Contratherapy: Recognition, part I (early draft)

The following is an early draft of a section from my thesis-in-progress, presented for this event with the Therapy and Social Change Network.

An introduction to the thesis can be found here.

Please note that it is very much ‘in the middle’ of development and will likely change significantly by the time it is ‘finished’. That said, I would love to get feedback as it develops, critical or supportive - please feel free to engage with it in the comments, and help me build it. I will try to honestly engage with any feedback and can cite you if appropriate.

(Also, I won’t have the time to do a bibliography for this before the event, but may edit it in later.)

Recognition (or, Relate)

"Real recognition of our presence and humanity would require a genuine reconsideration of so many people’s role in North American society that it would amount to a genuine leap of imagination." - Indigenous scholars George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World

Two of the most prolific and hallmark ideas of human relation in modern psychotherapies are 'empathy' and 'recognition'. A sense of empathy - the experience of 'feeling what another feels' - often both drives therapists into the field and keeps them in it. The capacity to empathize and to relate as 'mutuals' are often seen as both essential to the process of psychotherapy and as vital developmental outcomes of the therapeutic relationship. We rail against the breakdown of empathy: the valorization of sociopathy by right-wing chauvinists, divisive conflicts which descend to pure toxicity, unabashedly cruel mobs relishing in totalization and public humiliation. Our humanist conditionings cannot handle the psychic dissonance: we must repair, we must be in dialogue, we must see and recognize one another as 'equals'.

Yet when we put much of non/counter-humanist critique to work with many of these constructs, we might find that the fundamental assumptions and frameworks underpinning them begin to unravel. What might be seen, under the regime of liberal humanism, as universal and benevolent qualities often reveal structurations which may in many ways uphold existing cruel social orders. In this plateau, I will focus on two concepts: the Rogerian and common-sense notion of "empathy" and the psychodynamic concept of "mutual recognition". I argue that, when analyzed through immanent and postcolonial critique, these seemingly benign or noble concepts often become profound acts of erasure which stifle difference instead of embracing it - and consequently enable violent forms of relating which consume, eclipse, and exploit the Other. In unsettling these often taken-for-granted notions, my hope is that we might begin to open ourselves up to deeper and more emancipatory ways of relating.

The Image of Thought

At the heart of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical works is a profound critique of what he calls the "dogmatic image of thought," a mode of thinking that dominates Western culture and is fundamentally based on the process of 'representation'. For Deleuze, representation is a system that attempts to create a faithful copy of what it perceives as pre-existing reality. It operates through what he and Guattari termed the "iron collars of representation": identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance. This system presupposes a world of stable, identifiable subjects and objects that can be accurately mirrored in thought or language. It is structured by recognition - the act of matching a new experience or phenomenon to a pre-established concept. We encounter something unknown and say, "Oh! I recognize that, it is _." For Deleuze, this entire apparatus is a betrayal of reality. For him, reality is not a collection of static things to be re-presented but a dynamic, chaotic flux of "becoming" and pure difference. Much of his work, at least in Difference and Repetition, is to move us towards encounters of this pure difference, "to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same" (Deleuze 2014, xx). True thought, he insists, does not simply re-present the world (thus diminishing difference) but connects with its differential and creative forces.

If this is all too hazy, perhaps it is useful to momentarily draw on analogy, although analogy is a rough tool we ultimately wish to move beyond. Deleuze and Guattari would later (ATP) describe the dogmatic image of thought as “arboreal,” like a tree, where knowledge branches out in rigid, hierarchical ways that reinforce the existing structures at the core (what we might visualize as the trunk). Any new or different idea encountered is drawn back to, and mediated through, the core assumptions, reinforcing what is already accepted as known and stifling the capacity for truly new or transformative thought. Forms of representational logic reach out, branch-and-root-like, to pull the unknown back into the familiar, subsuming difference into more of the Same. Instead of allowing a true encounter with uncertainty or otherness, arboreal logic compels us to assimilate all that is new into existing knowledge systems. We each, under this regime, become little Christopher Columbuses: explorers, capturers, and colonizers of the unknown, including the 'dark continent' of the unconscious and the opaque Other.

Representation, then, becomes an attempt to subsume or erase difference rather than embrace or be moved by it. As Deleuze writes, "the prefix RE– in the word representation signifies this conceptual form of the identical which subordinates differences" (Deleuze 2014, 55). In encountering something unknown, we sit at the limits - the threshold - of knowledge. Instead of sitting with or moving into the unknown (an act that would require us to become-otherwise), representation reaches out and pulls this unknown phenomenon back into the 'tree'. In doing so, we subsume the unknown into existing knowledge systems: difference becomes eclipsed. This does not allow for true thought to emerge: true thinking emerges at the horizon, at the 'limit', at the threshold of the unknown, a threshold which is ostensibly unsettled and unsettling. We may all be familiar with the unsettled feeling of uncertainty, of not-knowing, of encountering an opaque Otherness which rejects transparency: but it is exactly in this unsettled space that new thought, growth, and change is possible. Identity, opposition, analogy, resemblance: none of these things can truly touch difference, but instead act as consumptive forces affixing the world to the dogmatic image of thought. Everything is remade in the image of the already-known.

Deleuze wants to reach for a philosophy that restores the primacy of difference and becoming, and escapes the operations of ‘sameness’, identity, and representation which fix us in place and structure the current social order. We could see Deleuze’s non-normative, immanent critique as fostering forms of escape from this dogmatic, all-consuming, similarity-reinforcing, difference-killing 'tree'. In opposition to this tree-like paradigm, Deleuze and Guattari propose the concept of the rhizome as an alternative image of thought. A rhizome, unlike a tree, has no central root or fixed hierarchy; it is a continually growing network where any point can connect to any other point. A common example is a potato: if a slice of skin is cut off and cast into the soil, a new potato will grow from it - endlessly de-centered, proliferating in autopoietic multidirectionality. Rhizomatic thought fosters openness, multiplicity, and the affirmation of difference, allowing for new and unexpected connections to emerge. For Deleuze, moving beyond the dogmatic, representational image of thought means embracing a mode of thinking-relating-becoming that is dynamic, creative, and untethered from the established structures which lock us into repetitions of the Same.

Plugging in: Empathy and Mutual Recognition

Empathy

Early in my therapy training programme, a young Chinese student in my cohort, who I’ll call Mei, shyly admitted in one of our training groups that she did not understand what empathy was. She could not wrap her head around it, and the group could not seem to explain it to her in a satisfactory way - the concept was all too foreign to her. My initial reaction was disbelief: how can this person be a therapist-in-training and not understand empathy? My humanist leanings (and arrogant whiteness) drove me to judge her as misaligned with the fundamental structures of ‘therapy’. Perhaps I was right; but if I was, this would not point to a fault in Mei but to a fault in a system which imposes universalized ideas of the 'human' and of human connection onto everyone. Mei, in her modest wisdom and defiance, was unsettling a construct I had taken for granted, a construct which I now find myself moving beyond.

Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy, initially writes:

"The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person."

We might already see many of the assumptions that Deleuze troubles here, such as a self-same 'other' whom we can accurately 'represent' the internal experience of. Rogers' conceptualizations evolved over time - he later more strongly stresses the ‘as if’ quality here (drawing on the logics of analogy) - but I do not believe they ever escaped the problematics of Deleuze's critique: they still reinforce the logics and structurations that Deleuze is moving away from.

If we plug Deleuze’s critique of representational thought into ‘empathy’ - either the Rogerian notion or the common-sense notion of ‘feeling what another feels’ - we are presented with a problem: empathy becomes impossible, and maybe even a dangerous assumption which erases difference. As Nagel offers us, we cannot know the interiority of another any more than we can that of a dog or a bat. (Even if a framework of ‘empathy’ recognizes this impossibility, it still strives for it in some form.) We can only have our own experience, and we can only relate that experience, and in the act of relating - as Deleuze’s critique of representation illuminates - we squash difference. Empathy, perhaps counterintuitively, becomes an act of solipsism: in assuming (to any degree) that what I am feeling represents what you are feeling, I am projecting my internal state onto yours, and thus not actually encountering your foundationally different experiencing but eclipsing it with mine. Empathy through this lens thus enacts what Jessica Benjamin calls ‘identificatory oneness’: a merging which consumes and erases otherness and difference. Instead of encountering the radical alterity of the other, empathy brings us to interact with mere reflections of ourselves - an endless narcissistic hall of mirrors.

If we return to person-centered literature, we find that a total desire to merge with the client often conjures a language of invasion or consumption:

The therapist fully merges with the patient; “the ego or psychic state of the counsellor had temporarily become merged with that of the counselee; he and I were one psychic unity. This is empathy” (May, 1989, p. 63). In this state, there can be very little awareness of the distinction between therapist and patient; “there is a critical point in empathy above which, when empathizing with more intensity, the emotional self-other differentiation gets lost. So, high levels of empathy would go together with a loss of emotional separation” (Vanaerschot, 1990, p. 289; cf. Corcoran, 1981, 1982). In the psychoanalytic vocabulary, the therapist gives up her ego for that of the patient (Olden, 1953). This model “treats the phenomenon of merging, or fusion, literally, as if there really were a genuine intermixing, blending of one personality with another’s” (Buie, 1981, p. 285). The therapist literally enters into the patient “by a process of empathy in which an immediate passage is made into the other” (Major & Miller, 1984, p. 246). (Mahrer et al., 1994, p. 191)

Invading the Other here is more or less fully valorized. We have the therapist “crawling inside of another person’s skin and seeing the world through his eyes” (Carkhuff, 1972, p. 58), the therapist who “is, quite literally, ‘in the client’s skin’” (Cooper, p. 4), the therapist who “can allow what the patient is saying to be as if it is coming in and through the therapist” (Mahrer et al., 1994, p. 193). (Sock puppet therapy, then.) Strikingly, the client's opacity here is not a thing to be honored or respected: opacity is a thing to be conquered, made transparent for the therapist's legibility and representations, made consumable in the quest to eliminate the one thing that troubles the merge: difference. The ego, encountering the unbearable unknowability of the Other, seeks to salve its unsettledness by merging alterity with the familiar: you and I, we're not so different after all.

Is this just a matter of semantics? Practitioners attached to humanistic psychotherapies may want to steer this into a conversation of redefinition, and say that what’s needed is an expansion of the concept of “empathy”, further dragging out the semantic debates on “core concepts” endemic to humanistic theory. I disagree; or rather, I feel no need to remain attached. All language carries with it a world of affective attachments - to conjure a word is to conjure a world (as Deleuze says, all language is ‘world-ing’). Should we, then, cling to ‘empathy’? I find that empathy is reaching for something vital, but perhaps it is slightly off trajectory. If we are looking for different worlds, is empathy too semantically bogged down by its common-sense meanings, too tightly knotted up in humanistic structurations to be effectively salvaged and carried with us? By continuing to rely on it would we, to some degree, continue to risk enacting identificatory oneness upon one another? I feel we would be better served by moving somewhere else entirely, somewhere not tethered to the structurations of humanism (and thus continuing to enact those structurations), which might better honor the opacity of the Other and speak more closely to what unfolds in relationship.

Towards affect

Where else might we go? Of course, we are not swinging into sociopathy - this is not a move into disconnection, but into a different way of thinking about connection. Instead of the interior and private concept of “emotions”, Deleuze offers us the concept of “affect” as pre- and trans-personal intensities, forces between persons which we are moved by and which we move. I think this shift might provide us a way out: we do not “feel what another person feels” - we are affected by persons, and we either allow or disallow ourselves to notice these affect-ings. This shift may appear pedantic, but I think it opens us up to an entirely different lens of analysis. We have moved from the pitiable “feeling for” of sympathy, through the presumptuous “feeling also” of empathy, towards something far more complex and multidimensional: being “affected by” an other. This does not provide us with the comfortable, univocal neatness of identificatory oneness: instead, we are forced to confront the complexity of difference, the unending diversity of how we are moved by the other in ways that are specific to us, specific to them, specific to the relationship, and specific to contexts around the relationship. There is no collapse to sameness here (or at least, I imagine there is less of a chance). In openly encountering difference, in allowing ourselves to become affected, we are forced to think - not simply retreat to (and reinforce) the familiar.

Those who are psychodynamically inclined might notice that this brings us a bit closer to the territory of “transference” and “counter-transference”, but I would like to move beyond both the unidirectionality and hierarchies attached to these (again, words and worlds), and find that affect is far more useful to that aim. Affect both does and does not flow along pre-determined lines of analyst/therapist and patient/client: I find that transference and counter-transference delimit us from the start, and still conjure a world of ‘one-person psychologies’ and ‘blank screens’ (despite psychodynamic developments since). Affect expands beyond (but no doubt holds space for) such binary dynamics within its multiplicities, escapes into the world outside the clinic, into the socio-political, into the non-human. All of these flows enter into the deeply affective event we call the therapeutic relationship.

Deleuze’s critique of representational thought unsettles many of the foundational structures underlying humanist psychotherapies; ‘empathy’ is only one. The attempt to represent another's feelings, under this analysis, becomes a form of power that reduces the Other to something that can be captured, known, and neatly understood by the ego. In doing so, we lose touch with the immanent flows of reality and lock the assemblages we call ‘persons’ into static images, into reflections of ourselves. The Other’s difference becomes domesticated, made safe for consumption. Deleuze's philosophy encourages us to instead embrace the ‘unthought’ and the ‘unrepresentable’ in the other, rather than trying to reign them into the territory of the 'familiar'. This becomes an encounter grounded not in the recognition of 'what is', but in the co-poietic creation of 'what could be': a shared attunement to the circulation of affects that allows for the emergence of new thoughts, new feelings, and new ways of being, some of which might escape the dogmatic structurations of the world-as-it-is. This Deleuzian lens challenges us to imagine a therapy that is less like holding up a mirror and more like opening a door to infinite plateaus of difference, possibility, and otherwise becomings.

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This is about a third of the plateau so far - the rest explores and challenges the concept of ‘mutual recognition’ as found in psychoanalysis, drawing on post-colonial and indigenous critiques of the politics of representation (e.g.: Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, Sheehi & Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation).