‘This sentence is false’, which must be false if it is true, and true if it is false. One suggestion is that the sentence fails to say anything, but sentences that fail to say anything are at least not true. In fact case, we consider to sentences ‘This sentence is not true’, which, if it fails to say anything is not true, and hence (this kind of reasoning is sometimes called the strengthened Liar). Other versions of the Liar introduce pairs of sentences, as in a slogan on the front of a T-shirt saying ‘This sentence on the back of this T-shirt is false’, and one on the back saying ‘The sentence on the front of this T-shirt is true’. It is clear that each sentence individually is well formed, and was it not for the other, might have said something true. So any attempts to dismiss the paradox by sating that the sentence involved are meaningless will face problems.
Even so, the two approaches that have some hope of adequately dealing with this paradox is ‘hierarchy’ solutions and ‘truth-value gap’ solutions. According to the first, knowledge is structured into ‘levels’. It is argued that there be one-coherent notion expressed by the verb; knows’, but rather a whole series of notions: knows0. knows, and so on (perhaps into transfinite), stated ion terms of predicate expressing such ‘ramified’ concepts and properly restricted, (1)-(3) lead to no contradictions. The main objections to this procedure are that the meaning of these levels has not been adequately explained and that the idea of such subscripts, even implicit, in a natural language is highly counterintuitive the ‘truth-value gap’ solution takes sentences such as (S) to lack truth-value. They are neither true nor false, but they do not express propositions. This defeats a crucial step in the reasoning used in the derivation of the paradoxes. Kripler (1986) has developed this approach in connection with the Liar and Asher and Kamp (1986) has worked out some details of a parallel solution to the Knower. The principal objection is that ‘strengthened’ or ‘super’ versions of the paradoxes tend to reappear when the solution itself is stated.
Since the paradoxical deduction uses only the properties (1)-(3) and since the argument is formally valid, any notions that satisfy these conditions will lead to a paradox. Thus, Grim (1988) notes that this may be read as ‘is known by an omniscient God’ and concludes that there is no coherent single notion of omniscience. Thomason (1980) observes that with some different conditions, analogous reasoning about belief can lead to paradoxical consequence.
Overall, it looks as if we should conclude that knowledge and truth are ultimately intrinsically ‘stratified’ concepts. It would seem that wee must simply accept the fact that these (and similar) concepts cannot be assigned of any-one fixed, finite or infinite. Still, the meaning of this idea certainly needs further clarification.
Its paradox arises when a set of apparently incontrovertible premises gives unacceptable or contradictory conclusions, to solve a paradox will involve showing either that there is a hidden flaw in the premises, or that the reasoning is erroneous, or that the apparently unacceptable conclusion can, in fact, be tolerated. Paradoxes are therefore important in philosophy, for until one is solved its show that there is something about our reasoning and our concepts that we do not understand. Famous families of paradoxes include the ‘semantic paradoxes’ and ‘Zeno’s paradoxes. Art the beginning of the 20th century, paradox and other set-theoretical paradoxes led to the complete overhaul of the foundations of set theory, while the ’Sorites paradox’ has lead to the investigations of the semantics of vagueness and fuzzy logics.
It is, however, to what extent can analysis be informative? This is the question that gives a riser to what philosophers has traditionally called ‘the’ paradox of analysis. Thus, consider the following proposition:
(1) To be an instance of knowledge is to be an instance of justified true belief not essentially grounded in any falsehood.
(1) if true, illustrates an important type of philosophical analysis. For convenience of exposition, I will assume (1) is a correct analysis. The paradox arises from the fact that if the concept of justified true belief not been essentially grounded in any falsification is the analysand of the concept of knowledge, it would seem that they are the same concept and hence that:
(2) To be an instance of knowledge is to be as an instance of.
knowledge and would have to be the same propositions as (1). But then how can (1) be informative when (2) is not? This is what is called the first paradox of analysis. Classical writings’ on analysis suggests a second paradoxical analysis (Moore, 1942).
(3) An analysis of the concept of being a brother is that to be a
brother is to be a male sibling. If (3) is true, it would seem that the concept of being a brother would have to be the same concept as the concept of being a male sibling and tat:
(4) An analysis of the concept of being a brother is that to be a brother is to be a brother
would also have to be true and in fact, would have to be the same proposition as (3?). Yet (3) is true and (4) is false.
Both these paradoxes rest upon the assumptions that analysis is a relation between concepts, than one involving entity of other sorts, such as linguistic expressions, and tat in a true analysis, analysand and analysandum are the same concept. Both these assumptions are explicit in Moore, but some of Moore’s remarks hint at a solution to that of another statement of an analysis is a statement partly about the concept involved and partly about the verbal expressions used to express it. He says he thinks a solution of this sort is bound to be right, but fails to suggest one because he cannot see a way in which the analysis can be even partly about the expression (Moore, 1942).
Elsewhere, of such ways, as a solution to the second paradox, to which is explicating (3) as:
(5) An analysis is given by saying that the verbal expression ‘χ is a brother’ expresses the same concept as is expressed by the conjunction of the verbal expressions ‘χ is male’ when used to express the concept of being male and ‘χ is a sibling’ when used to express the concept of being a sibling. (Ackerman, 1990).
An important point about (5) is as follows. Stripped of its philosophical jargon (‘analysis’, ‘concept’, ‘χ is a . . . ‘), (5) seems to state the sort of information generally stated in a definition of the verbal expression ‘brother’ in terms of the verbal expressions ‘male’ and ‘sibling’, where this definition is designed to draw upon listeners’ antecedent understanding of the verbal expression ‘male’ and ‘sibling’, and thus, to tell listeners what the verbal expression ‘brother’ really means, instead of merely providing the information that two verbal expressions are synonymous without specifying the meaning of either one. Thus, its solution to the second paradox seems to make the sort of analysis tat gives rise to this paradox matter of specifying the meaning of a verbal expression in terms of separate verbal expressions already understood and saying how the meanings of these separate, already-understood verbal expressions are combined. This corresponds to Moore’s intuitive requirement that an analysis should both specify the constituent concepts of the analysandum and tell how they are combined, but is this all there is to philosophical analysis?
To answer this question, we must note that, in addition too there being two paradoxes of analysis, there is two types of analyses that are relevant here. (There are also other types of analysis, such as reformatory analysis, where the analysands are intended to improve on and replace the analysandum. But since reformatory analysis involves no commitment to conceptual identity between analysand and analysandum, reformatory analysis does not generate a paradox of analysis and so will not concern ‘us’ here.) One way to recognize the difference between the two types of analysis concerning ‘us’ here is to focus on the difference between the two paradoxes. This can be done by means of the Frége-inspired sense-individuation condition, which is the condition that two expressions have the same sense if and only if they can be interchangeably ‘salva veritate’ whenever used in propositional attitude context. If the expressions for the analysands and the analysandum in (1) met this condition, (1) and (2) would not raise the first paradox, but the second paradox arises regardless of whether the expression for the analysand and the analysandum meet this condition. The second paradox is a matter of the failure of such expressions to be interchangeable salva veritate in sentences involving such contexts as ‘an analysis is given thereof. Thus, a solution (such as the one offered) that is aimed only at such contexts can solve the second paradox. This is clearly false for the first paradox, however, which will apply to all pairs of propositions expressed by sentences in which expressions for pairs of analysands and anslysantia raising the first paradox is interchangeable. For example, consider the following proposition:
(6) Mary knows that some cats tail.
It is possible for John to believe (6) without believing:
(7) Mary has justified true belief, not essentially grounded in any falsehood, that some cats lack tails.
Yet this possibility clearly does not mean that the proposition that Mary knows that some casts lack tails is partly about language.
One approach to the first paradox is to argue that, despite the apparent epistemic inequivalence of (1) and (2), the concept of justified true belief not essentially grounded in any falsehood is still identical with the concept of knowledge (Sosa, 1983). Another approach is to argue that in the sort of analysis raising the first paradox, the analysand and analysandum is concepts that are different but that bear a special epistemic relation to each other. Elsewhere, the development is such an approach and suggestion that this analysand-analysandum relation has the following facets.
(a) The analysand and analysandum are necessarily coextensive, i.e., necessarily every instance of one is an instance of the other.
(b) The analysand and analysandum are knowable theoretical to be coextensive.
© The analysandum is simpler than the analysands a condition whose necessity is recognized in classical writings on analysis, such as, Langford, 1942.
(d) The analysand do not have the analysandum as a constituent.
Condition (d) rules out circularity. But since many valuable quasi-analyses are partly circular, e.g., knowledge is justified true belief supported by known reasons not essentially grounded in any falsehood, it seems best to distinguish between full analysis, from that of (d) is a necessary condition, and partial analysis, for which it is not.
These conditions, while necessary, are clearly insufficient. The basic problem is that they apply too many pairs of concepts that do not seem closely enough related epistemologically to count as analysand and analysandum. , such as the concept of being 6 and the concept of the fourth root of 1296. Accordingly, its solution upon what actually seems epistemologically distinctive about analyses of the sort under consideration, which is a certain way they can be justified. This is by the philosophical example-and-counterexample method, which is in a general term that goes as follows. ‘J’ investigates the analysis of K’s concept ‘Q’ (where ‘K’ can but need not be identical to ‘J’ by setting ‘K’ a series of armchair thought experiments, i.e., presenting ‘K’ with a series of simple described hypothetical test cases and asking ‘K’ questions of the form ‘If such-and-such where the case would this count as a case of Q? ‘J’ then contrasts the descriptions of the cases to which; K’ answers affirmatively with the description of the cases to which ‘K’ does not, and ‘J’ generalizes upon these descriptions to arrive at the concepts (if possible not including the analysandum) and their mode of combination that constitute the analysand of K’‘s concept ‘Q’. Since ‘J’ need not be identical with ‘K’, there is no requirement that ‘K’ himself be able to perform this generalization, to recognize its result as correct, or even to understand he analysand that is its result. This is reminiscent of Walton’s observation that one can simply recognize a bird as a swallow without realizing just what feature of the bird (beak, wing configurations, etc.) form the basis of this recognition. (The philosophical significance of this way of recognizing is discussed in Walton, 1972) ‘K’ answers the questions based solely on whether the described hypothetical cases just strike him as cases of ‘Q’. ‘J’ observes certain strictures in formulating the cases and questions. He makes the cases as simple as possible, to minimize the possibility of confusion and to minimize the likelihood that ‘K’ will draw upon his philosophical theories (or quasi-philosophical, a rudimentary notion if he is unsophisticated philosophically) in answering the questions. For this conflicting result, the conflict should ‘other things being equal’ be resolved in favour of the simpler case. ‘J’ makes the series of described cases wide-ranging and varied, with the aim of having it be a complete series, where a series is complete if and only if no case that is omitted in such that, if included, it would change the analysis arrived at. ‘J’ does not, of course, use as a test-case description anything complicated and general enough to express the analysand. There is no requirement that the described hypothetical test cases be formulated only in terms of what can be observed. Moreover, using described hypothetical situations as test cases enables ‘J’ to frame the questions in such a way as to rule out extraneous background assumption to a degree, thus, even if ‘K’ correctly believes that all and only P’s are R’s, the question of whether the concepts of P, R, or both enter the analysand of his concept ‘Q’ can be investigated by asking him such questions as ‘Suppose (even if it seems preposterous to you) that you were to find out that there was a ‘P’ that was not an ‘R’. Would you still consider it a case of Q?
Taking all this into account, the fifth necessary condition for this sort of analysand-analysandum relations is as follows:
(e) If ‘S’ is the analysand of ‘Q’, the proposition that necessarily all and only instances of ‘S’ are instances of ‘Q’ can be justified by generalizing from intuition about the correct answers to questions of the sort indicated about a varied and wide-ranging series of simple described hypothetical situations. It so does occur of antinomy, when we are able to argue for, or demonstrate, both a proposition and its contradiction, roughly speaking, a contradiction of a proposition ‘p’ is one that can be expressed in form ‘not-p’, or, if ‘p’ can be expressed in the form ‘not-q’, then a contradiction is one that can be expressed in the form ‘q’. Thus, e.g., if ‘p is 2 + 1 = 4, then 2 + 1 ≠ 4 is the contradictory of ‘p’, for
2 + 1 ≠ 4 can be expressed in the form not (2 + 1 = 4). If ‘p’ is 2 + 1 ≠ 4, then 2 + 1-4 is a contradictory of ‘p’, since 2 + 1 ≠ 4 can be expressed in the form not (2 + 1 = 4). This is, mutually, but contradictory propositions can be expressed in the form, ‘r’, ‘not-r’. The Principle of Contradiction says that mutually contradictory propositions cannot both be true and cannot both be false. Thus, by this principle, since if ‘p’ is true, ‘not-p’ is false, no proposition ‘p’ can be at once true and false (otherwise both ‘p’ and its contradictories would be false?). In particular, for any predicate ‘p’ and object ‘χ’, it cannot be that ‘p’; is at once true of ‘χ’ and false of χ? This is the classical formulation of the principle of contradiction, but it is nonetheless, that wherein, we cannot now fault either demonstrates. We would eventually hope to be able ‘to solve the antinomy’ by managing, through careful thinking and analysis, eventually to fault either or both demonstrations.
Many paradoxes are as an easy source of antinomies, for example, Zeno gave some famously lets say, logical-cum-mathematical arguments that might be interpreted as demonstrating that motion is impossible. But our eyes as it was, demonstrate motion (exhibit moving things) all the time. Where did Zeno go wrong? Where do our eyes go wrong? If we cannot readily answer at least one of these questions, then we are in antinomy. In the “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant gave demonstrations of the same kind -in the Zeno example they were obviously not the same kind of both, e.g., that the world has a beginning in time and space, and that the world has no beginning in time or space. He argues that both demonstrations are at fault because they proceed on the basis of ‘pure reason’ unconditioned by sense experience.
At this point, we display attributes to the theory of experience, as it is not possible to define in an illuminating way, however, we know what experiences are through acquaintances with some of our own, e.g., visual experiences of as afterimage, a feeling of physical nausea or a tactile experience of an abrasive surface (which might be caused by an actual surface -rough or smooth, or which might be part of a dream, or the product of a vivid sensory imagination). The essential feature of experience is it feels a certain way -that there is something that it is like to have it. We may refer to this feature of an experience as its ‘character’.
Another core feature of the sorts of experiences with which this may be of a concern, is that they have representational ‘content’. (Unless otherwise indicated, ‘experience’ will be reserved for their ‘contentual representations’.) The most obvious cases of experiences with content are sense experiences of the kind normally involved in perception. We may describe such experiences by mentioning their sensory modalities ad their contents, e.g., a gustatory experience (modality) of chocolate ice cream (content), but do so more commonly by means of perceptual verbs combined with noun phrases specifying their contents, as in ‘Macbeth saw a dagger’. This is, however, ambiguous between the perceptual claim ‘There was a (material) dagger in the world that Macbeth perceived visually’ and ‘Macbeth had a visual experience of a dagger’ (the reading with which we are concerned, as it is afforded by our imagination, or perhaps, experiencing mentally hallucinogenic imagery).
As in the case of other mental states and events with content, it is important to distinguish between the properties that and experience ‘represents’ and the properties that it ‘possesses’. To talk of the representational properties of an experience is to say something about its content, not to attribute those properties to the experience itself. Like every other experience, a visual; experience of a non-shaped square, of which is a mental event, and it is therefore not itself irregular or is it square, even though it represents those properties. It is, perhaps, fleeting, pleasant or unusual, even though it does not represent those properties. An experience may represent a property that it possesses, and it may even do so in virtue of a rapidly changing (complex) experience representing something as changing rapidly. However, this is the exception and not the rule.
Which properties can be [directly] represented in sense experience is subject to debate. Traditionalists include only properties whose presence could not be doubted by a subject having appropriate experiences, e.g., colour and shape in the case of visual experience, and apparent shape, surface texture, hardness, etc., in the case of tactile experience. This view is natural to anyone who has an egocentric, Cartesian perspective in epistemology, and who wishes for pure data in experiences to serve as logically certain foundations for knowledge, especially to the immediate objects of perceptual awareness in or of sense-data, such categorized of colour patches and shapes, which are usually supposed distinct from surfaces of physical objectivity. Qualities of sense-data are supposed to be distinct from physical qualities because their perception is more relative to conditions, more certain, and more immediate, and because sense-data is private and cannot appear other than they are they are objects that change in our perceptual field when conditions of perception change. Physical objects remain constant.
Others who do not think that this wish can be satisfied, and who are more impressed with the role of experience in providing animisms with ecologically significant information about the world around them, claim that sense experiences represent properties, characteristic and kinds that are much richer and much more wide-ranging than the traditional sensory qualities. We do not see only colours and shapes, they tell ‘us’, but also earth, water, men, women and fire: We do not smell only odours, but also food and filth. There is no space here to examine the factors relevantly responsible to their choice of situational alternatives. Yet, this suggests that character and content are not really distinct, and there is a close tie between them. For one thing, the relative complexity of the character of sense experience places limitations upon its possible content, e.g., a tactile experience of something touching one’s left ear is just too simple to carry the same amount of content as typically convincing to an every day, visual experience. Moreover, the content of a sense experience of a given character depends on the normal causes of appropriately similar experiences, e.g., the sort of gustatory experience that we have when eating chocolate would be not represented as chocolate unless it was normally caused by chocolate. Granting a contingent ties between the character of an experience and its possible causal origins, once, again follows that its possible content is limited by its character.
Character and content are none the less irreducibly different, for the following reasons. (a) There are experiences that completely lack content, e.g., certain bodily pleasures. (b) Not every aspect of the character of an experience with content is relevant to that content, e.g., the unpleasantness of an aural experience of chalk squeaking on a board may have no representational significance. © Experiences in different modalities may overlap in content without a parallel overlap in character, e.g., visual and tactile experiences of circularity feel completely different. (d) The content of an experience with a given character may vary according to the background of the subject, e.g., a certain content ‘singing bird’ only after the subject has learned something about birds.
According to the act/object analysis of experience (which is a special case of the act/object analysis of consciousness), every experience involves an object of experience even if it has no material object. Two main lines of argument may be offered in support of this view, one ‘phenomenological’ and the other ‘semantic’.
In an outline, the phenomenological argument is as follows. Whenever we have an experience, even if nothing beyond the experience answers to it, we seem to be presented with something through the experience (which is itself diaphanous). The object of the experience is whatever is so presented to ‘us’-is that it is an individual thing, an event, or a state of affairs.
The semantic argument is that objects of experience are required in order to make sense of certain features of our talk about experience, including, in particular, the following. (i) Simple attributions of experience, e.g., ‘Rod is experiencing an oddity that is not really square but in appearance it seems more than likely a square’, this seems to be relational. (ii) We appear to refer to objects of experience and to attribute properties to them, e.g., ‘The after-image that John experienced was certainly odd’. (iii) We appear to quantify ov er objects of experience, e.g., ‘Macbeth saw something that his wife did not see’.
The act/object analysis faces several problems concerning the status of objects of experiences. Currently the most common view is that they are sense-data -private mental entities that actually posses the traditional sensory qualities represented by the experiences of which they are the objects. But the very idea of an essentially private entity is suspect. Moreover, since an experience may apparently represent something as having a determinable property, e.g., redness, without representing it as having any subordinate determinate property, e.g., any specific shade of red, a sense-datum may actually have a determinate property subordinate to it. Even more disturbing is that sense-data may have contradictory properties, since experiences can have contradictory contents. A case in point is the waterfall illusion: If you stare at a waterfall for a minute and then immediately fixate on a nearby rock, you are likely to have an experience of the rock’s moving upward while it remains in the same place. The sense-data theorist must either deny that there are such experiences or admit contradictory objects.
These problems can be avoided by treating objects of experience as properties. This, however, fails to do justice to the appearances, for experience seems not to present ‘us’ with properties embodied in individuals. The view that objects of experience is Meinongian objects accommodate this point. It is also attractive in as far as (1) it allows experiences to represent properties other than traditional sensory qualities, and (2) it allows for the identification of objects of experience and objects of perception in the case of experiences that constitute perception.
According to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects (whatever is perceived), but also to experiences like hallucinations and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences none the less appear to represent something, and their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which have been treated as properties. Meinongian objects (which may not exist or have any form of being), and, more commonly private mental entities with sensory qualities. (The term ‘sense-data’ is now usually applied to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects of sense experiences, as in the work of G. E. Moore) Act/object theorists may also differ on the relationship between objects of experience and objects of perception. In terms of perception (of which we are ‘indirectly aware’) are always distinct from objects of experience (of which we are ‘directly aware’). Meinongian, however, may treat objects of perception as existing objects of experience. But sense-datum theorists must either deny that there are such experiences or admit contradictory objects. Still, most philosophers will feel that the Meinongian’s acceptance of impossible objects is too high a price to pay for these benefits.
A general problem for the act/object analysis is that the question of whether two subjects are experiencing one and the same thing (as opposed to having exactly similar experiences) appears to have an answer only on the assumption that the experiences concerned are perceptions with material objects. But in terms of the act/object analysis the question must have an answer even when this condition is not satisfied. (The answer is always negative on the sense-datum theory; it could be positive on other versions of the act/object analysis, depending on the facts of the case.)
In view of the above problems, the case for the act/object analysis should be reassessed. The phenomenological argument is not, on reflection, convincing, for it is easy enough to grant that any experience appears to present ‘us’ with an object without accepting that it actually does. The semantic argument is more impressive, but is none the less answerable. The seemingly relational structure of attributions of experience is a challenge dealt with below in connection with the adverbial theory. Apparent reference to and quantification over objects of experience can be handled by analysing them as reference to experiences themselves and quantification over experiences tacitly typed according to content. Thus, ‘The after-image that John experienced was colourfully appealing’ becomes ‘John’s after-image experience was an experience of colour’, and ‘Macbeth saw something that his wife did not see’ becomes ‘Macbeth had a visual experience that his wife did not have’.
Pure cognitivism attempts to avoid the problems facing the act/object analysis by reducing experiences to cognitive events or associated disposition, e.g., Susy’s experience of a rough surface beneath her hand might be identified with the event of her acquiring the belief that there is a rough surface beneath her hand, or, if she does not acquire this belief, with a disposition to acquire it that has somehow been blocked.
This position has attractions. It does full justice to the cognitive contents of experience, and to the important role of experience as a source of belief acquisition. It would also help clear the way for a naturalistic theory of mind, since there seems to be some prospect of a physicalist/functionalist account of belief and other intentional states. But pure cognitivism is completely undermined by its failure to accommodate the fact that experiences have a felt character that cannot be reduced to their content, as aforementioned.
The adverbial theory is an attempt to undermine the act/object analysis by suggesting a semantic account of attributions of experience that does not require objects of experience. Unfortunately, the oddities of explicit adverbializations of such statements have driven off potential supporters of the theory. Furthermore, the theory remains largely undeveloped, and attempted refutations have traded on this. It may, however, be founded on sound basis intuitions, and there is reason to believe that an effective development of the theory (which is merely hinting at) is possible.
The relevant intuitions are (1) that when we say that someone is experiencing ‘an A’, or has an experience ‘of an A’, we are using this content-expression to specify the type of thing that the experience is especially apt to fit, (2) that doing this is a matter of saying something about the experience itself (and maybe about the normal causes of like experiences), and (3) that it is no-good of reasons to posit of its position to presuppose that of any involvements, is that its descriptions of an object in which the experience is. Thus the effective role of the content-expression in a statement of experience is to modify the verb it compliments, not to introduce a special type of object.
Perhaps, the most important criticism of the adverbial theory is the ‘many property problem’, according to which the theory does not have the resources to distinguish between, e.g.,
(1) Frank has an experience of a brown triangle
and:
(2) Frank has an experience of brown and an experience of a triangle.
Which is entailed by (1) but does not entail it. The act/object analysis can easily accommodate the difference between (1) and (2) by claiming that the truth of (1) requires a single object of experience that is both brown and triangular, while that of the (2) allows for the possibility of two objects of experience, one brown and the other triangular, however, (1) is equivalent to:
(1*) Frank has an experience of something’s being both brown and triangular.
And (2) is equivalent to:
(2*) Frank has an experience of something’s being brown and an experience of something’s being triangular,
and the difference between these can be explained quite simply in terms of logical scope without invoking objects of experience. The Adverbialists may use this to answer the many-property problem by arguing that the phrase ‘a brown triangle’ in (1) does the same work as the clause ‘something’s being both brown and triangular’ in (1*). This is perfectly compatible with the view that it also has the ‘adverbial’ function of modifying the verb ‘has an experience of’, for it specifies the experience more narrowly just by giving a necessary condition for the satisfaction of the experience (the condition being that there are something both brown and triangular before Frank).
A final position that should be mentioned is the state theory, according to which a sense experience of an ‘A’ is an occurrent, non-relational state of the kind that the subject would be in when perceiving an ‘A’. Suitably qualified, this claim is no doubt true, but its significance is subject to debate. Here it is enough to remark that the claim is compatible with both pure cognitivism and the adverbial theory, and that state theorists are probably best advised to adopt adverbials as a means of developing their intuitions.
Yet, clarifying sense-data, if taken literally, is that which is given by the senses. But in response to the question of what exactly is so given, sense-data theories posit private showings in the consciousness of the subject. In the case of vision this would be a kind of inner picture show which itself only indirectly represents aspects of the external world that has in and of itself a worldly representation. The view has been widely rejected as implying that we really only see extremely thin coloured pictures interposed between our mind’s eye and reality. Modern approaches to perception tend to reject any conception of the eye as a camera or lense, simply responsible for producing private images, and stress the active life of the subject in and of the world, as the determinant of experience.
Nevertheless, the argument from illusion is of itself the usually intended directive to establish that certain familiar facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception called naïevity or direct realism. There are, however, many different versions of the argument that must be distinguished carefully. Some of these distinctions centre on the content of the premises (the nature of the appeal to illusion); others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion (the kind of direct realism under attack). Let ‘us’ set about by distinguishing the importantly different versions of direct realism which one might take to be vulnerable to familiar facts about the possibility of perceptual illusion.
A crude statement of direct realism might go as follows. In perception, we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties, we do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something ‘else’, e.g., a sense-datum. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view, as for one thing a great many philosophers who are ‘not’ direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually ‘perceiving’ something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To talk that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to and of the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-datum theorists should want. At least, many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express in what they were of objecting too in terms of a technical (and philosophically controversial) concept such as ‘acquaintance’. Using such a notion, we could define direct realism this way: In ‘veridical’ experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surfaces, or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious verison of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all experience we are directly acquainted with parts or constituents of physical objects. The expressions ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’, and the distinction they mark between knowing ‘things’ and knowing ‘about’ things, are generally associated with Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), that scientific philosophy required analysing many objects of belief as ‘logical constructions’ or ‘logical fictions’, and the programme of analysis that this inaugurated dominated the subsequent philosophy of logical atomism, and then of other philosophers, Russell’s “The Analysis of Mind,” the mind itself is treated in a fashion reminiscent of Hume, as no more than the collection of neutral perceptions or sense-data that make up the flux of conscious experience, and that looked at another way that also was to make up the external world (neutral monism), but “An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth” (1940) represents a more empirical approach to the problem. Yet, philosophers have perennially investigated this and related distinctions using varying terminology.
Distinction in our ways of knowing things, highlighted by Russell and forming a central element in his philosophy after the discovery of the theory of ‘definite descriptions’. A thing is known by acquaintance when there is direct experience of it. It is known by description if it can only be described as a thing with such-and-such properties. In everyday parlance, I might know my spouse and children by acquaintance, but know someone as ‘the first person born at sea’ only by description. However, for a variety of reasons Russell shrinks the area of things that can be known by acquaintance until eventually only current experience, perhaps my own self, and certain universals or meanings qualify anything else is known only as the thing that has such-and-such qualities.
Because one can interpret the relation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not ‘epistemic’, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge, it is important to distinguish the above aforementioned views read as ontological theses from a view one might call ‘epistemological direct realism? In perception we are, on at least some occasions, non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence of a physical object. Since it is that these objects exist independently of any mind that might perceive them, and so it thereby rules out all forms of idealism and phenomenalism, which hold that there are no such independently existing objects. Its being to ‘direct’ realism rules out those views defended under the cubic of ‘critical naive realism’, or ‘representational realism’, in which there is some non-physical intermediary -usually called a ‘sense-datum’ or a ‘sense impression’ -that must first be perceived or experienced in order to perceive the object that exists independently of this perception. Often the distinction between direct realism and other theories of perception is explained more fully in terms of what is ‘immediately’ perceived, than ‘mediately’ perceived. What relevance does illusion have for these two forms of direct realism?
The fundamental premise of the arguments is from illusion seems to be the theses that things can appear to be other than they are. Thus, for example, straight sticks when immerged in water looks bent, a penny when viewed from certain perspective appears as an illusory spatial elliptic circularity, when something that is yellow when place under red fluorescent light looks red. In all of these cases, one version of the argument goes, it is implausible to maintain that what we are directly acquainted with is the real nature of the object in question. Indeed, it is hard to see how we can be said to be aware of the really physical object at all. In the above illusions the things we were aware of actually were bent, elliptical and red, respectively. But, by hypothesis, the really physical objects lacked these properties. Thus, we were not aware of the substantial reality of been real as a physical objects or theory.
So far, if the argument is relevant to any of the direct realisms distinguished above, it seems relevant only to the claim that in all sense experience we are directly acquainted with parts or constituents of physical objects. After all, even if in illusion we are not acquainted with physical objects, but their surfaces, or their constituents, why should we conclude anything about the hidden nature of our relations to the physical world in veridical experience?
We are supposed to discover the answer to this question by noticing the similarities between illusory experience and veridical experience and by reflecting on what makes illusion possible at all. Illusion can occur because the nature of the illusory experience is determined, not just by the nature of the object perceived, but also by other conditions, both external and internal as becoming of an inner or as the outer experience. But all of our sensations are subject to these causal influences and it would be gratuitous and arbitrary to select from indefinitely of many and subtly different perceptual experiences some special ones those that get ‘us’ in touch with the ‘real’ nature of the physical world and its surrounding surfaces. Red fluorescent light affects the way thing’s look, but so does sunlight. Water reflects light, but so does air. We have no unmediated access to the external world.
Still, why should we consider that we are aware of something other than a physical object in experience? Why should we not conclude that to be aware of a physical object is just to be appeared to by that object in a certain way? In its best-known form the adverbial theory of something proposes that the grammatical object of a statement attributing an experience to someone be analysed as an adverb. For example,
(A) Rod is experiencing a coloured square.
Is rewritten as?
Rod is experiencing, (coloured square)-ly
This is presented as an alternative to the act/object analysis, according to which the truth of a statement like (A) requires the existence of an object of experience corresponding to its grammatical object. A commitment to t he explicit adverbializations of statements of experience is not, however, essential to adverbialism. The core of the theory consists, rather, in the denial of objects of experience (as opposed ti objects of perception) coupled with the view that the role of the grammatical object in a statement of experience is to characterize more fully te sort of experience that is being attributed to the subject. The claim, then, is that the grammatical object is functioning as a modifier and, in particular, as a modifier of a verb. If it as a special kind of adverb at the semantic level.
At this point, it might be profitable to move from considering the possibility of illusion to considering the possibility of hallucination. Instead of comparing paradigmatic veridical perception with illusion, let ‘us’ compare it with complete hallucination. For any experiences or sequence of experiences we take to be veridical, we can imagine qualitatively indistinguishable experiences occurring as part of a hallucination. For those who like their philosophical arguments spiced with a touch of science, we can imagine that our brains were surreptitiously removed in the night, and unbeknown to ‘us’ are being stimulated by a neurophysiologist so as to produce the very sensations that we would normally associate with a trip to the Grand Canyon. Currently permit ‘us’ into appealing of what we are aware of in this complete hallucination that is obvious that we are not awaken to the sparking awareness of physical objects, their surfaces, or their constituents. Nor can we even construe the experience as one of an object’s appearing to ‘us’ in a certain way. It is after all a complete hallucination and the objects we take to exist before ‘us’ are simply not there. But if we compare hallucinatory experience with the qualitatively indistinguishable veridical experiences, should we most conclude that it would be ‘special’ to suppose that in veridical experience we are aware of something radically different from what we are aware of in hallucinatory experience? Again, it might help to reflect on our belief that the immediate cause of hallucinatory experience and veridical experience might be the very same brain event, and it is surely implausible to suppose that the effects of this same cause are radically different -acquaintance with physical objects in the case of veridical experience: Something else in the case of hallucinatory experience.
This version of the argument from hallucination would seem to address straightforwardly the ontological versions of direct realism. The argument is supposed to convince ‘us’ that the ontological analysis of sensation in both veridical and hallucinatory experience should give ‘us’ the same results, but in the hallucinatory case there is no plausible physical object, constituent of a physical object, or surface of a physical object with which additional premiss we would also get an argument against epistemological direct realism. That premiss is that in a vivid hallucinatory experience we might have precisely the same justification for believing (falsely) what we do about the physical world as we do in the analogous, phenomenological indistinguishable, veridical experience. But our justification for believing that there is a table before ‘us’ in the course of a vivid hallucination of a table are surely not non-inferential in character. It certainly is not, if non-inferential justifications are supposedly a consist but yet an unproblematic access to the fact that makes true our belief -by hypothesis the table does not exist. But if the justification that hallucinatory experiences give ‘us’ the same as the justification we get from the parallel veridical experience, then we should not describe a veridical experience as giving ‘us non-inferential justification for believing in the existence of physical objects. In both cases we should say that we believe what we do about the physical world on the basis of what we know directly about the character of our experience.
In this brief space, I can only sketch some of the objections that might be raised against arguments from illusion and hallucination. That being said, let us begin with a criticism that accepts most of the presuppositions of the arguments. Even if the possibility of hallucination establishes that in some experience we are not acquainted with constituents of physical objects, it is not clear that it establishes that we are never acquainted with a constituent of physical objects. Suppose, for example, that we decide that in both veridical and hallucinatory experience we are acquainted with sense-data. At least some philosophers have tried to identify physical objects with ‘bundles’ of actual and possible sense-data.
To establish inductively that sensations are signs of physical objects one would have to observe a correlation between the occurrence of certain sensations and the existence of certain physical objects. But to observe such a correlation in order to establish a connection, one would need independent access to physical objects and, by hypothesis, this one cannot have. If one further adopts the verificationist’s stance that the ability to comprehend is parasitic on the ability to confirm, one can easily be driven to Hume’s conclusion:
Let us chance our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe, we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceivable any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear̀d in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we have any idea but what is there Reduced. (Hume, 1739-40, pp. 67-8).
If one reaches such a conclusion but wants to maintain the intelligibility and verifiability of the assertion about the physical world, one can go either the idealistic or the phenomenalistic route.
However, hallucinatory experiences on this view is non-veridical precisely because the sense-data one is acquainted with in hallucination do not bear the appropriate relations to other actual and possible sense-data. But if such a view were plausible one could agree that one is acquainted with the same kind of a thing in veridical and non-veridical experience but insists that there is still a sense in which in veridical experience one is acquainted with constituents of a physical object?
A different sort of objection to the argument from illusion or hallucination concerns its use in drawing conclusions we have not stressed in the above discourses. I, have in mentioning this objection, may to underscore an important feature of the argument. At least some philosophers (Hume, for example) have stressed the rejection of direct realism on the road to an argument for general scepticism with respect to the physical world. Once one abandons epistemological; direct realisms, one has an uphill battle indicating how one can legitimately make the inferences from sensation to physical objects. But philosophers who appeal to the existence of illusion and hallucination to develop an argument for scepticism can be accused of having an epistemically self-defeating argument. One could justifiably infer sceptical conclusions from the existence of illusion and hallucination only if one justifiably believed that such experiences exist, but if one is justified in believing that illusion exists, one must be justified in believing at least, some facts about the physical world (for example, that straight sticks look bent in water). The key point to stress in relying to such arguments is, that strictly speaking, the philosophers in question need only appeal to the ‘possibility’ of a vivid illusion and hallucination. Although it would have been psychologically more difficult to come up with arguments from illusion and hallucination if we did not believe that we actually had such experiences, I take it that most philosophers would argue that the possibility of such experiences is enough to establish difficulties with direct realism. Indeed, if one looks carefully at the argument from hallucination discussed earlier, one sees that it nowhere makes any claims about actual cases of hallucinatory experience.
Another reply to the attack on epistemological direct realism focuses on the implausibility of claiming that there is any process of ‘inference’ wrapped up in our beliefs about the world and its surrounding surfaces. Even if it is possible to give a phenomenological description of the subjective character of sensation, it requires a special sort of skill that most people lack. Our perceptual beliefs about the physical world are surely direct, at least in the sense that they are unmediated by any sort of conscious inference from premisses describing something other than a physical object. The appropriate reply to this objection, however, is simply to acknowledge the relevant phenomenological fact and point out that from the perceptive of epistemologically direct realism, the philosopher is attacking a claim about the nature of our justification for believing propositions about the physical world. Such philosophers need carry out of any comment at all about the causal genesis of such beliefs.
As mentioned that proponents of the argument from illusion and hallucination have often intended it to establish the existence of sense-data, and many philosophers have attacked the so-called sense-datum inference presupposed in some statements of the argument. When the stick looked bent, the penny looked elliptical and the yellow object looked red, the sense-datum theorist wanted to infer that there was something bent, elliptical and red, respectively. But such an inference is surely suspect. Usually, we do not infer that because something appears to have a certain property, that affairs that affecting something that has that property. When in saying that Jones looks like a doctor, I surely would not want anyone to infer that there must actually be someone there who is a doctor. In assessing this objection, it will be important to distinguish different uses words like ‘appears’ and ‘looks’. At least, sometimes to say that something looks ‘F’ way and the sense-datum inference from an F ‘appearance’ in this sense to an actual ‘F’ would be hopeless. However, it also seems that we use the ‘appears’/’looks’ terminology to describe the phenomenological character of our experience and the inference might be more plausible when the terms are used this way. Still, it does seem that the arguments from illusion and hallucination will not by themselves constitute strong evidence for sense-datum theory. Even if one concludes that there is something common to both the hallucination of a red thing and a veridical visual experience of a red thing, one need not describe a common constituent as awarenesses of something red. The adverbial theorist would prefer to construe the common experiential state as ‘being appeared too redly’, a technical description intended only to convey the idea that the state in question need not be analysed as relational in character. Those who opt for an adverbial theory of sensation need to make good the claim that their artificial adverbs can be given a sense that is not parasitic upon an understanding of the adjectives transformed into verbs. Still, other philosophers might try to reduce the common element in veridical and non-veridical experience to some kind of intentional state. More like belief or judgement. The idea here is that the only thing common to the two experiences is the fact that in both I spontaneously takes there to be present an object of a certain kind.
The selfsame objections can be started within the general framework presupposed by proponents of the arguments from illusion and hallucination. A great many contemporary philosophers, however, uncomfortable with the intelligibility of the concepts needed to make sense of the theories attacked even. Thus, at least, some who object to the argument from illusion do so not because they defend direct realism. Rather they think there is something confused about all this talk of direct awareness or acquaintance. Contemporary Externalists, for example, usually insist that we understand epistemic concepts by appeal: To nomologically connections. On such a view the closest thing to direct knowledge would probably be something by other beliefs. If we understand direct knowledge this way, it is not clar how the phenomena of illusion and hallucination would be relevant to claim that on, at least some occasions our judgements about the physical world are reliably produced by processes that do not take as their input beliefs about something else.
The expressions ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’, and the distinction they mark between knowing ‘things’ and knowing ‘about’ things, are now generally associated with Bertrand Russell. However, John Grote and Hermann von Helmholtz had earlier and independently to mark the same distinction, and William James adopted Grote’s terminology in his investigation of the distinction. Philosophers have perennially investigated this and related distinctions using varying terminology. Grote introduced the distinction by noting that natural languages ‘distinguish between these two applications of the notion of knowledge, the one being of the Greek ϒνѾναι, nosene, Kennen, connaître, the other being ‘wissen’, ‘savoir’ (Grote, 1865, p. 60). On Grote’s account, the distinction is a natter of degree, and there are three sorts of dimensions of variability: Epistemic, causal and semantic.
We know things by experiencing them, and knowledge of acquaintance (Russell changed the preposition to ‘by’) is epistemically priori to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge about things. Indeed, sensation has ‘the one great value of trueness or freedom from mistake’ (1900, p. 206).
A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing, while a thought constituting knowledge about the thing is more or less distant causally, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a perceptual causal chain originating in the object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a sensation. The thing’s presented to ‘us’ in sensation and of which we have knowledge of acquaintance include ordinary objects in the external world, such as the sun.
Grote contrasted the imagistic thoughts involved in knowledge of acquaintance with things, with the judgements involved in knowledge about things, suggesting that the latter but not the former are mentally contentual by a specified state of affairs. Elsewhere, however, he suggested that every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about a thing involves a form, idea, or what we might call contentual propositional content, referring the thought to its object. Whether contentual or not, thoughts constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing are relatively indistinct, although this indistinctness does not imply incommunicably. On the other hand, thoughts constituting distinctly, as a result of ‘the application of notice or attention’ to the ‘confusion or chaos’ of sensation (1900, pp. 206-7). Grote did not have an explicit theory on reference, the relation by which a thought is ‘of’ or ‘about’ a specific thing. Nor did he explain how thoughts can be more or less indistinct.
Helmholtz held unequivocally that all thoughts capable of constituting knowledge, whether ‘knowledge that has to do with Notions’ (Wissen) or ‘mere familiarity with phenomena’ (Kennen), is judgements or, we may say, have conceptual propositional contents. Where Grote saw a difference between distinct and indistinct thoughts, Helmholtz found a difference between precise judgements that are expressible in words and equally precise judgements that, in principle, are not expressible in words, and so are not communicable (Helmholtz, 19620. As happened, James was influenced by Helmholtz and, especially, by Grote. (James, 1975). Taken on the latter’s terminology, James agreed with Grote that the distinction between knowledge of acquaintance with things and knowledge about things involves a difference in the degree of vagueness or distinctness of thoughts, though he, too, said little to explain how such differences are possible. At one extreme is knowledge of acquaintance with people and things, and with sensations of colour, flavour, spatial extension, temporal duration, effort and perceptible difference, unaccompanied by knowledge about these things. Such pure knowledge of acquaintance is vague and inexplicit. Movement away from this extreme, by a process of notice and analysis, yields a spectrum of less vague, more explicit thoughts constituting knowledge about things.
All the same, the distinction was not merely a relative one for James, as he was more explicit than Grote in not imputing content to every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about things. At the extreme where a thought constitutes pure knowledge of acquaintance with a thing, there is a complete absence of conceptual propositional content in the thought, which is a sensation, feeling or precept, of which he renders the thought incommunicable. James’ reasons for positing an absolute discontinuity in between pure cognition and preferable knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge at all about things seem to have been that any theory adequate to the facts about reference must allow that some reference is not conventionally mediated, that conceptually unmediated reference is necessary if there are to be judgements at all about things and, especially, if there are to be judgements about relations between things, and that any theory faithful to the common person’s ‘sense of life’ must allow that some things are directly perceived.
James made a genuine advance over Grote and Helmholtz by analysing the reference relation holding between a thought and of him to specific things of or about which it is knowledge. In fact, he gave two different analyses. On both analyses, a thought constituting knowledge about a thing refers to and is knowledge about ‘a reality, whenever it actually or potentially ends in’ a thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with that thing (1975). The two analyses differ in their treatments of knowledge of acquaintance. On James’s first analysis, reference in both sorts of knowledge is mediated by causal chains. A thought constituting pure knowledge of acquaintances with a thing refers to and is knowledge of ‘whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles’ (1975). The concepts of a thought ‘operating on’ a thing or ‘terminating in’ another thought are causal, but where Grote found teleology and final causes. On James’s later analysis, the reference involved in knowledge of acquaintance with a thing is direct. A thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing either is that thing, or has that thing as a constituent, and the thing and the experience of it is identical (1975, 1976).
James further agreed with Grote that pure knowledge of acquaintance with things, i.e., sensory experience, is epistemologically priori to knowledge about things. While the epistemic justification involved in knowledge about things rests on the foundation of sensation, all thoughts about things are fallible and their justification is augmented by their mutual coherence. James was unclear about the precise epistemic status of knowledge of acquaintance. At times, thoughts constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance are said to posses ‘absolute veritableness’ (1890) and ‘the maximal conceivable truth’ (1975), suggesting that such thoughts are genuinely cognitive and that they provide an infallible epistemic foundation. At other times, such thoughts are said not to bear truth-values, suggesting that ‘knowledge’ of acquaintance is not genuine knowledge at all, but only a non-cognitive necessary condition of genuine knowledge, knowledge about things (1976). Russell understood James to hold the latter view.
Russell agreed with Grote and James on the following points: First, knowing things involves experiencing them. Second, knowledge of things by acquaintance is epistemically basic and provides an infallible epistemic foundation for knowledge about things. (Like James, Russell vacillated about the epistemic status of knowledge by acquaintance, and it eventually was replaced at the epistemic foundation by the concept of noticing.) Third, knowledge about things is more articulate and explicit than knowledge by acquaintance with things. Fourth, knowledge about things is causally removed from knowledge of things by acquaintance, by processes of reelection, analysis and inference (1911, 1913, 1959).
But, Russell also held that the term ‘experience’ must not be used uncritically in philosophy, on account of the ‘vague, fluctuating and ambiguous’ meaning of the term in its ordinary use. The precise concept found by Russell ‘in the nucleus of this uncertain patch of meaning’ is that of direct occurrent experience of a thing, and he used the term ‘acquaintance’ to express this relation, though he used that term technically, and not with all its ordinary meaning (1913). Nor did he undertake to give a constitutive analysis of the relation of acquaintance, though he allowed that it may not be unanalysable, and did characterize it as a generic concept. If the use of the term ‘experience’ is restricted to expressing the determinate core of the concept it ordinarily expresses, then we do not experience ordinary objects in the external world, as we commonly think and as Grote and James held we do. In fact, Russell held, one can be acquainted only with one’s sense-data, i.e., particular colours, sounds, etc.), one’s occurrent mental states, universals, logical forms, and perhaps, oneself.
Russell agreed with James that knowledge of things by acquaintance ‘is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths’ (1912, 1929). The mental states involved when one is acquainted with things do not have propositional contents. Russell’s reasons here seem to have been similar to James’s. Conceptually unmediated reference to particulars necessary for understanding any proposition mentioning a particular, e.g., 1918-19, and, if scepticism about the external world is to be avoided, some particulars must be directly perceived (1911). Russell vacillated about whether or not the absence of propositional content renders knowledge by acquaintance incommunicable.
Russell agreed with James that different accounts should be given of reference as it occurs in knowledge by acquaintance and in knowledge about things, and that in the former case, reference is direct. But Russell objected on a number of grounds to James’s causal account of the indirect reference involved in knowledge about things. Russell gave a descriptional rather than a causal analysis of that sort of reference: A thought is about a thing when the content of the thought involves a definite description uniquely satisfied by the thing referred to. Indeed, he preferred to speak of knowledge of things by description, rather than knowledge about things.
Russell advanced beyond Grote and James by explaining how thoughts can be more or less articulate and explicit. If one is acquainted with a complex thing without being aware of or acquainted with its complexity, the knowledge one has by acquaintance with that thing is vague and inexplicit. Reflection and analysis can lead one to distinguish constituent parts of the object of acquaintance and to obtain progressively more comprehensible, explicit, and complete knowledge about it (1913, 1918-19, 1950, 1959).
Apparent facts to be explained about the distinction between knowing things and knowing about things are there. Knowledge about things is essentially propositional knowledge, where the mental states involved refer to specific things. This propositional knowledge can be more or less comprehensive, can be justified inferentially and on the basis of experience, and can be communicated. Knowing things, on the other hand, involves experience of things. This experiential knowledge provides an epistemic basis for knowledge about things, and in some sense is difficult or impossible to communicate, perhaps because it is more or less vague.
If one is unconvinced by James and Russell’s reasons for holding that experience of and reference work to things that are at least sometimes direct. It may seem preferable to join Helmholtz in asserting that knowing things and knowing about things both involve propositional attitudes. To do so would at least allow one the advantages of unified accounts of the nature of knowledge (propositional knowledge would be fundamental) and of the nature of reference: Indirect reference would be the only kind. The two kinds of knowledge might yet be importantly different if the mental states involved have different sorts of causal origins in the thinker’s cognitive faculties, involve different sorts of propositional attitudes, and differ in other constitutive respects relevant to the relative vagueness and communicability of the mental sates.
In any of cases, perhaps most, Foundationalism is a view concerning the ‘structure’ of the system of justified belief possessed by a given individual. Such a system is divided into ‘foundation’ and ‘superstructure’, so related that beliefs in the latter depend on the former for their justification but not vice versa. However, the view is sometimes stated in terms of the structure of ‘knowledge’ than of justified belief. If knowledge is true justified belief (plus, perhaps, some further condition), one may think of knowledge as exhibiting a Foundationalist structure by virtue of the justified belief it involves. In any event, the construing doctrine concerning the primary justification is layed the groundwork as affording the efforts of belief, though in feeling more free, we are to acknowledge the knowledgeable infractions that will from time to time be worthy in showing to its recognition.
The first step toward a more explicit statement of the position is to distinguish between ‘mediate’ (indirect) and ‘immediate’ (direct) justification of belief. To say that a belief is mediately justified is to any that it s justified by some appropriate relation to other justified beliefs, i.e., by being inferred from other justified beliefs that provide adequate support for it, or, alternatively, by being based on adequate reasons. Thus, if my reason for supposing that you are depressed is that you look listless, speak in an unaccustomedly flat tone of voice, exhibit no interest in things you are usually interested in, etc., then my belief that you are depressed is justified, if, at all, by being adequately supported by my justified belief that you look listless, speak in a flat tone of voice. . . .
A belief is immediately justified, on the other hand, if its justification is of another sort, e.g., if it is justified by being based on experience or if it is ‘self-justified’. Thus my belief that you look listless may not be based on anything else I am justified in believing but just on the cay you look to me. And my belief that 2 + 3 = 5 may be justified not because I infer it from something else, I justifiably believe, but simply because it seems obviously true to me.
In these terms we can put the thesis of Foundationalism by saying that all mediately justified beliefs owe their justification, ultimately to immediately justified beliefs. To get a more detailed idea of what this amounts to it will be useful to consider the most important argument for Foundationalism, the regress argument. Consider a mediately justified belief that ‘p’ (we are using lowercase letters as dummies for belief contents). It is, by hypothesis, justified by its relation to one or more other justified beliefs, ‘q’ and ‘r’. Now what justifies each of these, e.g., q? If it too is mediately justified that is because it is related accordingly to one or subsequent extra justified beliefs, e.g., ‘s’. By virtue of what is ‘s’ justified? If it is mediately justified, the same problem arises at the next stage. To avoid both circularity and an infinite regress, we are forced to suppose that in tracing back this chain we arrive at one or more immediately justified beliefs that stop the regress, since their justification does not depend on any further justified belief.
According to the infinite regress argument for Foundationalism, if every justified belief could be justified only by inferring it from some further justified belief, there would have to be an infinite regress of justifications: Because there can be no such regress, there must be justified beliefs that are not justified by appeal to some further justified belief. Instead, they are non-inferentially or immediately justified, they are basic or foundational, the ground on which all our other justifiable beliefs are to rest.
Variants of this ancient argument have persuaded and continue to persuade many philosophers that the structure of epistemic justification must be foundational. Aristotle recognized that if we are to have knowledge of the conclusion of an argument in the basis of its premisses, we must know the premisses. But if knowledge of a premise always required knowledge of some further proposition, then in order to know the premise we would have to know each proposition in an infinite regress of propositions. Since this is impossible, there must be some propositions that are known, but not by demonstration from further propositions: There must be basic, non-demonstrable knowledge, which grounds the rest of our knowledge.
Foundationalist enthusiasms for regress arguments often overlook the fact that they have also been advanced on behalf of scepticism, relativism, fideisms, conceptualism and Coherentism. Sceptics agree with foundationalist’s both that there can be no infinite regress of justifications and that nevertheless, there must be one if every justified belief can be justified only inferentially, by appeal to some further justified belief. But sceptics think all true justification must be inferential in this way -the foundationalist’s talk of immediate justification merely overshadows the requiring of any rational justification properly so-called. Sceptics conclude that none of our beliefs is justified. Relativists follow essentially the same pattern of sceptical argument, concluding that our beliefs can only be justified relative to the arbitrary starting assumptions or presuppositions either of an individual or of a form of life.
Regress arguments are not limited to epistemology. In ethics there is Aristotle’s regress argument (in “Nichomachean Ethics”) for the existence of a single end of rational action. In metaphysics there is Aquinas’s regress argument for an unmoved mover: If a mover that it is in motion, there would have to be an infinite sequence of movers each moved by a further mover, since there can be no such sequence, there is an unmoved mover. A related argument has recently been given to show that not every state of affairs can have an explanation or cause of the sort posited by principles of sufficient reason, and such principles are false, for reasons having to do with their own concepts of explanation (Post, 1980; Post, 1987).
The premise of which in presenting Foundationalism as a view concerning the structure ‘that is in fact exhibited’ by the justified beliefs of a particular person has sometimes been construed in ways that deviate from each of the phrases that are contained in the previous sentence. Thus, it is sometimes taken to characterise the structure of ‘our knowledge’ or ‘scientific knowledge’, rather than the structure of the cognitive system of an individual subject. As for the other phrase, Foundationalism is sometimes thought of as concerned with how knowledge (justified belief) is acquired or built up, than with the structure of what a person finds herself with at a certain point. Thus some people think of scientific inquiry as starting with the recordings of observations (immediately justified observational beliefs), and then inductively inferring generalizations. Again, Foundationalism is sometimes thought of not as a description of the finished product or of the mode of acquisition, but rather as a proposal for how the system could be reconstructed, an indication of how it could all be built up from immediately justified foundations. This last would seem to be the kind of Foundationalism we find in Descartes. However, Foundationalism is most usually thought of in contemporary Anglo-American epistemology as an account of the structure actually exhibited by an individual’s system of justified belief.
It should also be noted that the term is used with a deplorable looseness in contemporary, literary circles, even in certain corners of the philosophical world, to refer to anything from realism -the view that reality has a definite constitution regardless of how we think of it or what we believe about it to various kinds of ‘absolutism’ in ethics, politics, or wherever, and even to the truism that truth is stable (if a proposition is true, it stays true).
Since Foundationalism holds that all mediate justification rests on immediately justified beliefs, we may divide variations in forms of the view into those that have to do with the immediately justified beliefs, the ‘foundations’, and those that have to do with the modes of derivation of other beliefs from these, how the ‘superstructure’ is built up. The most obvious variation of the first sort has to do with what modes of immediate justification are recognized. Many treatments, both pro and con, are parochially restricted to one form of immediate justification -self-evidence, self-justification (self-warrant), justification by a direct awareness of what the belief is about, or whatever. It is then unwarrantly assumed by critics that disposing of that one form will dispose of Foundationalism generally (Alston, 1989, ch. 3). The emphasis historically has been on beliefs that simply ‘record’ what is directly given in experience (Lewis, 1946) and on self-evident propositions (Descartes’ ‘clear and distinct perceptions and Locke’s ‘Perception of the agreement and disagreement of ideas’). But self-warrant has also recently received a great deal of attention (Alston 1989), and there is also a reliabilist version according to which a belief can be immediately justified just by being acquired by a reliable belief-forming process that does not take other beliefs as inputs (BonJour, 1985, ch. 3).
Foundationalisms also differ as to what further constraints, if any, are put on foundations. Historically, it has been common to require of the foundations of knowledge that they exhibit certain ‘epistemic immunities’, as we might put it, immunity from error, refutation or doubt. Thus Descartes, along with many other seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophers, took it that any knowledge worthy of the name would be based on cognations the truth of which is guaranteed (infallible), that were maximally stable, immune from ever being shown to be mistaken, as incorrigible, and concerning which no reasonable doubt could be raised (indubitable). Hence the search in the “Meditations” for a divine guarantee of our faculty of rational intuition. Criticisms of Foundationalism have often been directed at these constraints: Lehrer, 1974, Will, 1974? Both responded to in Alston, 1989. It is important to realize that a position that is Foundationalist in a distinctive sense can be formulated without imposing any such requirements on foundations.
There are various ways of distinguishing types of Foundationalist epistemology by the use of the variations we have been enumerating. Plantinga (1983), has put forwards an influential innovation of criterial Foundationalism, specified in terms of limitations on the foundations. He construes this as a disjunction of ‘ancient and medieval Foundationalism’, which takes foundations to comprise what is self-evidently and ‘evident to he senses’, and ‘modern Foundationalism’ that replaces ‘evidently to the senses’ with ‘incorrigible’, which in practice was taken to apply only to beliefs about one’s present states of consciousness. Plantinga himself developed this notion in the context of arguing those items outside this territory, in particular certain beliefs about God, could also be immediately justified. A popular recent distinction is between what is variously called ‘strong’ or ‘extreme’ Foundationalism and ‘moderate’, ‘modest’ or ‘minimal’ Foundationalism, with the distinction depending on whether various epistemic immunities are required of foundations. Finally, its distinction is ‘simple’ and ‘iterative’ Foundationalism (Alston, 1989), depending on whether it is required of a foundation only that it is immediately justified, or whether it is also required that the higher level belief that the firmer belief is immediately justified is itself immediately justified. Suggesting only that the plausibility of the stronger requirement stems from a ‘level confusion’ between beliefs on different levels.
The classic opposition is between Foundationalism and Coherentism. Coherentism denies any immediate justification. It deals with the regress argument by rejecting ‘linear’ chains of justification and, in effect, taking the total system of belief to be epistemically primary. A particular belief is justified yo the extent that it is integrated into a coherent system of belief. More recently into a pragmatist like John Dewey has developed a position known as contextualism, which avoids ascribing any overall structure to knowledge. Questions concerning justification can only arise in particular context, defined in terms of assumptions that are simply taken for granted, though they can be questioned in other contexts, where other assumptions will be privileged.
Foundationalism can be attacked both in its commitment to immediate justification and in its claim that all mediately justified beliefs ultimately depend on the former. Though, it is the latter that is the position’s weakest point, most of the critical fire has been detected to the former. As pointed out about much of this criticism has been directly against some particular form of immediate justification, ignoring the possibility of other forms. Thus, much anti-foundationalist artillery has been directed at the ‘myth of the given’. The idea that facts or things are ‘given’ to consciousness in a pre-conceptual, pre-judgmental mode, and that beliefs can be justified on that basis (Sellars, 1963). The most prominent general argument against immediate justification is a ‘level ascent’ argument, according to which whatever is taken ti immediately justified a belief that the putative justifier has in supposing to do so. Hence, since the justification of the higher level belief after all (BonJour, 1985). We lack adequate support for any such higher level requirements for justification, and if it were imposed we would be launched on an infinite undergo regress, for a similar requirement would hold equally for the higher level belief that the original justifier was efficacious.
Coherence is a major player in the theatre of knowledge. There are coherence theories of belief, truth, and justification. These combine in various ways to yield theories of knowledge. We will proceed from belief through justification to truth. Coherence theories of belief are concerned with the content of beliefs. Consider a belief you now have, the beliefs that you are reading a page in a book, so what makes that belief the belief that it is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book than the belief hat you have a monster in the garden?
One answer is that the belief has a coherent place or role in a system of beliefs. Perception has an influence on belief. You respond to sensory stimuli by believing that you are reading a page in a book rather than believing that you have a centaur in the garden. Belief has an influence on action. You will act differently if you believe that you are reading a page than if you believe something about a centaur. Perspicacity and action undermine the content of belief, however, the same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has in the role it plays in a network of relations to the beliefs, the role in inference and implications, for example, I refer different things from believing that I am inferring different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other beliefs, just as I infer that belief from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from different things than I infer other beliefs from.
The input of perception and the output of an action supplement the centre role of the systematic relations the belief has to other beliefs, but it is the systematic relations that give the belief the specific content it has. They are the fundamental source of the content of beliefs. That is how coherence comes in. A belief has the content that it does because of the way in which it coheres within a system of beliefs (Rosenberg, 1988). We might distinguish weak coherence theories of the content of beliefs from strong coherence theories. Weak coherence theories affirm that coherences are one-determinant of the content of belief. Strong coherence theories of the contents of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the content of belief.
When we turn from belief to justification, we are in confronting a corresponding group of similarities fashioned by their coherences motifs. What makes one belief justified and another not? The answer is the way it coheres with the background system of beliefs. Again, there is a distinction between weak and strong theories of coherence. Weak theories tell ‘us’ that the way in which a belief coheres with a background system of beliefs is one determinant of justification, other typical determinants being perception, memory and intuition. Strong theories, by contrast, tell ‘us’ that justification is solely a matter of how a belief coheres with a system of beliefs. There is, however, another distinction that cuts across the distinction between weak and strong coherence theories of justification. It is the distinction between positive and negative coherence theories (Pollock, 1986). A positive coherence theory tells ‘us’ that if a belief coheres with a background system of belief, then the belief is justified. A negative coherence theory tells ‘us’ that if a belief fails to cohere with a background system of beliefs, then the belief is not justified. We might put this by saying that, according to a positive coherence theory, coherence has the power to produce justification, while according to a negative coherence theory, coherence has only the power to nullify justification.
A strong coherence theory of justification is a combination of a positive and a negative theory that tells ‘us’ that a belief is justified if and only if it coheres with a background system of beliefs.
Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: ‘S’ believes that ‘p’, where ‘p’ is a proposition toward which an agent, ‘S’, exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief is of this sort. If I trust what you say, I believe you. And someone may believe in Mrs. Thatcher, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all belief is ‘reducible’ to propositional belief, belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought a matter of my believing, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in free-markets or in God, a matter of your believing that free-market economy’s are desirable or that God exists.
It is doubtful, however, that non-propositional believing can, in every case, be reduced in this way. Debate on this point has tended to focus on an apparent distinction between ‘belief-that’ and ‘belief-in’, and the application of this distinction to belief in God. Some philosophers have followed Aquinas ©. 1225-74), in supposing that to believe in, and God is simply to believe that certain truths hold: That God exists, that he is benevolent, etc. Others (e.g., Hick, 1957) argue that belief-in is a distinctive attitude, one that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional belief together with some further attitude.
H.H. Price (1969) defends the claims that there are different sorts of ‘belief-in’, some, but not all, reducible to ‘beliefs-that’. If you believe in God, you believe that God exists, that God is good, etc., but, according to Price, your belief involves, in addition, a certain complex pro-attitude toward its object. One might attempt to analyse this further attitude in terms of additional beliefs-that: ‘S’ believes in ‘χ’ just in case (1) ‘S’ believes that ‘χ’ exists (and perhaps holds further factual beliefs about (χ): (2)’S’ believes that ‘χ’ is good or valuable in some respect, and (3) ‘S’ believes that χ’s being good or valuable in this respect is itself is a good thing. An analysis of this sort, however, fails adequately to capture the further affective component of belief-in. Thus, according to Price, if you believe in God, your belief is not merely that certain truths hold, you posses, in addition, an attitude of commitment and trust toward God.
Notoriously, belief-in outruns the evidence for the corresponding belief-that. Does this diminish its rationality? If belief-in presupposes belief-that, it might be thought that the evidential standards for the former must be, at least as high as standards for the latter. And any additional pro-attitude might be thought to require a further layer of justification not required for cases of belief-that.
Some philosophers have argued that, at least for cases in which belief-in is synonymous with faith (or faith-in), evidential thresholds for constituent propositional beliefs are diminished. You may reasonably have faith in God or Mrs. Thatcher, even though beliefs about their respective attitudes, were you to harbour them, would be evidentially substandard.
Belief-in may be, in general, less susceptible to alternations in the face of unfavourable evidence than belief-that. A believer who encounters evidence against God’s existence may remain unshaken in his belief, in part because the evidence does not bear on his pro-attitude. So long as this is united with his belief that God exists, the belief may survive epistemic buffeting-and reasonably so in a way that an ordinary propositional belief-that would not.
At least two large sets of questions are properly treated under the heading of epistemological religious beliefs. First, there is a set of broadly theological questions about the relationship between faith and reason, between what one knows by way of reason, broadly construed, and what one knows by way of faith. These theological questions may as we call theological, because, of course, one will find them of interest only if one thinks that in fact there is such a thing as faith, and that we do know something by way of it. Secondly, there is a whole set of questions having to do with whether and to what degree religious beliefs have warrant, or justification, or positive epistemic status. The second, is seemingly as an important set of a theological question is yet spoken of faith.
Epistemology, so we are told, is theory of knowledge: Its aim is to discern and explain that quality or quantity enough of which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief. We need a name for this quality or quantity, whatever precisely it is, call it ‘warrant’. From this point of view, the epistemology of religious belief should centre on the question whether religious belief has warrant, an if it does, hoe much it has and how it gets it. As a matter of fact, however, epistemological discussion of religious belief, at least since the Enlightenment (and in the Western world, especially the English-speaking Western world) has tended to focus, not on the question whether religious belief has warrant, but whether it is justified. More precisely, it has tended to focus on the question whether those properties enjoyed by theistic belief -the belief that there exists a person like the God of traditional Christianity, Judaism and Islam: An almighty Law Maker, or an all-knowing and most wholly benevolent and a loving spiritual person who has created the living world. The chief question, therefore, has ben whether theistic belief is justified, the same question is often put by asking whether theistic belief is rational or rationally acceptable. Still further, the typical way of addressing this question has been by way of discussing arguments for or and against the existence of God. On the pro side, there are the traditional theistic proofs or arguments: The ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments, using Kant’s terms for them. On the other side, the anti-theistic side, the principal argument is the argument from evil, the argument that is not possible or at least probable that there be such a person as God, given all the pain, suffering and evil the world displays. This argument is flanked by subsidiary arguments, such as the claim that the very concept of God is incoherent, because, for example, it is impossible that there are the people without a body, and Freudian and Marxist claims that religious belief arises out of a sort of magnification and projection into the heavens of human attributes we think important.
But why has discussion centred on justification rather than warrant? And precisely what is justification? And why has the discussion of justification of theistic belief focussed so heavily on arguments for and against the existence of God?
As to the first question, we can see why once we see that the dominant epistemological tradition in modern Western philosophy has tended to ‘identify’ warrant with justification. On this way of looking at the matter, warrant, that which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief, just ‘is’ justification. Belief theory of knowledge-the theory according to which knowledge is justified true belief has enjoyed the status of orthodoxy. According to this view, knowledge is justified truer belief, therefore any of your beliefs have warrant for you if and only if you are justified in holding it.
But what is justification? What is it to be justified in holding a belief? To get a proper sense of the answer, we must turn to those twin towers of western epistemology. René Descartes and especially, John Locke. The first thing to see is that according to Descartes and Locke, there are epistemic or intellectual duties, or obligations, or requirements. Thus, Locke:
Faith is nothing but a firm assent of the mind, which if it is regulated, A is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything, but upon good reason: And cannot be opposite to it, he that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fanciers: But, seeks neither truth as he ought, nor pats the obedience due his maker, which would have him use those discerning faculties he has given him: To keep him out of mistake and error. He that does this to the best of his power, however, he sometimes lights on truth, is in the right but by chance: And I know not whether the luckiest of the accidents will excuse the irregularity of his proceeding. This, at least is certain, that he must be accountable for whatever mistakes he runs into: Whereas, he that makes use of the light and faculties God has given him, by seeks sincerely to discover truth, by those helps and abilities he has, may have this satisfaction in doing his duty as rational creature, that though he should miss truth, he will not miss the reward of it. For he governs his assent right, and places it as he should, who in any case or matter whatsoever, believes or disbelieves, according as reason directs him. He that does otherwise, transgresses against his own light, and misuses those faculties, which were given him . . . (Essays 4.17.24).
Rational creatures, creatures with reason, creatures capable of believing propositions (and of disbelieving and being agnostic with respect to them), say Locke, have duties and obligation with respect to the regulation of their belief or assent. Now the central core of the notion of justification(as the etymology of the term indicates) this: One is justified in doing something or in believing a certain way, if in doing one is innocent of wrong doing and hence not properly subject to blame or censure. You are justified, therefore, if you have violated no duties or obligations, if you have conformed to the relevant requirements, if you are within your rights. To be justified in believing something, then, is to be within your rights in so believing, to be flouting no duty, to be to satisfy your epistemic duties and obligations. This way of thinking of justification has been the dominant way of thinking about justification: And this way of thinking has many important contemporary representatives. Roderick Chisholm, for example (as distinguished an epistemologist as the twentieth century can boast), in his earlier work explicitly explains justification in terms of epistemic duty (Chisholm, 1977).
The (or, a) main epistemological; questions about religious believe, therefore, has been the question whether or not religious belief in general and theistic belief in particular is justified. And the traditional way to answer that question has been to inquire into the arguments for and against theism. Why this emphasis upon these arguments? An argument is a way of marshalling your propositional evidence-the evidence from other such propositions as likens to believe-for or against a given proposition. And the reason for the emphasis upon argument is the assumption that theistic belief is justified if and only if there is sufficient propositional evidence for it. If there is not’ much by way of propositional evidence for theism, then you are not justified in accepting it. Moreover, if you accept theistic belief without having propositional evidence for it, then you are ging contrary to epistemic duty and are therefore unjustified in accepting it. Thus, W.K. William James, trumpets that ‘it is wrong, always everything upon insufficient evidence’, his is only the most strident in a vast chorus of only insisting that there is an intellectual duty not to believe in God unless you have propositional evidence for that belief. (A few others in the choir: Sigmund Freud, Brand Blanshard, H.H. Price, Bertrand Russell and Michael Scriven.)
Now how it is that the justification of theistic belief gets identified with there being propositional evidence for it? Justification is a matter of being blameless, of having done one’s duty (in this context, one’s epistemic duty): What, precisely, has this to do with having propositional evidence?
The answer, once, again, is to be found in Descartes especially Locke. As, justification is the property your beliefs have when, in forming and holding them, you conform to your epistemic duties and obligations. But according to Locke, a central epistemic duty is this: To believe a proposition only to the degree that it is probable with respect to what is certain for you. What propositions are certain for you? First, according to Descartes and Locke, propositions about your own immediate experience, that you have a mild headache, or that it seems to you that you see something red: And second, propositions that are self-evident for you, necessarily true propositions so obvious that you cannot so much as entertain them without seeing that they must be true. (Examples would be simple arithmetical and logical propositions, together with such propositions as that the whole is at least as large as the parts, that red is a colour, and that whatever exists has properties.) Propositions of these two sorts are certain for you, as fort other prepositions. You are justified in believing if and only if when one and only to the degree to which it is probable with respect to what is certain for you. According to Locke, therefore, and according to the whole modern Foundationalist tradition initiated by Locke and Descartes (a tradition that until has recently dominated Western thinking about these topics) there is a duty not to accept a proposition unless it is certain or probable with respect to what is certain.
In the present context, therefore, the central Lockean assumption is that there is an epistemic duty not to accept theistic belief unless it is probable with respect to what is certain for you: As a consequence, theistic belief is justified only if the existence of God is probable with respect to what is certain. Locke does not argue for his proposition, he simply announces it, and epistemological discussion of theistic belief has for the most part followed hin ion making this assumption. This enables ‘us’ to see why epistemological discussion of theistic belief has tended to focus on the arguments for and against theism: On the view in question, theistic belief is justified only if it is probable with respect to what is certain, and the way to show that it is probable with respect to what it is certain are to give arguments for it from premises that are certain or, are sufficiently probable with respect to what is certain.
There are at least three important problems with this approach to the epistemology of theistic belief. First, there standards for theistic arguments have traditionally been set absurdly high (and perhaps, part of the responsibility for this must be laid as the door of some who have offered these arguments and claimed that they constitute wholly demonstrative proofs). The idea seems to test. a good theistic argument must start from what is self-evident and proceed majestically by way of self-evidently valid argument forms to its conclusion. It is no wonder that few if any theistic arguments meet that lofty standard -particularly, in view of the fact that almost no philosophical arguments of any sort meet it. (Think of your favourite philosophical argument: Does it really start from premisses that are self-evident and move by ways of self-evident argument forms to its conclusion?)
Secondly, attention has ben mostly confined to three theistic arguments: The traditional arguments, cosmological and teleological arguments, but in fact, there are many more good arguments: Arguments from the nature of proper function, and from the nature of propositions, numbers and sets. These are arguments from intentionality, from counterfactual, from the confluence of epistemic reliability with epistemic justification, from reference, simplicity, intuition and love. There are arguments from colours and flavours, from miracles, play and enjoyment, morality, from beauty and from the meaning of life. This is even a theistic argument from the existence of evil.
But there are a third and deeper problems here. The basic assumption is that theistic belief is justified only if it is or can be shown to be probable with respect to many a body of evidence or proposition -perhaps, those that are self-evident or about one’s own mental life, but is this assumption true? The idea is that theistic belief is very much like a scientific hypothesis: It is acceptable if and only if there is an appropriate balance of propositional evidence in favour of it. But why believe a thing like that? Perhaps the theory of relativity or the theory of evolution is like that, such a theory has been devised to explain the phenomena and gets all its warrant from its success in so doing. However, other beliefs, e.g., memory beliefs, feel-felt in other minds is not like that, they are not hypothetical at all, and are not accepted because of their explanatory powers. There are instead, the propositions from which one start in attempting to give evidence for a hypothesis. Now, why assume that theistic belief, belief in God, is in this regard more like a scientific hypothesis than like, say, a memory belief? Why think that the justification of theistic belief depends upon the evidential relation of theistic belief to other things one believes? According to Locke and the beginnings of this tradition, it is because there is a duty not to assent to a proposition unless it is probable with respect to what is certain to you, but is there really any such duty? No one has succeeded in showing that, say, belief in other minds or the belief that there has been a past, is probable with respect to what is certain for ‘us’. Suppose it is not: Does it follow that you are living in epistemic sin if you believe that there are other minds? Or a past?
There are urgent questions about any view according to which one has duties of the sort ‘do not believe ‘p’ unless it is probable with respect to what is certain for you; . First, if this is a duty, is it one to which I can conform? My beliefs are for the most part not within my control: Certainly they are not within my direct control. I believe that there has been a past and that there are other people, even if these beliefs are not probable with respect to what is certain forms (and even if I came to know this) I could not give them up. Whether or not I accept such beliefs are not really up to me at all, For I can no more refrain from believing these things than I can refrain from conforming yo the law of gravity. Second, is there really any reason for thinking I have such a duty? Nearly everyone recognizes such duties as that of not engaging in gratuitous cruelty, taking care of one’s children and one’s aged parents, and the like, but do we also find ourselves recognizing that there is a duty not to believe what is not probable (or, what we cannot see to be probable) with respect to what are certain for ‘us’? It hardly seems so. However, it is hard to see why being justified in believing in God requires that the existence of God be probable with respect to some such body of evidence as the set of propositions certain for you. Perhaps, theistic belief is properly basic, i.e., such that one is perfectly justified in accepting it on the evidential basis of other propositions one believes.
Taking justification in that original etymological fashion, therefore, there is every reason ton doubt that one is justified in holding theistic belief only inf one is justified in holding theistic belief only if one has evidence for it. Of course, the term ‘justification’ has under-gone various analogical extensions in the of various philosophers, it has been used to name various properties that are different from justification etymologically so-called, but anagogically related to it. In such a way, the term sometimes used to mean propositional evidence: To say that a belief is justified for someone is to saying that he has propositional evidence (or sufficient propositional evidence) for it. So taken, however, the question whether theistic belief is justified loses some of its interest; for it is not clear (given this use)beliefs that are unjustified in that sense. Perhaps, one also does not have propositional evidence for one’s memory beliefs, if so, that would not be a mark against them and would not suggest that there be something wrong holding them.
Another analogically connected way to think about justification (a way to think about justification by the later Chisholm) is to think of it as simply a relation of fitting between a given proposition and one’s epistemic vase -which includes the other things one believes, as well as one’s experience. Perhaps tat is the way justification is to be thought of, but then, if it is no longer at all obvious that theistic belief has this property of justification if it seems as a probability with respect to many another body of evidence. Perhaps, again, it is like memory beliefs in this regard.
To recapitulate: The dominant Western tradition has been inclined to identify warrant with justification, it has been inclined to take the latter in terms of duty and the fulfilment of obligation, and hence to suppose that there is no epistemic duty not to believe in God unless you have good propositional evidence for the existence of God. Epistemological discussion of theistic belief, as a consequence, as concentrated on the propositional evidence for and against theistic belief, i.e., on arguments for and against theistic belief. But there is excellent reason to doubt that there are epistemic duties of the sort the tradition appeals to here.
And perhaps it was a mistake to identify warrant with justification in the first place. Napoleons have little warrant for him: His problem, however, need not be dereliction of epistemic duty. He is in difficulty, but it is not or necessarily that of failing to fulfill epistemic duty. He may be doing his epistemic best, but he may be doing his epistemic duty in excelsis: But his madness prevents his beliefs from having much by way of warrant. His lack of warrant is not a matter of being unjustified, i.e., failing to fulfill epistemic duty. So warrant and being epistemologically justified by name are not the same things. Another example, suppose (to use the favourite twentieth-century variant of Descartes’ evil demon example) I have been captured by Alpha-Centaurian super-scientists, running a cognitive experiment, they remove my brain, and keep it alive in some artificial nutrients, and by virtue of their advanced technology induce in me the beliefs I might otherwise have if I were going about my usual business. Then my beliefs would not have much by way of warrant, but would it be because I was failing to do my epistemic duty? Hardly.
As a result of these and other problems, another, externalist way of thinking about knowledge has appeared in recent epistemology, that a theory of justification is internalized if and only if it requires that all of its factors needed for a belief to be epistemically accessible to that of a person, internal to his cognitive perception, and externalist, if it allows that, at least some of the justifying factors need not be thus accessible, in that they can be external to the believer’ s cognitive Perspectives, beyond his ken. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalized and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any very explicit explanation.
Or perhaps the thing to say, is that it has reappeared, for the dominant sprains in epistemology priori to the Enlightenment were really externalist. According to this externalist way of thinking, warrant does not depend upon satisfaction of duty, or upon anything else to which the Knower has special cognitive access (as he does to what is about his own experience and to whether he is trying his best to do his epistemic duty): It depends instead upon factors ‘external’ to the epistemic agent -such factors as whether his beliefs are produced by reliable cognitive mechanisms, or whether they are produced by epistemic faculties functioning properly in-an appropriate epistemic environment.
How will we think about the epistemology of theistic belief in more than is less of an externalist way (which is at once both satisfyingly traditional and agreeably up to date)? I think, that the ontological question whether there is such a person as God is in a way priori to the epistemological question about the warrant of theistic belief. It is natural to think that if in fact we have been created by God, then the cognitive processes that issue in belief in God are indeed realisable belief-producing processes, and if in fact God created ‘us’, then no doubt the cognitive faculties that produce belief in God is functioning properly in an epistemologically congenial environment. On the other hand, if there is no such person as God, if theistic belief is an illusion of some sort, then things are much less clear. Then beliefs in God in of the most of basic ways of wishing that never doubt the production by which unrealistic thinking or another cognitive process not aimed at truth. Thus, it will have little or no warrant. And belief in God on the basis of argument would be like belief in false philosophical theories on the basis of argument: Do such beliefs have warrant? Notwithstanding, the custom of discussing the epistemological questions about theistic belief as if they could be profitably discussed independently of the ontological issue as to whether or not theism is true, is misguided. There two issues are intimately intertwined,
Nonetheless, the vacancy left, as today and as days before are an awakening and untold story beginning by some sparking conscious paradigm left by science. That is a central idea by virtue accredited by its epistemology, where in fact, is that justification and knowledge arising from the proper functioning of our intellectual virtues or faculties in an appropriate environment. This particular yet, peculiar idea is captured in the following criterion for justified belief:
(J) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ if and only if of S’s believing that ‘p’ is the result of S’s intellectual virtues or faculties functioning in appropriate environment.
What is an intellectual virtue or faculty? A virtue or faculty in general is a power or ability or competence to achieve some result. An intellectual virtue or faculty, in the sense intended above, is a power or ability or competence to arrive at truths in a particular field, and to avoid believing falsehoods in that field. Examples of human intellectual virtues are sight, hearing, introspection, memory, deduction and induction. More exactly.
(V) A mechanism ‘M’ for generating and/or maintaining beliefs is an intellectual virtue if and only if ‘M’‘s’ is a competence to believing true propositions and refrain from false believing propositions within a field of propositions ‘F’, when one is in a set of circumstances ‘C’.
It is required that we specify a particular field of suggestions or its propositional field for ‘M’, since a given cognitive mechanism will be a competence for believing some kind of truths but not others. The faculty of sight, for example, allows ‘us’ to determine the colour of objects, but not the sounds that they associatively make. It is also required that we specify a set of circumstances for ‘M’, since a given cognitive mechanism will be a competence in some circumstances but not others. For example, the faculty of sight allows ‘us’ to determine colours in a well lighten room, but not in a darkened cave or formidable abyss.
According to the aforementioned formulations, what makes a cognitive mechanism an intellectual virtue is that it is reliable in generating true beliefs than false beliefs in the relevant field and in the relevant circumstances. It is correct to say, therefore, that virtue epistemology is a kind of reliabilism. Whereas, genetic reliabilism maintains that justified belief is belief that results from a reliable cognitive process, virtue epistemology makes a restriction on the kind of process which is allowed. Namely, the cognitive processes that are important for justification and knowledge is those that have their basis in an intellectual virtue.
Finally, that the concerning mental faculty reliability point to the importance of an appropriate environment. The idea is that cognitive mechanisms might be reliable in some environments but not in others. Consider an example from Alvin Plantinga. On a planet revolving around Alfa Centauri, cats are invisible to human beings. Moreover, Alfa Centaurian cats emit a type of radiation that causes humans to form the belief that there I a dog barking nearby. Suppose now that you are transported to this Alfa Centaurian planet, a cat walks by, and you form the belief that there is a dog barking nearby. Surely you are not justified in believing this. However, the problem here is not with your intellectual faculties, but with your environment. Although your faculties of perception are reliable on earth, yet are unrealisable on the Alga Centaurian planet, which is an inappropriate environment for those faculties.
The central idea of virtue epistemology, as expressed in (J) above, has a high degree of initial plausibility. By masking the idea of faculties’ cental to the reliability if not by the virtue of epistemology, in that it explains quite neatly to why beliefs are caused by perception and memories are often justified, while beliefs caused by unrealistic and superstition are not. Secondly, the theory gives ‘us’ a basis for answering certain kinds of scepticism. Specifically, we may agree that if we were brains in a vat, or victims of a Cartesian demon, then we would not have knowledge even in those rare cases where our beliefs turned out true. But virtue epistemology explains that what is important for knowledge is toast our faculties are in fact reliable in the environment in which we are. And so we do have knowledge so long as we are in fact, not victims of a Cartesian demon, or brains in a vat. Finally, Plantinga argues that virtue epistemology deals well with Gettier problems. The idea is that Gettier problems give ‘us’ cases of justified belief that is ‘truer by accident’. Virtue epistemology, Plantinga argues, helps ‘us’ to understand what it means for a belief to be true by accident, and provides a basis for saying why such cases are not knowledge. Beliefs are rue by accident when they are caused by otherwise reliable faculties functioning in an inappropriate environment. Plantinga develops this line of reasoning in Plantinga (1988).
The Humean problem if induction supposes that there is some property ‘A’ pertaining to an observational or experimental situation, and that of ‘A’, some fraction m/n (possibly equal to 1) have also been instances of some logically independent property ‘B’. Suppose further that the background circumstances, have been varied to a substantial degree and also that there is no collateral information available concerning the frequency of ‘B’s’ among ‘A’s’ or concerning causal nomological connections between instances of ‘A’ and instances of ‘B’.
In this situation, an enumerative or instantial inductive inference would move from the premise that m/n of observed ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s’ to the conclusion that approximately m/n of all ‘A’s’ and ‘B’s’. (The usual probability qualification will be assumed to apply to the inference, than being part of the conclusion). Hereabouts the class of ‘A’s’ should be taken to include not only unobservable ‘A’s’ of future ‘A’s’, but also possible or hypothetical ‘a’s’. (An alternative conclusion would concern the probability or likelihood of the very next observed ‘A’ being a ‘B’).
The traditional or Humean problem of induction, often refereed to simply as ‘the problem of induction’, is the problem of whether and why inferences that fit this schema should be considered rationally acceptable or justified from an epistemic or cognitive standpoint, i.e., whether and why reasoning in this way is likely lead to true claims about the world. Is there any sort of argument or rationale that can be offered for thinking that conclusions reached in this way are likely to be true if the corresponding premiss is true or even that their chances of truth are significantly enhanced?
Hume’s discussion of this deals explicitly with cases where all observed ‘A’s’ ae ‘B’s’, but his argument applies just as well to the more general casse. His conclusion is entirely negative and sceptical: inductive inferences are not rationally justified, but are instead the result of an essentially a-rational process, custom or habit. Hume challenges the proponent of induction to supply a cogent line of reasoning that leads from an inductive premise to the corresponding conclusion and offers an extremely influential argument in the form of a dilemma, to show that there can be no such reasoning. Such reasoning would, ne argues, have to be either a priori demonstrative reasoning concerning relations of ideas or ‘experimental’, i.e., empirical, reasoning concerning mattes of fact to existence. It cannot be the former, because all demonstrative reasoning relies on the avoidance of contradiction, and it is not a contradiction to suppose that ‘the course of nature may change’, tat an order that was observed in the past will not continue in the future: but it also cannot be the latter, since any empirical argument would appeal to the success of such reasoning in previous experience, and the justifiability of generalizing from previous experience is precisely what is at issue-s o that any such appeal would be question-begging, so then, there can be no such reasoning.
An alternative version of the problem may be obtained by formulating it with reference to the so-called Principle of Induction, which says roughly that the future will resemble the last or, that unobserved cases will resemble observe cases. An inductive argument may be viewed as enthymematic, with this principle serving as a suppressed premiss, in which case the issue is obviously how such a premise can be justified. Hume’s argument is then that no such justification is possible: the principle cannot be justified a priori i t is not contradictory to den y it: it cannot be justified by appeal to its having been true in pervious experience without obviously begging te question.
The predominant recent responses to the problem of induction, at least in the analytic tradition, in effect accept the main conclusion of Hume’s argument, viz. That inductive inferences cannot be justified i the sense of showing that the conclusion of such an inference is likely to be truer if the premise is true, and thus attempt to find some other sort of justification for induction.
Bearing upon, and if not taken into account the term ‘induction’ is most widely used for any process of reasoning that takes ‘u’ from empirical premises to empirical conclusions support b y the premise, but not deductively entailed by them. Inductive arguments are therefore kinds of amplicative argument, in which something beyond the content of the premises is inferred as probable or supported by them. Induction is, however, commonly distinguished from arguments to theoretical explanations, which share this amplicative character, by being confined to inference in which the conclusion involves the same properties or relations as the premises. The central example is induction by simple enumeration, where from premiss telling that Fa, Fb, Fc. , where a, b, c, are all of some kind ‘G’, i t is inferred ‘G’s’ from outside the sample, such as future ‘G’s’ will be ‘F’, or perhaps other person deceive them, children may well infer that everyone is a deceiver. Different but similar inferences are those from the past possession of a property by some object to the same object’s future possession, or from the constancy of some law-like pattern in events, and states of affairs to its future constancy: all objects we know of attract each the with a fore inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, so perhaps they all do so, ad always will do so.
The rational basis of any inference was challenged by David Hume (1711-76), who believed that induction of nature, and merely reflected a habit or custom of the mind. Hume was not therefore sceptical about the propriety of processes of induct ion, but sceptical about the tole of reason in either explaining it or justifying it. trying to answer Hume and to show that there is something rationally compelling about the inference is referred to as the problem of induction. It is widely recognized that any rational defence of induction will have to partition well-behaved properties for which the inference is plausible (often called projectable properties) from badly behaved ones for which t is not. It is also recognized that actual inductive habits are more complex than those of simple and science pay attention to such factors as variations within the sample of giving ‘us’ the evidence, the application of ancillary beliefs about the order of nature, and so on. Nevertheless, the fundamental problem remains that any experience shows ‘us’ only events occurring within a very restricted part of the vast spatial temporal order about which we then come to believe things.
All the same, the classical problem of induction is often phrased in terms of finding some reason to expect that nature is uniform. In Fact, Fiction and Forecast (1954) Goodman showed that we need in addition some reason for preferring some uniformities to others, for without such a selection the uniformity of nature is vacuous. Thus, suppose that all examined emeralds have been green. Uniformity would lead ‘us’ to expect that future emeralds will be green as well. But now we define a predicate grue: χ is grue if and only if χ is examined before time ‘T’ and is green, or χ is examined after ‘T’ and is blue? Let ’T’ refer to some time around the present. Then if newly examined emeralds are like previous ones in respect of being grue, they will be blue. We prefer blueness a basis of prediction to gluiness, but why?
Goodman argued that although his new predicate appears to be gerrymandered, and itself involves a reference to a difference, this is just aparohial or language-relative judgement, there being no language-independent standard of similarity to which to appeal. Other philosophers have not been convinced by this degree of linguistic relativism. What remains clear that the possibility of these ‘bent’ predicates put a decisive obstacle in face of purely logical and syntactical approaches to problems of ‘confirmation?’.
Nevertheless, in the potential of change we are to think up to the present time but although virtue epistemology has good initial plausibility, we are faced apart by some substantial objections. The first of an objection, which virtue epistemology face is a version of the generality problem. We may understand the problem more clearly if we were to consider the following criterion for justified belief, which results from our explanation of (J):
(J ʹ) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ if and entirely if.
(1) there is a field ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’ such that
(a) ‘S’ is in ‘C’ with respect to the proposition that ‘p’, and
(b) ‘S’ is in ‘C’ with respect to the proposition that ‘p’, and
(e) If ‘S’ were in ‘C’ with respect to a proposition in ‘F’.
Then ‘S’ would very likely believe correctly with regard to
that proposition.
The problem arises in how we are to select an appropriate ‘F’ and ‘C’. For given any true belief that ‘p’, we can always come up with a field ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’, such that ‘S’ is perfectly reliable in ‘F’ and ‘C’. For any true belief that ‘p’, let ‘F’s’ be the field including only the propositions ‘p’ and ‘not-p’. Let ‘C’ include whatever circumstances there are which causes ‘p’s’ to be true, together with the circumstanced which causes ‘S’ to believe that ‘p’. Clearly, ‘S’ is perfectly reliable with respect to propositions in this field in these circumstances. But we do not want to say that all of S’s true beliefs are justified for ‘S’. And of course, there is an analogous problem in the other direction of generality. For given any belief that ‘p’, we can always specify a field of propositions ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’, such that ‘p’ is in ‘F’, ‘S’ is in ‘C’, and ‘S’ is not reliable with respect to propositions in ‘F’ in ‘C’.
Variations of this view have been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulation of a reliability account of knowing appeared in a note by F.P. Ramsey (1931), who said that a belief was knowledge if it is true, certain and obtained by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ just in case it is not at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the case that ‘p’. D.M. Armstrong (1973) drew an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicates the temperature and a belief that reliably indicate the truth. Armstrong said that a non-inferential belief qualified as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nominally sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth via laws of nature.
Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account of knowledge, primarily due to F.I. Dretske (19712, 1981), A.I. Goldman (1976, 1986) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of tis approach is that S’s belief that ‘p’ qualifies as knowledge just in case ‘S’ believes ‘p’ because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p’s’ being true, or because of a process or method that would not yield belief in ‘p’ if ‘p’ were not true. For example, ‘S’ would not have his current reasons for believing there is a telephone before him, or would not come to believe this, unless there was a telephone before him. Thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantor of the belief’s being true. A variant of the counterfactual approach says that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ only if there is no ‘relevant alterative’ situation in which ‘p’ is false but ‘S’ would still believe that ‘p’.
To a better understanding, this interpretation is to mean that the alterative attempt to accommodate any of an opposing strand in our thinking about knowledge one interpretation is an absolute concept, which is to mean that the justification or evidence one must have in order to know a proposition ‘p’ must be sufficient to eliminate all the alternatives to ‘p’ (where an alternative to a proposition ‘p’ is a proposition incompatible with ‘p’). That is, one’s justification or evidence for ‘p’ must be sufficient fort one to know that every alternative to ‘p’ is false. These elements of our thinking about knowledge are exploited by sceptical argument. These arguments call our attention to alternatives that our evidence cannot eliminate. For example, (Dretske, 1970), when we are at the zoo. We might claim to know that we see a zebra on the basis of certain visual evidence, namely a zebra-like appearance. The sceptic inquires how we know that we are not seeing a clearly disguised mule. While we do have some evidence against the likelihood of such a deception, intuitively it is not strong enough for ‘us’ to know that we are not so deceived. By pointing out alternatives of this nature that cannot eliminate, as well as others with more general application (dreams, hallucinations, etc.), the sceptic appears to show that this requirement that our evidence eliminate every alternative is seldom, if ever, met.
The above considerations show that virtue epistemology must say more about the selection of relevant fields and sets of circumstances. Establishing addresses the generality problem by introducing the concept of a design plan for our intellectual faculties. Relevant specifications for fields and sets of circumstances are determined by this plan. One might object that this approach requires the problematic assumption of a Designer of the design plan. But Plantinga disagrees on two counts: He does not think that the assumption is needed, or that it would be problematic. Plantinga discusses relevant material in Plantinga (1986, 1987 and 1988). Ernest Sosa addresses the generality problem by introducing the concept of an epistemic perspective. In order to have reflective knowledge, ‘S’ must have a true grasp of the reliability of her faculties, this grasp being itself provided by a ‘faculty of faculties’. Relevant specifications of an ‘F’ and ‘C’ are determined by this perspective. Alternatively, Sosa has suggested that relevant specifications are determined by the purposes of the epistemic community. The idea is that fields and sets of circumstances are determined by their place in useful generalizations about epistemic agents and their abilities to act as reliable-information sharers.
The second objection which virtue epistemology faces are that (J) and
(J ʹ) are too strong. It is possible for ‘S’ to be justified in believing that ‘p’, even when S’s intellectual faculties are largely unreliable. Suppose, for example, that Jane’s beliefs about the world around her are true. It is clear that in this case Jane’s faculties of perception are almost wholly unreliable. But we would not want to say that none of Jane’s perceptual beliefs are justified. If Jane believes that there is a tree in her yard, and she vases the belief on the usual tree-like experience, then it seems that she is as justified as we would be regarded a substitutable belief.
Sosa addresses the current problem by arguing that justification is relative to an environment ‘E’. Accordingly, ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ relative to ‘E’, if and only if S’s faculties would be reliable in ‘E’. Note that on this account, ‘S’ need not actually be in ‘E’ in order for ‘S’ to be justified in believing some proposition relative to ‘E’. This allows Soda to conclude that Jane has justified belief in the above case. For Jane is justified in her perceptual beliefs relative to our environment, although she is not justified in those beliefs relative to the environment in which they have actualized her.
We have earlier made mention about analyticity, but the true story of analyticity is surprising in many ways. Contrary to received opinion, it was the empiricist Locke rather than the rationalist Kant who had the better information account of this type or deductive proposition. Frége and Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) A German logician positivist whose first major works was “Der logische Aufbau der Welt” (1926, trs, as “The Logical Structure of the World,” 1967). Carnap pursued the enterprise of clarifying the structures of mathematics and scientific language (the only legitimate task for scientific philosophy) in “Logische Syntax der Sprache” (1934, trans. As “The Logical Syntax of Language,” 1937). Yet, refinements continued with “Meaning and Necessity” (1947), while a general losing of the original ideal of reduction culminated in the great “Logical Foundations of Probability” and the most importantly single work of ‘confirmation theory’ in 1950. Other works concern the structure of physics and the concept of entropy.
Both, Frége and Carnap, represented as analyticity’s best friends in this century, did as much to undermine it as its worst enemies. Quine (1908-) whose early work was on mathematical logic, and issued in “A System of Logistic” (1934), “Mathematical Logic” (1940) and “Methods of Logic” (1950) it was with this collection of papers a “Logical Point of View” (1953) that his philosophical importance became widely recognized, also, Putman (1926-) his concern in the later period has largely been to deny any serious asymmetry between truth and knowledge as it is obtained in natural science, and as it is obtained in morals and even theology. Books include “Philosophy of logic” (1971), “Representation and Reality” (1988) and “Renewing Philosophy (1992). Collections of his papers include “Mathematics, Master, sand Method” (1975), “Mind, Language, and Reality” (1975), and “Realism and Reason (1983). Both of which represented as having refuted the analytic/synthetic distinction, not only did no such thing, but, in fact, contributed significantly to undoing the damage done by Frége and Carnap. Finally, the epistemological significance of the distinctions is nothing like what it is commonly taken to be.
Locke’s account of an analyticity proposition as, for its time, everything that a succinct account of analyticity should be (Locke, 1924, pp. 306-8) he distinguished two kinds of analytic propositions, identified propositions in which we affirm the said terms if itself, e.g., ‘Roses are roses’, and predicative propositions in which ‘a part of the complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole’, e.g., ‘Roses are flowers’ (pp. 306-7). Locke calls such sentences ‘trifling’ because a speaker who uses them ‘trifles with words’. A synthetic sentence, in contrast, such as a mathematical theorem, states ‘a truth and conveys with its informative real knowledge’. Correspondingly, Locke distinguishes two kinds of ‘ necessary consequences’, analytic entailment where validity depends on the literal containment of the conclusions in the premiss and synthetic entailments where it does not. (Locke did not originate this concept-containment notion of analyticity. It is discussions by Arnaud and Nicole, and it is safe to say it has been around for a very long time (Arnaud, 1964).
Kant’s account of analyticity, which received opinion tells ‘us’ is the consummate formulation of this notion in modern philosophy, is actually a step backward. What is valid in his account is not novel, and what is novel is not valid. Kant presents Locke’s account of concept-containment analyticity, but introduces certain alien features, the most important being his characterizations of most important being his characterization of analytic propositions as propositions whose denials are logical contradictions (Kant, 1783). This characterization suggests that analytic propositions based on Locke’s part-whole relation or Kant’s explicative copula are a species of logical truth. But the containment of the predicate concept in the subject concept in sentences like ‘Bachelors are unmarried’ is a different relation from containment of the consequent in the antecedent in a sentence like ‘If John is a bachelor, then John is a bachelor or Mary read Kant’s Critique’. The former is literal containment whereas, the latter are, in general, not. Talk of the ‘containment’ of the consequent of a logical truth in the metaphorical, a way of saying ‘logically derivable’.
Kant’s conflation of concept containment with logical containment caused him to overlook the issue of whether logical truths are synthetically deductive and the problem of how he can say mathematical truths are synthetically deductive when they cannot be denied without contradiction. Historically. , the conflation set the stage for the disappearance of the Lockean notion. Frége, whom received opinion portrays as second only to Kant among the champions of analyticity, and Carnap, who it portrays as just behind Frége, was jointly responsible for the appearance of concept-containment analyticity.
Frége was clear about the difference between concept containment and logical containment, expressing it as like the difference between the containment of ‘beams in a house’ the containment of a ‘plant in the seed’ (Frége, 1853). But he found the former, as Kant formulated it, defective in three ways: It explains analyticity in psychological terms, it does not cover all cases of analytic propositions, and, perhaps, most important for Frége’s logicism, its notion of containment is ‘unfruitful’ as a definition; mechanisms in logic and mathematics (Frége, 1853). In an insidious containment between the two notions of containment, Frége observes that with logical containment ‘we are not simply talking out of the box again what we have just put inti it’. This definition makes logical containment the basic notion. Analyticity becomes a special case of logical truth, and, even in this special case, the definitions employ the power of definition in logic and mathematics than mere concept combination.
Carnap, attempting to overcome what he saw a shortcoming in Frége’s account of analyticity, took the remaining step necessary to do away explicitly with Lockean-Kantian analyticity. As Carnap saw things, it was a shortcoming of Frége’s explanation that it seems to suggest that definitional relations underlying analytic propositions can be extra-logic in some sense, say, in resting on linguistic synonymy. To Carnap, this represented a failure to achieve a uniform formal treatment of analytic propositions and left ‘us’ with a dubious distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary. Hence, he eliminated the reference to definitions in Frége’s explanation of analyticity by introducing ‘meaning postulates’, e.g., statements such as (∀χ) (χ is a bachelor-is unmarried) (Carnap, 1965). Like standard logical postulate on which they were modelled, meaning postulates express nothing more than constrains on the admissible models with respect to which sentences and deductions are evaluated for truth and validity. Thus, despite their name, its asymptomatic-balance having to pustulate itself by that in what it holds on to not more than to do with meaning than any value-added statements expressing an indispensable truth. In defining analytic propositions as consequences of (an explained set of) logical laws, Carnap explicitly removed the one place in Frége’s explanation where there might be room for concept containment and with it, the last trace of Locke’s distinction between semantic and other ‘necessary consequences’.
Quine, the staunchest critic of analyticity of our time, performed an invaluable service on its behalf-although, one that has come almost completely unappreciated. Quine made two devastating criticism of Carnap’s meaning postulate approach that expose it as both irrelevant and vacuous. It is irrelevant because, in using particular words of a language, meaning postulates fail to explicate analyticity for sentences and languages generally, that is, they do not define it for variables ‘S’ and ‘L’ (Quine, 1953). It is vacuous because, although meaning postulates tell ‘us’ what sentences are to count as analytic, they do not tell ‘us’ what it is for them to be analytic.
Received opinion gas it that Quine did much more than refute the analytic/synthetic distinction as Carnap tried to draw it. Received opinion has that Quine demonstrated there is no distinction, however, anyone might try to draw it. Nut this, too, is incorrect. To argue for this stronger conclusion, Quine had to show that there is no way to draw the distinction outside logic, in particular theory in linguistic corresponding to Carnap’s, Quine’s argument had to take an entirely different form. Some inherent feature of linguistics had to be exploited in showing that no theory in this science can deliver the distinction. But the feature Quine chose was a principle of operationalist methodology characteristic of the school of Bloomfieldian linguistics. Quine succeeds in showing that meaning cannot be made objective sense of in linguistics. If making sense of a linguistic concept requires, as that school claims, operationally defining it in terms of substitution procedures that employ only concepts unrelated to that linguistic concept. But Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics replaced the Bloomfieldian taxonomic model of grammars with the hypothetico-deductive model of generative linguistics, and, as a consequence, such operational definition was removed as the standard for concepts in linguistics. The standard of theoretical definition that replaced it was far more liberal, allowing the members of as family of linguistic concepts to be defied with respect to one another within a set of axioms that state their systematic interconnections -the entire system being judged by whether its consequences are confirmed by the linguistic facts. Quine’s argument does not even address theories of meaning based on this hypothetico-deductive model (Katz, 1988 and 1990).
Putman, the other staunch critic of analyticity, performed a service on behalf of analyticity fully on a par with, and complementary to Quine’s, whereas, Quine refuted Carnap’s formalization of Frége’s conception of analyticity, Putman refuted this very conception itself. Putman put an end to the entire attempt, initiated by Fridge and completed by Carnap, to construe analyticity as a logical concept (Putman, 1962, 1970, 1975a).
However, as with Quine, received opinion has it that Putman did much more. Putman in credited with having devised science fiction cases, from the robot cat case to the twin earth cases, that are counter examples to the traditional theory of meaning. Again, received opinion is incorrect. These cases are only counter examples to Frége’s version of the traditional theory of meaning. Frége’s version claims both (1) that senses determines reference, and (2) that there are instances of analyticity, say, typified by ‘cats are animals’, and of synonymy, say typified by ‘water’ in English and ‘water’ in twin earth English. Given (1) and (2), what we call ‘cats’ could not be non-animals and what we call ‘water’ could not differ from what the earthier twin called ‘water’. But, as Putman’s cases show, what we call ‘cats’ could be Martian robots and what they call ‘water’ could be something other than H2O Hence, the cases are counter examples to Frége’s version of the theory.
Putman himself takes these examples to refute the traditional theory of meaning per se, because he thinks other versions must also subscribe to both (1) and. (2). He was mistaken in the case of (1). Frége’s theory entails (1) because it defines the sense of an expression as the mode of determination of its referent (Fridge, 1952, pp. 56-78). But sense does not have to be defined this way, or in any way that entails (1). / it can be defined as (D).
(D) Sense is that aspect of the grammatical structure of expressions and sentences responsible for their having sense properties and relations like meaningfulness, ambiguity, antonymy, synonymy, redundancy, analyticity and analytic entailment. (Katz, 1972 & 1990).
(Note that this use of sense properties and relations is no more circular than the use of logical properties and relations to define logical form, for example, as that aspect of grammatical structure of sentences on which their logical implications depend.)
(D) makes senses internal to the grammar of a language and reference an external; matter of language use -typically involving extra-linguistic beliefs, Therefore, (D) cuts the strong connection between sense and reference expressed in (1), so that there is no inference from the modal fact that ‘cats’ refer to robots to the conclusion that ‘Cats are animals’ are not analytic. Likewise, there is no inference from ‘water’ referring to different substances on earth and twin earth to the conclusion that our word and theirs are not synonymous. Putman’s science fiction cases do not apply to a version of the traditional theory of meaning based on (D).
The success of Putman and Quine’s criticism in application to Fridge and Carnap’s theory of meaning together with their failure in application to a theory in linguistics based on (D) creates the option of overcoming the shortcomings of the Lockean-Kantian notion of analyticity without switching to a logical notion. this option was explored in the 1960s and 1970s in the course of developing a theory of meaning modelled on the hypothetico-deductive paradigm for grammars introduced in the Chomskyan revolution (Katz, 1972).
This theory automatically avoids Frége’s criticism of the psychological formulation of Kant’s definition because, as an explication of a grammatical notion within linguistics, it is stated as a formal account of the structure of expressions and sentences. The theory also avoids Frége’s criticism that concept-containment analyticity is not ‘fruitful’ enough to encompass truths of logic and mathematics. The criticism rests on the dubious assumption, parts of Frége’s logicism, that analyticity ‘should’ encompass them, (Benacerraf, 1981). But in linguistics where the only concern is the scientific truth about natural concept-containment analyticity encompass truths of logic and mathematics. Moreover, since we are seeking the scientific truth about trifling propositions in natural language, we will eschew relations from logic and mathematics that are too fruitful for the description of such propositions. This is not to deny that we want a notion of necessary truth that goes beyond the trifling, but only to deny that, that notion is the notion of analyticity in natural language.
The remaining Frégean criticism points to a genuine incompleteness of the traditional account of analyticity. There are analytic relational sentences, for example, Jane walks with those with whom she strolls, ’Jack kills those he himself has murdered’, etc., and analytic entailment with existential conclusions, for example, ‘I think’, therefore ‘I exist’. The containment in these sentences is just as literal as that in an analytic subject-predicate sentence like ‘Bachelors are unmarried’, such are shown to have a theory of meaning construed as a hypothetico-deductive systemisations of sense as defined in (D) overcoming the incompleteness of the traditional account in the case of such relational sentences.
Such a theory of meaning makes the principal concern of semantics the explanation of sense properties and relations like synonymy, an antonymy, redundancy, analyticity, ambiguity, etc. Furthermore, it makes grammatical structure, specifically, senses structure, the basis for explaining them. This leads directly to the discovery of a new level of grammatical structure, and this, in turn, makes possible a proper definition of analyticity. To see this, consider two simple examples. It is a semantic fact that ‘a male bachelor’ is redundant and that ‘spinster’ is synonymous with ‘woman who never married; . In the case of the redundancy, we have to explain the fact that the sense of the modifier ‘male’ is already contained in the sense of its head ‘bachelor’. In the case of the synonymy, we have to explain the fact that the sense of ‘sinister’ is identical to the sense of ‘woman who never married’ (compositionally formed from the senses of ‘woman’, ‘never’ and ‘married’). But is so fas as such facts concern relations involving the components of the senses of ‘bachelor’ and ‘spinster’ and is in as far as these words are syntactic simple, there must be a level of grammatical structure at which syntactic simple are semantically complex. This, in brief, is the route by which we arrive a level of ‘decompositional semantic structure; that is the locus of sense structures masked by syntactically simple words.
Discovery of this new level of grammatical structure was followed by attemptive efforts as afforded to represent the structure of the sense’s finds there. Without going into detail of sense representations, it is clear that, once we have the notion of decompositional representation, we can see how to generalize Locke and Kant’s informal, subject-predicate account of analyticity to cover relational analytic sentences. Let a simple sentence ‘S’ consisted of a -place predicate ‘P’ with terms T1 . . . ,. Tn occupying its argument places. Then:
The analysis in case, first, S has a term T1 that consists of a place predicate Q (m > n or m = n) with terms occupying its argument places, and second, P is contained in Q and, for each term TJ. . . . T1 + I ,. . . . , Tn, TJ is contained in the term of Q that occupies the argument place in Q corresponding to the argument place occupied by TJ in P. (Katz, 1972)
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