Links beween Langs and affect/script theory

• A Wish to Share by D.William, Ph.D., 3/11/98
  
  

Dr. William has provided a concise summary of Dr. Langs' most trenchant contributions, and provided references that can help any clinician learn more about this important movement in the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I owe Dr. Langs two debts---his concept of the bipersonal field was one of the ideas that (as I will explain in a moment) pushed me further in the direction of affect theory, and (well after my own work had been published) his nephrologist son Charles saved my mother's life through his recognition that her nearly fatal untreatable cardiovascular illness had been caused by occult renal artery stenosis that was promptly remediated by arterial homograft. Last evening a bunch of us celebrated her 88th birthday at dinner and toasted the younger Dr. Langs.

What did the elder Dr. Langs teach us? First and foremost, in a series of books, papers, lectures, and courses that influenced many and angered still more, he maintained that psychoanalysis is not the dispassionate science claimed by the majority of its proponents. It was, he said, an interaction between two hard-working protagonists, an interaction as dependent on the inner life of the analyst as on the inner life of the analysand. Langs gave the lie to the idea that any therapist can possibly become objective; we are first and always both thinking and feeling entities. He thought it ridiculous to assume or maintain that the effectiveness of the analyst depended on analytic neocortical cognition, and insisted that the entire world of the analyst entered every analytic session. The therapeutic interaction involved some joinder of the entire worlds of both participants, and he forced our attention to that field of interaction.

Langs and I agree about the importance of the bipersonal field. The difference between us is that I asked differently about the forces within that field. To me, the hidden realm involved the affective life of the individual, a life that I believed to have been explicated by Tomkins better than anyone else in history. Affect theory explained the forces that managed life experience in order to make salient, urgent, important that which required the highest level of neocortical cognition, and script theory explained the ways we humans unconsciously evaded awareness of novelty through the efficient but therefore costly routinization of data analysis.

My own contributions to the work of Tomkins are somewhat flashy but relatively meagre. I have provided some advance toward our understanding of the biology and therefore the medicine of human emotion, allowing linkage between the worlds of academic psychology and psychopharmacology that had previously been split into separate turfs. Furthermore, I have developed easily taught methods of psychotherapy that devolve from affect/script theory, methods that have allowed many of our colleagues to work with what they and their patients seem to describe as enhanced effiency. Vernon C. (Vick) Kelly, Training Director of the Tomkins Institute, has expanded Tomkins's work in another direction, providing a completely new way of approaching problems of intimacy. (A good summary of Vick's work may be seen as his definitive chapter in our 1996 book "Knowing Feeling: Affect, Script, and Psychotherapy" for WW Norton.) I then expanded Vick Kelly's work to provide a new kind of understanding of public and political process, summarized as my paper "From Empathy to Community" in the just-released issue of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, a volume dedicated to the memory of my good friend and mentor, Michael Franz Basch.

Those of us who study affect/script theory devote a good deal of attention to the expressions of affect that appear everywhere in the therapeutic encounter. We listen for affect in tone of voice, look for it on the face of patient and therapist, search for evidence everywhere we can find it. We try to identify the scripts involved in the stuckedness of both patient and therapist, and to develop methods of remediation based on our understanding of these scripts. In our world, clinical supervision is a bit more difficult than within disciplines that ignore the affective display of both participants. The only difference, I guess, is that in our group we have studied enough about shame---our own and the other guy's---that we tend to smile at rather than run away from evidence of our own contribution to problems in therapy.

Doug William has opened an interesting and fruitful realm of discourse, and I hope all of us will learn from it more about the role of affect and script in the therapeutic encounter. Those of you who would prefer a hands-on introduction to these methods of therapy we now call "the Philadelphia System" can join us on Cape Cod in late August for a week-long course on the theories and practice about which we talk in this forum. Check out the link to the Cape Cod Institute on the home page for Behavior OnLine for more information; I'll place a more succinct note about that course on this forum another time.

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