Voices from Israel | October 2019
I am happy to introduce you to a paper written by Mira Horwitz. This paper was presented at the April 2019 ‘Association Day’ of the Israel Association for Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity with the participation of Donna Orange Psy.D. as our Guest.
With wit supported by prolific imagination, Mira takes us to an interdisciplinary journey that deepens our understanding of Empathy. Harnessing the philosophies of Aristotle, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and an imaginary meeting between Kohut and his patient, Mira offers what she calls, following Husserl, our ability to “see essences”.
Subjectivity as an Open Horizon Between
Particularity and Essence
Mira Horowitz
When I was a child, I loved to make up stories. I used to imagine different endings to events that had happened in reality and even my personal diary underwent changes that crossed the line between reality and imagination. When I was a counselor in the Scouts, I used to tell my scouts ghost stories as we sat around a campfire on our hikes and camping trips, creating a story full of suspense and a surprise ending. As a mother, I would often read story books to my daughters, but they frequently asked me to give them “a made-up story”, something I fabricated on the spur of the moment. As time passed, the stories and my story-telling skills became increasingly marginal in my life. However, once, many years ago, I was returning from a lecture I had delivered to ultra-Orthodox women counselors on the subject of eating disorders. Wearing a long skirt, I walked through the streets of B’nei Brak, smiling, after a three- hour lecture I had given, which had received especially warm responses. The caution and anxiety which at first accompanied this meeting between women who were strangers to one another – the secular lecturer and the ultra-Orthodox education counselors – turned into a pleasant emotional connection accompanied by great interest and laughter. Suddenly, a familiar feeling arose in me. I recalled that an experience such as this is not foreign to me. It was the feeling that I had when I was sixteen, telling stories to my scouts who sat facing me with wide-open eyes, full partners in this shared experience taking shape between us.
What is it about a story that enables us to bridge the interpersonal gaps? To bridge the distances of time and between different cultures? To connect between different age groups? What inner stratum in us does it touch? What must a good story contain in order to touch us? To arouse in us true, real feelings, even though it is a figment of one’s imagination, a fantasy? A good story can serve us as a selfobject, the other who is different from us and enables us to better understand ourselves. The strangeness and the otherness are cancelled out as we become part of the story and the story becomes a part of ourselves, of our being.
Kohut maintained that these foundations are the basis of empathy and claimed that empathy is the only way through which we can understand the other person and his unique characteristics. In his seminal paper from 19591, Introspection, Empathy and Psychoanalysis, Kohut sets out to overcome the empirical external variances that differentiate one person from another. He gives as an example a person who is extremely tall. Is it at all possible for me to understand what it is like to be that person? “Let us consider a simple example. We see a person who is unusually tall. It is not to be disputed that this person’s unusual size is an important fact for our psychological assessment—without introspection and empathy, however, his size remains simply a physical attribute. Only when we think ourselves into his place, only when we, by vicarious introspection, begin to feel his unusual size as if it were our own and thus revive inner experiences in which we had been unusual or conspicuous, only then begins there for us an appreciation of the meaning that the unusual size may have for this person and only then have we observed a psychological fact.”2
Kohut here claims that the physical height of a person, a particular empirical fact that can be perceptually observed and factually described, can take on a wider meaning which, in turn, will facilitate an internal understanding of the other’s awareness, that very other who does not empirically have this particular trait and therefore apparently is not expected to understand it internally. In his argument, Kohut successfully maintains the ancient philosophical tension and bridges between realism and idealism, between the internal and the external, between fact and interpretation, and between perception and understanding, without collapsing into one of the two extremes.
Kohut directs the empathic observation inwardly, towards the subjective, internal and hidden elements on the one hand, but such that are given to universal understanding on the other hand. These elements have the attribute of internal essence, as described by Aristotle. Aristotle’s Theory of Categories serves as a solid foundation upon which to examine Kohut’s fundamental claim regarding empathy – which it is an interpersonal step that bridges over otherness and is oriented towards a common essential base.
Aristotle based his philosophy of Nature upon observation, examining natural phenomena in general, and the organs and behavior of animals in particular.3 In his metaphysical writings, Aristotle describes Nature, the objects in Nature and how they performance. Physics deals with “What is wherever it is”, i.e., the attributes of every single thing that exists in the world. Nature is filled with a plethora of objects, varied and different from one another, yet Science, according to Aristotle, concerns itself with becoming familiar and gathering information on both the singular objects and the objects in general, the differences between the singular objects and what links them together. Despite the differences, variety and multiplicity, Aristotle insisted that within each and every species a clear unity is preserved. His Theory of Categories is based on this premise.
In observing the different objects in the world, it immediately becomes apparent that they are material objects – made of material of one form or another, solid or fluid. It is the material attributes of objects in Nature that differentiate between them. A human being is different from a dog, a dog from a cat, a cat from a cypress tree, etc. Yet within the category of each and every species a clear unity is preserved.4 This unity characterizes the singular object, it is the shared attribute of additional singular objects. This shared attribute lies at the very basis of all things in the world, it is what enables us to separate them into groups and categorize them. Aristotle repeatedly claimed, “A human being gives birth to a human being”, through which he emphasized the constancy of every single species in Nature. This constancy is the “form” (in Greek, idea or eidos). The reference here is not to the object’s external form, but rather to its “internal form”, or its essence, i.e.: combination of those attributes that make the object what it is.5 Aristotle called the forms “universal” and the objects that exemplified them he called “particulars”. Thus, every object or thing in Nature has foundations or particular material attributes, and formational, universal foundations.
Following Aristotle, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of the Phenomenological stream in philosophy, called the form “essence” (eidos) – that is the a priori, universal, abstract, inherent foundation of every single thing in the world.6 Husserl based himself on these classical conceptualizations when he set out to describe the structural ontology of the world and of awareness, and claimed that one of the great mistakes of modern Empiricism is the rejection of the concept of essence and the search for the particular, concrete appearance of things in the world – without recognizing their essential obligatory foundation. The essence is the “what” that makes something what it is. Its particular appearance, which embodies a specific physical presence in time and space, with specific attributes that make it unique, appears in the world with its universal characteristics as well, in its essence, so that it could have appeared in another place, at another time and with other attributes – and yet still be what it is.7
The contingency of the object’s specific exterior, which can be coincidental, is not absolute. It is limited and subordinated to the necessity of the essence of the object.8 When we think of a tree, draw a tree or see a tree, the tree can be young or old, it can be a fruit tree or an ornamental tree, a tree in bloom or bare of leaves. But if it is a tree, it cannot be a dog. The variety of possible forms of its exterior is limited by the necessity of its essence – to be a tree. There is a consolidation between the coincidental and the mandatory.
If all the particular exterior appearances are based on a necessary essential foundation, what enables the variety of its external expressions? What enables our understanding to be open to the variety of existential possibilities? Or, inspired by this particular day, what gives us the free expression of the self, on the one hand, and the freedom of empathic understanding on the other hand? According to Husserl, the essence is a shared foundation, a universal foundation of the individual’s appearance. Husserl emphasizes: “Whatever belongs to the essence of the individual can also belong to another individual.”9 The existence of essences is not dependent upon their empirical embodiment. The essence is an internal, hidden foundation of the object. The object, according to Husserl, has ways of its own to “show” us its essence via its particular appearances. This is the “appearance of the essence” or “the intuition of the essence”, which possesses insight and enables us, according to Husserl, to see the essence of things and gather information on essences.
Observation is basically a perceptual, sensory, heedful activity. We direct our eyes outwardly, observe the objects in the world and observe each other, our facial expressions and our behavior. Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher who was deeply influenced by Husserl, wrote about the phenomenology of perception, and presented his central argument that sensory perception and empirical facts are of no value without the subjective significance they are endowed with: “There is nothing in the appearance of a landscape, an object or a body whereby it is predestined to look ‘gay’ or ‘sad’, ‘lively’ or ‘dreary’, ‘elegant’ or ‘coarse’ “…10 Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty determines that Man is a reflective subject. He moves about in the world and experiences it in a way that repeatedly deciphers the world.
We live in the world and endow the things around us with meaning directly and immediately. Factual sensory perception is not a preliminary stage to thinking, but rather a factor that gives meaning to what surrounds us as we exist in the world: “The world is not what I think it is, but what I live through.”11 Exterior appearance does not contradict meaning, nor is it more actual or less actual than it. Perception is not the same as sensation. Perception is always part of a wider field that includes internal dimensions of impressions, expectation, imagination, completion, etc. Just as we are able to easily perceive a form from a collection of dots by “completing” in our imagination a continuous line, thus our perception is not limited to the input received from the senses, but rather we already perceive meanings.12 Awareness, therefore, is not limited to perceiving the external dimensions only, but is simultaneously oriented inwardly, to perceive the essence and meaning of things “from the inside”.
Now let us return, with the help of Aristotle, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, to the tall man who enters Kohut’s room. I imagine Kohut, who himself was a tall, impressive-looking man, opening the door and noticing that the man facing him, we’ll call him John, is an especially tall person. Kohut glances at him and asks him in. John stoops slightly as he enters Kohut’s room. He doesn’t seem comfortable in his own skin, his hands dangle at the sides and his shoulders droop. Kohut shakes John’s hand and immediately feels a warm, strong hand, but the handshake is weak, as if John were being careful not to squeeze too hard. This handshake reminds Kohut of something, a kind of memory of the body that arouses in him images and experiences. He remembers that when he was a child he was sent to a summer camp, where he didn’t know a single other child. On the first day he stood with the other members of his group, feeling skinny and small next to them. But the counselor then looked at him kindly, and gave him a prolonged handshake that was warm and encouraging. Kohut remembers that handshake as signaling the successful continuation of summer camp for him. Meanwhile, Kohut gestures with his hand to John to sit down and he himself sits in his armchair. However, John doesn’t seem to find his place, he turns this way and that, seemingly because the sofa and the space around it are too small and crowded for him. Kohut, who still feels inside himself the sense of encouragement and support which that handshake transmitted to him as a child, turns his good, smiling eyes towards John and says, “I am happy you came. I see my sofa isn’t so comfortable. I’d like to think of something we can do to make you feel more comfortable here.” John smiles and says, “It’s not the sofa, it’s me. I’m too tall for this world.” Kohut then responds: “It’s really uncomfortable that the world is small on you. That’s how it is when everything is relative. Imagine that now I feel as if I’m a small, short little boy. I have to remind myself that on the inside I’m tall.” They both laugh warmly. John says: “That’s really interesting. Because, the reason I turned to therapy is that everywhere I go – at work, with friends, even with my two teen-age daughters – I feel what you’ve just said. That I have no place to be and that I’m a little boy who no one sees, who is insignificant. I didn’t know how to put it into words because I was sure you wouldn’t understand what I mean, because, after all, I’m so big and take up so much space.,”
Once again, I’ve gone back to “Made-up stories”. I’ve taken the liberty to do so, and hope that Kohut won’t object. For this story, I used Kohut as an example, a short, theoretic example, based on an external attribute, yet opening up the possibilities of understanding through the fundamental, human, shared characteristic – of prominence. Our ability to “see essences”, according to Husserl, is immediate and intuitive, yet it passes through remembrance, inner observation and imagination, and thus opens up empathic understanding to human space whose horizons are infinite.
References
1 Kohut, H. (1959) Introspection, Empathy and Psychoanalysis – An Examination of the Relationship between Mode Observation and Theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 7:459-483.
2 Ibid, p. 460.
3 Landau, Y. (1988), p. 7(Heb.)
לנדא, י. (1988). מבוא למטפיסיקה ולפילוסופיית הטבע של אריסטו. משרד הביטחון – ההוצאה לאור.
4 Ibid., pp. 29-30
5 Ibid. (1988). P. 30
6 Smith, D. W. (2013). Husserl. Routledge: London & NY. P. 52
7 Husserl, E. (2012). Ideas. Translated by Gibson, W.R.B. Routledge: London & NY. §2. P.10.
8 Ibid, p.11.
9 Ibid. Ibid.
10 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012 [1945]). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans: Donald A. Landes. Routledge: London & NY. P. 27.
11 Ibid. P. xviii.
12 Ibid, p. 4.
Mira Horwitz is a senior clinical psychologist and supervisor in psychotherapy and psychodiagnosis. She is the director of the day care unit for eating disorders and the chief psychologist in the psychiatric ward at the Schneider children hospital. Mira is a lecturer in the psychotherapy program at the Bar Ilan University and at the advance education program of child & adolescence psychiatry at Tel Aviv university medical school.
mirahorwitz@gmail.com
