Recent books.

Presents a collection of released books, topics included are feminism, interactionism and experimental phenomenology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Beyond the reflection: The role of the mirror paradigm in clinical practice.

Reviews the book, Beyond the reflection: The role of the mirror paradigm in clinical practice by Paulina Kernberg, Bernadette Buhl-Nielsen, and Lina Normandin (see record 2007-00911-000). This modestly presented volume overflows with insight and new ways of looking at the mirroring experience for children and adolescents. Kernberg and her collaborators present the rich history of the image, metaphor, and pervasive role of the mirror in human experience; they carefully describe the "subjective experience of wonder, admiration, and an objective dimension of truth" in the mirror paradigm (2006, p. xv). For the psychotherapist, Kernberg's work provides a rich resource; the review of past and current research and theorizing about the mirroring function of mothers and primary caregivers is thorough and up-to-date with the most recent advances in neuroscience, attachment theory, and infant research. From Freud to Lacan, from Winnicott to Stern, and from Schore to Gergely, Kernberg presents a sweeping exposition of the various images of the mirror. This volume is worthwhile if only for its presentation of this body of recent research. But there is so much more to be found here. While this is not the first time that Kernberg has presented us with her work with mirror observation and interviews (Kernberg, 1984, 1987), this volume integrates the research about early mother- child experience, and the mirroring paradigm in the psychoanalytic theories about child development, with the phenomenology of child and adolescent psychotherapy. The clinician will find a useful application of the theory to clinical practice and diagnosis that is hard to find in the literature. Beebe and Lachmann (2002) have accomplished this integration between infant research and adult treatment, but Kernberg's application of her research and the demonstrated correlation between the findings of mirror experience, attachment histories, and clinical experience is a rare and welcome addition to the literature. There are also valuable links made between the findings around mirror experience and children's trauma histories. This reader came away feeling that a tremendous debt is owed to the authors for helping to ground clinical theory and practice in substantial current research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On Relying on Metaphor: What Psychoanalysts Might Learn From Wallace Stevens.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens offers lessons for psychoanalysts--especially in regard to the postmodern concern that there is no single true way of telling the human tale. Stevens was preoccupied with the impossibility of grasping reality through language. Nevertheless he made beautiful, true poems. Psychoanalytic concepts too may be only language, "merely" metaphors. But in collaborative metaphor making there is the possibility of finding provisional truth, that is, other, better ways of telling our experience and playing out our life stories. We can continue to rely on an interpretative process that organizes experience without expecting or needing to pin it down in any final sense. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relational being.

Reviews the book, Relational being: Beyond self and community by Kenneth J. Gergen (see record 2009-10534-000). In this book, Gergen develops and elaborates a theoretical framework for shifting the unit of analysis in psychology and other social sciences away from the individual toward relationships. The core arguments of the book revolve around claims that individuals (“bounded entities”) are social constructs that should be understood not as natural and self-evident phenomena but rather as emergent from relationships. By corollary, many of the properties traditionally associated with individuals (e.g., thoughts, feelings, beliefs) are argued to be better understood as relational accomplishments; that is, as arising from the larger context of the social fabric from which individuals are seen to be emergent. Significantly, Gergen also asserts that traditional individualist assumptions have negative impacts on our social world. He focuses on a number of specific domains to illustrate how a relational approach would lead to a more constructive, harmonious, and better existence. I found much value in the practical aspects of Gergen’s exposition of relational being, while feeling uncomfortable with the epistemological and ontological foundations provided in the book. The root of this ambiguity seems to lie in Gergen’s own contradictory stance, which oscillates between offering a relational approach as “just another perspective” (i.e., no more or less true than any other) and implying the moral and epistemic superiority of relational over individualist approaches. Although the former position seems to me sensible and appropriate, the latter (which dominates in the book) constitutes an unnecessary universalism that seems to run counter to the pluralistic spirit that is evident in parts of the book. Gergen’s own words, Let us replace the Hobbesian dystopia of 'all against all,' with a vision of 'all with all' (p. 403) for me sums up both the strengths and weaknesses of the book—the insights offered by the application of a relational perspective to specific practical contexts are a truly valuable contribution; but suggesting that this perspective is a panacea and needs to replace all individualistic accounts is counterproductive. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Response to book reviews: Relating to my reviewers.

Responds to the reviews by K. O'Doherty (see record 2011-04026-005) and J. W. Clegg (see record 2011-04026-006) of the current author's book, Relational being: Beyond self and community (see record 2009-10534-000). One of my chief reactions to the resistances represented in these reviews is that the volume failed to make clear a vision of how we might go on together in the academic world where different viewpoints dominate. To elaborate: both reviewers take issue with my relational account in terms of its seeming dismissal or eradication of cherished concepts—including for Clegg, personal experience, genuine selfknowledge, and independent moral agency; and for O’Doherty, individual awareness, agency, and causality. In a certain sense their resistances are justified. My account raises critical concerns with such concepts, and in certain cases offers a radical reconceptualization. Both reviewers also suggest that these are questions of fundamental ontology, and offer arguments against what they see as my faulty foundations. However, as I tried to explain in the work, I approach theory development from a social constructionist perspective. This means replacing the traditional goal of the theorist to “tell the truth” about the world, with the attempt to generate an intelligibility that may foster different—and possibly more viable—forms of life. In effect, I am not attempting to articulate a final philosophy; I neither propose nor wish to argue ontology. From a constructionist perspective such arguments are futile; on what grounds other than those we construct could we settle such differences? Now to be fair, both Clegg and O’Doherty recognize this constructionist background, and my attempt to avoid eliminating alternative traditions or conceptions. However, this recognition does not deter them from returning to questions of fundamentals; they seem to want a knock-down conflict in which “justified true belief” will win out. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Becoming relational: From abstract systems to embodied relations.

Reviews the book, Relational being: Beyond self and community by Kenneth J. Gergen (see record 2009-10534-000). The primary plea of the book is that psychology consider a relational rather than individual (much less subindividual) conception of its phenomena. Gergen encourages us to "treat what we take to be the individual units as derivative of relational process" (xxi). This notion of a fundamentally relational subject is one that the reader is invited to explore and to test against other, more traditional, ways of constructing being. It is a proposition entertained and evaluated in terms of its implications but it is not presented as the real, true, or most factual account of human experience. Throughout the text, Gergen attempts to replace the individual or monological expositional style with a more dialogical, plural kind of textual negotiation. The book is constantly questioning and coming to terms with itself, its critics, and its limitations. The book is, as Bakhtin (1973) might have it, multivocal. Gergen invokes his own authorial voice, but also his voice as an embedded, historical being. Each chapter is peppered with anecdotes and personal reflections woven into the overall narrative as concrete counterpoint to the abstractions of theoretical argument. In the process, Gergen is surprisingly intimate, personal, and generous with his private life and history. The book also becomes something more human, narrative, and funny than is usual in theoretical exegesis. This style is quite inviting, partly because it is rooted in everyday life but also because it explicitly invites, and even voices, the critic, the question, and the doubt. Ultimately, what is compelling in the pages of Relational Being is what is fundamentally compelling about relationalism itself—namely, the way that it displaces abstract system as the core of meaning and replaces it with embodied relation. This displacement has the potential to redress some of the essential distortions at the heart of Enlightenment reason—particularly that venerable tradition of riding one’s chosen theoretical hobby horse into the face of concrete, lived experience (and into the face of the doubting, suffering, demanding other that stands in the way). Relational practice moves us away from the distortions that inevitably come when we make everything we encounter instrumental to some idea that we cherish (and, in the process, become blind to whatever lived truth first made that idea sing for us). Relational practice asks us, instead, to continually return to the lived relation and so continually rupture and remake the narratives by which we understand it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)