John Knapp Responds to Gustavo Guerra (letter to the editor)

I read with great interest Gustavo Guerra’s very kind review of Ken Womack’s and my Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and
Literary Study, (U. Of Delaware Press, 2003) in your March 2006 (12. 4) issue (pp. 230-232). In the interests of full disclosure, Gustavo was a doctoral student at Northern Illinois University some years ago and did his dissertation under my friend and my former Chair James Mellard, who had a gentile but decade-long disagreement with me about the relative merits of Lacanian and neo-Freudian psychoanalysis vs. (in
want of a better term) versions of empirical psychology for use in literary criticism. We have never really resolved these debates, and so I am not too surprised that Dr. Guerra has picked up his pen and continued the conversation. While I profoundly disagree with some of his assessments, I must say that his review was cogent and useful for me, because I now have a chance to respond not only to his review but to others who may be thinking along the same lines. Before one can nudge a dominating paradigm in any discipline to make room for some new and different thinking, one must first define how the new ideas are different from the old while, at the same time, expressing in some detail what it is that is new.

First, I would direct Gustavo to my essay in Mosaic 37.1 (March 2004): pp. 149-166, titled “Family Systems Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: A Comparative Critique.” In that essay, I detail answers, I believe, to almost all the issues he raises. Briefly, Family Systems Therapy (FST) was founded, in part, by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who became disenchanted with what I have called classical Freud, and so developed the theories and therapeutic practices that I discuss at some length in my Introduction to Reading. No wonder some of the language looks familiar, but it is so primarily in a nominal sense, just as Chomsky’s linguistics still uses words like subject, predicate, and object. But, language commonalities aside, Family Systems Therapy does not, as Gustavo suggests, depend on “some of the same Freudian principles [we] denigrate” as it tries to make a place for itself in literary criticism as the new kid on the block; my Mosaic essay makes that clear. Among the biggest differences: this system posits the sense of a family as a co-evolutionary eco-system, based metaphorically on such cybernetic principles as homeostasis vs. morpho-genesis, and expressed in transactional communication patterns among all members of the system.

Second, I am speaking of the classical Freud and his acolyte, Jacques Lacan, who are employed almost exclusively in the humanities; for humanists, 90 percent of their attention remains on one person or one character at a time. Many in the humanities have come late to interpersonal or inter-relational psychoanalysis and when they have, like Paula Marantz Cohen (1991), their theories tend to be influenced by variations (mother-infant; father-daughter) of early Object Relations. By contrast, most working psychoanalysts today are, with a few exceptions, eclectic and will borrow

Page 79

from almost anything that works. W. R.D. Fairbairn’s Object Relations theories, for example, were indeed the grandfathers and grandmothers for some early thinkers in Family Systems Therapy like James Framo and Samuel Slipp, but they and other Family Systems theorists and clinicians soon developed practices that went beyond the mother-child focus of early Object Relations, and then they (or therapists) responded by borrowing back, as it were, from their offspring. Indeed, to the extent that clinical psychoanalysts ignored Freud’s rejection of regular interaction between the rest of psychology and his own work, the clinical practices of both psychoanalysis and Family Systems Therapy became significantly enriched. That change has tended to be true everywhere but in literary criticism—until recently. Our book was one attempt of several to bring to the humanities what has long been true in actual clinical practice.

Again, I would like to thank Gustavo Guerra for a thoughtful and kindly review and I hope we can continue the debate in some other forum in the future.

Page 80