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International Journal ofPsychoanalytic Self PsychologyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsp20

Accounting for Agency ina Connectionist World: AResponse to Kati BreckenridgeJoye Weisel-Barth Ph.D. Psy.D. aa Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, LosAngelesPublished online: 14 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Joye Weisel-Barth Ph.D. Psy.D. (2012) Accounting for Agencyin a Connectionist World: A Response to Kati Breckenridge, International Journal ofPsychoanalytic Self Psychology, 7:4, 526-532, DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2012.710314

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International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 7:526–532, 2012Copyright © The International Association for Psychoanalytic

Self PsychologyISSN: 1555-1024 print / 1940-9141 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15551024.2012.710314

Accounting for Agency

in a Connectionist World:

A Response to Kati

Breckenridge

Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D.

In this meditation on the relationship between the constraints ofconnectionist systems on one side, and the possibility of human freedom onthe other, the author suggests that a sense of agency emerges in the develop-ment of the reflective mind and imagination, a process that psychoanalysisfacilitates and encourages.

Keywords: complexity theory; connectionist sensibility; constraints; creativ-ity; freedom; loneliness; personal agency

Of course, I’m happy about and appreciative of Kati Breckenridge’sclose, trenchant, and enriched reading of the story of Emily andme. It feels wonderful to receive such careful and positive atten-

tion for my work—full of understanding and recognition. Not only isthis personally gratifying, but it is also motivating. That’s the good news.It is simultaneously the bad news because of the daunting question thatBreckenridge poses: “If everything is embedded and distributed across therelational landscape. . .that is, no one person or interaction is responsiblefor change, then how do we think about those seemingly key interventions

Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D., is a Senior Instructor, Training Analyst, and Supervisorat the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; and Book Review Editor forthe International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.

This article has been NetLinked. Please visit www.iapsp.org/netlink to view or postcomments or questions to the author about this article.

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Response to Kati Breckenridge 527

that we as therapists seem to do?” Self-doubtful, but out of respect forher thoughtful essay, I feel motivated—and obligated— to try a responseto Kati. Although I could comment on other aspects of her paper, I willlimit myself to a personal meditation on this single question. The medi-tation is not a scholarly but an associational reflection on how a complexcontextualist sensibility, has helped me to think about my own individual-ity and about the sources of my autonomy, agency, choices, and whatevercreativity I have exercised in my work and relationships.

Looking at the last paragraph, I realize that it is a good introduc-tion to my thoughts. While the response I am about to write is personal,ostensibly arising solely from a place inside my brain, in fact it is entirelycontextualized. In dynamic systems parlance, it is an “emergent” propertyof my experiences in the world: my physical and chemical body world, mycultural heritage, my family traditions and practices, my education, myreading, my 30-plus years working as a psychologist and psychoanalyst,and all my relational experience as daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend,analyst, citizen, and, more specifically, as a friend and close colleague ofKati Breckenridge over many years. My sense of obligation and choice towrite this response is, then, both genuinely “mine” as an experience, but itis also “evenly distributed” across the landscape of the interacting matrixesof my life.

I’ll begin with a chapter in my student life when I closely read thepoems of William Butler Yeats. Yeats was an Irish aristocratic wannabe whowrote poems about Irish characters, real and mythological. He subscribedto Victorian ideas about women and their circumscribed place in the world,and he maintained odd affinities to late nineteenth century occult move-ments. In contrast, I was—probably still am—a dreamy literary wannabefrom a solid, liberal, middle-class, Jewish-American family, two generationsremoved from a Russian shtetl. How different can two people be? And yet,Yeats’ poems transcend these parochial differences; they had and continueto have a powerful emotional impact on me.

One poem in its complexity, mystery, and wisdom confused me as ayoungster, but over the years it has repeatedly returned to me, teachingsomething profound about the creative process and about a central ingre-dient of “becoming.” The poem is “The Fisherman.” In it, Yeats (1983)sets up a contrast between two audiences: one audience for whom he pre-viously wanted to write, members of his contemporary Irish urban world,and another audience that he now longs to write for, an audience embodiedin the solitary figure of “The Fisherman.” Here is the poem:

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528 Joye Weisel-Barth

Although I can see him still,The freckled man who goesTo a grey place on a hillIn grey Connemara clothesAt dawn to cast his flies,It’s long since I beganTo call up to the eyesThis wise and simple man.All day I’d looked in the faceWhat I had hoped ‘twould beTo write for my own raceAnd the reality;The living men that I hate,The dead man that I loved,The craven man in his seat,The insolent unreproved,And no knave brought to bookWho has won a drunken cheer,The witty man and his joke,Aimed at the commonest ear,The clever man who criesThe catch-cries of the clown,The beating down of the wiseAnd great Art beaten down.Maybe a twelvemonth sinceSuddenly I began,In scorn of this audience,Imagining a man,And his sun-freckled face,And grey Connemara cloth,Climbing up to a placeWhere stone is dark under froth,And the down-turn of his wristWhen the flies drop in the stream;A man who does not exist,A man who is but a dream;And cried, “Before I am oldI shall have written him onePoem maybe as coldAnd passionate as the dawn.” (Yeats, 1983, pp. 145–146)

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What do we learn from Yeats here? First, he suggests that the abil-ity to write—and by extension to assert personal individuality—requiresan audience, is created, cultivated, and augmented in interaction withan audience. Creative performance, then, does not happen in isolation;it wants an audience to listen to—the words “audio” and “audience” havethe same root—and see it. And the creative process wants even more fromthe audience than hearing and registering what it has to say. It needs feed-back, the shaping nourishment of understanding and emotional response.In the poem, Yeats seems particularly disappointed and angry that he doesnot have such a mutual relationship and “feedback system” with his con-temporary Irish audience. Its makeup has become “living men that I hate,”men who do not listen to, appreciate, or nourish him reciprocally. We seethat not just any audience will do. Yeats uses the embarrassing term “myown race” to describe his imagined audience, and, however impolitic fromour twenty-first century perspective, the term “race” has culturally reso-nant meanings for him. These meanings are embodied in the “fisherman.”

The “fisherman” is “wise” and “simple,” perfectly rooted in and inte-grated with his environmental place. He exudes the land, matches it;beneath the surface “froth” of life, the fisherman and the land are bothhard and grey as stone and yet as “passionate” as the dawn. His early morn-ing trek up the grey hill feels timeless, both eternal and enduring. But thereis also a particularity about this fisherman—he is a creature of Connemarain Western Ireland, right down to the homespun cloth he wears. There areother specific details that Yeats gives us that make this “dream” fishermanreal and solid. The “freckles” place him in the sun, and the “down-turn” ofhis wrist as he casts his line suggests the dignity of accomplishment in hiswork. And so, the fisherman represents something enduring in the Irishculture that Yeats identifies with, connects himself to, and longs to drawfrom and enfold into his poetry.

Yeats seems to believe that, in order to make creative meaning, theartist—and, by extension, the person—cannot be psychologically alone.Art and living require the fertility of cultural identifications and humanrelationships, even internalized ones. It is in interaction with culture andother people, even imagined ones, that our mind and imagination expandas do our perceived choices and creative possibilities. Paradoxically, Yeatslearns in the poem that we do not write “for” our race; we write from ourrace. Indeed, ironically, in spite of his disclaimer, in this poem and every-where in his poetry, Yeats also writes from his complicated connections andimagined conversations with his contemporary human contexts.

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530 Joye Weisel-Barth

Yeats’ ideas jibe with my own life experience. I began keeping a jour-nal as soon as I began to put letters together and to read, and I have alwaysaddressed my journal entries to someone—at times a real person and atother times an imagined friend or reader. From the beginning, I supposethat I, like Yeats, had a whiff, an unarticulated intuition of something rela-tional and circular about my private journal scribbling. I remember at fourwriting a letter to my mother, who was away from home on family business.The letter-writing effort was exciting and laborious for a little girl, midwifedby my very patient nanny. And when the letter was all written, when I tookin the shape of it and the conglomeration of squiggles that expressed me tomy mother, and when I imagined my mother receiving it and respondingto me in her own squiggles, the letter suddenly seemed a magical thing,something beautiful and bathed in light, illuminating my mother’s pres-ence in my life and my connection to her. Later, as a student, I continuedto write my papers to either an imagined reader or audience—teachers,friends, and so forth—people who would get my ideas and then engage inimaginary conversations with me. Through these imaginary conversations,I would often discover deeper understandings and a clearer and larger per-sonal voice. What I glean from all this—with the aid of my knowledge ofsystems or complexity theory—is that even the most private self-generatedacts, in fact, require and reflect multiple levels of human interaction.

By now in psychoanalysis we are familiar with these dynamic,connectionist notions. Infant researchers and attachment researchers inmany modes have persuaded us that humans come into being only throughthe minds of others. Similarly, contemporary relational and intersubjectivetheorists argue that others pull us into the human community by seeing,hearing, recognizing, and informing us about our own separate minds. Onlyin relationship with the worlds of others can we possibly become enlargedversions of ourselves. And, as we discover our own minds, we necessarilyrecognize that others have their own minds as well, and so we learn of oursimultaneous human separateness and connection. In this cognitive andemotional crucible, we also begin to make conscious choices and generateacts that impact both our own lives and our larger human and physicalenvironments.

Sometimes I worry that those of us committed to a systems sensibilityhave somewhat distorted the consequences of our irreducible embedded-ness in physical and relational matrixes. We emphasize the constraints ofthis condition rather than the potential freedoms it affords. Thus, as I havewritten, it sometimes feels in our writings that the person or self disappears

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Response to Kati Breckenridge 531

into his or her contexts or that the baby dissolves in his own bath water(Weisel-Barth, 2009). Certainly, one consequence of our embeddednessis that our agency and choices are constrained by our physical and rela-tional matrixes, both known and unknown or unconscious. But as I havesuggested above, that is not the only potential consequence.

Paradoxically—and here is the thrust of my response to KatiBreckenridge—it is in recognizing and reflecting on these physical andrelational matrixes, constraints and all, that we discover our voices andour choices. One goal of the psychoanalytic enterprise is to create andenlarge reflective capacities and functions, to enable our patients and usto know, feel, and think about the nature of our connections and inter-actions with our contexts. My clinical experience persuades me that, asa result of enlarged reflective functioning, we and our patients are alsoable to imagine more life possibilities and choices, to articulate thosepossibilities with greater language facility, and to assert ourselves withmore initiative and effectiveness in the world. Agency emerges, then, inthe reflective mind and imagination, processes that psychoanalysis devel-ops and encourages. It is at this nexus in the analytic relationship—inthe private mind and imagination as it recognizes its deep connectionsto the multivariate other—that we find our agentic voice, choice, andcapacity for self-assertion. It is here that just as our environments affectus, we become able to affect our environments by performing the “keyinterventions that we as therapists seem to do.”

References

Weisel-Barth, J. (2009), Stuck: Choice and agency in psychoanalysis. Internat. J. Psychoanal.Self Psychol., 3: 288–312.

Yeats, W. B. (1983), The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New York: Scribners.

Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D.4826 Andasol Ave.Encino, CA 91316818-986-4098dr.joye@sbcglobal.net

Translations of Abstract

En esta reflexión sobre la relación entre las constricciones de los sistemas conexionistasy la posibilidad de la libertad humana, la autora sugiere que un sentimiento de iniciativa

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532 Joye Weisel-Barth

emerge en el desarrollo de la mente reflexiva y la imaginación, un proceso que el psicoanáli-sis facilita y estimula.

Dans cette méditation sur la relation entre, d’une part, les contraintes des systèmes con-nectionnistes, et d’autre part, la possibilité de liberté humaine, l’auteur suggère que lesentiment d’être un agent émerge dans le développement d’une imagination et d’un espritréflexifs, un processus que la psychanalyse favorise et encourage.

In questa riflessione sulla relazione tra i vincoli dei sistemi di connessione e la possibilitàdella libertà umana, l’autrice suggerisce che un senso di agency emerge dallo sviluppo dellaqualità riflessiva della mente e dell’immaginazione, un processo che la psicoanalisi facilita eincoraggia.

In dieser Meditation über die Beziehung zwischen den Fesseln bindender Systeme aufder einen Seite und der Möglichkeit menschlicher Freiheit auf der anderen, weist dieAutorin auf ein Gefühl der Wirksamkeit hin, das in der Entwicklung von Reflexivität undImagination auftaucht, ein Prozess, der durch die Psychoanalyse erleichtert und verstärktwird.

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