Michael Horne, MD | In Memorium

I was lucky to be an undergraduate at the University of Sydney during the 60s when it was thought that works of literature were best studied as phenomena in their own right and not as authored products of history or culture. This stance allowed the text to speak for itself and so facilitated the emergence of the polysemic nature of the work as a whole. This reading method was the unwitting origin of the contextual rather than foundational approach that I now take towards understanding the ‘texts’ of my analysands.

In the inner city hospital in which I did my medical training I began to see the value of being simultaneously present to and outside of the dramas in which my patients and I were immersed. During my psychiatric training this gradually evolved into a rudimentary form of phenomenologically oriented psychotherapy.

When I came to Stanford University Medical School for post psychiatric residency training I was introduced to British Object Relations, to a more contemporary view of Freud than I had received in Medical School, and to Analytical Psychology. As I studied Jung’s work more closely I realized it was an object relations theory with the addition of the postulate of a largely unconscious change agent ‘the Self’. This phenomenon was to me ‘the second therapist in the room’, the manifestation of which has saved the day for me on many occasions.

I entered training at the San Francisco Jungian Institute full of confidence that I had found the ‘right’ analytic theory.  However, to my surprise I found that Analytical Psychology was riven by theoretically based schisms. Since my days in residency in Australia I had been reading and taking classes in phenomenology and other aspects of philosophy and I began to apply this point of view to analysis by making the heretical claim that philosophy was prior to psychoanalysis. This topic has subsequently become my main clinical and theoretical interest.

My priority now is to move more deeply into the over all work of the philosophers. Interestingly they are all dead and as of now there is no one to take their places. These philosophers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. During their lifetimes all of them eschewed the traditional approaches. Instead they worked in ways that were experience near in a variety of situations.

I now see my work as being related to the minutia of all things. This brings a whole new outlook to the most omnipresent concept the dyad deals with; that of reality. When I work with my co-workers in the dyad we see together that there are multiple realities that have become ossified and this is where the dyad does it’s work to open a space in which to wonder.