Adrienne Harris comes to the hinterlands… Perhaps in part because we have baseball.

Adrienne Harris, one of the seminal psychoanalytic theorists of the relational perspective and a leading writer on women’s issues, came to visit our Institute last weekend.  The chair of our workshop committee made it clear that the scheduling of the workshop was contingent on the Mets baseball team being in town that weekend.  I have written about other visitors in the past (Andrea Celenza, Kirsten Dahl, Peter Goldberg, and Anton Kris) and psychoanalytic luminaries have been visiting us since long before I began blogging.  Dr. Harris’s visit has been harder for me to wrap my mind around than previous visits.  Unlike others, she did not seem to come with a particular set agenda.  She did not want to inform us of this or that new thought, perspective, or population that we should be working with.  Though she had a prepared paper, she referenced it but did not spend most of her time reading from it during her formal presentation.  She seemed, instead of to be espousing a thesis, to be working it out - in her head, and in the room; sounding it out before us rather than asserting it.  There was a way, then, that her visit seemed less like a discrete event than – frankly – a dream state for me.  It has taken me a while to figure out, then, how to write about it.

Perhaps the best way to characterize Dr. Harris’ visit is to compare it to something that Anna Freud said about her father – “All the other analysts seemed so certain, but not Poppa, he was always questioning.”  It seemed to me that Dr. Harris, like Dr. Freud (pere) both in his writing and in his thinking, was practicing analytic functioning – that is, when she was here, in the informal talk, in her formal presentation, in the dinner, and when she was consulting on a case; she was working out of a state of evenly hovering attention.  This did not mean that she herself was dreamy, evanescent or unclear – her encyclopedic knowledge of analytic authors was constantly on display as she referenced specific works of individuals to support the points that she was making – and she had a laser like ability to hone in on certain clinical issues – she really got aspects of the patient that was presented on Saturday (my own patient, actually, so I felt as certain as one can that the inferences she was making were on target) – and she seemed to float in an easy interactional space with the people that she came in contact with throughout the weekend.  Actually, to be truthful, she didn't just get aspects of the patient, but brought the patient to life - my understanding of the patient took on a deeper, richer, three dimensional quality as I heard her sensitively and deeply engage with the material that I presented.

The central dilemma that she seemed to be referencing through the weekend, in so far as there was one, is the dilemma – or tension – that exists between the duality of genders – a categorical difference – and the fluidity of the gender identities that seem to proliferating at a dizzying pace.  She illustrated this with a conversation she had with her ten year old grandson who had impressed her with his description of some of the “63” gender variations he was aware of.  And what seemed remarkable to me is that this woman, who has thought and read deeply about gendered living – seemed as open to the basic confusion that this plenitude of genders creates in a ten year old boy, and in me, and in my peers.  That she, like all of us, is letting this new world of gender identity rattle and roll around in her head even after she has written scholarly papers on it and treated many patients with gender issues.  She radiated an approachable uncertainty about such issues as sex reassignment surgery – a procedure that she regularly consults about with patients.

Again, I don’t mean to say that she couldn’t be appropriately definitive.  She talked about some of her cases where she had reservations that were solidly based in a sense of the time that it takes for a person to make the psychological transition from a predominantly masculine (or feminine) identity to a predominantly feminine (or masculine) identity.  This is a gradual and iterative process – but the physical transition of surgery is dichotomous – and irreversible – and she expressed human concern about the potential for a person to feel that they had made a permanent mistake – and she seemed committed to helping people avoid such a mistake while also wanting to facilitate supporting transitions that people are deeply psychologically committed to.  But, again, this was not stated as anything like a dogmatic position, but felt more like a feeling out and an attempt to feel into a space that is highly contingent on the psychological experience of the individual person that she might be working with at this particular moment.

I think that part of the complication that Dr. Harris is addressing as she works through this – and that was implicit in what she was saying (and if it was explicit, I am not recalling it), is that our binary gender identity (and sexuality, for that matter) is a biological and social construction – and, as such, becomes categorical, but our psychological reality, especially from the relational perspective that she talked about creating with Steven Mitchell, Lew Aron, and Jeremy Safron, (while she was also processing the loss in the past couple of years of both Lew and Jeremy), is multifaceted – and we actually have multiple self-states that get evoked in a variety of contexts and that these shift and slide and relate to each other in fluid configurations.  I don’t think that, from this perspective, it makes sense for any of us to be this gender or that – this sexuality or that – and yet we are – and settle into a reasonably reliable state of being.  We organize ourselves around a central identity, I suppose, with states that are more and less consistent with that.

At the same time, though, Dr. Harris was advocating – in part by talking about how Lew Aron had advocated for her – a kind of psychoanalytic freedom that the psychoanalyst should not just facilitate in her or his patients, but experience for him or herself.  That the psychoanalyst should pursue thoughts and initiatives that are fascinating – that they should explore areas that are of interest – as she has done in pursuing more information about Freud’s interlocutor Sandor Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who was able to question some of Freud’s most ardently stated positions.  Ultimately, with Aron’s encouragement, she helped open the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School in New York, where she teaches.  This example did not call attention to her accomplishment – instead it encouraged in me a certain sense of permission – one that I have found lacking within the analytic ranks – to follow my nose and explore what is of interest to me.

One of the central concerns that Dr. Harris articulated was the way that our central identities – she cited the early American feminists as an example including the suffragettes – can become narrowed - so that, in her example, the suffragettes' conviction that human rights belonged to all did not get extended to African Americans.  We need to keep ourselves aware of how our central beliefs should influence aspects of our functioning that may be in our blind spots.  So she was encouraging us to be thinking about the intersectionality of identities – not just gender, sexuality, race, or class, but the ways in which these overlap.  She extended this into thinking about how our institute can become more involved in helping individuals in our community across the range – especially of social and economic class.

The problem becomes, how do we remain open to the parts of ourselves that are invisible to us?  And isn’t this the central problem of psychoanalysis – how can we know that which is unknowable – the unconscious?  And Dr. Harris’ response had less to do with specific content or positions – though she was able to access these as needed to help shape her and our thoughts about the issue that was at hand – but it was an analytic attitude that pervaded her openness to us, to her patients, and to our patients as we talked about them with her.  This is complicated by a world that is evolving - it is becoming a new and different place as we become new and different people who are interacting with it in new and different ways.  We need new theories and new ways of understanding the dilemmas that we and our patients confront.  Dr. Harris' openness became a model - that we should be open to the world and to thinking about it in new and different ways.

This openness extended to her broader experience of the weekend.  After being with us, she joined one of our faculty to take in a baseball game, where her beloved Mets, not yet mathematically eliminated from the play-offs were playing.  She stated that her love of the game was partly the result of her love for her father, who shared his love of the game with her.  She also explored our Underground Railroad Museum and lingered in this fly-over state as a source of information about the world at large.  She was surprised, on her return flight, to see that it was filled with Mets fans.  “Aren’t the Mets the team of the working class?” she wondered to me.   When I responded that everyone in New York is rich these days, she responded “Oh, of course.  I forgot.  And the really rich folks live in Brooklyn.  Yikes.”

 

Yes, we live in very strange days, but thankfully there are people like Dr. Harris to help us figure out how to do that.    

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