Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory

by George E. Atwood

This is an important work, both for the psychology of personality and for psychoanalytic theory. The authors establish a broad, 'decentered' perspective . . . whose purpose is to integrate various theories of personality by acknowledging their inevitable subjectivity, and then using that subjectivity to demarcate the limits of each theory. They provide fascinating psychobiographical case studies of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank, in which they demonstrate the relation between the internal world of each author and the major preoccupations and motivational principles of each theory. They convincingly argue that the broad metapsychological abstractions in each theory are defensive or reparative reifications of the internal psychodynamics of each theorist. This book raises important issues and questions for readers at all levels. (Stephen A. Mitchell, Ph.D. Library Journal)

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1977

Reviews

[Richard Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Faces in the Clouds was pretty good, so I decided to check out its sequel, Faces in a Cloud. Forewarning: Practicing psychoanalysts are this book’s target audience, and as someone who’s never sat in a chair of any therapeutic variety, I may not be the prime candidate for review. But because I’m quite partial to the idea that philosophers’ philosophies are not produced in vacuums (which they’d have us believe) but invariably and significantly influenced by their personal circumstances, so I could not resist the same thesis applied to psychologists’ psychologies. Which is, indeed, that of this collaboration:

It is our contention that the subjective world of the theorist is inevitably translated into his metapsychological conceptions and hypotheses regarding human nature, limiting the generality of his theoretical constructions and lending them a coloration expressive of his personal existence as an individual. [p.5]

Psychobiography is the name of the game with Atwood and Stolorow, who dig into primary and secondary sources on each of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and Otto Rank to unearth a series of their formative life experiences, then detail the formal correspondences to each of their respective conceptions about what is universal in human personality structure and development. Although the whole effort is rather convincing, I suspect any competent author could construct similar arguments from cherry-picked patterns of behavior. Additionally, what for the duo constitutes “formative,” in my reading, analogizes to “childhood and adolescent traumata.” But this is not necessarily the case, as in Pete Docter's epochal masterwork Inside Out, which quite irrefutably demonstrated that joyous moments can be equally reifying.

The theoretical constructions of Freud and Reich stemmed from urgent attempts to protect and/or restore images of emotionally significant others; those of Jung and Rank from an equally urgent need to sustain and/or repair a precarious self-organization. [p.174-175]

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Accepting the authors’ frame of investigation, however, these conclusions are indeed borne out. And because one would be hard-pressed to refute the reasoning by which they were drawn, I will instead comment on the frame, which is couched within Heinz Kohut’s own, more contemporaneously accepted school, self psychology—Kohut who, within the confines of these pages, is never himself, as it were, placed on the couch.

At least Atwood and Stolorow are smart enough to acknowledge the limitations of their own metapsychology. What sort of person, after all, becomes a psychoanalyst (or philosopher) of any legitimacy without an attitudinal attunement, born or bred, towards what is before, behind, beyond? In the last section of the last chapter, where the two tout their theory of intersubjectivity, the pair foreground it by noting:

We have proposed that every theory of personality universalizes the theorist’s personal solution to the nuclear dilemmas and crises of his own life history. Clearly, this generalization, if valid, must also apply to us. Upon reflection, we can recognize that the idea of intersubjectivity itself has attained the status of a universal within our framework. [p.189]

And proceeding—but only in the broadest sense (no personal details whatsoever)—to describe, in the space of a few sentences, with language that reeks of post-hoc rationalization, their own psychological “traumata.” Of course I’m being needlessly harsh, perhaps of some paradoxical, pathological, masochistic need to discredit the beliefs to which I am most partial. Yes, I confess, I’m a card-carrying intersubjectivist, no matter what language game within which it situates itself. It’s the way of the world.

A serious confrontation with a theory of personality awakes a whole pattern of positive and negative subjective resonance in the individual, and his eventual attitudes toward the material will be profoundly affected by its degree of compatibility with his own personal reality. [p.7]

In the spirit of pure transparency, I found myself identifying with several of the psychologists as here characterized, but against said spirit I will emphatically not be putting on display the particular sections I highlighted, which would be a more pornographic exercise than the already quite explicit breadcrumbs I’ve left glistening across the technosphere. As to my personal metapsychology, insofar as one exists, it is the cobbled-together Frankenchild of various frameworks and makes claims to neither universality nor self-consistency; attempting to elucidate at this juncture would end in a trash fire. Nevertheless I must reveal a desire to be, as it were, revealed to myself (at the very least), for why else would I bother doing all this? By definition, intersubjectivity requires other subjects. So, dear readers, tell me—tell me who I am.

Favorite quotes
“[P]ersonality theories contain many concepts which cannot under any circumstances be validated (or invalidated); these are the reified metapsychological superstructures presumed to encompass and ultimately to determine the human condition.” [p.11]

“Every theory of personality can be shown to contain elements deriving not only from the theorist’s personal world, but also from the external social field of ideas and concepts within which he lives and works.” [p.13]

“We are proposing the concept of reification – or more broadly, the concretization of experience – as a ubiquitous defensive strategy appearing not only in systems of personality theory, but in a wide variety of psychological products, ranging from grand philosophical ideologies to highly idiosyncratic individual ‘personal myths’ about the nature of the universe and human existence.” [p.175]

Otto Rank I, with zero prior familiarity with the man, found to be a character of absolute hilarity, not least because the authors felt the need to insert (the only time this happens in the entire book, highlighting its notability) this personal aside:

(Incidentally, we notice in ourselves an at times considerable irritation brought on not only by Rank’s extravagant intellectual claims, but also by his contempt for other thinkers, manifested in the ease with which he dismisses theories that are in opposition to his own.) [p.152]

Rank (age 21, Daybooks p.52): “Now I see everything clearly: the world process is no longer a riddle. I can explain the whole culture, yes, I can explain everything. What shall I be able to do with the remainder of my life?” [p.151-152]

“Even if [B.F. Skinner’s] hypothesized private and covert behavioral processes could be shown to exist, perhaps amplified on the high-science instrumentation of the future, the most one could expect to observe would be objective correlates, and not, as he implies, the experiences themselves.” [p.20]

“The objectivist deprecation of personal bias and subjective thinking is itself an ideological and subjective stance, and one that is by no means shared by all scientists (e.g., the analysis of the personal dimension of scientific knowing by Polanyi 1958). Furthermore it intrudes upon the conduct of personality research, limiting its empirical domain, trivializing the problems it studies, and excluding a quest for broader theoretical understanding.” [p.23]

“The exigencies of objectivist experimentation further require that the variables of interest be ‘operationalized,’ a procedure which more often than not in modern personality research introduces a profound degree of distortion and ambiguity into the issues being investigated. Ultimately the impact of these factors on the field as a whole produces an inversion of priorities, wherein the methods deemed acceptable begin to dictate the problems being studied rather than the other way about.” [p.22]

“The third distinguishing feature of the case study approach is that it is clinical and interpretive (rather than experimental or deductive). It advances the understanding of individuals not by the testing of delimited hypotheses arrived at on some independent basis, but through a process of interrogation and construction evolved from the empirical materials at hand. Repeatedly it raises the interpretive question of what the experiential and life-historical context is within which various regions of the person’s behavior have meaning.” [p.28]

Postscript
Jacques Lacan, Félix Guattari, R.D. Laing, all figures of intense interest, all well within the authors’ historical reach (book first published 1979), and a whole host of other colorful 20th-century mind-obsessives are not even touched here, although the Atwood and Stolorow methodology can be applied to them in equal measure. I will juicily gobble up any attempt at psychobiographizing these or related individuals, and no, I’m not going to do it myself.

P.P.S.
Less than two weeks before the mighty American nation learned that Bill Clinton would continue earning $400k per annum for the four years following, in the Texan metropolis of Dallas, a medical bookstore by the name of Majors Scientific Books, now closed, eternally memorialized by its 2-star Yelp review, sold my copy of Faces in a Cloud for the grand total of $51.26, then $51.26, now $78.41, to one Robert Bennett, who, it appears, by the well-kept condition of the pages, didn’t actually read the thing, and who, it appears, would have benefited from doing so, but who decided, instead, regrettably (for him), luckily (for me), to resell it to some random Half Price Books, god-knows-where, where an employee was tasked, at some point, with listing its entire catalog, of which this book was now part, on the online catalog of a still-extant retailer, Amazon, then tiny, now titanic, to be purchased some time later by this your intrepid reader for a grand total of $12.80, then $12.80, now $12.80.

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should anyone ever ask me if I finish books that bore me, I will point to this book and say "Yes."
The scholarship unimpressed me. The writing was something I'd expect from an author with no academic training, as I got a sense of academic-wannabe during reading, as if the book was an attempt at science without really knowing how it's done.
An upside is that the book may provide some authors - especially those interested in the deep psychology of their characters - with ideas for character development and revelation.