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PARTISAN REVIEW
suspension of the whole issue of either belief or disbelief).* Supposedly,
this suspension will allow the patient to "make himself accessible to [the
interpretation's) artistic and rhetorical surround" and to appreciate "a kind
of linguistic and narrative closure." Also, Spence recommends that
therapists signal a hypothetical or tentative rather than factual tone by
prefacing their interpretations with qualifiers such as
"It
seems to me that
... " or "I wonder if.... " He writes that "clinical impact" should be
understood to mean "aesthetic experience" - something to which truth
(understood as involving referentiality, objectivity, or historical factuality)
would be quite irrelevant. Carried along by Spence's graceful prose, the
reader never stops to ask whether the patient's failure to believe in actual
historical veracity might somehow be problematic, perhaps even inimical
to therapeutic improvement.
Spence's aestheticist interpretation of the impact of the psychothera–
peutic encounter is clearly reminiscent of the emphasis, common in
twentieth-century aesthetics, on the presumed self-sufficiency of the work
of art, on its escape from the vulgarity of reference to things existing be–
yond itself. The writings of Roy Schafer share elements of this kind of
aestheticism, but he also stresses another (not unrelated) way in which a
postmodemist understanding of psychotherapy could have a salutary effect
-namely, by increasing the patient's self-conscious awareness of the per–
spectival nature of reality and of his or her own role in creating under–
standing. Thus Schafer writes that a main effect of psychoanalytic treat–
ment should be to help analysands become "more versatile, sophisticated,
and relativistic historians of their lives." In a reversal of the traditional
emphasis on developing insight into the present as a (previously uncon–
scious) repetition of the past, he stresses fostering the analysand's self–
conscious awareness of the role of his own ongoing interaction in creating
an
image
or
conception
of the past. "More and more the alleged past must
be experienced consciously as a mutual interpenetration of past and pre–
sent," writes Schafer. "The time is always present. The event is always an
ongoing dialogue." Here the emphasis is less on the patient's responding
to the pleasing coherency of a narrative or other interpretation, than on
appreciating the malleability of what passes for reality, and on the patient's
recognition of the constituting role of his or her own story-producing
mind.
Richard Geha gives things a slightly more negative, Derridean twist at
the end of a recently published article, stressing not the creative so much
*As
I.
A. Richards remarks regarding Coleridge's notion of "a willing suspension
of disbelief': "It is better to say that the question of belief or disbelief, in the
intellectual sense, never arises when we are reading well."
