Ruth Stein

“My overall sense of this discussion is a lively mix; questions more than answers, deep divisions, tensions between the clinical and theoretical uses of psychoanalysis. I think Harris’ initial sense of anxiety was well founded, in that the discussion ended in a bitter dispute over “process”. I suspect, as did others, that the anxiety about the topic got displaced into personal attacks.”

White apparently labors under several misconceptions: 1) he misrecognizes psychoanalysis as divisible into theory and practice; 2) he misinterprets “anxiety” as having been displaced into aggression; and 3) he fails, as most psychoanalysts do, to appreciate the difference between the real world and the psychoanalytic dream-world.

Let’s take up the third point first since it bears directly on the issue of how a discussion of masculinity can be better pursued. The netcast can be best summarized as failed dialogue. Here’s how dialogue and debate work in the real world, as opposed to the psychoanalytic dream-world: I say, as I did, that Fogel’s theoretical syncretism is superficial and counter-productive to meaningful treatment and theory related to gender issues, and then Fogel defends why he believes syncretism to be useful and meaningful. Then I enlighten him as to why he’s mistaken, and then he enlightens me, and so on. Instead, what happened is that Fogel opted out of any potential dialogue, not only with me, but others who critiqued/questioned his theory and method. While the reasons for his early withdrawal are likely overdetermined, one reason Fogel probably opted out is because he doesn’t face sharp criticism often. His essay should have been rejected from JAPA, and convincing reasons for its acceptance have yet to be produced. In the psychoanalytic dream-world, open and public distinction-making is rare. Along with the reality that there is but a handful of first-rate close and discriminating readers of manuscripts, there is the tandem one that analysts eschew real debate, and, while everyone has some story of a bloody conflict, such moments are only symptomatic of the general and pervasive air of lazy agreement that, after so long, becomes intolerable (to some, anyway). Irruptions and eruptions are inevitable in this idea-poor atmosphere, and their absence should not be mistaken for something like compassion.

This brings us to point two: White’s conflation of anxiety and aggression. Ignoring the fact that there are much simpler and elegant reasons for aggression than supposed anxieties unleashed in a discussion of masculinity of all things (perhaps White should [re]read his Kierkegaard), I would recall us to what should have been obvious in the criticisms of Fogel’s work and electronic presence. Such criticisms have nothing to do with the personal (that is, Fogel as an individual) and everything to do with making distinctions concerning types, distinctions apparently that no one was willing and/or able to make. Any sensitive reader of the netcast cannot fail to notice that I, at any rate, take Fogel to be an unfortunate type of psychoanalytic thinker and practitioner. Typologies are often useful. And so I could cite 50 authors in the psychoanalytic tradition (broadly defined) who comprise a type of thinker deserving of our close attention on the issue of masculinity and gender, any one of whose writings happen to be infinitely richer than Fogel’s. Recently, while reading Philip Bromberg’s (2003/2006) brilliant case study of “Dolores” wherein he pauses to reflect on the effects the therapeutic process is having on his own sense of masculinity and himself as a man, I was struck again by the inconsequentiality of Fogel’s observations. There is, I submit, more thought in this digressive moment (a couple of paragraph’s worth) of Bromberg’s than in Fogel’s entire essay. I think we need to make distinctions, and I think we need to strive for something richer. The value of drawing on other authors cannot be underestimated, especially since Fogel’s reading on the subject of masculinity appears to be debilitatingly limited. Thus I reiterate my plea for serious cross-disciplinary engagements.

How does one fashion something better (point three)? By rejecting language, like White’s, about theory and practice divides, for starters. There is no theory/practice division; it just gets confused with the little defenses many put in place to prevent themselves from seeing that some persons are much better theorizers than they are practitioners, and some are better practitioners than theorizers, and some are equally poor being both, and some are excel as both. Again, we don’t like to make distinctions concerning persons’ work; we prefer to use abstractions to conceal our talk about what a certain analyst appears and doesn’t appear capable of doing, intellectually or in the consulting room. I’ve always thought the goal is to be both an excellent theorist and an excellent practitioner. I see no point in pretending there is a choice to make. That we may surmise that some, like Fogel, have made a choice, perhaps at a level below awareness, is not evidence that such a binary is necessary or desirable.

Some might (rightly, imho) argue that Fogel is not a scholar, and thus his work shouldn’t be judged according to standards more appropriate for ascertaining its scholarly (i.e., critical and theoretical) value. The problem with this argument is apparent: Fogel wrote an essay entitled “The Riddle of Masculinity…” published in what is taken to be a leading journal: this essay is not expressly a clinical piece, though he may have (as I suspect) felt that the theory components were merely obligatory, while the clinical vignettes are the real substantive part. The point is simply that Fogel, as theoretician and as clinician, should be evaluated for his contribution to both theory and practice. If he is critiqued more heavily from one perspective than the other, that only indicates the relative deficiencies of what he has written, and not a divide between the theoretical and clinical uses of psychoanalysis.