The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 55, No. 2, 1995

Visions of the Self Edited by Althea J. Homer, Ph.D.

Maurice Friedman's concept of self seems to stand midway between that of self as structure in modern object relations theory and the postmodern focus on meaning within dialogue and discourse. Friedman, leaning upon the work of Buber, describes a dialogical view of the self that both allows for a central core that is unique and ongoing, yet that requires the I-Thou dialogue to come into real-ization. Our uniqueness is not an "it" that can be captured on an MMPI readout or caught like a butterfly in a net. Passing one's hand through the northern lights might more aptly, though poetically, speak to the experience of contact with our unique and ongoing core self. Our uniqueness has an is-ness to it. We can't describe it without losing that which is its essential quality. We can just be it. This uniqueness, or rather some small facet of it, becomes revealed to ourself and to the other through the specific dialogue with a separate and unique other. This interplay of two uniquenesses is described by Ingrain as the signature of the relationship. Friedman attempts to capture that uniqueness when he describes the "touchstones of reality . . . those basic attitudes that are imprinted on us by the signal events in our lives and that we bring with us to our meeting with new events."

AJH

THE VISION OF THE SELF IN DIALOGUE Maurice Friedman

This essay might equally well have been called "Selves in Dialogue." To enter into dialogue means to step into essential relation with another self. What is more, we become selves in the first instance through our meeting 169 0002-954B/95/0600-0169507.50/1 © 1995 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

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with the selves of our parents and family. By dialogue, of course, I do not mean just two people talking but the genuine meeting between two or more people who are ready to bring their whole persons into reciprocal relation with the other and to affirm and preserve the otherness of the other person or persons in so doing. This view of dialogue I owe to Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and his philosophical anthropology. THE LIFE OF DIALOGUE

Martin Buber's classic presentation of his philosophy of dialogue is his poetic book I and Thou. Here he distinguishes between the "l-Thou" relationship, which is direct, mutual, present, and open, and the "l-It," or subject-object, relation in which one relates to the other only indirectly and nonmutually, knowing and using the other. What is decisive is the relationship itself--whether it is sharing or possessing, imposing on the other or helping her to unfold, valuing the relationship in itself or valuing it only as a means to an end. Buber's I-Thou philosophy is concerned with the difference between mere existence and authentic existence, between being human at all and being more fully human, between remaining fragmented and bringing the conflicting parts of oneself into an active unity, between partial and fuller relationships with others. No one ever becomes a "whole person." But one may move in the direction of greater wholeness through greater awareness and fuller response in each new situation. The intrapsychic is only the accompaniment of the dialogue between person and person. What is essential is not what goes on within the minds of the partners in a relationship but what happens between them. For this reason, the dialogical view of the self is unalterably opposed to that psychologism that wishes to remove the reality of relationship into the separate psyches of the participants. "The inmost growth of the self does not take place, as people like to suppose today," writes Buber, "through our relationship to ourselves, but through being made present by the other and knowing that we are made present by him" (Buber, 1988, p. 61). Being made present as a person is the heart of what Buber calls confirmation. To understand confirmation, we must understand the distancing and relating through which we become selves in the first place. Underlying the I-Thou, as also the I-It relations, is that twofold movement of setting at a distance and entering into relationship that Buber makes the foundation of his philosophical anthropology (Buber, 1988, Chap. 2). Much pathology can be understood in terms of too great distancing or too close relating. Distancing is not I-It; rather I-It is the thickening and elaboration of the distance when one fails to complete the movement of distancing by entering into relation.

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Through distancing and relating we become unique selves, but this is not just a fulfillment of an inborn potentiality. We need to be confirmed by others in our uniqueness and our unique potentiality in order to become ourselves in our uniqueness. Confirmation is interhuman, but it is not simply social or interpersonal. Unless one is confirmed in one's uniqueness as the person one can become, one is only seemingly confirmed. The confirmation of the other must include an actual experiencing of the other side of the relationship so that one can imagine quite concretely what another is feeling, thinking, and knowing. This "inclusion," or imagining the real, does not abolish the basic distance between oneself and the other. It is rather a bold swinging over into the life of the person one confronts, through which alone I can make her present in her wholeness, unity, and uniqueness. Inclusion, or "imagining the real," must be distinguished from that empathy that goes to the other side of the relationship and leaves out one's own side and that identification that remains on one's own side and cannot go over to the other. Only the two sides together can produce that confirmation from the therapist that begins to replace the disconfirmation that the patient has experienced in family and community. This confirmation comes through understanding the patient from within and through going beyond this, as Hans Tr~b (1991) suggests, to that second stage when the demand of the community is placed on the patient. This demand enables the patient to go back into dialogue with those from whom he or she has been cut off. This experiencing of the other side is essential to the distinction that Buber makes between "dialogue," in which I open myself to the otherness of the person I meet, and "monologue," in which, even when I converse with her at length, I allow her to exist only as a content of my experience. Wherever one lets the other exist only as part of oneself, "dialogue becomes a fiction, the mysterious intercourse between two human worlds only a game, and in the rejection of the real life confronting him the essence of all reality begins to disintegrate" (Buber, 1985, p. 24). In "What Is Common to All" (Buber, 1988, Chap. 4), Buber unfolds the implications of Heraclitus' statement, "One should follow the common." To follow the common world that we build together through our interhuman "speech-with-meaning" does not mean that we have to conform. On the contrary, each of us where he or she is must stand our ground and make our unique contribution. Given this understanding of the common order, it is also possible to understand how we injure it. We all stand, says Buber, in an objective world of relatedness, and this objective relatedness can then rise to an actual existential relation to other people. It is this existential relation that we can injure.

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In "Guilt and Guilt Feelings" (Buber, 1988, Chap. 6) Buber distinguishes between guilt feelings born of neurotic guilt and real, or existential, guilt. Guilt feelings may be the result of the social climate, taboos, neurosis, or Freud's internalized superego. But there is also such a thing as real or existential guilt, guilt that you have taken on yourself as a person in a personal situation. Freud's guilt is repressed into the unconscious; you do not know it. But existential guilt you do know. Only it is possible that you no longer identify yourself with the person who committed the injury. Existential guilt also arises, writes Buber, from injuring the common order of existence, the foundation of which we know--at some level--to be the foundation of our own and of all human existence. Each of us understands--in terms of our family, our friendships, the people we work with, our social groups of whatever kind--what it means to injure the social realities in which we share. Buber puts forward three steps that can be taken toward overcoming existential guilt. The first is that I illuminate this guilt: I who am so different am nonetheless the person who did this. Second, we have to persevere in that illumination--not as an anguished self-torment but as a strong, broad light. If we were only guilty in relation to ourselves, the process might stop there. But we are always also guilty in relation to others. Therefore, we must take the third step of repairing the injured order of existence, restoring the broken dialogue through an active devotion to the world. If we have injured it, only we can restore it. We may not be able to find the person we injured: that person may be dead or the situation may be radically changed. Yet there are a thousand places where we can restore the injured order of existence, not just the one in which we injured it. It is just here, in the real guilt of the person who has not responded to the legitimate claim and address of the world that the possibility of transformation and healing lies. Guilt does not reside in the person, says Buber. Rather, one stands, in the most realistic sense, in the guilt that envelops one. Similarly, the repression of guilt and the neuroses that result from this repression are not merely psychological phenomena, but real events between persons. Existential guilt is thus an event of the "between" that arises from the sickness between person and person and that can be healed only by going from the ruptured dialogue to the resumption of dialogue. DIALOGUE AND UNIQUENESS

So far from being opposites, as is commonly thought, dialogue and the unique are necessary corollaries within the philosophy of the interhuman. By the unique I do not mean difference. Uniqueness is what makes a person or thing of value in itself, that which is unrepeatable and for which no

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other value can be substituted, that which is not a matter of usefu]ness or function but, however much it may exist in relation to others, is a center in itself. Both the different and the individual are known only in comparison and contrast while the unique is known only in and for itself. As applied to the human person, the unique is not purely descriptive-Where could we hope to isolate and identify it?--and still less purely normative--lt is the enemy of every general ideal that looks away from the concrete situation from which one starts. The unique is a concrete lifeevent, of value in itself. It is the inmost meaning of the "person" as distinct from the "individual." The unique is not an embodied Platonic idea or Aristotelian form. It is no a priori essence or destiny or mere chance. It is the movement of the person through time, the response of the person to situation, the interaction of the person with event. Its realization takes place through knowing and being known, calling and being called, through what I have called "the courage to address and the courage to respond" (M. S. Friedman, 1972, Chap. 17). It is our uniqueness yet it is not in us. It comes into being between us and what is not ourselves. We cannot possess it or claim it as an attribute of our nature or being. Yet it and it alone makes us unmistakably ourselves. The unique is known only through dialogue. Only in genuine dialogue do I relate and respond to the other for herself and for the sake of our relationship and not as a function of knowledge and use, comparison and contrast, reflection and analysis, education and exploitation. But the converse is also true. Every genuine dialogue is unique. An ever-renewed presentness and presence can be fully concrete and meaningful only insofar as it is unique. There is no essence of dialogue that can thread its way through the world of particulars as some ideal universal. The proper understanding of dialogue includes uniqueness; for it is only in uniqueness that there is real mutuality, presentness, and presence. Dialogue means a mutual sharing in reciprocal presentness of the unique. The unique implies otherness but otherness capable of entering into communion. The uniqueness of each of the partners of the dialogue is made up of, created, or formed by the uniqueness of this particular relationship, the uniqueness of which, in turn, is made up of created, or formed by the particular, present event of meeting. Yet each past event may become present again when it is taken up in its concrete uniqueness into a new present event. The new event is not identical with the old, but it carries it into reborn presentness. Because this is so, we may also say that the uniqueness of each of the partners of dialogue is included and revealed in the uniqueness of this particular relationship and the uniqueness of this particular relationship is included and revealed in the uniqueness of the particular, present event.

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The word person bridges over and unites three separate realities of personal existence. On the one hand, we speak of the mysterious imprint of uniqueness on an incessantly changing, varying process that would have no essential unity as an "1" were it not for this imprint. Second, however, the person finds her full reality in the present, and personality exists in actualized form only in the present. When we speak, as we must, of personality extending over time, it is the alternation between actual and potential personality that we mean. The existence of the person in time is not a smooth process but an alternation between moments of real presentness and other moments--of sleep, of semiconsciousness, of distraction, inner division, illness--when a person falls from actualized presentness into mere subsistence, or potentiality. Third, a person finds herself as person through going out to meet the other, through responding to the address of the other. She does not lose her center, her personal core, in an amorphous meeting with the other. If she sees through the eyes of the other and experiences the other's side, she does not cease to see through her own eyes and experience the relationship from her own side. A real person does not remain shut within herself or use her relations with other as a means to her own self-realization. She realizes herself as an "1," a person, through going out again and again to meet the "Thou." We are all persons, to a certain extent, by courtesy of one another. We call each other back into being persons when sleepiness, sickness, or malaise have divested us of our personhood. What makes us persons is the stamp of uniqueness, of personal wholeness, and this is not anything that can ever be looked at or grasped as an object. This stamp of uniqueness is not something we can know directly in ourselves. We know it of each other as we enter into dialogue, but we know it of ourselves only in that dim awareness that has to do with becoming more and more uniquely ourselves in responding to what is not ourselves (see M. S. Friedman, 1983, Chap. 2). THE TENSION BETWEEN PERSONAL CALLING AND SOCIAL ROLE

The paradox of what I call the "contract," of confirmation with strings attached, which originates in the family, becomes intensified and hardened as we move out into the social and economic roles that we must take upon ourselves to exist in human society. We realize our personal uniqueness only insofar as we answer the call that comes to us from the persons and situations that confront us. Each of us has need of the personal confirmation that can come only when we know our "calling"--our existence in the fullest sense of the term, as an answer to a call. No one is able simply

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to confirm oneself. One may be able to do without the admiration of crowds, but one cannot do without that silent dialogue, often internalized within oneself, through which one places one's effort within the context of a mutual contact with what is not oneself. We need to feel that our work is "true"--both as a genuine expression of the reality that we encounter in our lives and as a genuine response to some situation or need that calls us. Each one of us must risk oneself to establish oneself as the person that one is and risk failure in so doing. Paradoxically, this means that while the "calling" in its original meaning is an answer to a call, we have to take the first step ourselves and assert that we are called before the call comes. Then we may experience the sense of incongruity that comes when one part of ourselves is consciously "role-playing" while another part looks on and asks whether we can, in all good faith, identify ourselves with this role. If we can make this venture "stick," then we shall be confirmed by others in our "calling" and soon will come to identify ourselves so much with our social role that our self-image will be unthinkable without it. The person who enters this transition stage stands in the tension point between personal and social confirmation. She cannot resolve this tension by renouncing social confirmation, for no one can live without it. Everybody must play a social role both for the sake of economic livelihood and as the simple prerequisite for any sort of relations with other people in the family and society. On the other hand, she cannot resolve the tension by sacrificing personal confirmation; for this suppression of a basic human need results in an anxiety that may be more and more difficult to handle as the gap between person and role widens. To stand in this tension, however, is to insist that one's confirmation in society also be in some significant sense a confirmation of oneself as a unique person who does not fit into any social category or who in playing a social role does so in a unique way that is consonant with her personal uniqueness (M. S. Friedman, 1983, Chap. 7). HEALING THROUGH MEETING

Largely on the foundations Buber has laid has arisen "dialogical psychotherapy." By dialogical psychotherapy we mean a therapy centered on the meeting between the therapist and his or her client or family as the central healing mode, whatever analysis, role-playing, or other therapeutic techniques or activities may also enter in. If the psychoanalyst is seen as an indispensable midwife in bringing up material from the unconscious to the conscious, this is not yet "healing through meeting." Only when it is recognized that everything that takes place within therapy--free association, dreams, silence, pain, anguish--takes place as a reflection of the vital rela-

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tionship between therapist and patient do we have what may properly be called dialogical psychotherapy. An important problem that healing through meeting encounters is that of the limits of responsibility of the helper. Therapists open to the new vistas of healing through meeting will feel that more is demanded of them than is provided by their professional methods and their professional role. What is crucial is not the skill of the therapist but, rather, what takes place between the therapist and the client and between the client and other people--what Aleene Friedman calls "The Healing Partnership" (A. Friedman, 1992). Only as a partner can a person be perceived as an existing wholeness. To become aware of a person, Buber points out, means to perceive his or her wholeness as a person defined by spirit: to perceive the dynamic center that stamps on all utterances, actions, and attitudes the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible if, and as long as, the other is for me the detached object of my observation, for that person will not thus yield his or her wholeness and its center. It is possible only when he or she becomes present for me in genuine dialogue (Buber, 1988, Chap. 3). Another issue is the extent to which in healing through meeting we are talking about a two-sided event that is not susceptible to techniques in the sense of willing and manipulating in order to bring about a certain result. The basic element of healing, when it is a question not of some repair work but restoring the atrophied personal center, is healing through meeting. This is so because much of what we call "mental illness" comes from being disconfirmed or not being confirmed. It is also consonant with Buber's notion of the unconscious as the wholeness of the person before the differentiation and elaboration into psychic and physical, inner and outer. This applies to dreams too, which from this standpoint are never just the raw material of the unconscious but, upon being remembered, have already entered into the dialogue between therapist and client and between the client and others. The result of this approach is the possibility of having dialogues with our dreams themselves, as with any other person or thing that comes to meet us (M. S. Friedman, 1985, Chaps. 1, pp. 10-14). Therapy too rests upon the I-Thou relationship of openness, mutuality, presence, and directness. Yet it can never be fully mutual. There is mutual contact, mutual trust, and mutual concern with a common problem but not mutual inclusion. The therapist can and must be on the patient's side too and, in a bipolar relationship, imagine quite concretely what the patient is thinking, feeling, and willing. But the therapist cannot expect or demand that the patient practice such inclusion with him or her. Yet there is mutuality, including the therapist sharing personally with the client when that seems helpful. I speak in several of my books of "touchstones of reality" (Friedman,

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1972), those basic attitudes that are imprinted on us by signal events in our lives and that we bring with us to our meeting with new events. Although our touchstones of reality are unique to each of us, we are able to enter into a "dialogue of touchstones" in which we share life stances. Touching on the other's way of touching may itself become a touchstone of reality for us. In addition to this mutual dialogue of touchstones, there is also one that shares the normative limitation of mutuality that is true of all dialogical therapy, i.e., when the therapist can include and confirm the patient without the patient being able to "imagine the real" and experience the therapist's side of the relationship. Through his or her greater experience in inclusion and imagining the real the therapist enables the patient to go beyond the terrible either/or of remaining true to one's touchstones of reality at the cost of being cut off from the community or of entering into relation with the community at the cost of denying one's touchstones. The therapist must help the patient bring his or her touchstones of reality into dialogue with really other persons, beginning with the therapist him- or herself. A significant extension of the life of dialogue and of dialogical psychotherapy is the theory of "will and willfulness" developed under Buber's influence by the Sullivanian psychoanalyst Leslie H. Farber. Farber sees genuine will as an expression of real dialogue, arbitrary willfulness as a product of the absence of dialogue. The proper setting of wholeness is dialogue. When this setting eludes us, "we turn wildly to will, ready to grasp at any illusion of wholeness (however mindless or grotesque) the will conjures up for our reassurance." This is a vicious circle, for the more dependent a person becomes on the illusion of wholeness, the less she is able to experience true wholeness in dialogue. "At the point where he is no longer capable of dialogue he can be said to be addicted to his will." Willfulness then is nothing other than the attempt of will to make up for the absence of dialogue by handling both sides of the no longer mutual situation. No longer in encounter with another self, one fills the emptiness with one's own self, and even that self is only a partial one, its wholeness having disappeared with the disappearance of meeting. "This feverish figure, endlessly assaulting the company, seeking to wrench the moment to some pretense of dialogue, i s . . . the figure of man's separated will posing as his total self" (Farber, 1966, p. 57). REFERENCES

Buber, M. (1985). Between Man and Man. Trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith with an Introduction by Maurice Friedman. New York: Macmillan Paperbacks. Buber, M. (1988). The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy of the Interhuman. Ed.

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with an Introductory Essay (Chap. 1) by Maurice Friedman, trans, by Maurice Friedman and R. G. Smith. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. Farber, L. H. (1966). The Ways of the Will: Toward a Psychology and Psychopathology of the Will New York: Basic Books. Friedman, A. (1992). Treating Chronic Pain: The Healing Partnership. New York: Plenum, Insight Books. Friedman, M. S. (1972). Touchstones of Reality: Existential Trust and the Community of Peace. New York: E. P. Dutton. Friedman, M. S. (1983). The Confirmation of Otherness: In Family, Community, and Society. New York: Pilgrim Press. Friedman, M. S. (1985). The Healing Dialogue in Psychotherapy. New York: Jason Aronson. Paperback edition, Northvale, N J: Jason Aronson, 1994. Tffib, H. (1991 ). In Friedman, M. S. (1991). The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader. Ed. with Introductions and Conclusion and an extended updating Preface by Maurice Friedman. Atlantic Highlands, N J: Humanities Press International, pp. 497-505.