Interview with Alan Bass
- Interview with Alan Bass
This interview was conducted in 2007 following the publication of Bass's book Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (Stanford University Press, 2006). It originally appeared on the website of the Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies (CIPS).
Your new book, Interpretation and Difference, fleshes out with greater complexity the philosophical stakes of your previous book, Difference and Disavowal, to which it appears as a companion. It's recognizably more theoretical than clinical, more philosophical than psychoanalytic. But my impression is that one of your major concerns is the breakdown of these sorts of oppositions, to show how philosophy and psychoanalysis fit together. It would seem wrong or at least inadequate to consider it simply more theoretical or more philosophical than the previous book, although you're treating Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, who are more readily considered philosophers. So, how does the new book extend the previous work in ways that are still relevant to clinical practice?
The answer is clearly in the title. Difference and Disavowal starts with the clinical problem of resistance to interpretation—concrete patients. There are two basic points: concrete patients have a defensive stance toward any differentiating process, and in treatment, interpretation serves a differentiating function. Such patients will bring to treatment their basic defenses, which will be manifest against the interpretive process itself. However, I always feel we learn the most from limit cases. And since these are limit cases for interpretation, they force us to think about interpretation in ways that we have not heretofore. Particularly about the question I call the reality of difference. In Difference and Disavowal, I tried to make clear that one of the things that has to change for analysts, if they are to work effectively with concrete patients, is their own conception of reality. If the analyst has the same concrete understanding of reality as the patient, he or she will never be able to understand what the patient is defending against, how the patient is using the presupposition that reality is what is objectively there, to defend against something else, other aspects of reality. In Interpretation and Difference, my aim is to look at those philosophers who have reexamined interpretation along with metaphysical presuppositions about reality. These are, most prominently, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.
That was intrinsic to my question about the breakdown of the opposition between psychoanalysis and philosophy, because each of the thinkers you're working with considers himself to be practicing something other than philosophy as it is traditionally conceived.
This has always been one of my basic ideas. Freud always said psychoanalysis cannot be metaphysics. Yet Freud, I believe, did not understand in depth what metaphysics really means. he did not understand how he repeated metaphysical presuppositions in some of his most basic thinking, including what it means to practice interpretation. So yes, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are the great line of thinkers who are trying to think outside the constraints of metaphysics, all the while understanding—as Derrida in particular emphasizes—that metaphysics is not something we can just jump out of. It has to be very carefully and rigorously understood, then deconstructed and dismantled, to find other ways of thinking. So that, indeed, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are not philosophers in the traditional sense, and there is a very strong psychoanalytic cast to what they do. [End Page 2]
Perhaps Nietzsche most of all, who considered himself a psychologist and genealogist—practicing on history by practicing with force.
And he uses interpretation as part of what he calls active thinking and active interpretation, which is an entirely different conception of interpretation than the reactive, identity-producing, equality-enforcing interpretation of metaphysics. Heidegger, I would say, is a reader of the history of metaphysics in terms of "symptoms." He is always looking at how metaphysics is the history of a repression—not repression in the psychoanalytic sense, but the history of a forgetting of the question of being. But then metaphysics becomes a set of symptoms that manifest this forgetfulness. There is a kind of theory of compromise formation in Heidegger, although...
