An Archaeology of the Analysing Instrument: Otto Isakower's Self-Experiment

TY - JOUR

T1 - An Archaeology of the Analysing Instrument

T2 - Otto Isakower's Self-Experiment

AU - Dawson, Benjamin

PY - 2023/8/30

Y1 - 2023/8/30

N2 - The article offers an intellectual reconstruction of Otto Isakower’s concept of the ‘analyzing instrument’, the vehicle by which the analyst’s mind is understood to become joined to the patient’s, each in a comparable state of regressed self-observation. This view of technique is shown to have grown out of Isakower’s pre-war research (shaped by the work of Paul Schilder and Paul Federn) on a variety of predormescent hallucination that still bears his name, ‘the Isakower phenomenon’. Primarily, however, it is Isakower’s amateur, apparently peripheral interest in the history and epistemology of science which was, the article argues, central to the evolution of his ideas. In particular, Isakower’s study of the scientific practices of self-observation and self-experimentation used by the nineteenth-century sensory physiologist, Johannes Müller, is shown to have been a decisive relay point between his earlier clinical research on hypnagogic states and his later reflections on technique. In underscoring the significance of that study, the article suggests that something of the transitional character of Müller’s scientific practices—his location on the threshold between Romantic and modern, positivist styles of investigating the senses—is retained in Isakower’s fascinating model of the analytic situation.

AB - The article offers an intellectual reconstruction of Otto Isakower’s concept of the ‘analyzing instrument’, the vehicle by which the analyst’s mind is understood to become joined to the patient’s, each in a comparable state of regressed self-observation. This view of technique is shown to have grown out of Isakower’s pre-war research (shaped by the work of Paul Schilder and Paul Federn) on a variety of predormescent hallucination that still bears his name, ‘the Isakower phenomenon’. Primarily, however, it is Isakower’s amateur, apparently peripheral interest in the history and epistemology of science which was, the article argues, central to the evolution of his ideas. In particular, Isakower’s study of the scientific practices of self-observation and self-experimentation used by the nineteenth-century sensory physiologist, Johannes Müller, is shown to have been a decisive relay point between his earlier clinical research on hypnagogic states and his later reflections on technique. In underscoring the significance of that study, the article suggests that something of the transitional character of Müller’s scientific practices—his location on the threshold between Romantic and modern, positivist styles of investigating the senses—is retained in Isakower’s fascinating model of the analytic situation.

U2 - 10.3366/pah.2023.0469

DO - 10.3366/pah.2023.0469

M3 - Article

SN - 1460-8235

VL - 25

SP - 189

EP - 221

JO - Psychoanalysis and History

JF - Psychoanalysis and History

IS - 2

ER -