IDI President M. Gerard Fromm reports on a series of engagements over the past month:
Last month in Geneva, immediately after Vamik Volkan and I conducted the IDI Training Workshop, I participated in the European Regional Meeting of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. The meeting was led by Voytek Chelkowski, who attended the IDI Workshop in Vienna and supported the Workshop in Geneva in many ways. The theme of the ERM was “Between Neutrality and Engagement.” Gabrielle Rifkind of The Oxford Process, who attended one of the IDI meetings in Oxford, and I were panelists offering reflections on that theme. I thought I would share those reflections here.
The eminent psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, concluded Childhood and Society by saying that “I have nothing to offer except a way of looking at things.” My way of looking at things begins with the clinical. Neutrality for me is, first of all, a clinical concept. But in the spirit of the Geneva International Motor Show, which was being held at the same time as the ERM, I also found myself approaching it as an automotive concept! I happen to own a Mazda Miata, a wonderful little sports car convertible. I bought it when it was new (in 1990!) and I’m hoping it lasts long enough for me to teach my grandchildren how to drive a manual shift.
In “neutral”, the engine responds with a purr or a roar to my pressure on the accelerator. The motor is “engaged.” But, since it is not in gear, the transmission is not engaged, so no movement can occur. In neutral, I’m free to examine why the engine might be making a peculiar sound, or to imagine myself on a race track. This turns out to have a lot in common with Freud’s dream theory; the sleeping person is free to dream – to feel things and fantasize in dreams; in other words to engage the experiential system – because the action system is in neutral. It’s only a dream; no harm will come from it. This captures another thing Erikson said; that it’s crucially important “to make the distinction between play and irreversible purpose.” Dreams are a system in which people can play out feelings, fears, wishes, etc., without the purposefulness of action. Thus, they can learn before doing. Neutralizing one sub-system allows — is a condition for — engagement in another.
This brings us back to a clinical perspective. Freud came to the idea of neutrality in the midst of writing his technical papers. So, it was about how to do analysis, even if the papers mainly focused on how not to do it. His great discovery – a clinical discovery but also part of what the young science of psychology was also studying – was free association. Freud recommended that the analyst cultivate a “free-floating attention” so as not to be captured by first associations, thereby to be available to hear what comes next. Neutrality was about a listening stance. Later, he noted its importance in supporting the analyst– and his or her emotional responsiveness in the service of the psychoanalytic task – in the face of the patient’s transference love and the analyst’s eagerness to cure. But, first of all, it was about listening and helping patients listen to themselves.
Anna Freud formally defined neutrality, in the new era of psychoanalytic structural theory, as a position equidistant between the id, the ego and the superego. Not only were passions or drives to be kept in neutral – so that they could be experienced but also understood – so were judgements. Initially, the ERM seemed to treat neutrality and engagement as if they were opposites. But partisanship may be a more accurate antonym for neutrality, and disengagement, detachment, even dissociation may be more accurate antonyms for engagement. If this is so, it raises a question about what dynamic may have led to the polarization of neutrality and engagement in the ERM, and perhaps elsewhere. Given the valences that came through, why the idealization of engagement and the view of neutrality as dereliction?
Whatever that dynamic may be, I would define neutrality – in the work with patients or with parties in conflict – as a stance through which to hold the potential engagement with all sides of what a person or group is bringing, including the sides they might wish we wouldn’t engage with. It represents what the psychoanalyst, Andre Green, called “the positive value of the empty space,” and it allows the possibility of a “third position,” from which a “how is it right?” exploration might occur.
In the first IDI Workshop, the “Ghostbusters” movie came up in a dream. Troubled people and troubled communities are indeed haunted by ghosts of past traumas. Neutrality is part of a stance that suspends judgement about those ghosts, which might allow them to be engaged in order to tell their stories. While dialogue facilitators, like analysts, are not neutral about outcomes – they hold the hope for positive change that brought the patient or the group to the dialogue in the first place – they do hold a neutral stance regarding the process. In so doing, they express a deep conviction that the problem can only be solved by the participants and that, given a good-enough process, the participants can find the resources within themselves to do so. Fundamentally, neutrality is about a recognition of authority – who has the authority to do what – and about trust.
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