Immersion versus interactivity and analytic field

Abstract

Losing oneself in a story, a film or a picture is nothing but another step in the suspension of disbelief that permits one to become immersed in the 'novel' of reality. It is not by chance that the text-world metaphor informs classical aesthetics that, more than anything else, emphasizes emotional involvement. On the contrary, as in much of modern art, self-reflexivity and metafictional attention to the rhetoric of the real, to the framework, to the conventions and to the processes of meaning production, all involve a disenchanted, detached and sceptic vision--in short, an aesthetics of the text as game. By analogy, any analytic style or model that aims to produce a transformative experience must satisfactorily resolve the conflict between immersion (the analyst's emotional participation and sticking to the dreamlike or fictional climate of the session, dreaming knowing it's a dream) and interactivity (for the most part, interpretation as an anti-immersive device that 'wakes' one from fiction and demystifies consciousness). In analytic field theory the setting can be defined--because of the weight given to performativity of language, to the sensory matrix of the transference and the transparency of the medium--the place where an ideal balance is sought between immersion and interaction.

‘Caesura’ as Bion’s discourse on method

“…a field model – is not only simultaneity (because there is always a duration to be considered, and hence a ‘historical’ dimension, if only of a few seconds), but also attention to the form of the content, to the system and structure of communication, considered, like language, as the dynamic realm of links and differences. Attention to the transformational structure of the analytic field permits a new vision of the text and a new form of analysis, focusing more on functional aspects and on the container than on the contained, but the two levels are interdependent: it is the interaction with the syntagmatic aspect, by virtue of its selective function, that establishes itself as a limit to interpretive drift (Civitarese, 2005, 2006, 2008a, 2008b). I therefore believe that the guarantee of an effective junction between the two planes, of a type of thought that overcomes the antithesis between the history and the present, lies precisely in the mental state of receptivity permitted by negative capability, a preliminary art of self‐negation and of sacrificing what one knows.…”

Borges in My Office: the Analysis of a Man Dwelling Outside of Time

“…The presence of these two stories in my mind resulted in a kind of immersion in their desperate emotional climate, evoking a certain suspension of disbelief regarding the kind of omnipotent solutions that Borges employs (Civitarese 2008). This immersion brought me into closer, more empathic contact with David's faults, and made me feel, if only for a brief moment, that such omnipotent wishes are viable.…”

“…However, there are only a handful of cases in analytic writing in which a single patient's psychic experience is illuminated in great detail by the works of a particular author. Civitarese (2008), a contemporary Bionian, discussed the analyst's "immersion" in the "fiction" of the analytic setting, and utilizes the literary texts arising in a session to illuminate a patient's state of mind and the state of the transferential matrix, bouncing his own literary and philosophical associations against it. In a similar yet distinct vein, the potential we wish to emphasize is that of employing a literary text-not to "read" the text of the patient, but to open up another dimension of seeing and containing, for both patient and analyst.…”

Bion’s “Evidence” and His Theoretical Style

“…So O/being is opposed to K (knowledge)/knowing, which indicates an intellectual understanding. Ideally, in clinical work, the analyst should continuously go through the sequence of O → K → O → K, a process I would reformulate as a continuous oscillation between immersion and interactivity (see Civitarese 2008).…”

“…Bion extracts a whole way of thinking from this passage. Transcending the caesura of binary oppositions that structure the theoretical and technical field of psychoanalysis can be seen as his ruling principle of method (Civitarese 2008). It is significant, therefore, that he should comment that Freud stopped there, seeing himself as the child who surpasses the father.…”