Entry 1: (purpose and introductory ramblings)
Entry 2: (Some collected notes on Transference, Neurosis, Internal Objects, and Repetition Compulsion)
Entry 3: But something else that is on my mind - representation.
Entry 4: Psychoanalysis in plain language (some notes on neurosis, character / personality, defense, etc.)(this is an early version of a section of a larger work on Nick Land, Mark Fisher, U/Acc, Suicide and Homicide)
Entry 5: Suggested Readings
Entry 6: Emotional Reason for this Blog
Entry 7 - Self Analysis
Entry 8 - Why (or how, IDK) psychoanalysis fell (hard, to its death) out of fashion (or became fashionable at the expense of substance, IDK), not to mention some other stuff (follower requested)
Entry 9 - Omnipotence and Desire
Entry 10: The Empty Signifier of Evidence Based (This is going in the psychoanalysis blog, but its meaningfully connected to all my work on this blog especially here)
Entry 11: A Brief Dive Into Kleinian Object Relations Theory
Entry 12: Some Elaborations on Earlier Polemics (Etiology and Authority)
Entry 13: Kantianism in Psychoanalysis (13.1 to elaborate on Kant)
Entry 13.1: Kant in Psychoanalysis
Entry 13.2 Kantian Model of Mind in Psychoanalysis (Ron Britton)
Entry 13.3 Kantian Model of Mind in Psychoanalysis
Entry 14: Some Notes on Freud: A Primer for Andre Green
Entry 15 - Follower Request (Jenkinson on Death)
Entry 16 - A Polemic for a polemic
Entry 17 - Reader Requests - Dream Analysis? Silence as an analytic technique?
Entry 18: Zizek's Vulgar Marxism Confused for Psychoanalytic Praxis?
Entry 19: Marx and Green / Practice, Theory and Cybernetic Feedback
Entry 20: Andre Green and The Work of the Negative (drives, objects, and metapsychology)
Entry 21: OCD...
Entry 22: Group Psychology and Herd Mentality
Entry 23: Notes on Diagnosis
Entry 24: Short Fragmented Notes on Lacan's Mirror Stage
Entry 25: Notes on Mental Illness, Drive Theory, and Reality TV
Entry 26: Getting the Juices Flowing Again (On Production)
Entry 27: Some Notes on Dream Analysis as Materialism
Entry 28: Blog-reader Response
Entry 29: 'Lacan Ruined Psychoanalysis'
Entry 30: Epidemics, Epistemics, and Ethics - or Praxis
Entry 31: Some Thoughts On JA Miller's 'Docile to Trans'
Entry 1: (purpose and introductory ramblings)
A: This blog will
- correct misconceived polemics regarding psychoanalytic theory, concepts, and technique
- clarify unintentional mistakes about psychoanalytic theory, concepts, and technique
- map the above onto real, lived experience without deprecating the nature of the thought ramble and roam
- proceed chronologically/alphabetically/genealogically (but will proceed by my own desire)
- use citations (but will include names of thinkers and texts)
- be exceptionally in depth, critical, or in any way exhaustive
- people who want to learn more about psychoanalysis in general
- people who want to challenge their already critical notions of psychoanalysis
- people who want to get an idea of the way psychoanalysis critiques itself
- (No one has to have any pre-knowledge of any philosophy, psychology, or psychoanalysis)
- I read many books from all fields and publishers, but mainly books published by Semiotext(e), Repeater, Verso, University of Minnesota Press, and Urbanomic. These publishers and the series they produce (Forerunners First Ideas, Theory Out of Bounds, Intervention Series, Foreign Agents, Redactions, Collected Writings, etc.), as well as the consistency of inter-textuality and self-referentiality that is unintentionally produced between these series and publishing houses, tends to create a broad-stroke narrative of psychoanalysis as;
- 1: some archaic practice terribly disconnected from any worthwhile thought;
- 2: a solely Lacanian or hardline Freudian affair;
- 3: a leftist theoretical apparatus for leveraging a revolution and performing critique
***
What is psychoanalysis?
A critical theory of mind (epistemological) and a technique of working with people (methodological) to reduce dystonic symptoms (things the patient or analysand identifies in themselves as not liking and wanting to learn more about) while helping people develop dynamic tools to interface with life and its demands as they arise (not necessarily the common place critique that psychoanalysis simply prepares people to better function within a hegemonic society, or be better capitalist, etc.).
Psychoanalysis, despite it being the object of attack from Marxists, should please Marxists considering it is one of the few fields in which the theory and praxis are directly connected, but more on this later. For now, the approach of psychoanalysis actually lies somewhere between the left's positive idea of psychoanalysis - that the analyst helps the analysand become a critical anti-capitalist force in society - and the left's negative idea of psychoanalysis - that, with its emphasis on money and representation, it not only fails to produce revolutionary potential but in fact suppresses (or oppresses) revolutionary potential by reducing polyvocality (many voices, having many ideas, many associations, many meanings) to one static symbol (you say you want to become a better writer, but it seems to me your interest in maintaining control of the pen is really an interest in controlling the power of the penis and anally retaining and purifying your work in an obsessional manner, blah blah blah).
Contemporary psychoanalysis always sees things on multiple registers (see Bucci's 'referential model') - the patient wishes to learn to write better. What is it that keeps them from being what they want to be? Could this also be a surface manifestation of a deeper feeling of inadequacy? Could inadequacy be related to early childhood experiences as much as it is related to here-and-now social situations? The answer is more often than not yes on all accounts (psychoanalysis endorses affirmation, not negation).
On a different note, very simply, psychoanalysis aims (not unlike Nietzschean philosophy) at helping the analysand unpack what is their value or voice and what is a value or voice that they have inherited from someone or something else without question. In this way psychoanalysis helps people create values that match their lived experiences.
- My own example: As a child my father would repeatedly bash 80s music. Thus, I grew up with the notion that 80s music was low-quality, low-talent, and insincere due to its use of synthetic instruments (drum machines, keyboards, etc.). As I began to undergo analysis myself, I was able to begin to question this value and in time I found that I quite enjoyed a large portion of 80s music. This was my father's value that had no real lived connection to my own experiences. Upon realizing I liked 80s music I retrospectively discovered that I had secretly enjoyed many 80s hits as a child, but had hidden it from my father, or used irony to distance myself from a true enjoyment. The same idea on a more 'serious' level: I was raised as a bleeding heart liberal. At some point in my graduate career, watching a rerun of Stephen Colbert's political show, I had the thought 'this isn't funny, its just a disingenuous strawman of the right's attempt at making sense of their world.' At this point I began questioning my dogmatic leftism and am currently in some uncharted territory of political ambiguity....
More concretely: Psychoanalysis, broken down (or analyzed) into the basic words, means the analysis of psychic contents.
To analyze simply means to break down into parts, or to follow a line of thinking back from a larger item (macro or molar, reified or ossified) to two or more smaller items. Psychic contents simply means the stuff that appears or is experienced as internal.
Internal / external is a dichotomy important to psychoanalysis (as we will see later when exploring the major theorists) despite the fact that internal and the external are hotly debated concepts outside the psychoanalytic milieu (starting with Kant and his transcendental critique which roots things like space, time, order, synthesis, etc. as internal functions of varying interacting faculties and categories, to later topics of debate between sociology and psychology and the limits each field of study was willing to admit to or polemically assign to the other, to much later works like that of Deleuze and Guattari who work to dissolve the hard and fast difference between the inside and the outside, a trajectory they take up following Freud's description in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a primitive organism and its development from inanimate surface tension in inorganic matter to a soft inner space that develops a crust as to defend against overwhelming tension states thus forming an inside and an outside, to most recently the work of thinkers like Mark Fisher, Nick Land, Robin Mackay who, in synthesizing many of the thinkers who came before them, emphasize the importance of thinking in terms of impersonal flows of energy on [non-mystical] cosmological and geological scales).
If this was confusing, do not fret. We will expand on this at a later date.
Tune in for tomorrow's post where I will clarify some of what was said here as well as introduce some new material...
Entry 2: (Some collected notes on Transference, Neurosis, Internal Objects, and Repetition Compulsion)
Psychoanalysis starts in the late 1800s with Freud and Breuer's study of hysteric women. With hysterics - and we don't have to put stock into the term, but simply have to use heuristically for the time being - it quickly becomes evident that the symptomology cannot be reduced to medical explanations or illnesses. F and B surmise: So, if medical treatment is either inappropriate, or due to there being no medical ailment, useless, perhaps we should investigate the patient's understanding of their experiences and see what can be learned.
Through talking, some symptoms seem to cease or become reduced. Thus, the talking cure is born.
Through talking, some symptoms seem to cease or become reduced. Thus, the talking cure is born.
Next, with these women, Freud and Breuer begin to experience something they will later conceptualize as transference, i.e. when the patient assumes certain facts about the doctor and has certain feelings about these assumed facts that do not seem to arise from having spent time or having gotten to know the doctor. These are the experiences of the patient being aroused through association and then projected upon the doctor. This happens daily in all our lives. We get a warm feeling from someone who we have never met who may not have done something particularly warm, and, upon reflection, see that they remind us of a loved one. Ex: a coworker of mine, younger, seems to have fond platonic feelings for me very quickly (we 'hit it off' with ease and maintain a good friendship despite no longer working similar shifts together). It turns out this coworker has an older brother about the same age as me whom the coworker is in good standing with. The coworker has had positive relations with an older male which has seemingly transferred to our work relationship.
On transference: to be brief,
Freud’s oeuvre can be summed up as ‘You are not having a reaction to me here in
the moment, you are reacting to an event or person from your past.’ For
psychoanalysis the present is dictated by a model consisting of dynamically
interacting internal objects unconsciously predicated and developed on
rigidified and ossified experiences of the past (I have had a good experience with my older brother, so if a coworker reminds me of an older brother via association, I am likely to lean towards having a positive relationship).
The concept was
originally termed "transference neurosis" by Jung. Like Freud, Jung’s
oeuvre was something like ‘if one is introverted, one should learn to be more
extroverted; if one is extroverted, one should learn to be more introverted.
Thus, one should be omniverted.’ That is, for psychoanalysis, ultimately one
should be able to call upon the appropriate tools (ideas, thoughts and
feelings) to deal with whatever situation is at hand. Dynamism and active position over
stasis and reaction.
Similarly, neurosis,
when it appears as a concept separate from transference neurosis, is essentially a response to an event that is not necessarily appropriate to the event – or
more accurately, a limited response in relation to a previously psychically
solidified context, an internal object, rather than a present reality. In other
words, it is reactionary, responding to a
stale stereotype from the past. For example, a patient of mine has social
anxiety despite being in a safe environment full of friendly people. He cannot
help but avoid social exchanges, and when confronted with a stranger’s out
reached handshake gesture, seizes up or begins to sweat profusely. This patient
has only a few tools to deal with the situation at hand, tools build on past experiences (or imagined experiences, which we will cover when we get into drive theory). After psychoanalysis
with myself where the patient is exposed to the possibility of new ideas,
thoughts, and feelings through a variety of different interventions, the
patient can pull from a wider reservoir of possible responses previously
unthought or foreclosed. I reiterate: the neurotic is reactionary - earlier
traumas from the there-and-then are compulsively repeated and enacted in
response to a variety of otherwise nontraumatic stimuli in the here-and-now (Freud's repetition compulsion), whereas the analyzed
patient may muster the appropriate tools to respond to the situation at hand.
I lied...I need more time to appropriately cover the models of mind as they vary across psychoanalysts...
------
D and G rip psychoanalysis a new one
Isn't psychoanalysis silly or bad because it reduces multiplicities and variations to single representations? Isn't representation old news?
Yes and no.
Gone is the old positivist psychoanalysis that looked for 'real' material links between an object and its possible symbolic meaning. Here to stay, following the hermeneutic turn, is the kind of Kantian (synthetic, concerned with internal models of experience and knowledge) psychoanalysis Bion and Felix Guattari practiced.
What this means is that the psychoanalytic experience is about creating links or connections, not necessarily tracing things back to the past (though it can be this), based on the patient's material. Meaning is made with the analyst, not uncovered.
In a good analytic situation, 'overcoding' (the analyst taking the analysand's material and re arranging it, squashing the patient's voice / subjectivity) rarely happens, but in the cases where it does happen, it is used only to help the patient further de or un code (re-territorialization in the name of de-territorialization).
Analysts have long since given up the technique of telling the patient how things are and instead get much more interested in their 'psychic reality,' to use an old Freudian / Jungian term. Some time is spent learning about the person's experiences and the way they make sense of the world. When the patient becomes interested in the analyst to an extent that they seek input, the analyst asks questions to understand the function of the patient asking. When a consensus is met - often without it being an explicit statement between both parties - the patient and therapist can begin co-creating meaning.
This might all seem like jargon, but I'll keep picking away until it makes sense....
Convoluted sentence inbound: I realize I feel like I imagine people of color or people of a certain gender feel when someone who is not of that in-group has strong opinions one way or another about something of important value to that in-group (for example, when people of color say white people shouldn't get to decide what is or isn't racist; when woman say that men shouldn't pass laws about reproductive rights, etc.).
I don't seek the same legitimacy or authority, nor claim the same struggle as these groups (I don't want to identify as to avoid equating the object of my feeling - psychoanalysis - with the object of their feeling - race or gender - for a number of reasons) but I do think the feelings may be the same or similar.
What gives all these philosophers any right to pretend to get psychoanalysis enough to criticize it?
If you haven't been analyzed or trained analytically, one really has little grasp on the actual clinical literature - which tends to stay pretty confined to clinically trained psychoanalytic circles - and how the theory - which often does leak into other circles - is actually applied to clinical matters with real people.
On the one hand, a lot of thinkers just use psychoanalysis for a stand in for something that is wrong and outdated - 'you can't just psychoanalyze this or that' or 'psychoanalysis would say this, but we say that...' (more specific examples to come in later posts). That is, psychoanalysis is degraded. On the other hand, a lot of people want to call themselves psychoanalysts but seem to have never reflected on their own feelings in relation to an other's, their own process of thinking, their own biases, and in many cases, have never sat with a patient. That is, psychoanalysis is glorified as a purely intellectual tool for doing this or that.
To use another comparison - albeit an absolutely cringe one - my profession is not your costume.
What is an internal object, you ask?
Freud develops the concept but it is Melanie Klein who really runs with it. We will get to that later. For now we will relate the idea of an internal object to the discussion of 'voice / value' form entry 1. Here is how I sometimes explain this to my patients (when they are interested and ready to hear it in a way that is both intellectually and emotionally relevant to their treatment):
As a little baby, one has the impulse to do as they please. Pick up things, put them in your mouth, run around, poop and pee wherever. Then comes a time where forces in your life - first, often mom and dad, then the school and the outside world (generalized forms of mom and dad) - say 'no.' Prohibitions are put on actions so that one can become a civilized member of society.
As development of the organism continues to unfold, the 'nos' from the outside get more complex. They turn into moral and ethical mandates as opposed to ones of simple survival or cleanliness (no, young infant, you may not put that Lego piece in your mouth, no you cannot poop on the counter) . Ex: "Jimmy, you should share with your brother. You're being selfish" or "You're embarrassing me right now, stop that," things parents regularly, when overstimulated, say to their children.
Overtime the sentence, internalized by the young child, loses it original enunciator and context while the affective value sticks. Through psychoanalysis, the patient is helped to reclaim the enunciation. Patient's walk around with self-attacking statements in their heads - after trying too hard to fit in or failing at a social situation, a patient tells himself internally "oh you idiot, why did you do that. You're so stupid. Might as well hang yourself." This is a sentence which has lost its original enunciator. The original statement, spelled out, is "I, your father, think you, my daughter, are stupid for not being able to perform to my adult standards." This is of course an abstracted and reconstructed statement of something more like "why did you do that, c'mon, you should know better" which, as language theory tells us, contains an implied 'I' ("I think what you did is hard to make sense of, I think you should know better") and affectively - as language is a vehicle for affect (in general, and especially with children in a family situation) more than it is a medium for cognitive or intellectual information - communicates a message that is felt to the child as an attack or critique (you're stupid). Thus, often I will ask - 'is that Jonny's belief or someone else's.'
Tune in for the next installment which, by Twitter suggestion, will cover a "straightforward comparisons (ideally with diagrams) between each theory's (topological) conception of mind, starting with Freud's 1898 "interpretation of dreams" model and moving forward from there."
I lied...I need more time to appropriately cover the models of mind as they vary across psychoanalysts...
Entry 3: But something else that is on my mind - representation.
This will be a short addition....more tomorrow....------
D and G rip psychoanalysis a new one
Isn't psychoanalysis silly or bad because it reduces multiplicities and variations to single representations? Isn't representation old news?
Yes and no.
Gone is the old positivist psychoanalysis that looked for 'real' material links between an object and its possible symbolic meaning. Here to stay, following the hermeneutic turn, is the kind of Kantian (synthetic, concerned with internal models of experience and knowledge) psychoanalysis Bion and Felix Guattari practiced.
What this means is that the psychoanalytic experience is about creating links or connections, not necessarily tracing things back to the past (though it can be this), based on the patient's material. Meaning is made with the analyst, not uncovered.
In a good analytic situation, 'overcoding' (the analyst taking the analysand's material and re arranging it, squashing the patient's voice / subjectivity) rarely happens, but in the cases where it does happen, it is used only to help the patient further de or un code (re-territorialization in the name of de-territorialization).
Analysts have long since given up the technique of telling the patient how things are and instead get much more interested in their 'psychic reality,' to use an old Freudian / Jungian term. Some time is spent learning about the person's experiences and the way they make sense of the world. When the patient becomes interested in the analyst to an extent that they seek input, the analyst asks questions to understand the function of the patient asking. When a consensus is met - often without it being an explicit statement between both parties - the patient and therapist can begin co-creating meaning.
This might all seem like jargon, but I'll keep picking away until it makes sense....
Entry 3.1: A Few More Quick Notes on Representation
A lot of crit theory critiques of psychoanalysis are concerned with its model of representation.
Representation is bad. Symbolic value is bad. Significaiton is bad. The real is good. blah blah blah.
To an extent, there is a profundity to the critique here. Overly simplifying a patient's communications, or reducing their experiences to static and tired symbols and linguistic meanings can, to use Guattari's word, impotentize the patient and, ultimately, collude with the part of the patient that wants to avoid having feelings or exploring intolerable ideas. Furthermore, to rely on the Freudian lexicon and insist on strange and absurd interpretations that do not fit the context of the patient and their inner and outer world is to simply mis understand the 'analysis' part of the field while lapsing into dogma.
HOWEVER, very simply put, to critique psychoanalysis for its representational or symbolic tendencies is a flaccid critique that doesn't really interact with psychoanalysis. Its the equivalent of going to a horror movie and critiquing it for not having enough romantic drama (or being too scary). You don't go to a horror film for romantic drama. In abstract terms, its like saying that red isn't loud enough, square isn't bright enough, etc. In more technical terms, to critique psychoanalysis for representation and symbolism (tied to language) is to commit what Kant would call a categorical error.
Similarly, this is why Bion - a hardline Kantian - says that is incorrect to critique psychoanalysis for not being 'scientific enough.' He says, paraphrasing of course, 'psychoanalysis can't be not scientific enough, it can only be or not be psychoanalytic enough.'
So, when critics critique psychoanl. for being these things, they are just saying it should be something else other than what it is. What the critics really mean is that 'psychoanalysis thinks representation and symbolism are important for helping people and understanding the human mind' which crit theory disagrees with and says 'but, in reality, there is alot to the world other than the representational.' A psychoanalyst would agree with this. Yes, there are other ways of viewing the mind, but when one is doing psychoanalysis, one operates under the premise that things can be represented and that it can be of help to the person.
This is why Guattari conceptualized a 'schizoanalysis' which was a practice of psychoanalysis, but with its critiques incorporated into it (a meta-analysis of psychoanalysis)...
Entry 4: Psychoanalysis in plain language (some notes on neurosis, character / personality, defense, etc.)
(this is an early version of a section of a larger work on Nick Land, Mark Fisher, U/Acc, Suicide and Homicide)
In addition to the
theory, Psychoanalysis is something best experienced as both an analyst and an
analysand. True to the theories of psychoanalysis itself, the idiosyncratic
concepts often don’t ‘click’ until they are affectively obtained, that is, felt
in the body and enacted with an other who has the fortitude to contain and
interpret the enactment meaningfully, or, similarly, felt in the body,
processed as emotion, and expressed as language. With that said, I will try to
condense my own personal experiences as a patient and therapist, as well as
years of literature research, into a few pages with the intention of
demonstrating accelerationism’s overlooked consistency with the therapeutic
aspects of psychoanalysis. Broad strokes will be used to cover large tracts of
ground quickly which often has the effect of reifying large molar aggregates,
though this is not the intention, and words will not be minced in any attempt
to protect the reader’s feelings, keep the reader’s interest, or teach
newcomers. This is a pain gauntlet, not a textbook.
I am not a
Schopenhauerian pessimist, believer in the resentful Freudian death drive, or any
of that other high school existentialist-nihilist type nonesense, however, it
is a fact that being alive, despite its abundant pleasures and joys, and even
with the abandonment of harmful overreaching moralism, is at its core an
intolerable frustration that the somatic material – not to mention the mental
circuitry being as it is an incorporeal feedback abstraction of this somatic
material – struggles gravely to process. In fact, it is, by its overwhelmingly
stimulating nature, never fully processed and thus there exists an excess of
intensities which are at all times overflowing and collecting into reservoirs
of surplus which require, not necessarily discharge (as mechanistic models are
outdated), but investment and expenditure.
Take, for simplicities
sake, the average human organism. It’s birth into the world constitutes an exit
from a state of more or less immediate and unconscious comfort and
gratification via the womb. Or, in other words, a state of low frustration. Once
outside the womb the infant is required to act, though still minimally, in
accordance with an outside. There is a mouth to use, a nipple to latch onto, a
body to position in space as to minimize discomfort (all frustrations, what card
carrying Nietzschean from Freud’s early inner circle Otto Rank referred to as ‘birth
trauma’). Still, however, the infant is, hopefully to an extent, the center of
attention. The adults in its world not only organize the object world as to be
conducive to the infant’s development – baby proofing the house, appropriate
lighting, sound, temperature, etc. – but they also respond to its needs by taking
on the bulk of the responsibility, i.e. basic caretaking. As time progresses,
this infant is required to take on more actions and responsibilities, and
slowly becomes less and less the center of attention. Eventually the child must
come to terms, on some register at least, that the parents aren’t his or her
sole possession, nor his or her sole provider of attention, and that they may
not always give all their attention to the child. As the child becomes even
older he or she realizes that not only do the parents pay attention to each
other at the expense of the child at times, but that others in the world exist,
and that the objects and subjects of the world aren’t determined or controlled
by the child’s will, wishes, or center of agency. That is, growing up is a slow
process of building frustration whereupon the outside topples residual feelings
of omnipotence which originally helped the infant survive. As developmental
psychologists rightly show, children do gain mastery and agency, but whether or
not this sense of control ever fills the wound torn open by birth is up for
debate.
Now, how exactly the
individual navigates this wound essentially leads to character, or defensive
psychic structure, i.e. mental illness. Too much time has been spent trying to
find the ‘origins’ of mental illnesses as if there is some hidden secret to be
unlocked. Mental illness is, at its core, a resolution to a conflict that
becomes reified, ossified, and inappropriately used as a static tool to
approach dynamic situations that do not call for that static tool. In other
words, somewhere along our development a challenge presented itself that
required some kind of solution to continue living and the solution was clung to
as time went on. For example, a child feels – and the feeling may have to do
with internal sensations, i.e. drives, or external objects, or both - that his
household is dangerous, that if he is seen or noticed he will be the object of
ridicule, criticism, attack, or worse, and thus, mostly in an unconscious
manner, the child acts in a way that reduces the likelihood of receiving attention.
He now flies under the radar, increasing his chances of survival. This child
grows up to sit at the edges of the room, shy, introverted. This personality is
appropriate, even advantageous, at times, but ultimately, if it is the only way
one can approach any situation – say, a situation that calls for a more
extroverted approach – then it is a detriment, and to rely on it is neurotic
and creates life conflicts.
In this sense, the
neurotic goes through life attempting to stick a square peg in a round hole.
The obsessional unconsciously believes that if he thinks hard enough about the
minute details of the peg, the hole, or both, that somehow the peg will fit –
or that the intolerable feelings of the fact that the peg will never fit will
somehow be less intolerable. The depressive unconsciously believes that the
peg, broken from repeated attempts at fitting it into the wrong hole for so
long and thus discarded in the gutter (or simply broken through being as being
is imperfect in relation to the idealism capable in the mind), will return,
pristine, if only he were good enough. The hysteric and psychotic… we’ll have
to cover these at a later time.
In a more general sense, the neurotic,
whatever their particular condition and relation to the outside may be, cannot
tolerate actual alterity, which by its very nature is outside the residual
infantile phantasy of omnipotence, whether that be on the geological scale,
i.e. the outside world of objects and the physical play of forces between those
objects, and the people that populate that world who have wishes, desires,
ideas, and feelings that are not always consistent with the subject’s.
The suicidal at his or
her core is not depressed, he or she is angry. Life is not what it is supposed
to be, but violence or anger feels intolerable, so the self is chosen as object
of attack…but again, we will have to cover this more at length later…
Entry 5: Suggested Readings
In no particular order -
The Work of the Negative - Andre Green
New Fundamentals for Psychoanalysis - Jean Laplanche
The Shadow of the Object - Christopher Bollas
Learning From Experience - Wilfred Bion
Attacks on Linking - Wilfred Bion
Psychic (or Mental) Treatment - Freud
Negation - Freud
Mourning and Melancholia - Freud
Purloined Letter Seminar - Lacan
Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, in general.
This entry will be a bit different. It is an entry about my own motivation for writing this blog bit. At the beginning I outlined some intellectual motivations, but this is an emotional motivation.Entry 6: Emotional Reason for this Blog
Convoluted sentence inbound: I realize I feel like I imagine people of color or people of a certain gender feel when someone who is not of that in-group has strong opinions one way or another about something of important value to that in-group (for example, when people of color say white people shouldn't get to decide what is or isn't racist; when woman say that men shouldn't pass laws about reproductive rights, etc.).
I don't seek the same legitimacy or authority, nor claim the same struggle as these groups (I don't want to identify as to avoid equating the object of my feeling - psychoanalysis - with the object of their feeling - race or gender - for a number of reasons) but I do think the feelings may be the same or similar.
What gives all these philosophers any right to pretend to get psychoanalysis enough to criticize it?
If you haven't been analyzed or trained analytically, one really has little grasp on the actual clinical literature - which tends to stay pretty confined to clinically trained psychoanalytic circles - and how the theory - which often does leak into other circles - is actually applied to clinical matters with real people.
On the one hand, a lot of thinkers just use psychoanalysis for a stand in for something that is wrong and outdated - 'you can't just psychoanalyze this or that' or 'psychoanalysis would say this, but we say that...' (more specific examples to come in later posts). That is, psychoanalysis is degraded. On the other hand, a lot of people want to call themselves psychoanalysts but seem to have never reflected on their own feelings in relation to an other's, their own process of thinking, their own biases, and in many cases, have never sat with a patient. That is, psychoanalysis is glorified as a purely intellectual tool for doing this or that.
To use another comparison - albeit an absolutely cringe one - my profession is not your costume.
Entry 7 - Self Analysis
Follower request
Psychoanalysis begins with the failure of medical treatment on European woman 'with' what was then called hysteria, but it does not begin to really take off until Freud's 1900 masterpiece (actually 1899 but Freud changed the date for superstitional reasons) Interpretation of Dreams.
One of the interesting things about IoD is that it does not so much focus on others dreams, but on Freud's own dreams, that is, it is a book of self analysis. In fact, many of Freud's discoveries over his lifetime come from self analysis (including, as Lacan and D and G have pointed out, the Oedipal complex).
In other words, self analysis is there from the start in psychoanalysis and is crucial to the analytic endeavor, a trend that is clearly seen later in the history of psychoanalysis (1950s-1980s) as it developed into the ongoing discussion regarding transference and counter transference.
Counter transference is an important concept to touch on briefly as it is essentially a form of self analysis in relation to another person. How do I feel or think when in the presence of another who, to some degree, aims to impart or produce in me certain thoughts and feelings.
When I sit with a patient I monitor my inner experience (what Theodore Reik referred to as listening with the third ear, or whatever) as I listen to the patient talk. What thoughts, ideas, and feelings are aroused in me? What do I make of these? Do they seem to readily connect to the patient's personality, or the content or form of their speech (or lack of...)? Maybe these thoughts, ideas, and feelings tell me something about the patient; maybe they are completely disconnected and more about myself than the patient.
This is important to highlight as it seems to me that many of the pop-psychoanalysts (whether on social media, the lecture circuit, the publishing circuit, etc.) seem to get stuck analyzing other people and other things at the expense of meaningfully examining themselves; looking through a psychoanalytic lens at film, culture, literature, their enemies, other theories, etc.
Rather than analyzing an incel on Twitter, pointing out this or that banality that only vaguely, if at all, maps onto anything substantial or clinical, look at yourself (in a non-handwringing and non slave-morality way of course) and see what you find.
So how does one self analyze? It's not something you can (or should) prescribe, but it is something you can outline if someone is interested in having a place to start
- When you react to something, don't assume you're reaction is 'the' 'T'ruth.
- ex1: Someone on my Twitter feed posts in a way that I interpret as being pompous, bombastic, arrogant, etc. The tone or subtext seems to me to read 'This is unquestionable truth and you're not worth my time / are stupid if you disagree.' My initial reaction is to want to argue with this person - 'this is not the case, these are the reasons you have got this or that wrong.' Rather than act, I instead get curious why I have had this reaction. What about this person taking these positions gets me to react in an argumentative way? Put aside the fact that the content could be right or wrong (as often factual disputes are erected and used as a way of covering up emotional disputes) and get curious about this dynamic. My conclusion: this person wants to communicate that they should be taken seriously, and should be taken as an authority on this matter. Even though I disagree with their take, I can understand and respect their wish to be seen as someone whose take is important. This may or may not be true, but its a self analysis that allows me to then post something encouraging or at least non confrontational (or not post at all) in place of meaningless Twitter arguing.
- ex2: Justin Murphy's Deleuze book is all over Twitter right now. A good self analysis moment for those so vocally decrying the book would be 'what about this book bothers me so much?'
Hard mode: Things like 'his take is stupid' or 'there is no evidence for this' don't suffice as answers.
If these are the answer you arrive at, the next question to ask yourself is 'so what about having a stupid take bothers me so much?' or 'So why does a take with what I consider a lack of evidence bother me so much?' As Nietzsche points out, our thoughts and feelings are bound up with subjective values, and it is very often not the case that we truly have an earth shatteringly clear and objective reaction to an event.
- As demonstrated above, try to find the motivation for your thoughts or feelings, and each time you arrive at a new idea, look for the idea before that.
- In regard to more internal matters, trust your gut feelings and following your own line of flight or chain of association
- ex1: I had a dream where I was killing people with a mounted machine gun. After killing a few people, I began running away through swampy woods to escape the people who had begun surrounding my mounted gun. In the dream the people were carrying AK47s and shooting at me while yelling punitive and moralistic slogans at me as I ran away. There were in particular a few more slender and fast running people who caught up to me more easily, threatening my safety with knives.
Go ahead. Interpret this dream. You will never come up with a meaning other than the generic one that most people would come up with regarding violence, fear, etc.
Upon waking up I self analyzed the dream - which seemed to have absolutely no relation to my previous day or feeling states - and was immediately able to make sense of the dream.
- I first remembered visiting my long time girlfriend's parent's house and watching a clip on my phone of a vidyagame I sometimes play. The clip was of a Russian soldier using a mounted machine gun to kill the enemy team. This exaplains both the mounted machine gun killing and the AK47s I dreamed up for the soldiers (AK being essentially a universal cinematic and real symbol for Russian involvement).
So what of the swamp, the punitive and slender-fast figures? The house I visited was in a significantly warmer, more humid climate than what I am used to, and the previous day (and most likely during the night) I had been profusely sweating. This most likely inspired the idea of a swamp, or swamp like experiences. Next I associated to the fact that I was in someone else's house, and had to follow a set of rules I was not used to, which seems to connect to the slender and punitive figures.
I am trailing off for the moment....
Entry 8 - Why (or how, IDK) psychoanalysis fell (hard, to its death) out of fashion (or became fashionable at the expense of substance, IDK), not to mention some other stuff (follower requested)
(Consistent with entropic forces, the longer this blog exists, the quicker and dirtier it gets)
In the early 1900s Psychoanalysis was, as Freud and Jung discussed it, a plague set to infect the globe.
A hundred years later its been reduced to one of those viruses that, in being both mostly eradicated by the over application of bleach and disinfectant wipes (American scientism) and also survived by generations that now have developed immunity to it (French mumbojumbo), has morphed into a dual-strand ultra resistant hyper virus...
- Strand 1: the butt end of a joke
- Strand 2: hollow intellectual practice for social theorists to use to leverage their crackpot but oddly familiar theories with some kind of idiosyncratic-quirky authority
That is, the latter - hyperintellectual french abstraction- and the former - American pragmatist anti intellecutalism - came together in a pincer maneuver in the 50s to cut off Psychoanslysis' head, leaving the bloated corpse to academics disconnected from clinical affairs who had never stepped foot in an analytic office (to analyze or be analyzed). Psychoanalysis, mired in its own internal political and theoretical struggles, responded poorly. The refugees of the psychoanalytic infighting took solace in Europe in the bulwarks of the fruedomarxist left where they engaged in endless sociophilosophical debates about this or that reified concept, while others drifted towards the conservative reactionary right (some european fringe lacanians and Hardline fruedians), while in the US the psychoanalytic diasporians made flaccid legitimacy/authority appeals to science and sociology.
This combination of clusterfucks gave the outside world every reason they needed to turn their back on psychoanalysis - 'It's either overly theoretical jargon that does not connect to my lived experience, or its a kind of rehash of old social reformist / conservatism, or a mixture of the two, why do I need this fucking thing again?'
Couple this with the vector of anti-authority (which I have no verifiable or convincing genealogy for other than some speculation that the increased access to technology, the increased advancement of this technology, and the miniaturization and openness of and to information that was previously behind what were essentially paywalls which, when coupled with the understandable fear of authoritarianism coming out of WWII, has lead to a cultural impetus that tends towards individuals seeking their own justifications and knowledge sometimes to their own benefit, sometimes not [think flat earth, anti-vaxxers, self-diagnosers who use WebMD, etc.]) - and we should remember traditional psychoanalytic technique required to some extent on important notions of authority - and we get a disinterest or hatred of psychoanalysis.
To capture what I mean: A follower sent me an excerpt from a Bruce Fink book about a Lacanian analyst who, in typical Lacanian fashion, would end the patient's session a few minutes in every time as to communicate to the patient that the analyst had no time or patience to mess around with the patient's tendency to obsessively go on at length with defensive intellectualism. I replied that this might've worked when people valued the analyst's authority - a time where one actually said 'wow, its a true honor that this famous Lacanian has taken the time to see me' - but now a patient will simply leave treatment and find a mystical guru or self help coach that will feed them feel good bullshit, or, even more likely, they'll go home and live a miserable life projecting their problems into and onto objects that in turn aid the narrative that 'all hope is lost, I am destined to be depressed, blah blah blah, etc.' This is all without mentioning that the content of psychoanalysis - or what it aims at bringing awareness too - is precisely the stuff that people have worked to repress or keep out of consciousness.
This content of psychoanalysis - i.e. the stuff we don't want to deal with - brings me to a separate point: A follower asked me my thoughts on the book The Courage to Be Disliked. I haven't read the book, but in browsing Twitter threads commenting on the book, it got me thinking about reiterating the plain, nonjargon content (tempted to say lesson, but this is too rationalistic-cognitive-punitive) of psychoanalysis.
I'll have to say more on this in another entry, but for now I am very drawn to the idea that the patient eventually comes to experience the fact that others will think things about or have feelings about them that they do not agree with, and that the patient will too feel and think things about others that may be true but do not require the other to agree with in order for the truth to be effective. That is, it is my thinking that a patient should eventually get to a point where the validation of the other or an appeal to another's authority is no longer needed, but simply one factor among many to take into consideration when speaking and acting.
....
A tired, late night, fun clinical thingy.
So much energy is spent trying to account for how others will react to our own actions, feelings, thoughts, etc.
We find ourselves trying to act in a way that both gets us what we want, and prevents us from receiving dystonic responses from others.
The unconscious belief underpinning this (or the conscious thought that can be put to this unconscious behavior) is that we control others or can control others with our actions, feelings, thoughts, etc. Others will react how they are going to react, and one needs to keep this, as a reality, in mind when one acts or enunciates.
This is the meeting of desires.
Talking in psychoanalysis is about desire - enunciations of will to power - not order words.
Many patients - children in particular - believe that the only reason to talk is to make others do something, change, or get them something. For these kinds of patients, talking is unconsciously believed to be a kind of mind control.
Patient A: 'My mom always says X or Y and it makes me feel terrible'
Therapist: 'Well that's terrible, what would happen if mom were told this things made people feel that way?' (avoid using 'you' and Patient A's name as to allow patient ability to talk generally without feeling criticized for not being able to stand up for himself)
Patient A: 'I want to tell her that, but it wouldn't do anything anyways.'
Therapist: 'She won't change?'
Patient A: 'Nope.'
Therapist: 'Then what do you have to lose, could it feel better to simply get it out?'
That is, one shan't act or speak to control or change others, but enunciate so that it does not stay internally where it becomes an object of obessional drift.
Entry 11: A Brief Dive Into Kleinian Object Relations Theory
Entry 10: The Empty Signifier
of Evidence Based (This is going in
the psychoanalysis blog, but its meaningfully connected to all my work on this
blog especially here)
Lacanians, reacting to a brief period of time where
comparing Lacan to Jung was cool, absolutely hate it when you compare Lacan to
Jung. So, naturally we’re gonna do it even if it doesn’t really work.
“the signifier is a unique unit of being
which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence […] it will be and
will not be wherever it goes.” – Lacan 1966
“when there was
nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened. Interpretations
are only for those who don’t understand; it is only the things we don’t
understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand
and that is why he tries to interpret it” – Jung 1934.
The signifier signifies an absence. If something was immediately
available as a presence it would therefore not require a sign to stand in for
it.
In the name of an unlikely and hated synthesis, Lacan
indicates we put a symbol in place of a reality that can’t be experienced, and
Jung says we necessarily are driven to explore these symbols for the very
reason that we do not know the thing we are symbolizing.
As long as there is something we don’t understand there is a
desire to interpret or signify that lack of intuitive experience or
understanding on some level, as we can only begin to interpret that which we
don’t immediately intuitively know or have as an internal object.
Recently I realized this was no truer, and no more present, puns intended, than in the
recent trend around “evidence based” research in the social sciences field. Johnathon Schedler (2015) has
his own criticism of the term which is certainly worth reading, however I will
not explicate it here.
Rather, I will present two small vignettes as evidence,
again pun intended, before moving onto my main exposition.
- - Years ago I was invited to a meeting to discuss tutoring students for psychology at my undergraduate college, as I was a tutor of psychology in the same program during my stay at the school. Some professors of the psychology department and some other current tutors were concerned that, come second semester, students would no-show, or cancel tutor sessions. One tutor suggested we show up to classes and introduce ourselves, that way students are familiar with the tutors and aren’t afraid to come to tutor sessions. Another suggested we hold a small seminar outside of class time. A teacher suggested we could try and relate with the students more. Another added that perhaps the students weren’t aware how helpful tutoring could be. I contributed: “Has anyone asked the kids what is keeping them from coming the second semester?” The tutors and professors considered the idea silently for a moment. I then added “perhaps we could make a small survey in which they could choose a reason from a few provided on why they stop coming in the second semester, and we could interpret the data.” My suggestion received a courtesy nod and the previous conversations resumed.
- - A friend I am close with invited me to sit in on a monthly staff meeting at his place of employment (a think tank, essentially). Whether they were trying to prove effects of certain substances on individuals as a theoretical foundation for a program, or whether they were trying to determine what should be included in said educational program for individuals, mainly parents and substance abusers, neither conversation even considered what parents or substance abusers thought, felt, desired, or needed. That is, never in the conversation did anyone suggest actually gathering data from the source, the people the programs were intended to help.
In both these cases what was considered helpful for these
populations seemed to be unaffected by the actual reports of the people who
constitute the population in need of help. There seemed to be preconceived
ideas of what was or wasn’t helpful that acted as axioms which colored and
coded the discourse. The tying factor
between these two vignettes is that the first group of people, psychology
professors who have been teaching and working for years at an undergraduate
level, and the second group of people, sociologists with political motives, both
consider themselves to be “evidenced based,” and scoff at the mention of
qualitative data.
What the person in question, the object of the aim of all
these social programs, has to thinks, say, or feel about their own experience is
just whatever. In one case, the group represented in the second vignette went
as far to discredit the methodology and findings of a study based on the fact
that the data was solely consistent of people’s self-reports about drug use. Their
criticism was ‘of course a drug addict will report positive experiences with
the drug, why would one even do a study like this. It doesn’t document the
harms.’ Here we see how distant from evidence evidence based social research
has become. Rather than observe a phenomenon, - ‘it appears substance abusers
enjoy using substances even if it is highly damaging to themselves on many
levels,’ - and then take steps to undergo more research in order to develop a
framework to understand or interpret the data, or in the very least posit a
hypothesis, the contemporary evidence based crowd develops a particular
discourse that evidence is grafted through as to filter out the aforementioned
complexity and create a reformed object that seems more tolerable and easily
formatted into ‘common sense.’
The real hypothesis in this case could be something along
the lines of, ‘perhaps even though it would seem to make sense that a person
would not engage in an activity knowing how unhealthy it is, there may be a
more profound or complex series of motives or causes underneath this action,
this warrants further study.’ Instead, this is deemed incompatible and in its place
a simple 1:1 ratio devoid of unconscious motives is supplemented. This ends up
looking like ‘the person must not really be aware of how damaging the habit is’
or ‘we need to study the objective and physical effects of the drug rather than
the subjective components that led to the subject using it.’ In a sentence,
Marx thought the proletariat were duped into being part of capitalism, but, as Deleuze
and Guattari utilizing Wilhelm Reich point out, we have a hand in our own
groveling at the feet of the despot.
This brings me back to Lacan. Here, in both these groups,
“evidence based” is an empty signifier. It sits in the space of absence where
an actual foundation of evidence would otherwise be present. What evidence
based really means for these people is manifest, defended, experience constructed
of traditional, cognitive, westernized ‘common sense’ further constructed in
and of colloquialisms, platitudes, and niceties. It is a type of ideology.
Here, “evidence based” is not a sign that indicates that the praxis, or theory
is based, or founded on evidence, but rather, it serves as a frame. It says ‘view what follows in this particular
fashion regardless of the actual qualities of what follows.’
Take the first vignette. The conversation is ripe with
preconceptions. The implied reasons conjured up by teachers, and tutors on why
students attended tutoring sessions significantly less in the second semester
were because the tutors must be unfamiliar, the students must be afraid of
coming, or they must not be able to relate to us. Generally the idea was that
anxiety or the unknown was at the root cause.
The subtext is, in a
sentence, ‘if people aren’t doing something that seems to have obvious merit it
must be due to an obvious, and easily understood reason like fear. If we could
just convince them of our relatability, and friendlessness, or perhaps appeal
to fact that we are here to help, then they would simply cease to have these
feelings and then would better align their inner perceptions to match with the
external reality.’ The presupposition is what Freud would call reality
principle. Motives are assumed, and assigned to people by other people on the
notion of what is commonly accepted as a truth without a particular
investigation into their idiosyncratic understanding or perception of the
world. In regard to the signifier,
evidenced based, here we can see there is really no evidence, but rather
relatively baseless conjecture.
This particular ideology permeates our entire culture. The
media assumes that the racist, sexist, or homophobic person is not educated,
and that if he or she were educated, he or she would surely be on the other
side of the fence. The solution for these people - and they are looking for
solutions, means to ends, not processes of understanding - is a book, a program, or a platitude. The
thought doesn’t occur that many well educated people are racist, sexists, and
homophobic, for these are related to psychological and social developments and
emotional conflicts, not necessarily cognitive education.
Entry 11: A Brief Dive Into Kleinian Object Relations Theory
Putting aside the fact that ‘simplifying’ any theory is unacceptable on the grounds that it defeats the very purpose of theory - that of explaining phenomenon in terms that are more detailed and intricate than the phenomenon would otherwise present itself during ‘practical’ or layman discourse (i.e. simplified theory is a tautology as the phenomena a theory is trying to get at is already in its simplified form) - we are going to be very bad simplify object relations.
Patients come to analysis with the idea that it is the world outside that makes them bad, - ‘everyone else has the problem. If everyone else just changed I would be fine.’This is humanism. Humanism asserts that the human is generally good and that outside forces corrupt the individual (both a philosophical position and a psychological and therapeutic school via Carl Rogers).
This position the patient begins at is linear and unidirectional - ‘The world outside exerts influence on me internally and I am a passive receiver of that influence and therefore a product of that world.’ Or, in the case of those who self-attack, the message is ‘I am bad and unworthy of this world which is good. I put badness into this world.’ In both cases, there is a clear unidirectionality. In the former, the subject is passive and the world is active. In the latter, the subject is active and the world is passive.
Object relations precisely rejects this unidirectional victim / perpetrator dynamic. In place of this object relations posits a bi-directional and complex interrelationship (one might say dialectical, but I want to avoid the pitfalls of Hegelianism so I won’t use this word) were both subject and object are passive and active at the same time, each moving in both directions, mutually influencing each other as they move (to a degree, what is what is meant by Freud’s after effect / deferred action concept).
Whereas the neurotic says ‘it is the world that is bad and me that is good, and this world makes me bad,’ the matured via analysis object relations patient says ‘I act in a way that gets me into situations where I create a bad world,’ or ‘I act in a way as to reconfirm my own perception of a bad world’ (and this isn’t say the world doesn’t have its ‘badness’ – as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you…).
The mature object relations patient recognizes his or her part in the enactment. In the case of ‘if everyone else would just change,’ the object relations patient realizes that his/her term ‘everyone’ necessarily includes his or herself. This is because for object relations, the criteria for what defines an object is, to an extent, relative. Person B is an object in the experience of Person A, the subject. At the same time, Person A is an object in the experience of Person B, the subject (see the previous comment regarding mutually influential vectors – this is also Sartre’s ‘hell is other people.’). The subject makes the other an object. This dynamic is not true for those who first come to treatment. For those who first come to treatment, the subject / object relation is, as I mentioned earlier, rigid and fixed: the subject is impressed upon by a world of objects, or the subject impresses upon a world of objects.
Object relations is much more complex than this neurotic position: A effects B, and at the same time, B effects A, and each time A and B affect each other there is created a third: A, B, and the point A and B meet, a point which is different depending on whether A is meeting B or B is meeting A. We can call where A meets B an X and we can call where B meets A a Y. This gives us a lot of permutations to work with: (ABX, BAX, XAB, AXB, BXA; ABY, BAY, YAB, AYB, BYA…etc.)
This brings us back to ‘simplified object relations.’
There is a philosophical underpinning here that should be addressed: Object relations not only aims to implicate the subject in his/her role in whatever the world view of the subject is, it also has written into its metaphysics (if we can call it that) the idea that there is no pure object or thing in itself. Or, if there is a thing in itself, object relations theorists don’t really care about it (or its inseparable from the object as perceived via being an un-symbolizable residue, i.e. Lacan’s real). An object is always-already a mediated thing. It is a representation spurred into being by fragmented sensory data which is reconstructed and translated into symbolic terms (or otherwise left at a somatic level) and therefore transforms into some sort of fantasy, a fantasy which is then projected onto the skeletal structure that spurred the original fragmented sensory data into being, thus causing a doubling up or feeding-back of some aspects of the skeletal structure complimented by an eroding of other aspects. (A musical metaphor comes to mind: There is an experimental musical performance where someone records a simple sound in a large room with good reverberation. The sound and its reverb is then played back an re-recorded into another device. This continues to repeat. The effect is that the reverb from the room continues to amplify itself. The frequencies best captured by the reverb continue to become more pronounced while the frequencies originally muted become more muted until they disappear. This is the process of projection and introjection).
This is surely not the way patients come into our practices. The naïve patient relies on an old enlightenment tradition of naturalism: My insides reflect my outsides in a unidirectional manner. Object relations – and it is no coincidence here that Bion and Britton are Kantians – relies on a semi-Kantian-constructivist hybrid idea that an object is already-always mediated to an extent, and that a mirror-naturalism model is false and actually a neurotic (or psychotic) form of defense.
Patients come to analysis with the idea that it is the world outside that makes them bad, - ‘everyone else has the problem. If everyone else just changed I would be fine.’This is humanism. Humanism asserts that the human is generally good and that outside forces corrupt the individual (both a philosophical position and a psychological and therapeutic school via Carl Rogers).
This position the patient begins at is linear and unidirectional - ‘The world outside exerts influence on me internally and I am a passive receiver of that influence and therefore a product of that world.’ Or, in the case of those who self-attack, the message is ‘I am bad and unworthy of this world which is good. I put badness into this world.’ In both cases, there is a clear unidirectionality. In the former, the subject is passive and the world is active. In the latter, the subject is active and the world is passive.
Object relations precisely rejects this unidirectional victim / perpetrator dynamic. In place of this object relations posits a bi-directional and complex interrelationship (one might say dialectical, but I want to avoid the pitfalls of Hegelianism so I won’t use this word) were both subject and object are passive and active at the same time, each moving in both directions, mutually influencing each other as they move (to a degree, what is what is meant by Freud’s after effect / deferred action concept).
Whereas the neurotic says ‘it is the world that is bad and me that is good, and this world makes me bad,’ the matured via analysis object relations patient says ‘I act in a way that gets me into situations where I create a bad world,’ or ‘I act in a way as to reconfirm my own perception of a bad world’ (and this isn’t say the world doesn’t have its ‘badness’ – as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you…).
The mature object relations patient recognizes his or her part in the enactment. In the case of ‘if everyone else would just change,’ the object relations patient realizes that his/her term ‘everyone’ necessarily includes his or herself. This is because for object relations, the criteria for what defines an object is, to an extent, relative. Person B is an object in the experience of Person A, the subject. At the same time, Person A is an object in the experience of Person B, the subject (see the previous comment regarding mutually influential vectors – this is also Sartre’s ‘hell is other people.’). The subject makes the other an object. This dynamic is not true for those who first come to treatment. For those who first come to treatment, the subject / object relation is, as I mentioned earlier, rigid and fixed: the subject is impressed upon by a world of objects, or the subject impresses upon a world of objects.
Object relations is much more complex than this neurotic position: A effects B, and at the same time, B effects A, and each time A and B affect each other there is created a third: A, B, and the point A and B meet, a point which is different depending on whether A is meeting B or B is meeting A. We can call where A meets B an X and we can call where B meets A a Y. This gives us a lot of permutations to work with: (ABX, BAX, XAB, AXB, BXA; ABY, BAY, YAB, AYB, BYA…etc.)
This brings us back to ‘simplified object relations.’
There is a philosophical underpinning here that should be addressed: Object relations not only aims to implicate the subject in his/her role in whatever the world view of the subject is, it also has written into its metaphysics (if we can call it that) the idea that there is no pure object or thing in itself. Or, if there is a thing in itself, object relations theorists don’t really care about it (or its inseparable from the object as perceived via being an un-symbolizable residue, i.e. Lacan’s real). An object is always-already a mediated thing. It is a representation spurred into being by fragmented sensory data which is reconstructed and translated into symbolic terms (or otherwise left at a somatic level) and therefore transforms into some sort of fantasy, a fantasy which is then projected onto the skeletal structure that spurred the original fragmented sensory data into being, thus causing a doubling up or feeding-back of some aspects of the skeletal structure complimented by an eroding of other aspects. (A musical metaphor comes to mind: There is an experimental musical performance where someone records a simple sound in a large room with good reverberation. The sound and its reverb is then played back an re-recorded into another device. This continues to repeat. The effect is that the reverb from the room continues to amplify itself. The frequencies best captured by the reverb continue to become more pronounced while the frequencies originally muted become more muted until they disappear. This is the process of projection and introjection).
This is surely not the way patients come into our practices. The naïve patient relies on an old enlightenment tradition of naturalism: My insides reflect my outsides in a unidirectional manner. Object relations – and it is no coincidence here that Bion and Britton are Kantians – relies on a semi-Kantian-constructivist hybrid idea that an object is already-always mediated to an extent, and that a mirror-naturalism model is false and actually a neurotic (or psychotic) form of defense.
Entry 12: Some Elaborations on Earlier Polemics (Etiology and Authority)
In previous entries I touched upon two unrelated topics - nonpsychoanalysts making claims or critiques about psychoanalysis, and the notion that 'we spend too much time trying figure out what causes mental illnesses.'
Here's a combination of the two that I stumbled upon today:
Pete Wolfendale - who (despite probably being smart and nice) I find to be a particularly intolerably mixture of annoying and boring - posted this Tweet about this article.
I didn't really read the article (and neither should you) because it's inconsequential. What got me was Wolfendale's Tweet. He writes
In previous entries I touched upon two unrelated topics - nonpsychoanalysts making claims or critiques about psychoanalysis, and the notion that 'we spend too much time trying figure out what causes mental illnesses.'
Here's a combination of the two that I stumbled upon today:
Pete Wolfendale - who (despite probably being smart and nice) I find to be a particularly intolerably mixture of annoying and boring - posted this Tweet about this article.
I didn't really read the article (and neither should you) because it's inconsequential. What got me was Wolfendale's Tweet. He writes
"One more piece of evidence that bipolar disorder is neurodegenerative."
Wolfendale is a philosopher who, according to his self identifiers, is bound up with figure such as Kant, Heidegger, and Deleuze, and is associated with OOO (object oriented ontology / philosophy). He's not a psychoanalyst or even a psychoanalytic theorist, though he has read Deleuze and did study at Warwick (where Nick Land and Mark Fisher studied), and OOO has some crossover with Zizek, so he is certainly aware of psychoanalysis (but who isn't in academia).
Though he's not making any claims about psychoanalysis, he is making a claim about the etiology of a disease or condition that would be better left to people who actually work in real, everyday situations with these people (and this is not say that people can't theorize, or do or say whatever they want. I encourage everyone to do what they want as long as they're mindful of how it might effect their likelihood of getting what they want out of their life...).
But this is all still besides the point.
The 'slept' approach to this would be to argue that neurological models of understanding mental health make this or that mistake (which I think they do), or that a layman or nonanalyst should not make claims to what is or is not the cause or nature of mental illnesses / conditions, whatever, etc. We're not doing either of these. As we said, these are slept. We wanna we WOKE.
Woke: Etiology, when it comes to good psychotherapy, doesn't really matter. Etiology is to be constructed by the analyst and the analysand based on the former's understanding of the latter's self reports.
Ok. A bold statement. Let's unpack it.
I think when arguing / debating, discussing others, whether the stakes are high or low, one should always be generous to the other argument. Assume it is right, but does not quite have the effect the arguer intends it to (You need to create a common ground with your other and then come to a point of clear agreement or disagreement). No point in fighting tooth and nail over stuff that is, at the end of the day, not really connected to the comings and goings of the outside world.
So, let's just assume that X mental illness is totally neurological, physical, genetic, whatever. So what? As a talk therapist, this won't change how I approach my interventions. In other words, the point of identifying a clear and indubitable etiology for an illness is so that the scientific method and its abstractions can be applied accurately with limited actual experience of the thing at hand (relying on data points, quantitative stuff, etc.). Science wants to say 'Disease X is caused by A and B. Because A and B are the causes, treatment Y and Z should be utilized as they have been deemed effective in trials / research.' The point of determining etiology is to determine how to approach the treatment. This works for medicine and physical surgical manipulation, not for talk.
The genius of psychoanalysis is that the cybernetic and affective aspects of speech or communication are used to relieve symptoms through producing mental effects (think the placebo effect, or CCRU concept of hyperstition) without making direct physical changes.
I leave with a discussion between myself and a supervisor that sums up what we have been saying
There's a lot written on Freud's secret Kantianism, not to mention the similarities between some of Lacan's conceptualization of desire and Kant.
However, there are actual Kantian psychoanalysts such as Bion and Britton.
Here's a little bit of old case data that will end up in a book I am writing on Guattari.
(the patient, an older man with schizophrenia, becomes angry in session at times but, as is par the course for schizophrenia, finds his anger intolerable)
To understand, let us consider Mr. R.’s talk of frozenness through the thought of two German Idealist philosophers; 1: It is a Hegelian double negation as Lacan or Zizek might argue; 2: It is a Kantian category of knowledge, what Bion, a Kantian, would call +K / -K, or what Britton, also a Kantian, would call a “counter belief.” That is, rather than defend his feelings of being hot and angry by negating it ‘I am not feeling hot and angry (vague, indefinite, but could mean frozen),’ he instead substitutes or counters with the positively framed phrase “I am feeling frozenized” in place of the negation phrase. This is less confusing and more clinically relevant than it may seem: One may communicate the same thing in many ways: (A) I am hot. This is the affirmative or positive. (B) I am not hot. This is the negative to statement (A). (C) I am cold. This is the affirmative or positive that expresses one of many possible meanings as the negative phrase (B). I am cold is a positively framed negation of the phrase I am hot. I am feeling forzenized / I am not feeling hot. The two phrases share the same referent but demonstrate different semantic approaches to the same communication.
Though, of course, semantic approach may itself be an important communication, but space does not allow us to engage this idea here.
Entry 13.1: Kant in Psychoanalysis
A wide therapeutic resistance, in patients and therapists alike, which is often not addressed properly is the fear of knowing and creating which is disguised as the wish for learning.
The analyst who brought this to our attention in the analytic community is Wilfred Bion. As a therapist, my oeuvre stresses the Bionian concept of knowledge as an affectual experience of the here and now which requires no hard and fast rigid / logical or rational aspects.
For Bion a feeling is a fact (I've used this intervention on a heavily guarded patient to much success).When one reads anything, or sits with any patient, one does not ever ‘not know.’ ‘Not knowing’ is predicated on an idealized notion (written as ‘what is supposed to happen’) of what it means to know. One already always knows one’s internal experience – ‘I sit here with this patient and am filled with the feeling of not being able to think in their presence – I know that this patient does not want me to know. I know I feel frustrated with this experience, etc.’
Or, when a student says ‘I don’t know what the author is trying to say here,’ what they are saying is ‘I currently know my own feeling as a fact (frustration) and that affectual fact disturbs me (because I think I shouldn't feel this way) to the point where I disavow my knowing of it.’ In other words, we trick ourselves into thinking 'its not that I am frustrated, it’s that I don’t know. 'One always knows (the other through the self). This is, after all, the essence of the idea of counter transference.
What does this have to do with counter transference? The ‘I don’t know’ resistance is a counter transference resistance, one we see in our patients. We ask them to expand on an idea, they reply ‘I don’t know.’ The entry level therapist is shut down and accepts this. A well trained therapist responds with ‘you don’t have to know anything here, just give me a guess’ or ‘make it up’ or ‘any hypothesis?’ or ‘whatever comes to mind’ or… etc. etc.
For example, when a patient of mine in a group says something and the other group members respond with ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘I don’t get it,’ it is not that they haven’t understood their fellow, no matter how unclear he is being, but rather, it is that they’ve let a frustrating experience block their intuitive and instinctive ability to synthesize the available data into a likely narrative or meaning, or synthetic knowing. They have crossed out their ability to make meaningful links and associations to this fellow's words and affect which would allow an internal transforming and sense making of his utterances. Compounding this is a sneaky resistance, what I call the Socratic Neurotic – ‘I avoid saying / acting I know because one can only learn when one admits one does not know!’ This has the effect of appearing like a defense/resistance is actually a positive trait (eager to learn) when learning actually comes from curious application of here and now / in the moment knowledge (It is a fact I feel such and such a away etc. etc.). This is what Britton (also a Bionian and Kantian) would call a counter belief.
To sum, I will be a happy camper the day I hear my patients be able to say (in their own language of course) ‘I observed feelings of frustration in myself while listening to that / reading that, and that frustration made me want to fall back on the idea that I didn’t know something, but I realize I know my own feeling of frustration, and through being aware of this, I realize that I know more about what that person said / the text I read than I initially thought, as when I mentalize my frustration I free my mind up to be curious and make connections that, when curious, readily come with little effort.’ The main take away is that the analyst needs to take in what the analysand is putting out and find a way to return it to the analysand in a tolerable way.
Kant makes a reappearance with Ogden, who relies on Bion, who in one paper (which I forget) has a section in one of his papers on the transference matrix entitled ‘Sexual Things in Themselves,’ the thing in itself of course being Kant’s concept of the non experienced entity or set of forces which is known to exist via a priori reason, also known as Noumena (Freud’s primary process or Lacan's real is basically Noumena. Raw experience that cannot be known or symbolized, only experienced as affective intensity).
This kind of Kantian affirmative vitalism is exemplified well in Betty Joseph’s concept of 'the total situation' which is also the title of her paper in which the concept appears.
For Joseph, the psychoanalytic process is always active and in motion. Everything, even nothing, is something, as ‘nothing’ does not indicate a not being, but rather indicates what old Jewish physicians (Freud is not far off from this general description…) such as Moses Maimonides would term ‘apophatic,’ or using negative phrases to denote a positive (Maimonides' concept of God also beautiful lines up with D and G's BwO, which I will talk about in another time...). This apophatic negative indicates several things. In this sense, psychoanalysis is always affirmative and positive, but not necessarily positivistic. This connects to the theme I've been developing here: K / knowledge (and we will see this come up again in Bollas – ‘the unthought known’), or Bion’s -K. We know it, it animates us from the unconscious, but we don’t know we know it yet. Or, Bion’s mystical idea that thoughts wait around until a thinker is found to think them (which beautifully mirrors Whitehead's idea that the subject is produced as a residual of material forces in the world - the supraject - or D and G's idea that forces create the subject or the assemblage of enunciation).
Even, as Joseph mentions, when the patient comes to us and remains silent, or talks about his boring day to day life, we are learning many things on many different levels (a nothing gives us knowledge through the form of the nothing). This is a good practical putting to use of Freud’s old adage that there is no negative in the unconscious, no ‘no’ in the unconscious. How does this relate more to K? Joseph puts forth her idea that the analysis is always active and in motion because we can always learn something even from nothing – this is because there is no such thing as nothing, just somethings and somethings, and any ‘nothing’ we come up with is really a refusal on the analyst’s part to be where the patient is or needs to be.
I'm reminded of a conflict I had with a supervisee - she was stating that she did not ‘get’ the patient, which I mentioned is in fact a good grasp on where the patient is at. This is the K function, and the idea that there is always something going on in the transference. It is not that there is something that is not understood or unknown (a negative), it is that my supervisee understood or knew the patient and had an adverse reaction to it – didn’t like what she saw, so to speak, so she attacked the link that would give her knowledge into the patient (just as the patient attacks his / her own link when they do not like what they see in themselves). In a Kantian sense, we are always making sense out of anything put in front of us, a la the transference is always affirmative and inducing us with knowledge.
To be specific, we only learn from the negative (a good supplementary reading on Joseph would be Andre Green’s entire book The Work of the Negative…) if we are viewing the ‘whole situation’ – the direct communications, indirect communications, enactments, slips of tongue, dreams, etc. need to be viewed only in relation to one another and ultimately in relation to the analyst. They don’t mean much on their own. Another part of this whole situation business is the general feeling and position the patient puts us in – am I always worried about being late for the sessions? When I am in session, do I constantly want to make interventions when they are not required? The whole situation is all of the aforementioned.
Whereas most Kleinians are secret Kantians, Bollas studied under or was analyzed by (it is unclear, and I haven’t done enough research) a Heideggerian, that is, a disciple of philosopher Martin Heidegger. Though, living in London and training at Tavistock, he is thoroughly consistent with previous thinkers such as Joseph, (Pick who we have yet to mention), Bion, etc. etc. His concept of the ‘evocative object’ is from Bion / Klein. Consistent with Joseph and Klein, Bollas talks of the total situation. Further consistent with Joseph, the analyst always has an influence on the analysand which creates in the analysand an instinct to aid (in some cases) the analyst – ‘yes, that was a good interpretation’ even though the interpretation was actually bad, or more subtly, ‘I had this dream…’ a dream which is clearly couched in analytic jargon, dreamt for the analyst. The content can be mostly disregarded, the form or expression says ‘Look, you are a good analyst, and thus I have brought you a gift...'
I want to end this rant on a moment that synthesizes some of the Kantian strands brought up and how they relate generally to psychoanalysis.
As I have noted earlier in this blog, Bion decried any notion of criticizing Psychoanalysis as unscientific simply because that criticism does not meaningfully apply to psychoanalysis. That is, calling psychoanalysis ‘not scientific enough’ is like calling psychoanalysis ‘not religious enough.’ Alternatively, and this is my metaphor, it’s like criticizing baseball for not being ‘basketball enough.’ Bion’s idea here comes from Kant (and as we have shown Bion was an unabashed Kantian): Kant had similar things to say, like how you would not say ‘the color orange is not round enough.’ That is, roundness is not a necessary quality to define what is or is not orange. Likewise, we would not say ‘the cube is green enough to be a cube.’ The criticism must match the categorically necessary features: We can only criticism science for not being scientific, and we can only criticize psychoanalysis for not being psychoanalytic enough.
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Entry 13.2 Kantian Model of Mind in Psychoanalysis (Ron Britton)
For Britton, belief is to psychic reality as perception is to material reality, a distinction bound up with active / passive positions.
We do not actively perceive this world – or actively will ourselves to perceive it. I do not command my eyes to see or ears to hear. I do not will my senses to synthesize and be imbued with a sense of cohesion, time, and space. This world impresses upon me some set of chaotic experiences that I automatically assemble into sense and non-sense, and if I wish not to experience these things they can only be avoided through altering my senses (close my eyes, block my ears etc.) or negating positives (I didn’t see that, that didn’t happen) or repressing experiences (Away it goes, into the vault.) Perception (and eventually belief) is a synthesis of all sorts of psychological and physical processes and these processes construct and constitute and work with the material of the experiences impressed on us. We create reflections or representations of experiences (or part of Melanie Klien's object relations theory).
There is no 1 to 1 correlation between objects and perceptions, which would imply an active object and a passive receiver.
We're getting into CCRU territory here (Kant, belief, affect).
Briton writes “unless a phantasy has the status of belief it does not have consequences." You might argue that 'the disbelief of a fantasy may have consequences. The unbelief of a fantasy may consequences! (un, non, and dis should be distinguished. Kant did this and it is where we get unconscious instead of nonconscious. Un leaves room for movement and escapes binary logic). The answer to this is that the only reason one would negate a belief into a disbelief (or disavow it) would be if one already believed in it to begin with. A fantasy we haven’t given meaning or weight to (belief) has no reason to be negated or disavowed.
He goes on “Subjective belief precedes object evaluation” (which is basically Kant’s project across all his works, reconciling science and religion). We believe in some sort of coherence or meaning, or attribute value to certain events and causal explanations before we have knowledge. Every day we operate on belief or ‘faith’ that things will be as they were yesterday without actual 'knowledge' (other than internal consistency) of the fact. I have no intimate knowledge of how my internal organs are operating at this very moment, but I have faith that my heart will continue to pump blood.
The concept Britton introduces after elaborating on these notions is Counter belief (pg.20), which seems to be a fantasy about a fantasy. It is overlooked in most psychoanalytic encounters. Analysands unconsciously put forth clichés and banalities in psychoanalytic jargon to appear as ‘good patients’ to avoid their real issues. In this sense, Counter-belief is sort of like Lacan’s purloined letter, or Deleuze and Guattari’s “repressing representation.” A whole parallel set of fantasies are devised to throw the analyst off track (I’ve certainly caught myself doing this in my own analysis).
In everyday language, this is is when someone interviewing for a job, when asked what their greatest weakness is, replies with something they don't feel too bad about admitting - 'I work too hard' or 'Sometimes I am disorganized.' Never will they say 'I detest authority and act in small ways to sabotage the workflow in the workplace.'
Entry 13.3 Kantian Model of Mind in Psychoanalysis
Ogden in his Introduction to Reading Bion beginsby quoting Bion at length
I don't have much more to say on this as I think it speaks for itself (and the reader should use their own mind to construct a belief or a meaning here instead of relying on me...)
Entry 14: Some Notes on Freud: A Primer for Andre Green
We will briefly cover some main points from two of Freud's integral papers before ending with a general explication of a basic psychoanalytic concept.
A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis
Freud’s conceptualization of presence and absence in psychoanalysis is necessary to the understanding of the unconscious but often left out of clinical discussion.
Freud seems to indicate the presence of absence. We cannot imagine an absence (go ahead, try and think of nothing or a lack or absence of something – you have to think of the thing first before you negate it!) or experience a real absence. We can only symbolize an absence, and even that symbolization of an absence is itself some sort of presence.
If we tune our ‘observing ego’ well enough we can catch when a “conception – or any other psychical (mental) element” becomes absent and then present again. I want to add that often we do not know something (X) is present or absent (especially if it is unconscious), but we may recognize when X deviates from its current position (x moves from present to absent or from absent to present). In movement we tend to recognize it. We do not experience presences and absences, but experience, only in hindsight, the feeling of the motion between presences and absences. A thought had a change.
Motion is necessarily bound up with time.
This idea of retrospective (temporal) change is important. In regard to the person who is hypnotized (the archaic precursor to psychoanalysis) to execute a command later on: “But not the whole of it [hypnotized command] emerged into consciousness: only the conception of the act to be executed” (p.261).
That is, we don’t consciously integrate the feelings, thoughts, or language from processes that have become unconscious, but we tend to act them out without knowing. The dangerous thing is then the rational mind can apply some sort of context to the unconscious act and quickly subsume it to a defensive narrative. In other words; 1: Unconscious idea. 2: Relatively conscious action. 3: Retroactively assigned reason for conscious action to fill the void of causality our phenomenological experience necessitates.
This is where some psychoanalysts get off with claiming character or ego as displaced or empty. What I say I am is never really what I am (or was) because I have already assigned a different meaning to it then there was in the moment (unless one is analyzed for many years perhaps?).
In this same paper where Freud introduces these conceptualizations of presence and absence is a wonderful comparison of the mind to photography on page - photo negative, photo positive, etc. It’s like when Sartre, though for the most part completely misunderstanding psychoanalysis, says that man is the negation of all things. To an extent this is true: negation is necessary for thought. Imagine an endless association of positive phenomenon or positive words closely attached to representations. This is the horror of psychosis in many ways (and we will touch upon this later with Green's Work of the Negative...)
Inhibition of Symptoms
With a little bit of presence and absence covered we can quickly get into the metapsychology.
This inhibition / symptom model is derived from the economic metapsychology. We see Freud’s use of economics directly when he uses the analogy of a banker and money to explain that the symptom and inhibition occur through an instinct / drive being damned up (unsatisfied, repressed). This damned up ‘energy’ then becomes bound up through a counterintuitive reinvestment.
That is: X (instinct) is unsatisfied à S or I (symptom / inhibition) formation à S or I formation is reinvested in with X (instinctual energy) à Feedback cycle emerges (return of the repressed, repetition compulsion).
Aside: does this not show the absurdity of the notion of a biological death drive (which we will get to later)? If a symptom or inhibition is a damning of libido (libido becomes bound and expressed as symptom), and this very damn (bound quantity) becomes further invested with what ‘energy’ is left in the economy (unbound quantity), resulting in the repetition compulsion (maintenance of symptom and conditions adequate for such maintenance), then is it not safe to say that self-destructive or counterintuitive behaviors and thoughts are not a manifestation of some inherent pull towards death, but simply a blockage in a flow of libido? I think so. We should move towards reframing the death drive as a lack of available libido due to poor investment, not an 'active' force itself (In Deleuze and Guattari's language, the death drive is an articulation of libido or the life drive).
End aside.
Now we have a subject with a symptom or inhibition.
When we think of this process in light of the facts that 1: satisfying our instinct/drive may actually bring about unpleasure (loss of meaning, the ‘little death,’ depression towards the end of a fantasy, etc.), and 2: great pleasure may be derived from putting off satisfaction, we can then see that the investment in a symptom or inhibition may be more naturally occurring and sustaining than the contrary. That is, it should be clear to us why our patients cling to their illness.
Now that we have viewed the process by which the symptom/inhibition forms, Freud points out that a distinction is needed between symptom and inhibition.
Some Notes on the Death Drive
The 19th century was arguably the century of mechanism, and 1920 was a big year for physics. These mechanistic physics, best exemplified by the physicalist school of Brucke and Hemholtz, whom Freud’s early professors where cultish followers of, was still fresh from its academic battle with the vitalism /animism arguments derived from Natural Science, a field which itself emerged from German Idealism, Naturphilosophie, and early Greek philosophy (the lineage is something like Pre-Socratics -> Aristotle -> Descartes -> Hume -> *Maybe Schelling here* Kant -> …).All of this is immensely present – almost to the point of getting in the way - in Freud’s 1920 game changer Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
In short, Freud, relying on physicist laws like the law of constancy or conservation (with a heavily implied use of the law of entropy) as well as using Fechner and other scientists of the time, argues for a drive separate to libido which he calls the death drive.The argument loses its sense of profundity when laid bare: There is inert, inanimate material. Somehow it forms a crust or surface upon which tension levels are required to be regulated. Following the law of constancy, the organism must want to reduce external tension to maintain a homeostatic internal state. Too much or too little tension disrupts this threshold and creates in the basic psychic apparatus an unpleasant tension. Thus, we have the pleasure principle. An organism wishes to maintain a certain base level of tension in relation to its environment.
Despite these shaky vitalistic beginnings, it gets worse. Here’s where Freud really mucks it up: What if an organism wanted to maintain this homeostatic function to the extent that it ‘realized,’ following the metapsychological assumptions of a libidinal economy of cathecting and de-cathecting bound and unbound energy, that it would be more economically efficient to reduce tension to a minimum point than it would to tirelessly maintain tension at a base level requiring a modulation of levels both up and down, all to the extent that the psychic apparatus really aimed to extinguishing life, not maintain it?
This is a philosophical speculation about natural physical systems wrapped up in the out dated and over simplified physics of the 19th century which thrown in alongside some child observation (which is one of my favorite moments in all of Freud, despite what it lacks in really evidencing the death drive), microbiology (which is misunderstood), and clinical / cultural ‘empirical’ evidence (patients who repeat destructive acts and war). Oh, not to mention a little jab at Nietzsche (power instinct)!
This is without mentioning the fact that – and this is consistent with my above critiques of the 19th century discourse which reaches back into 17th century Naturephilosophie – the whole second part of this paper (20 pages and on) is basically an adaption of Kant’s work on categories of understanding dressed up with 19th century psychoanalytic language (I have written a 9,000 word paper that will eventually be a book expanding on these themes and reviewing the science, and I must say all my research indicates that Freud’s science was outdated for even its time, and, in short, if we do not start with the law of conservation as governing physical systems as a basic assumption then the rest of the death drive argument falls apart).
With all this said, this reading is absolutely key to psychoanalysis and metapsychological ecopnomics. Freud was obviously a genius, and his attempt to tie together various epistemological and methodological models to form a philosophical view on the human organism is excellent. And with this said, the death drive is not naturalistic or scientific concept, as Deleueze and Guattari point out, it is a way out of a problem: If pleasure guides us, then why do we have war? Why do my patients maintain these 'bad' habits? (Why do I, Freud, smoke my jaw into oblivion and alienate all my friends?)
Or, more broadly in relation to the vitality of psychoanalysis, the death drive solves the problem of naïve humanism. The death drive is an ethical position, an as if, that says ‘even if this is bogus science, who cares! It’s not about the science, it’s about acting as if you had a death drive in you,’ or whatever, because humanism relies too heavily on projecting the 'negative' into the environment where it can be left undealt with. The death drive brings the conflict back to an internal level. This much is correct and on track, but Freud’s 19th century method is not.
Ok, time for Andre Green.
Entry 15 - Follower Request (Jenkinson on Death)
Just kidding. Andre Green will come later. I've slipped too much into the deep theoretical and clinical aspects of psychoanalysis.
We need to get back to be being quick and dirty.
A follower of the blog sent a podcast my way (Stephen Jenkinson – Die Wise: How to Understand the Meaning of Death), kindly asking for my psychoanalytic take.
Jenkinson is talking about death, a subject that psychoanalysis, for a number of reasons, has always had a lot to say about.
He’s all a bit too Christian in his notion that life is in a way a slow death or process of dying, or that ‘death grants life another shot,’ that death is what gives meaning, etc., or whatever. But he is also Nietzschean in his quest for affirmation, his intolerance for morose and depressive defenses against life, and Buddhist mystification of passive death (and, as the scholars say, was not Nietzschean a self-aware Christian trying to remedy his own nihilistic illness?).
He points out early (in an introduction teaser clip) something to the effect that ‘in a world with constant heartbreak, we try to have less heart’ and ‘why shouldn’t death be heartbreaking.’ To loop back around to psychoanalysis: Otto Rank in his 1929 book Truth and Reality and its follow up Will Therapy writes “Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death” which is absolutely clinically true. Its cliché form is that people go through life avoiding making connections with other people out of fear that that relationship might one day end (if it will end and cause pain, I will avoid it from the start). These people, in attempt to prepare themselves in advance for hurt as to maximize the enjoyment of life and the minimization of pain (utilitarianism) end up living hollow, lonely lives devoid of meaning. The safe life is not a good life. Life is about risk (and this is different than constantly engaging in danger…).
Platitudes aside (and that word is a little too harsh for Jenkinson), what Jenkinson is saying here is that some things do produce negative feelings in us, and rather than protect ourselves by disavowing these feelings through using euphemisms, defenses, etc., we need to allow ourselves to feel them and process them meaningfully. Death can in fact be scary, and it is certainly inevitable. Get in touch with the feelings this produces in us.
Jenkinson tells a short story about a terminally ill woman who avoids talking about death, has a mother that does not talk about death, and has a yoga teacher who says she is ‘on the right path’ i.e. is avoiding the fact of her impending death. Jenkinson takes the position that it is her duty to accept her death in order to affirm her life. Despite the truth of this, Jenkinson does not realize that a person sometimes needs to rely on a defense against death in order to recuperate some enjoyment before the final act. It is my opinion that Jenkinson gets a little moralistic about things (people should die this or that way) and that life affirmation is for living; a patient who is near death does not necessarily need to affirm life by admitting to their death. However, different therapists will handle these situations in their own ways.
In general, the psychoanalytic question would be ‘does the patient want to live or die?’ and ‘How do they want to live / die.’ I, as an analyst, only help people live. When suicidal patients arrive at my office I work with them until their resistance to living comes to the forefront (or arises in the transference or relationship between himself and myself) whereupon I ask ‘Would you like to work with me to figure out how to live without wanting to kill yourself?’ Or, if the patient needs a more containing statement, I might say ‘I only help people who want to live. If you want to figure out how to live we can do that together. If you want to die I will help you check into a hospital, or you can find another therapist.’ I have yet to have any patient who hasn’t said ‘yes.’ This is affirming life while also having feelings about death (what psychoanalysis aims to do, in a way…).
Entry 16 - A Polemic for a polemic
A short polemic.
Yes. A schizo may be better off taking a walk rather than lying on the couch and having some stupid Freudian attempt to interpret his word salad. Yes, analytic discourse is to an extent artificial.
But a schizo is not better out for a walk if when on this walk he can't pass a stranger without thinking they have read his mind; without thinking that if he locks eyes with someone they surely must be following him, watching him; that if he lets 'bad' thoughts slip into his mind - such as murdering people - that the people he sees as he walks will in fact be murdered; without believing that the world will implode if he does not perform this or that ritual, etc.
That is, a clinical schizo cannot enjoy a walk, much anything else. What they need is something artificial because the world is already too real. They are already on the outside, in a relationship with the outside world.
Entry 17 - Reader Requests - Dream Analysis? Silence as an analytic technique?
This blog is in part me venting frustration (a cope, as they would say), part me sharing bits of knowledge or experience (if we can posit a difference...) that excite me, part me wanting to connect with people and feel as if my knowledge is actually helpful (my desire to teach).
This entry is composed entirely of the last item, that is, reader requested topics (though reader requested is quite narcissistic of me).
1: Dream analysis:
Entry 18: Zizek's Vulgar Marxism Confused for Psychoanalytic Praxis?
My most frequent reader send me a quote from a Zizek lecture.
Yes, Ziz is completely incorrect.
In a strange move, Ziz invokes a superego injunction in order to substantiate an abstraction that is not felt as a material entity in the body (one should devote one's self to a cause greater than one's self). Psychoanalysis is about analyzing down abstractions and superego injunctions so that one can understand one's own wants and needs (and how they relate to a history of conflict) and therefore one's self, not denigrate one's self (piece of bullshit). This is not say that there is surely a hard and fast self or unfractured ego (as the lacanians will show well enough that this is a myth) but rather to say that beneath all the play of signifiers there are real bodies, drives, and affect. If its one thing Lacanians never understand (and what Freud, Andre Green, Laplanche, Deleuze and Guattari do) is that there's a body, or material, underneath all the push and pull of lack and signification (drive theory is overlooked by or rather distorted into a language game).
As Nick Land writes
'The goal of psychoanalysis is precisely to bring you to the point where you can finally be in touch with the drives and conflicts that make up the thing we refer to hesitantly as the self, and once this is done, understand what one wants and therefore finally work for a need or want that falls on the side of constructive or life affirming existence. This can be mean investing this libidinal drive into politics (an ego sublimated object that should be taken balanced and maturely), religion (a superego sublimated object that should be done in a life affirming manner), and love (an Id sublimation that can be done in a meaningful manner).
Not as catchy, but Ziz has always sacrificed profundity at the expense of making poop jokes.
(Ok, for the record I like Ziz, and he isn't totally wrong, what he really means is that the analyst brings the analysand out of their narcissistic bubble and helps them develop ego strength to the point where they can withstand being in a world with actual people - objects - rather than part objects and the projections we throw onto them...)
Similarly, elsewhere Ziz makes an equally grievous error when he says.
He's a psychoanalytic philosopher.
That is, he doesn't see patients, attend supervision, maintain a training analysis, contribute to or at clinical conferences, work at a clinic, etc. etc.
In the 60s Lacan made it so that anyone who wanted to be an analyst could train at his institute and, when they were ready, call themselves an analyst (the whole in fights between American psychoanalysts, European psychoanalysts, and French european psychoanalysts is a large bit of history to cover...think M.D.s vs. PHDs. vs. Psya.Ds. ...).
As someone who actually treats patients (and despite still being in training I've been seeing patients for 5+ years, which is very small in comparison to analysts who see patients for up to 70 years of their lifetime...) I can assure you people do change.
Here is the way I will synthesize my experience with Ziz's proclamation and in doing so link it back to the emphasis on drive theory above: Yes, you do have to change 'the system that pushes people to do things' but that system is internal and it is the system of drives and their vicissitudes. Psychoanalysis does not work on an intellectual level (which Ziz, an obsessional academic, is stuck at as indicated by his approach to theory and the anecdotes that one can find regarding his 'analysis' [if you can call it that] with Miller...), it works on an emotional level to resolve conflicts and give patients, as I have said, new emotional and maturational experiences through resolving resistances via transference...
Entry 19: Marx and Green / Practice, Theory and Cybernetic Feedback
Popular psychoanalysis has come to be a Marxist theoretical affair the very nature of which ironically overshadows its possible and already existent practical Marxist aspects (all that is solid melt into air including marxism itself which lapses into commodity fetishism...).
Polemic meant to evoke notions of Petersonian 'cultural marxism?' No.
Statement meant to highlight that in the 50s-80s psychoanalysis in Europe, with the help of Lacan, came to be attached to Marx and social theory critical of the ego and subject while at the same time in America psychoanalysis was morphing into the opposite, individualized ego psychology? Also no, though this is helpful to keep in mind.
Statement meant to provoke a renewed interest in psychoanalytic practice and therefore also a renewed interest in psychoanalytic theory? Yes!
Popular psychoanalysis has come to be a CMC cycle that has 'lost similitude' (Foucault) or 'lost the symbol' (Jung) [Yes, I'm well aware of the methodological shakiness of mixing discourses like this, as well as the plain irony of talking about Marx through two thinkers, one antithetical to Marx the other indifferent...).
We don't need to get lost in theoretical jargon to get at what this means and why it is important, we simply need to provide the following model from which the intelligent reader can synthesis their own meaning:
'Clinical' Psychoanalysis has built into it several feedback mechanisms - practices - that hone theory. Theory can then be used to further hone practice (and so on and so on...). What does this mean? I'm in a session with a patient. I have a theory or hypothesis regarding the patient (how they feel, what they think, what they want, etc.). I test it on my patient by taking my internal thoughts and feelings and forming them thoughtfully into a question or interpretation aloud. As Freud points out in several early papers, an interpretation is only as good as the patient's response to it (whether it 'takes' or not, to use old medical jargon). Even if, as an analyst, you have all these genius ideas of whats going on with the patient, if these ideas don't stick in the transference and help produce a transference conducive to the task of analysis (whatever that task may be, i.e., the conscious or unconscious goals decided upon between analyst and analysand), then your theory is essentially useless (what Guattari meant when he said 'psychoanalysts need to get a grip' and do what works, not what is right...).
'Pure Theory' - which is what Lacan wanted to move analysis towards, for better or worse - does not have this feedback mechanism (maybe it does in non-positivist epistemological models, but that's another story...). Whether or not your theory catches on is essentially up to language games and cult of personality (can you defeat or persuade your opponent). Academic debates disconnected from material circumstances (real people and their actual experiences). For example, theoretical psychoanalysts who don't see patients take film and cultural events as their object of analysis. These objects cannot provide feedback to an interpretation. The object can be endlessly manipulated intellectually to fit the model, and the model can be manipulated to fit the event (which is one latent critique D and G levy towards Freud in his treatment of the Wolfman and his conceptualization of Schreber). Never will Vertigo reply back to Zizek - 'No, you get me all wrong, I don't feel that way at all' (just an example, I like Zizek's analysis of Vertigo...).
This gets us to Andre Green's astute observation that, in simple terms, psychoanalysis is the only field wherein practice is theory and theory is practice, or what Marx was trying to get at in reconnecting theory to material (D and G - form and content are interchangable; McLuahan - the medium is the message; Baudrillard - the simulation and the hyperreal; Nick Land and Mark fisher - theoryfiction and hyperstition, etc.).
Green, in an interview in 1994 says
The take away here is not another polemic against Lacan. I quite like Lacan (to an extent) and can also entertain the idea that Green is kind of an asshole with his on biases (Green had nasty things to say about my own analyst, completely dismissed D and G; he is an MD and MD analysts are notorously hateful towards non-MD fields, etc. etc.), but that we should start thinking critically about what we think psychoanalysis is, and we should be suspicious of the sort of cottage industry of Lacnian-Marxist theoretical stuff that pours off the conveyor belts of critical theory presses, not to mention the 'psychoanalysts' behind these texts who have never sat with a patient in their lives.
Entry 20: Andre Green and The Work of the Negative (drives, objects, and metapsychology)
Drive and Object
A distinction between drive derivative (invested energy that has become distorted) and drive (semi-mentalized internal motivating force) is important.
In The Work of the Negative Green emphasizes how a drive is always conditioned by an object (not unlike how in physics the plane of space is conditioned by an object), meaning therefore that the drive derivative always contains object traces (mother was too cold, drive went inwards, father was too competitive, drive was stunted or frustrated at ever turn).
For Freud a drive is always latent (as opposed to manifest). We only experience a drive as it appears in an object-investment or some other kind of secondary or ‘derivative’ fashion, never in a pure state (not unlike Kant's thing in itself).
Drive derivative is basically character or what drive theorists would call drive organization (drives became arranged in a certain way, or the manner and matter of ‘discharge’ has taken on certain tendencies, libidinal avenues etc.). It is also similar to what Guattari calls an assemblage of enunciation - a the play of dynamic forces leaves a residue that becomes the subject or cite (Whiteheads superject).
The drive and its object impressions are bound up with the notion of negation.
Drive and Negation
Freud's ideas on negation (see his early paper on negation) are not Hegel's (as Green points out). There is no pure negative, or rather, the negative is always a derivative of a positive. There is always something active occurring. The mind and body are primed to go and are met with resistance which they must overcome (a sort of pseudo-vitalism).
As Green explicating Freud points out, the object is always somewhat disruptive, disappointing, and hated for both putting an end to the infant’s feeling of omnipotence and also always bringing into being a sense of non-immediate gratification (part of what Lacan will call lack). This means, as Freud points out, that a non-anthropomorphic form of sadism is evident at birth – the infant hates the object. The fantasy of the object is better. So, sadism is hate of the ‘O/outside’ before there is an idea ‘the O/other.’ When the infant gets a sense of alterity, sadism may be put into the outside, ‘the other,’ and then reflected back at the self; masochism is sadism with the self as object. This puts masochism and sadism back in the economic structure. This also gets us from the reality principle / death drive (primary sadism) to the reality principle (ego and super ego, i.e. identifications with others), to the pleasure principle / libido, (invested and gaining pleasure from being sadistic to others, or identifying as others and being sadistic to the self).
Thus, rather than life/death drive or bad/good objects, Green introduces us to objectalization / deobjectalization. Deobjectalization is an attack on object relations and a withdrawal of investment in objects which Green compares his idea to Bion’s attack on links and Lacan’s breakdown of the signifying chain. This is partly because objectalization is equated with symbolization, the ability to make sense, and links and signifier chains are about making sense out of datum. In the deobjectalized subject, a schizophrenic for example, it is not so much a pathological splitting process that lies at the genesis of the schizophrenia, but rather the veritable lack of any sort of splitting process because splitting implies, to a more or lesser degree, some level relationship with an object, whereas a veritable lack of splitting implies a complete withdrawal into the self, part of which means a rejection of the other, the object. The ‘split’ is disavowed which removes the need for an object, and thus an encounter with an object is taken off the table, so to speak. This he calls negative narcissism, which is a moving towards a zero point.
Death Drive, Sex, and Love:
Green is at his most Freudian here. The death drive is related to sublimation. Sublimation is the sexual drive becoming desexualized and repressed or invested elsewhere. This investment or repression is related to the superego, and the superego is related to identification, often with that of the father during the Oedipal situation. When libido, that which binds, is spread out -- thus becoming to an extent unbinding -- and invested through identification (relatively external) and subsequent super ego agency (relatively internal model of external identification) opens up space for the death drive to thrive. This is so because the process of sublimation (gratification is delayed, satisfaction is deferred, i.e. the oedipal father’s prohibition and the unavailability of the mother, the subsequent identification and internal agency) opens up furthered investment in frustrating and disappointing objects (reality). This is of course where the oedipal castration comes into play (it is not the father that castrates, but the very existence of an object and reality that terminates the infant’s fantasy of omnipotence).
So, for Freud, sublimation = desexualization=defusion or spreading out of libido coupled with objects, and defusion means that the libido can no longer keep the death drive in check, which means the death drive takes predominance.
Naturally all these drive theory has implications on many aspects of life such as love.
The fear people have when in romantic relationships isn’t really about abandonment or some wish for death, it’s a fear of being the other’s object of desire which is further complicated by the fact that any act of closeness or love unconsciously arouses the spite and vengeance towards the original object which, despite its best efforts, is always disappointing.
Sharing, loving, pleasure, tolerance, etc. cannot be created in us by an object alone. An internal drive is always required. These drives get mixed up when we are in romantic relationships. People think they are achieving satisfaction of their own drives when they’ve really resigned themselves to leaving their drives unsatisfied while getting enjoyment out of satisfying their couple’s drives. That is, you believe you are being fulfilled in a relationship but you have sacrificed your own fulfillment for the fulfillment of the other which masks itself as fulfillment of yourself (a repetition compulsion of the early Winnocottian false/true self conflict). In short, object love does not facilitate drive autonomy. Being loved precludes one from the risk of loving another and the important maturational event of realizing that the object is already partially lost. This is part of the function of the analytic situation.
The analytic situation is ‘negative’ – the analyst is quiet, out of sight, in order to bring out ‘positive’ symptoms. Green writes “instead of searching for it actively, it turns out to be better to arrange things in such a way that it reveals itself spontaneously. This is the invention of analysis” (pg. 164).
To prepare us for getting back to psychoanalysis in general, and in relation to this negative/positive dichotomy, here are the values of psychoanalysis:
Entry 25: Notes on Mental Illness, Drive Theory, and Reality TV
In the entry before the last, I commented briefly on the heuristics of diagnosis.
What I didn't touch on there, and what is a long standing issue in psychoanalysis and its related psychiatric fields, is the discussion of whether or not mental illness is 'real' or not.
It's a poorly framed question. Even mistakes, errors, lies, etc., are real, to some degree (unreal, hyperreal, etc.). So what does it mean when we ask if mental illness is real? We mean to say - is the concept of 'mental illness' functional in its goal of understanding people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to the extent that it can be used to aid people who want aid, or give insight to other care providers. The question is whether it helps or huts.
Along these lines, Thomas Szasz - who denies being an 'anti-psychiatrist,' but for our purposes here can be considered about as close to one as one can get - famously asserted that mental illness is a myth. Since then, social critics, postmodernists, post structuralists, etc., - Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, R.D. Laing, - all riding the antipsychiatrist wave, have toed this line one way or another.
Let's switch gears for a second. I've been watching a lot of reality TV love shows with my girlfriend such as the UK's Love Island and the US's Love is Blind. How is this related? Watch these shows and you will no longer question whether or not mental illness is real.
In Love is Blind, people go on literal blind dates, that is, they meet many people but are obscured by a barrier from seeing one another. Eventually they must decide, based only on their conversations and sound of voice, which person they want to choose to marry, at which point they meet in person and reveal their physical appearance to their new 'fiancee.' Obviously, this can cause conflicts - 'the person I got to know and like talking with is not physically appealing to me, what know?' kind of conflicts.
For example, we watch Jessica struggle with being unattracted to her choice. Unfortunately for Jessica, she seems completely unable to have any insight into her conflict which results in very strange behavior. Jessica appears unable to tell her partner she does not find him attractive except in ways that are totally cruel followed by a guilty retraction of her statements (or sometimes a complete denial she even said that). For example, she tells her partner that she finds him second best to another man whom she finds "sexy and attractive," only to laugh off and reject this 'sexy' man when this he approaches her asking if she is interested him. She smiles when she is angry, a forced smile that seems to indicate she cannot tolerate her own anger (incongruent affect); she fails to synthesize contrasting ideas or feelings such as joyfully pronouncing the beauty of a dress while also saying it feels "wrong" and crying.
All of this would be OK if Jessica seemed to have some insight into her rapidly fluctuating feelings, but she seems to really believe each contrasting feeling or idea in that moment, only to switch, seemingly without noticing she had previously felt differently, to the opposite feeling or idea. We could talk more about others - such as Jessica's partner who seems to intuitively understand that Jessica does not have any interest him yet still insists that they are "on the same page" without asking Jessica if she is, in fact, on the same page as him - but we get the idea.
This is mental illness in the flesh. Jessica (and her partner) seemingly gets nothing of what she wants or needs from whatever game she is unconsciously playing out with these men. It seems she is unable to allow herself to have feelings one might think reasonable to have given the circumstances, and it seems she drastically lacks continuity in her feeling states and ideations. In clinical jargon, she seems to lack a stable ego; she seems fragmented.
The idea, at least for Freud, is the materialist hypothesis that the mind is an extension of the body; an attempt to transform bodily forces - instincts, functions, processes - into symbols. We have all kinds of instincts, some of which are socially acceptable, some of which are not. Therefore, as 'social' 'animals' we are in conflict between our body and its needs and our outer world. In addition to these internal stimuli that always exert pressure, there are external stimuli - social pressures, other people and their wants and needs (Sartre's 'hell is other people') etc., that create further conflict. For Freud (and Nietzsche), when an internal or external stimuli presents itself, one needs to act with one's body accordingly, otherwise one suppresses the instinct unnaturally, throwing the body out of cycle. However, because we 'live in a society,' to reference the great meme, we cannot always act on our instincts and therefore we must find alternative ways of 'discharging' the instinct. This way is through talking. Instead of doing, we talk about how we feel and what we would like to do. This helps develop narrative continuity (ego) and provide a higher feeling of relief than not acting and not talking.
In short, if you are not getting what you need or want - or rather, your own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors are preventing you from getting what you need or want - and you are unable to recognize how you feel and how your feelings shift in relation to your instinctual responses to internal and external situations, all of which result in conflict, and if you are unable to resolve this conflict and it further impedes your getting what you need or want, and if this feedback cycle feedbacks out of control and becomes common place to the extent that it impedes personality or dynamic response to the world, then you are experiencing mental illness.
This is what, in clinical jargon, is called a personality disorder. You wouldn't use the same tool to approach all tasks, would you? Then why would you use the same limited responses, give or take, for all situations? But these metaphors run the risk of preachy cognitive behavior...we don't want this.
With this in mind, and if we don't like the terminology - given it is harsh, almost critical - we could always say 'mental-dynamism-challenged' or 'those with dynamic difficulty.' You think I'm being cheeky - I am not. This is what mental illness is. Conflicts over dynamism.
Though he's not making any claims about psychoanalysis, he is making a claim about the etiology of a disease or condition that would be better left to people who actually work in real, everyday situations with these people (and this is not say that people can't theorize, or do or say whatever they want. I encourage everyone to do what they want as long as they're mindful of how it might effect their likelihood of getting what they want out of their life...).
But this is all still besides the point.
The 'slept' approach to this would be to argue that neurological models of understanding mental health make this or that mistake (which I think they do), or that a layman or nonanalyst should not make claims to what is or is not the cause or nature of mental illnesses / conditions, whatever, etc. We're not doing either of these. As we said, these are slept. We wanna we WOKE.
Woke: Etiology, when it comes to good psychotherapy, doesn't really matter. Etiology is to be constructed by the analyst and the analysand based on the former's understanding of the latter's self reports.
Ok. A bold statement. Let's unpack it.
I think when arguing / debating, discussing others, whether the stakes are high or low, one should always be generous to the other argument. Assume it is right, but does not quite have the effect the arguer intends it to (You need to create a common ground with your other and then come to a point of clear agreement or disagreement). No point in fighting tooth and nail over stuff that is, at the end of the day, not really connected to the comings and goings of the outside world.
So, let's just assume that X mental illness is totally neurological, physical, genetic, whatever. So what? As a talk therapist, this won't change how I approach my interventions. In other words, the point of identifying a clear and indubitable etiology for an illness is so that the scientific method and its abstractions can be applied accurately with limited actual experience of the thing at hand (relying on data points, quantitative stuff, etc.). Science wants to say 'Disease X is caused by A and B. Because A and B are the causes, treatment Y and Z should be utilized as they have been deemed effective in trials / research.' The point of determining etiology is to determine how to approach the treatment. This works for medicine and physical surgical manipulation, not for talk.
The genius of psychoanalysis is that the cybernetic and affective aspects of speech or communication are used to relieve symptoms through producing mental effects (think the placebo effect, or CCRU concept of hyperstition) without making direct physical changes.
I leave with a discussion between myself and a supervisor that sums up what we have been saying
Me: "I was being criticized by a colleague for relying on the idea that depression was caused not only by an investment in a lost internal object, but also the superego's repression of intolerable feelings of anger, anger that then gets turned inwards out of fear or retaliation or violence, etc., as opposed to treating depression as some sort of chemical imbalance, or social ill."Entry 13: Kantianism in Psychoanalysis (13.1 to elaborate on Kant)
Supervisor: "What difference does it make, right? The intervention is all the same, help the patient talk and see what you can do in the transference to help"
There's a lot written on Freud's secret Kantianism, not to mention the similarities between some of Lacan's conceptualization of desire and Kant.
However, there are actual Kantian psychoanalysts such as Bion and Britton.
Here's a little bit of old case data that will end up in a book I am writing on Guattari.
(the patient, an older man with schizophrenia, becomes angry in session at times but, as is par the course for schizophrenia, finds his anger intolerable)
To understand, let us consider Mr. R.’s talk of frozenness through the thought of two German Idealist philosophers; 1: It is a Hegelian double negation as Lacan or Zizek might argue; 2: It is a Kantian category of knowledge, what Bion, a Kantian, would call +K / -K, or what Britton, also a Kantian, would call a “counter belief.” That is, rather than defend his feelings of being hot and angry by negating it ‘I am not feeling hot and angry (vague, indefinite, but could mean frozen),’ he instead substitutes or counters with the positively framed phrase “I am feeling frozenized” in place of the negation phrase. This is less confusing and more clinically relevant than it may seem: One may communicate the same thing in many ways: (A) I am hot. This is the affirmative or positive. (B) I am not hot. This is the negative to statement (A). (C) I am cold. This is the affirmative or positive that expresses one of many possible meanings as the negative phrase (B). I am cold is a positively framed negation of the phrase I am hot. I am feeling forzenized / I am not feeling hot. The two phrases share the same referent but demonstrate different semantic approaches to the same communication.
Though, of course, semantic approach may itself be an important communication, but space does not allow us to engage this idea here.
Entry 13.1: Kant in Psychoanalysis
A wide therapeutic resistance, in patients and therapists alike, which is often not addressed properly is the fear of knowing and creating which is disguised as the wish for learning.
The analyst who brought this to our attention in the analytic community is Wilfred Bion. As a therapist, my oeuvre stresses the Bionian concept of knowledge as an affectual experience of the here and now which requires no hard and fast rigid / logical or rational aspects.
For Bion a feeling is a fact (I've used this intervention on a heavily guarded patient to much success).When one reads anything, or sits with any patient, one does not ever ‘not know.’ ‘Not knowing’ is predicated on an idealized notion (written as ‘what is supposed to happen’) of what it means to know. One already always knows one’s internal experience – ‘I sit here with this patient and am filled with the feeling of not being able to think in their presence – I know that this patient does not want me to know. I know I feel frustrated with this experience, etc.’
Or, when a student says ‘I don’t know what the author is trying to say here,’ what they are saying is ‘I currently know my own feeling as a fact (frustration) and that affectual fact disturbs me (because I think I shouldn't feel this way) to the point where I disavow my knowing of it.’ In other words, we trick ourselves into thinking 'its not that I am frustrated, it’s that I don’t know. 'One always knows (the other through the self). This is, after all, the essence of the idea of counter transference.
What does this have to do with counter transference? The ‘I don’t know’ resistance is a counter transference resistance, one we see in our patients. We ask them to expand on an idea, they reply ‘I don’t know.’ The entry level therapist is shut down and accepts this. A well trained therapist responds with ‘you don’t have to know anything here, just give me a guess’ or ‘make it up’ or ‘any hypothesis?’ or ‘whatever comes to mind’ or… etc. etc.
For example, when a patient of mine in a group says something and the other group members respond with ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘I don’t get it,’ it is not that they haven’t understood their fellow, no matter how unclear he is being, but rather, it is that they’ve let a frustrating experience block their intuitive and instinctive ability to synthesize the available data into a likely narrative or meaning, or synthetic knowing. They have crossed out their ability to make meaningful links and associations to this fellow's words and affect which would allow an internal transforming and sense making of his utterances. Compounding this is a sneaky resistance, what I call the Socratic Neurotic – ‘I avoid saying / acting I know because one can only learn when one admits one does not know!’ This has the effect of appearing like a defense/resistance is actually a positive trait (eager to learn) when learning actually comes from curious application of here and now / in the moment knowledge (It is a fact I feel such and such a away etc. etc.). This is what Britton (also a Bionian and Kantian) would call a counter belief.
To sum, I will be a happy camper the day I hear my patients be able to say (in their own language of course) ‘I observed feelings of frustration in myself while listening to that / reading that, and that frustration made me want to fall back on the idea that I didn’t know something, but I realize I know my own feeling of frustration, and through being aware of this, I realize that I know more about what that person said / the text I read than I initially thought, as when I mentalize my frustration I free my mind up to be curious and make connections that, when curious, readily come with little effort.’ The main take away is that the analyst needs to take in what the analysand is putting out and find a way to return it to the analysand in a tolerable way.
Kant makes a reappearance with Ogden, who relies on Bion, who in one paper (which I forget) has a section in one of his papers on the transference matrix entitled ‘Sexual Things in Themselves,’ the thing in itself of course being Kant’s concept of the non experienced entity or set of forces which is known to exist via a priori reason, also known as Noumena (Freud’s primary process or Lacan's real is basically Noumena. Raw experience that cannot be known or symbolized, only experienced as affective intensity).
This kind of Kantian affirmative vitalism is exemplified well in Betty Joseph’s concept of 'the total situation' which is also the title of her paper in which the concept appears.
For Joseph, the psychoanalytic process is always active and in motion. Everything, even nothing, is something, as ‘nothing’ does not indicate a not being, but rather indicates what old Jewish physicians (Freud is not far off from this general description…) such as Moses Maimonides would term ‘apophatic,’ or using negative phrases to denote a positive (Maimonides' concept of God also beautiful lines up with D and G's BwO, which I will talk about in another time...). This apophatic negative indicates several things. In this sense, psychoanalysis is always affirmative and positive, but not necessarily positivistic. This connects to the theme I've been developing here: K / knowledge (and we will see this come up again in Bollas – ‘the unthought known’), or Bion’s -K. We know it, it animates us from the unconscious, but we don’t know we know it yet. Or, Bion’s mystical idea that thoughts wait around until a thinker is found to think them (which beautifully mirrors Whitehead's idea that the subject is produced as a residual of material forces in the world - the supraject - or D and G's idea that forces create the subject or the assemblage of enunciation).
Even, as Joseph mentions, when the patient comes to us and remains silent, or talks about his boring day to day life, we are learning many things on many different levels (a nothing gives us knowledge through the form of the nothing). This is a good practical putting to use of Freud’s old adage that there is no negative in the unconscious, no ‘no’ in the unconscious. How does this relate more to K? Joseph puts forth her idea that the analysis is always active and in motion because we can always learn something even from nothing – this is because there is no such thing as nothing, just somethings and somethings, and any ‘nothing’ we come up with is really a refusal on the analyst’s part to be where the patient is or needs to be.
I'm reminded of a conflict I had with a supervisee - she was stating that she did not ‘get’ the patient, which I mentioned is in fact a good grasp on where the patient is at. This is the K function, and the idea that there is always something going on in the transference. It is not that there is something that is not understood or unknown (a negative), it is that my supervisee understood or knew the patient and had an adverse reaction to it – didn’t like what she saw, so to speak, so she attacked the link that would give her knowledge into the patient (just as the patient attacks his / her own link when they do not like what they see in themselves). In a Kantian sense, we are always making sense out of anything put in front of us, a la the transference is always affirmative and inducing us with knowledge.
To be specific, we only learn from the negative (a good supplementary reading on Joseph would be Andre Green’s entire book The Work of the Negative…) if we are viewing the ‘whole situation’ – the direct communications, indirect communications, enactments, slips of tongue, dreams, etc. need to be viewed only in relation to one another and ultimately in relation to the analyst. They don’t mean much on their own. Another part of this whole situation business is the general feeling and position the patient puts us in – am I always worried about being late for the sessions? When I am in session, do I constantly want to make interventions when they are not required? The whole situation is all of the aforementioned.
Whereas most Kleinians are secret Kantians, Bollas studied under or was analyzed by (it is unclear, and I haven’t done enough research) a Heideggerian, that is, a disciple of philosopher Martin Heidegger. Though, living in London and training at Tavistock, he is thoroughly consistent with previous thinkers such as Joseph, (Pick who we have yet to mention), Bion, etc. etc. His concept of the ‘evocative object’ is from Bion / Klein. Consistent with Joseph and Klein, Bollas talks of the total situation. Further consistent with Joseph, the analyst always has an influence on the analysand which creates in the analysand an instinct to aid (in some cases) the analyst – ‘yes, that was a good interpretation’ even though the interpretation was actually bad, or more subtly, ‘I had this dream…’ a dream which is clearly couched in analytic jargon, dreamt for the analyst. The content can be mostly disregarded, the form or expression says ‘Look, you are a good analyst, and thus I have brought you a gift...'
I want to end this rant on a moment that synthesizes some of the Kantian strands brought up and how they relate generally to psychoanalysis.
As I have noted earlier in this blog, Bion decried any notion of criticizing Psychoanalysis as unscientific simply because that criticism does not meaningfully apply to psychoanalysis. That is, calling psychoanalysis ‘not scientific enough’ is like calling psychoanalysis ‘not religious enough.’ Alternatively, and this is my metaphor, it’s like criticizing baseball for not being ‘basketball enough.’ Bion’s idea here comes from Kant (and as we have shown Bion was an unabashed Kantian): Kant had similar things to say, like how you would not say ‘the color orange is not round enough.’ That is, roundness is not a necessary quality to define what is or is not orange. Likewise, we would not say ‘the cube is green enough to be a cube.’ The criticism must match the categorically necessary features: We can only criticism science for not being scientific, and we can only criticize psychoanalysis for not being psychoanalytic enough.
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Entry 13.2 Kantian Model of Mind in Psychoanalysis (Ron Britton)
"The only thing that I felt encouraging in that respect was in reading a book on the introduction of German philosophy, two centuries ago into England, when Kant was the major philosophical figure. And it was simply an account of how long it was before it was acknowledged in England. It was more than 50 years before Kant was anything other than ridiculed in the British intellectual tradition, despite the fact that the people doing the ridiculing couldn't read Kant because he hadn't been translated, and they didn't read German. But that was even better reason for rejecting him, because he wrote in another language." - Ron Britton in interview with UK Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2010.Britton in his paper Psychic Reality and Unconscious Belief flawlessly applies Kant to clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis.
For Britton, belief is to psychic reality as perception is to material reality, a distinction bound up with active / passive positions.
We do not actively perceive this world – or actively will ourselves to perceive it. I do not command my eyes to see or ears to hear. I do not will my senses to synthesize and be imbued with a sense of cohesion, time, and space. This world impresses upon me some set of chaotic experiences that I automatically assemble into sense and non-sense, and if I wish not to experience these things they can only be avoided through altering my senses (close my eyes, block my ears etc.) or negating positives (I didn’t see that, that didn’t happen) or repressing experiences (Away it goes, into the vault.) Perception (and eventually belief) is a synthesis of all sorts of psychological and physical processes and these processes construct and constitute and work with the material of the experiences impressed on us. We create reflections or representations of experiences (or part of Melanie Klien's object relations theory).
There is no 1 to 1 correlation between objects and perceptions, which would imply an active object and a passive receiver.
We're getting into CCRU territory here (Kant, belief, affect).
Briton writes “unless a phantasy has the status of belief it does not have consequences." You might argue that 'the disbelief of a fantasy may have consequences. The unbelief of a fantasy may consequences! (un, non, and dis should be distinguished. Kant did this and it is where we get unconscious instead of nonconscious. Un leaves room for movement and escapes binary logic). The answer to this is that the only reason one would negate a belief into a disbelief (or disavow it) would be if one already believed in it to begin with. A fantasy we haven’t given meaning or weight to (belief) has no reason to be negated or disavowed.
He goes on “Subjective belief precedes object evaluation” (which is basically Kant’s project across all his works, reconciling science and religion). We believe in some sort of coherence or meaning, or attribute value to certain events and causal explanations before we have knowledge. Every day we operate on belief or ‘faith’ that things will be as they were yesterday without actual 'knowledge' (other than internal consistency) of the fact. I have no intimate knowledge of how my internal organs are operating at this very moment, but I have faith that my heart will continue to pump blood.
The concept Britton introduces after elaborating on these notions is Counter belief (pg.20), which seems to be a fantasy about a fantasy. It is overlooked in most psychoanalytic encounters. Analysands unconsciously put forth clichés and banalities in psychoanalytic jargon to appear as ‘good patients’ to avoid their real issues. In this sense, Counter-belief is sort of like Lacan’s purloined letter, or Deleuze and Guattari’s “repressing representation.” A whole parallel set of fantasies are devised to throw the analyst off track (I’ve certainly caught myself doing this in my own analysis).
In everyday language, this is is when someone interviewing for a job, when asked what their greatest weakness is, replies with something they don't feel too bad about admitting - 'I work too hard' or 'Sometimes I am disorganized.' Never will they say 'I detest authority and act in small ways to sabotage the workflow in the workplace.'
Entry 13.3 Kantian Model of Mind in Psychoanalysis
Ogden in his Introduction to Reading Bion beginsby quoting Bion at length
“In the introduction to Learning from Experience [Bion's book], Bion carefully and patiently explains to the reader how he would like this book to be read: The book is designed to be read straight through once without checking at parts that might be obscure at first….if the reader will read straight through, those points will become clearer as he proceeds….”He goes on
“First; the reader must be able to tolerate not knowing, getting lost, being confused and pressing ahead anyway…What it is to learn from experience (or the inability to do so) will be something for the reader to experience first-hand in the act of reading this book…In other words, if the reader is to engage in something more than ‘merely reading’…he must become the author of his own book (his own set of thoughts)…psychoanalytic writing as an effort not to report, but to create an emotional experience”Putting aside the fact that this is precisely how Anti-Oedipus (and much of Guattari) was written and should be read, this is how one should approach interacting with any mind or text; it's how the mind works with the world (as elaborated in 13.2).
I don't have much more to say on this as I think it speaks for itself (and the reader should use their own mind to construct a belief or a meaning here instead of relying on me...)
Entry 14: Some Notes on Freud: A Primer for Andre Green
We will briefly cover some main points from two of Freud's integral papers before ending with a general explication of a basic psychoanalytic concept.
A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis
Freud’s conceptualization of presence and absence in psychoanalysis is necessary to the understanding of the unconscious but often left out of clinical discussion.
Freud seems to indicate the presence of absence. We cannot imagine an absence (go ahead, try and think of nothing or a lack or absence of something – you have to think of the thing first before you negate it!) or experience a real absence. We can only symbolize an absence, and even that symbolization of an absence is itself some sort of presence.
If we tune our ‘observing ego’ well enough we can catch when a “conception – or any other psychical (mental) element” becomes absent and then present again. I want to add that often we do not know something (X) is present or absent (especially if it is unconscious), but we may recognize when X deviates from its current position (x moves from present to absent or from absent to present). In movement we tend to recognize it. We do not experience presences and absences, but experience, only in hindsight, the feeling of the motion between presences and absences. A thought had a change.
Motion is necessarily bound up with time.
This idea of retrospective (temporal) change is important. In regard to the person who is hypnotized (the archaic precursor to psychoanalysis) to execute a command later on: “But not the whole of it [hypnotized command] emerged into consciousness: only the conception of the act to be executed” (p.261).
That is, we don’t consciously integrate the feelings, thoughts, or language from processes that have become unconscious, but we tend to act them out without knowing. The dangerous thing is then the rational mind can apply some sort of context to the unconscious act and quickly subsume it to a defensive narrative. In other words; 1: Unconscious idea. 2: Relatively conscious action. 3: Retroactively assigned reason for conscious action to fill the void of causality our phenomenological experience necessitates.
This is where some psychoanalysts get off with claiming character or ego as displaced or empty. What I say I am is never really what I am (or was) because I have already assigned a different meaning to it then there was in the moment (unless one is analyzed for many years perhaps?).
In this same paper where Freud introduces these conceptualizations of presence and absence is a wonderful comparison of the mind to photography on page - photo negative, photo positive, etc. It’s like when Sartre, though for the most part completely misunderstanding psychoanalysis, says that man is the negation of all things. To an extent this is true: negation is necessary for thought. Imagine an endless association of positive phenomenon or positive words closely attached to representations. This is the horror of psychosis in many ways (and we will touch upon this later with Green's Work of the Negative...)
Inhibition of Symptoms
With a little bit of presence and absence covered we can quickly get into the metapsychology.
This inhibition / symptom model is derived from the economic metapsychology. We see Freud’s use of economics directly when he uses the analogy of a banker and money to explain that the symptom and inhibition occur through an instinct / drive being damned up (unsatisfied, repressed). This damned up ‘energy’ then becomes bound up through a counterintuitive reinvestment.
That is: X (instinct) is unsatisfied à S or I (symptom / inhibition) formation à S or I formation is reinvested in with X (instinctual energy) à Feedback cycle emerges (return of the repressed, repetition compulsion).
Aside: does this not show the absurdity of the notion of a biological death drive (which we will get to later)? If a symptom or inhibition is a damning of libido (libido becomes bound and expressed as symptom), and this very damn (bound quantity) becomes further invested with what ‘energy’ is left in the economy (unbound quantity), resulting in the repetition compulsion (maintenance of symptom and conditions adequate for such maintenance), then is it not safe to say that self-destructive or counterintuitive behaviors and thoughts are not a manifestation of some inherent pull towards death, but simply a blockage in a flow of libido? I think so. We should move towards reframing the death drive as a lack of available libido due to poor investment, not an 'active' force itself (In Deleuze and Guattari's language, the death drive is an articulation of libido or the life drive).
End aside.
Now we have a subject with a symptom or inhibition.
When we think of this process in light of the facts that 1: satisfying our instinct/drive may actually bring about unpleasure (loss of meaning, the ‘little death,’ depression towards the end of a fantasy, etc.), and 2: great pleasure may be derived from putting off satisfaction, we can then see that the investment in a symptom or inhibition may be more naturally occurring and sustaining than the contrary. That is, it should be clear to us why our patients cling to their illness.
Now that we have viewed the process by which the symptom/inhibition forms, Freud points out that a distinction is needed between symptom and inhibition.
A symptom: Occurs from repression of instinct Is a sign or substitute for an instinct Is a strange side effect or new phenomenon for an instinct Is necessarily pathological.
An inhibition: Often of a sexual and aggressive nature or related to these instincts. Often a restriction or lowering of a function of the ego. Isn’t necessarily pathological.
An example of a symptom is: Organ failure (Hysteric reactions such as body seizing, going blind, etc.).
An example of an inhibition is: Inability to write (fingers cannot clinch pen, mind cannot produce ideas to be written).
Other interesting comments on this paper: Freud warns us that we may be lead astray if we overestimate the role of the super ego in the process of repression. Repression is originally the ego rejecting the id. Freud warns us of taking his structural model (id/ego/superego) too rigidly. He reminds us that the ego is the organized part of the id, and the super ego is a specialized part of the ego (articulations, not rigid separate entities). In this sense, there is really only id (libido) and its derivatives (this supports my above aside- Libido and its vicissitudes. No wonky death drive). We do not have a protective shield for internal processes, but we do have one for outside, so it is likely that our internal protective measures are modeled on our external ones. Though Freud does not go this far - this helps us understand projection. The inside needs to be put outside so that it may be dealt with. Freud offers us a helpful definition for resistance: an action undertaken to protect repression (anti-cathexis).Out of the economic metapsychology, which is built on a notion of presence of absence, comes the death drive.
Some Notes on the Death Drive
The 19th century was arguably the century of mechanism, and 1920 was a big year for physics. These mechanistic physics, best exemplified by the physicalist school of Brucke and Hemholtz, whom Freud’s early professors where cultish followers of, was still fresh from its academic battle with the vitalism /animism arguments derived from Natural Science, a field which itself emerged from German Idealism, Naturphilosophie, and early Greek philosophy (the lineage is something like Pre-Socratics -> Aristotle -> Descartes -> Hume -> *Maybe Schelling here* Kant -> …).All of this is immensely present – almost to the point of getting in the way - in Freud’s 1920 game changer Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
In short, Freud, relying on physicist laws like the law of constancy or conservation (with a heavily implied use of the law of entropy) as well as using Fechner and other scientists of the time, argues for a drive separate to libido which he calls the death drive.The argument loses its sense of profundity when laid bare: There is inert, inanimate material. Somehow it forms a crust or surface upon which tension levels are required to be regulated. Following the law of constancy, the organism must want to reduce external tension to maintain a homeostatic internal state. Too much or too little tension disrupts this threshold and creates in the basic psychic apparatus an unpleasant tension. Thus, we have the pleasure principle. An organism wishes to maintain a certain base level of tension in relation to its environment.
Despite these shaky vitalistic beginnings, it gets worse. Here’s where Freud really mucks it up: What if an organism wanted to maintain this homeostatic function to the extent that it ‘realized,’ following the metapsychological assumptions of a libidinal economy of cathecting and de-cathecting bound and unbound energy, that it would be more economically efficient to reduce tension to a minimum point than it would to tirelessly maintain tension at a base level requiring a modulation of levels both up and down, all to the extent that the psychic apparatus really aimed to extinguishing life, not maintain it?
This is a philosophical speculation about natural physical systems wrapped up in the out dated and over simplified physics of the 19th century which thrown in alongside some child observation (which is one of my favorite moments in all of Freud, despite what it lacks in really evidencing the death drive), microbiology (which is misunderstood), and clinical / cultural ‘empirical’ evidence (patients who repeat destructive acts and war). Oh, not to mention a little jab at Nietzsche (power instinct)!
This is without mentioning the fact that – and this is consistent with my above critiques of the 19th century discourse which reaches back into 17th century Naturephilosophie – the whole second part of this paper (20 pages and on) is basically an adaption of Kant’s work on categories of understanding dressed up with 19th century psychoanalytic language (I have written a 9,000 word paper that will eventually be a book expanding on these themes and reviewing the science, and I must say all my research indicates that Freud’s science was outdated for even its time, and, in short, if we do not start with the law of conservation as governing physical systems as a basic assumption then the rest of the death drive argument falls apart).
With all this said, this reading is absolutely key to psychoanalysis and metapsychological ecopnomics. Freud was obviously a genius, and his attempt to tie together various epistemological and methodological models to form a philosophical view on the human organism is excellent. And with this said, the death drive is not naturalistic or scientific concept, as Deleueze and Guattari point out, it is a way out of a problem: If pleasure guides us, then why do we have war? Why do my patients maintain these 'bad' habits? (Why do I, Freud, smoke my jaw into oblivion and alienate all my friends?)
Or, more broadly in relation to the vitality of psychoanalysis, the death drive solves the problem of naïve humanism. The death drive is an ethical position, an as if, that says ‘even if this is bogus science, who cares! It’s not about the science, it’s about acting as if you had a death drive in you,’ or whatever, because humanism relies too heavily on projecting the 'negative' into the environment where it can be left undealt with. The death drive brings the conflict back to an internal level. This much is correct and on track, but Freud’s 19th century method is not.
Ok, time for Andre Green.
Entry 15 - Follower Request (Jenkinson on Death)
Just kidding. Andre Green will come later. I've slipped too much into the deep theoretical and clinical aspects of psychoanalysis.
We need to get back to be being quick and dirty.
A follower of the blog sent a podcast my way (Stephen Jenkinson – Die Wise: How to Understand the Meaning of Death), kindly asking for my psychoanalytic take.
Jenkinson is talking about death, a subject that psychoanalysis, for a number of reasons, has always had a lot to say about.
- Theoretically: What comes to mind immediately is that Freud famously said that ‘death has no model in the unconscious’ which simply means that considering the UCS. is composed of either repressed experiences or repressed or sublimated drives (and some combination of these), we have no internal memory or imagination derived from actual occurrence regarding death. Speaking of consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness, by the nature of death, of course, if we have died we don’t live to tell the tale. Tl;dr: if we haven’t died we can’t have a model of it. Because of this (having a vague of idea of something that never happened), and because we at some point know it will happen, that is, we will die (which the existential psychoanalysts pick up nicely on), we live with an ambivalence or anxiety towards death. But this is all old news.
- Pragmatically: As psychotherapists we often deal with people who have an ambivalent (a word Jenkinson talks about for a bit) relationship to death. The suicidal patient comes because part of them doesn’t want to kill themselves. Other patients come because they are afraid of their wishes to kill or destroy. Others are not aware of their suicidal or homicidal wishes or conflicts and come to us with symptoms that expresses these conflicts. Schizophrenics, as they progress through treatment, are able to talk about having childhood experiences where as children they feared killing their parents or destroying the whole world (in their imagination, not often in reality…). Depressives often won’t or can’t get in touch with their violent or angry thoughts (and thoughts aren’t actions), nor their wishes to kill (wish is fantasy, not plan or reality. We all have thoughts about things without acting on them). To be brief and reductive, when these people can get in touch with these feelings and wishes their depressive symptoms begin to lessen and they are able to have a wider range of feelings. Manics in part believe they are omnipotent, they feel they can’t die. Chronic Anorexics constantly disavow the terrible feelings related to the danger they put themselves in through malnutrition. And this is of course without mentioning that we as therapists might be working with people who are not depressed but melancholic due to a death of a loved one, or their own impending death due to a chronic illness.
He’s all a bit too Christian in his notion that life is in a way a slow death or process of dying, or that ‘death grants life another shot,’ that death is what gives meaning, etc., or whatever. But he is also Nietzschean in his quest for affirmation, his intolerance for morose and depressive defenses against life, and Buddhist mystification of passive death (and, as the scholars say, was not Nietzschean a self-aware Christian trying to remedy his own nihilistic illness?).
He points out early (in an introduction teaser clip) something to the effect that ‘in a world with constant heartbreak, we try to have less heart’ and ‘why shouldn’t death be heartbreaking.’ To loop back around to psychoanalysis: Otto Rank in his 1929 book Truth and Reality and its follow up Will Therapy writes “Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death” which is absolutely clinically true. Its cliché form is that people go through life avoiding making connections with other people out of fear that that relationship might one day end (if it will end and cause pain, I will avoid it from the start). These people, in attempt to prepare themselves in advance for hurt as to maximize the enjoyment of life and the minimization of pain (utilitarianism) end up living hollow, lonely lives devoid of meaning. The safe life is not a good life. Life is about risk (and this is different than constantly engaging in danger…).
Platitudes aside (and that word is a little too harsh for Jenkinson), what Jenkinson is saying here is that some things do produce negative feelings in us, and rather than protect ourselves by disavowing these feelings through using euphemisms, defenses, etc., we need to allow ourselves to feel them and process them meaningfully. Death can in fact be scary, and it is certainly inevitable. Get in touch with the feelings this produces in us.
Jenkinson tells a short story about a terminally ill woman who avoids talking about death, has a mother that does not talk about death, and has a yoga teacher who says she is ‘on the right path’ i.e. is avoiding the fact of her impending death. Jenkinson takes the position that it is her duty to accept her death in order to affirm her life. Despite the truth of this, Jenkinson does not realize that a person sometimes needs to rely on a defense against death in order to recuperate some enjoyment before the final act. It is my opinion that Jenkinson gets a little moralistic about things (people should die this or that way) and that life affirmation is for living; a patient who is near death does not necessarily need to affirm life by admitting to their death. However, different therapists will handle these situations in their own ways.
In general, the psychoanalytic question would be ‘does the patient want to live or die?’ and ‘How do they want to live / die.’ I, as an analyst, only help people live. When suicidal patients arrive at my office I work with them until their resistance to living comes to the forefront (or arises in the transference or relationship between himself and myself) whereupon I ask ‘Would you like to work with me to figure out how to live without wanting to kill yourself?’ Or, if the patient needs a more containing statement, I might say ‘I only help people who want to live. If you want to figure out how to live we can do that together. If you want to die I will help you check into a hospital, or you can find another therapist.’ I have yet to have any patient who hasn’t said ‘yes.’ This is affirming life while also having feelings about death (what psychoanalysis aims to do, in a way…).
Entry 16 - A Polemic for a polemic
A short polemic.
"A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch" -Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-OedipusPerhaps hyperbolic, but its come to mean 'psychoanalysis is bad because it substitutes a silly artificial world for a real world.' After all, the following line is "A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world."
Yes. A schizo may be better off taking a walk rather than lying on the couch and having some stupid Freudian attempt to interpret his word salad. Yes, analytic discourse is to an extent artificial.
But a schizo is not better out for a walk if when on this walk he can't pass a stranger without thinking they have read his mind; without thinking that if he locks eyes with someone they surely must be following him, watching him; that if he lets 'bad' thoughts slip into his mind - such as murdering people - that the people he sees as he walks will in fact be murdered; without believing that the world will implode if he does not perform this or that ritual, etc.
That is, a clinical schizo cannot enjoy a walk, much anything else. What they need is something artificial because the world is already too real. They are already on the outside, in a relationship with the outside world.
Entry 17 - Reader Requests - Dream Analysis? Silence as an analytic technique?
This blog is in part me venting frustration (a cope, as they would say), part me sharing bits of knowledge or experience (if we can posit a difference...) that excite me, part me wanting to connect with people and feel as if my knowledge is actually helpful (my desire to teach).
This entry is composed entirely of the last item, that is, reader requested topics (though reader requested is quite narcissistic of me).
1: Dream analysis:
What's the deal with it within the confines of psychoanalysis?
Why has it fallen out of style in contemporary / mainstream psychology?
To be brief, Freud 'discovers' dream analysis in the late 1800s, writing Interp. of Dreams in 1899, superstitionally setting the publishing date to 1900. In this text he analyzes only his own dreams.
The thinking on the matter is simple - we aren't conscious of everything that goes on in our body, our thoughts and feelings are byproducts of our body's natural vital processes, therefore, theoretically and empirically, we are not fully conscious of all thoughts and feelings, etc. etc. This maps onto everyday experience. Ok.
Thus, as is the case with metaphysics, scientific reasoning, criminal investigation, or medical practice, that which is unknowable / unable to be experienced (or in the very least distant from direct knowledge or experience) must be intuited or inferred through evidence. Dreams provide evidence of the unconscious in that their symbols can (not 'have to') be traced back to everyday experiences the dreamer experienced recently, or thoughts and feelings the dreamer finds meaningful to their life narrative. This marks the first significant time in history that dreams are looked at through a materialist lens (i.e. the body and its processes produce affects that intellectualized and when stimuli from the outside is reduced to a minimum in sleep, these swirling body sensations are poorly translated into images to which, later, motion and therefore narrative is attributed to...).
Now, in the 60s-80s a big rift in psychoanalytic dream studies develops. It can be summed up as the positivists vs. the hermeneuticists. Positivists: dreams 'have' meaning. Each symbol has a meaning waiting to be discovered. You can map out consistencies between dreams etc. Hermeneuticists: dreams don't take on meaning until the analysand gives them meaning via the context in which they bring up the dream, and the contexts in which the dream was created, or, until the analyst interprets the dream in a meaningful way that 'sticks' with the analysand. Freud was a little bit of both, which both parties seem to deny. So, inside psychoanalysis dream analysis gets pulled in two directions - i.e. analysis, without a common front, shot itself in the foot here (i'm being a bit dramatic, analysts just work the way they think works best).
Unfortunately, therapy as a whole drifts away from models of meaning making in the late 70s and early 80s and instead moves towards ego psychology in america, which is much more pragmatic and focused on defenses, and things like CBT, which makes claims to empirical science and behavioral principles to which dreams are part of the 'black box' of the mind which positive statements can't be made regarding. So, outside of psychoanalysis, science and therapy (with their physicalist bias) move away from looking at 'heady' or 'airy' things such as dreams as valid. This move left dreams to fall into the dreaded discursive gap where it was picked up by pop-psych, esoterica, and mysticism (dream journals, dream symbol books).2: Silence as an analytic technique:
This one is simple. As I went over earlier in this blog, the analyst utilizes transference to help the analysand in whatever way they want or need help.
Transference is when the patient transfers ideas, feelings, assumptions, beliefs, etc. etc. onto the therapist, and the therapist uses these to resolve conflicts and give the patient new emotional maturational experiences.
A very superficial but still significant reason an analyst may remain quiet is because the analyst may not yet know what the communication means, or may have an idea of what it means but wishes to let the train of thought or signifiers play out uninterrupted (at conferences I've heard some Lacanians talk about waiting to see who or what 'other' the sentence is supposed to refer to...Object relation analysts want to decipher what internal objects the patient is responding to in themselves and what perceived part object the analyst is, drive theorists will see what the drives will do when frustrated, ego and self psych analysts will see what kind of defense the patient erects to deal with their unrequited talk, etc. etc.).
The analyst may be quiet as to reduce stimuli and therefore induce the patient to project onto the therapist their wishes, beliefs, fears, etc.
The analyst may also be quiet as to help the patient get in touch with their inner thoughts and feelings (similar to how reduced stimuli, i.e. sleeping, allows the inner processes to feedback off eachother and form dreams, what Freud referred to as the royal road to the unconscious).
Another reason the analyst may keep quiet is to assess character and maturation - when deprived, does the patient ask the therapist to be more active? Does the patient accept this and sulk? Does the patient get mad? These can be clues to the patients history and how they tended to resolve conflicts across their lifetimes.
I give an example (heavily coded as to not betray confidentiality):
A patient relays a series of mundane facts about their life but inserts in the middle of these boring facts an alarming anecdote about doing something very dangerous and possibly life threatening. The patient then continues with boring facts and then goes quiet. We sit in quiet. I observe internally the feeling of frustration. I trace the frustration back to the idea that the patient is trying to provoke me into being worried and losing my cool. I also notice that I don't immediately believe the patient to have done such a crazy and dangerous thing. I wonder what the patient might get out of provoking me? I then wonder if perhaps the patient was doing a dangerous thing and my own narcissism - i.e. wanting to be a good therapist who doesn't have patients who act out so immaturely - is preventing me from feeling the true seriousness of the event.
All of this thought exists in my head during the silence. I then break the silence
"Should I be worried about you?"This should suffice. An entire session would bore.
Entry 18: Zizek's Vulgar Marxism Confused for Psychoanalytic Praxis?
My most frequent reader send me a quote from a Zizek lecture.
"The goal of psychoanalysis is precisely to bring you to the point where you can finally forget about that piece of bullshit which is yourself or myself, and finally work for a cause (political, religious, love, etc)."As Zizek would say - NO! (violent hand shake). Is it not quite the opposite of what is said here?
Yes, Ziz is completely incorrect.
In a strange move, Ziz invokes a superego injunction in order to substantiate an abstraction that is not felt as a material entity in the body (one should devote one's self to a cause greater than one's self). Psychoanalysis is about analyzing down abstractions and superego injunctions so that one can understand one's own wants and needs (and how they relate to a history of conflict) and therefore one's self, not denigrate one's self (piece of bullshit). This is not say that there is surely a hard and fast self or unfractured ego (as the lacanians will show well enough that this is a myth) but rather to say that beneath all the play of signifiers there are real bodies, drives, and affect. If its one thing Lacanians never understand (and what Freud, Andre Green, Laplanche, Deleuze and Guattari do) is that there's a body, or material, underneath all the push and pull of lack and signification (drive theory is overlooked by or rather distorted into a language game).
As Nick Land writes
“If the unconscious is structured like a language it is only because language has the pattern of a plague” (pg. 185 FN), later adding “Freud floats upon…impersonal flows of desire that erupt out of traumatized nature. Where are the flows in Lacan? Where would one be less likely to find anything that flows than in…his texts?” (Pg. 283 FN).So, to use Ziz's quote
'The goal of psychoanalysis is precisely to bring you to the point where you can finally be in touch with the drives and conflicts that make up the thing we refer to hesitantly as the self, and once this is done, understand what one wants and therefore finally work for a need or want that falls on the side of constructive or life affirming existence. This can be mean investing this libidinal drive into politics (an ego sublimated object that should be taken balanced and maturely), religion (a superego sublimated object that should be done in a life affirming manner), and love (an Id sublimation that can be done in a meaningful manner).
Not as catchy, but Ziz has always sacrificed profundity at the expense of making poop jokes.
(Ok, for the record I like Ziz, and he isn't totally wrong, what he really means is that the analyst brings the analysand out of their narcissistic bubble and helps them develop ego strength to the point where they can withstand being in a world with actual people - objects - rather than part objects and the projections we throw onto them...)
Similarly, elsewhere Ziz makes an equally grievous error when he says.
“You can’t change people, but you can change the system so that people aren’t pushed to do certain things.”Let's be honest. Zizek isn't really a psychoanalyst...
He's a psychoanalytic philosopher.
That is, he doesn't see patients, attend supervision, maintain a training analysis, contribute to or at clinical conferences, work at a clinic, etc. etc.
In the 60s Lacan made it so that anyone who wanted to be an analyst could train at his institute and, when they were ready, call themselves an analyst (the whole in fights between American psychoanalysts, European psychoanalysts, and French european psychoanalysts is a large bit of history to cover...think M.D.s vs. PHDs. vs. Psya.Ds. ...).
As someone who actually treats patients (and despite still being in training I've been seeing patients for 5+ years, which is very small in comparison to analysts who see patients for up to 70 years of their lifetime...) I can assure you people do change.
Here is the way I will synthesize my experience with Ziz's proclamation and in doing so link it back to the emphasis on drive theory above: Yes, you do have to change 'the system that pushes people to do things' but that system is internal and it is the system of drives and their vicissitudes. Psychoanalysis does not work on an intellectual level (which Ziz, an obsessional academic, is stuck at as indicated by his approach to theory and the anecdotes that one can find regarding his 'analysis' [if you can call it that] with Miller...), it works on an emotional level to resolve conflicts and give patients, as I have said, new emotional and maturational experiences through resolving resistances via transference...
Entry 19: Marx and Green / Practice, Theory and Cybernetic Feedback
Popular psychoanalysis has come to be a Marxist theoretical affair the very nature of which ironically overshadows its possible and already existent practical Marxist aspects (all that is solid melt into air including marxism itself which lapses into commodity fetishism...).
Polemic meant to evoke notions of Petersonian 'cultural marxism?' No.
Statement meant to highlight that in the 50s-80s psychoanalysis in Europe, with the help of Lacan, came to be attached to Marx and social theory critical of the ego and subject while at the same time in America psychoanalysis was morphing into the opposite, individualized ego psychology? Also no, though this is helpful to keep in mind.
Statement meant to provoke a renewed interest in psychoanalytic practice and therefore also a renewed interest in psychoanalytic theory? Yes!
Popular psychoanalysis has come to be a CMC cycle that has 'lost similitude' (Foucault) or 'lost the symbol' (Jung) [Yes, I'm well aware of the methodological shakiness of mixing discourses like this, as well as the plain irony of talking about Marx through two thinkers, one antithetical to Marx the other indifferent...).
We don't need to get lost in theoretical jargon to get at what this means and why it is important, we simply need to provide the following model from which the intelligent reader can synthesis their own meaning:
'Clinical' Psychoanalysis has built into it several feedback mechanisms - practices - that hone theory. Theory can then be used to further hone practice (and so on and so on...). What does this mean? I'm in a session with a patient. I have a theory or hypothesis regarding the patient (how they feel, what they think, what they want, etc.). I test it on my patient by taking my internal thoughts and feelings and forming them thoughtfully into a question or interpretation aloud. As Freud points out in several early papers, an interpretation is only as good as the patient's response to it (whether it 'takes' or not, to use old medical jargon). Even if, as an analyst, you have all these genius ideas of whats going on with the patient, if these ideas don't stick in the transference and help produce a transference conducive to the task of analysis (whatever that task may be, i.e., the conscious or unconscious goals decided upon between analyst and analysand), then your theory is essentially useless (what Guattari meant when he said 'psychoanalysts need to get a grip' and do what works, not what is right...).
- Tl;dr: use a theory, get feedback from the patient, hone the theory. The stuff that works sticks with the patient and then sticks (hopefully) with the analysts who communicate with each other at conferences, lectures, classes, supervisions, etc. (which are all themselves other feedback mechanisms) and therefore tends to be more likely to stick in the future (self reinforcing feedback) or is subjected to rigorous critique.
'Pure Theory' - which is what Lacan wanted to move analysis towards, for better or worse - does not have this feedback mechanism (maybe it does in non-positivist epistemological models, but that's another story...). Whether or not your theory catches on is essentially up to language games and cult of personality (can you defeat or persuade your opponent). Academic debates disconnected from material circumstances (real people and their actual experiences). For example, theoretical psychoanalysts who don't see patients take film and cultural events as their object of analysis. These objects cannot provide feedback to an interpretation. The object can be endlessly manipulated intellectually to fit the model, and the model can be manipulated to fit the event (which is one latent critique D and G levy towards Freud in his treatment of the Wolfman and his conceptualization of Schreber). Never will Vertigo reply back to Zizek - 'No, you get me all wrong, I don't feel that way at all' (just an example, I like Zizek's analysis of Vertigo...).
This gets us to Andre Green's astute observation that, in simple terms, psychoanalysis is the only field wherein practice is theory and theory is practice, or what Marx was trying to get at in reconnecting theory to material (D and G - form and content are interchangable; McLuahan - the medium is the message; Baudrillard - the simulation and the hyperreal; Nick Land and Mark fisher - theoryfiction and hyperstition, etc.).
Green, in an interview in 1994 says
" An exceptional intelligence and the ability to produce some very interesting works do not necessarily imply his adherence to the psychoanalytical experience...in psychoanalysis, we are committed to an alliance between practice and theory...We cannot regard a psychoanalyst in the same way we regard a philosopher. A philosopher’s only concern is himself and other philosophers: a psychoanalyst must also deal with people outside his field...
How is it, you might ask, that someone who for seven years was an associate and an admirer of Lacan could suddenly abandon him, and become one of his foes? [Green talking about himself] My answer is that it requires time to completely deconstruct Lacan’s theoretical mechanism and to relate it to his practice in general. At the time, I limited myself to a kind of compromise. I said: “I cannot approve of your practice, but your theory interests me”. Only in 1984 did I realize that theory and practice were considerably more interwoven than one would have thought. It is impossible to say: “His practice was debatable, but his writing is sound..."
The comparison between Lacan and Heidegger doesn’t work. We can not say that Heidegger’s practice is Nazism. Insofar as he is a philosopher, his thought originates from texts. But you cannot put the psychoanalyst in a similar position: he is responsible for the patients in his care. Every now and then I see some “couch-scarred” patients, people who have undergone all sorts of abuse by Lacanian analysts. Here we are not talking about theories! And patients have to pay for this! This is their practice, this is how they earn their living!" "As analysts, how we think informs how we act. How we act also helps us inform how we think.
The take away here is not another polemic against Lacan. I quite like Lacan (to an extent) and can also entertain the idea that Green is kind of an asshole with his on biases (Green had nasty things to say about my own analyst, completely dismissed D and G; he is an MD and MD analysts are notorously hateful towards non-MD fields, etc. etc.), but that we should start thinking critically about what we think psychoanalysis is, and we should be suspicious of the sort of cottage industry of Lacnian-Marxist theoretical stuff that pours off the conveyor belts of critical theory presses, not to mention the 'psychoanalysts' behind these texts who have never sat with a patient in their lives.
Entry 20: Andre Green and The Work of the Negative (drives, objects, and metapsychology)
Drive and Object
A distinction between drive derivative (invested energy that has become distorted) and drive (semi-mentalized internal motivating force) is important.
In The Work of the Negative Green emphasizes how a drive is always conditioned by an object (not unlike how in physics the plane of space is conditioned by an object), meaning therefore that the drive derivative always contains object traces (mother was too cold, drive went inwards, father was too competitive, drive was stunted or frustrated at ever turn).
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| metapsychological cybernetic positive feedback: (X) drive invests in (Y) object (Y) object becomes tied to (X) drive (X-Y) object (Y) and drive (X) break off from drive and turn into drive unit (xy) XY is then used to retrospectively determine drive and object (templexity or de and reterritorialization) |
Drive derivative is basically character or what drive theorists would call drive organization (drives became arranged in a certain way, or the manner and matter of ‘discharge’ has taken on certain tendencies, libidinal avenues etc.). It is also similar to what Guattari calls an assemblage of enunciation - a the play of dynamic forces leaves a residue that becomes the subject or cite (Whiteheads superject).
The drive and its object impressions are bound up with the notion of negation.
Drive and Negation
Freud's ideas on negation (see his early paper on negation) are not Hegel's (as Green points out). There is no pure negative, or rather, the negative is always a derivative of a positive. There is always something active occurring. The mind and body are primed to go and are met with resistance which they must overcome (a sort of pseudo-vitalism).
- Aside: There is a valid point of criticism here, however. There is honest negation which, though still derivative of a positive value, is not indicative of repressed content. As Zizek, referring to this paper, points out in a lecture, with Freud’s at times overbearing authoritarian interpretive style, the patient may have been left feeling unheard, not really listened to. Imagine sitting on a couch and knowing Freud is going to find some way to make what you say about your parents. To an anxious neurotic this might induce a feeling of wanting to make sure Freud really hears you – ‘Doctor, please don’t just take this next bit to be about my mother or something, please listen to what I have to say…’ Furthermore, we need to add in the layers of defense in the patient’s reports: The contemporary psychoanalytic patient – who has undoubtedly been exposed to the Freudian or Psychoanalytic clichés as cultural jokes in the very least – may use a negation simply to throw the analysis of his/her trail (this is done unconsciously, of course).
- Let me use myself as an example (I don’t actually do this as far as I know): Say I really have a problem with my father but I say ‘This next story has nothing to do with my mother at all, it’s about my dad,’ and then I start talking about my dad. Perhaps your analytic ear has gotten stuck on the first negation ‘don’t think of mother,’ as the ‘trained’ patient knows, perhaps if only unconsciously, that this negation will trigger a certain response in the analyst. Now, your mind is on the mother – ‘this story must have something to do with the mother which is why he felt the need to negate it from the start,’ - the fake problem presented as the real problem, while I talk about the father, the real problem presented as the fake problem. This I precisely what is dealt with in Lacan’s analysis of the purloined letter. However, Lacan seriously leads psychoanalysis astray by reading more Hegel into Freud than there really was, and thereby wedding psychoanalysis to French linguistics and the dialectic of the negative as lack. Though ‘returning to Freud,’ Lacan clearly departs from Freud, for as we see in the negation paper, Freud’s idea of negation is that it has to do with a primary positive.
***
Back to the idea at hand.
Once outside the womb, the drive is always tied to an object in so far as the drive presses for discharge and is either met with an object which can contain it and work with it, or met with an obstructive object which frustrates the drive – or still worse, ‘no’ object at all in the case of the adult who does not heed the infant’s call (or heeds it too late thus imprinting into the infant the subjective feeling that the world is not going to heed the cry).
The way the drives are navigated in these early stages, with the early objects, constitutes in large what Green calls the work of the negative: repression, negation, disavowal, foreclosure, etc. These are all the mechanisms of defense we use to either deal with something not being (mom never came when I cried) or being but not being pleasant (mom came but was emotionally absent, etc.).
He calls this process of transforming early experiences into narratives 'how one ‘negativizes’ the negative.' The absence of the mother turns into not an absence of a mother in the object relations and drive vicissitudes, but rather, precisely a present bad mother. Absence (-) is filled in with a further negative, the bad mother: -(-)=--/+. Or, in a different way of negativizing the negative, absence is repressed altogether. It’s not that I had a bad mom and that’s why I am fucked up, but rather, I have 'no clue' why I am fucked up – I.e., hysterical symptomology like blindness or paralysis etc….
Death Drive Topos and Metapsychology
Put crudely, give a person enough negativized negatives and they'll become sickly, inhabited with a morose Thanatos. To this effect, the death drive is not an energic 'negative' force as much as it is a turning away or rejection of the object, as the object is - strictly following the emergence of fantasized and hallucinated objects that is - by its nature always disappointing and potentially threatening, the latter especially to the infant’s feeling (phantasy) of omnipotence. That is, the object, in addition to being associated with dangerous loss, always puts a limit (think Kantian categories and their filtering of the Outside) on the feeling of endlessness and power of the infant, therefore it is, in a limited sense, castrating.
Green (pg. 226) writes
This is why Good and Bad objects (i.e. Kleinian theory) as concepts are misnomers. The object isn’t good or bad - subjective values that the infant cannot fathom - but rather, the object is or is not. These are spacio-temporal parameters (Kant and topos - D and G's factory floor blueprint as opposed to representational model or mind as theater, i.e. McDougal) that better correspond to the way a primitive infant experiences the world (the infant moves to experience and as developmental psychology shows us, infants tend to be highly oriented to special dimensions from birth).
Consistent with Laplanche’s work in New Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, for Green there is no ‘pre-object’ or ‘objectless phase.' There is always an object that is required for survival. It may not be understood by the infant as an object, but it is an object none the less. Furthermore, negation and non-object relations (what we might called narcissistic transference in the room where the analyst does not feel he/she exists) is precisely a “relation of non-relating” (what D and G may call disjunctive synthesis) where the very act of not relating is what indicates that you exist in the room (if you really didn’t exist to the other we may not be filled with the feeling that we don’t exist).
Back to the idea at hand.
Once outside the womb, the drive is always tied to an object in so far as the drive presses for discharge and is either met with an object which can contain it and work with it, or met with an obstructive object which frustrates the drive – or still worse, ‘no’ object at all in the case of the adult who does not heed the infant’s call (or heeds it too late thus imprinting into the infant the subjective feeling that the world is not going to heed the cry).
The way the drives are navigated in these early stages, with the early objects, constitutes in large what Green calls the work of the negative: repression, negation, disavowal, foreclosure, etc. These are all the mechanisms of defense we use to either deal with something not being (mom never came when I cried) or being but not being pleasant (mom came but was emotionally absent, etc.).
He calls this process of transforming early experiences into narratives 'how one ‘negativizes’ the negative.' The absence of the mother turns into not an absence of a mother in the object relations and drive vicissitudes, but rather, precisely a present bad mother. Absence (-) is filled in with a further negative, the bad mother: -(-)=--/+. Or, in a different way of negativizing the negative, absence is repressed altogether. It’s not that I had a bad mom and that’s why I am fucked up, but rather, I have 'no clue' why I am fucked up – I.e., hysterical symptomology like blindness or paralysis etc….
Death Drive Topos and Metapsychology
Put crudely, give a person enough negativized negatives and they'll become sickly, inhabited with a morose Thanatos. To this effect, the death drive is not an energic 'negative' force as much as it is a turning away or rejection of the object, as the object is - strictly following the emergence of fantasized and hallucinated objects that is - by its nature always disappointing and potentially threatening, the latter especially to the infant’s feeling (phantasy) of omnipotence. That is, the object, in addition to being associated with dangerous loss, always puts a limit (think Kantian categories and their filtering of the Outside) on the feeling of endlessness and power of the infant, therefore it is, in a limited sense, castrating.
Green (pg. 226) writes
“[…] Freud concludes the exposition [dual drive theory] by extending the activity of the death drive to the state of the organism after orgasm, Eros having been eliminated through the discharge of the satisfaction obtained. The concessions […]to the death drive may seem exorbitant; does the activity of Eros really just shrink away? For sure, on this point we are faced with Freud at his most speculative; Freud the metaphysician, in spite of himself.”The experienced absences of early infancy (and this language is tentative as the infant does not experience absence as much as they experience an overwhelming presence of internal dysregulation – i.e., too hungry no food, dirty diaper, or a million other things – which comes to be signified later by absence) come to color all drive configurations. That is, the lost object or bad object colors all drive attachments from that point onward (the field of mind is itself a depression, just as in vulgar pop physics the existence of objects effects the grid of space and time).
This is why Good and Bad objects (i.e. Kleinian theory) as concepts are misnomers. The object isn’t good or bad - subjective values that the infant cannot fathom - but rather, the object is or is not. These are spacio-temporal parameters (Kant and topos - D and G's factory floor blueprint as opposed to representational model or mind as theater, i.e. McDougal) that better correspond to the way a primitive infant experiences the world (the infant moves to experience and as developmental psychology shows us, infants tend to be highly oriented to special dimensions from birth).
Consistent with Laplanche’s work in New Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, for Green there is no ‘pre-object’ or ‘objectless phase.' There is always an object that is required for survival. It may not be understood by the infant as an object, but it is an object none the less. Furthermore, negation and non-object relations (what we might called narcissistic transference in the room where the analyst does not feel he/she exists) is precisely a “relation of non-relating” (what D and G may call disjunctive synthesis) where the very act of not relating is what indicates that you exist in the room (if you really didn’t exist to the other we may not be filled with the feeling that we don’t exist).
As Green explicating Freud points out, the object is always somewhat disruptive, disappointing, and hated for both putting an end to the infant’s feeling of omnipotence and also always bringing into being a sense of non-immediate gratification (part of what Lacan will call lack). This means, as Freud points out, that a non-anthropomorphic form of sadism is evident at birth – the infant hates the object. The fantasy of the object is better. So, sadism is hate of the ‘O/outside’ before there is an idea ‘the O/other.’ When the infant gets a sense of alterity, sadism may be put into the outside, ‘the other,’ and then reflected back at the self; masochism is sadism with the self as object. This puts masochism and sadism back in the economic structure. This also gets us from the reality principle / death drive (primary sadism) to the reality principle (ego and super ego, i.e. identifications with others), to the pleasure principle / libido, (invested and gaining pleasure from being sadistic to others, or identifying as others and being sadistic to the self).
Thus, rather than life/death drive or bad/good objects, Green introduces us to objectalization / deobjectalization. Deobjectalization is an attack on object relations and a withdrawal of investment in objects which Green compares his idea to Bion’s attack on links and Lacan’s breakdown of the signifying chain. This is partly because objectalization is equated with symbolization, the ability to make sense, and links and signifier chains are about making sense out of datum. In the deobjectalized subject, a schizophrenic for example, it is not so much a pathological splitting process that lies at the genesis of the schizophrenia, but rather the veritable lack of any sort of splitting process because splitting implies, to a more or lesser degree, some level relationship with an object, whereas a veritable lack of splitting implies a complete withdrawal into the self, part of which means a rejection of the other, the object. The ‘split’ is disavowed which removes the need for an object, and thus an encounter with an object is taken off the table, so to speak. This he calls negative narcissism, which is a moving towards a zero point.
Death Drive, Sex, and Love:
Green is at his most Freudian here. The death drive is related to sublimation. Sublimation is the sexual drive becoming desexualized and repressed or invested elsewhere. This investment or repression is related to the superego, and the superego is related to identification, often with that of the father during the Oedipal situation. When libido, that which binds, is spread out -- thus becoming to an extent unbinding -- and invested through identification (relatively external) and subsequent super ego agency (relatively internal model of external identification) opens up space for the death drive to thrive. This is so because the process of sublimation (gratification is delayed, satisfaction is deferred, i.e. the oedipal father’s prohibition and the unavailability of the mother, the subsequent identification and internal agency) opens up furthered investment in frustrating and disappointing objects (reality). This is of course where the oedipal castration comes into play (it is not the father that castrates, but the very existence of an object and reality that terminates the infant’s fantasy of omnipotence).
So, for Freud, sublimation = desexualization=defusion or spreading out of libido coupled with objects, and defusion means that the libido can no longer keep the death drive in check, which means the death drive takes predominance.
Naturally all these drive theory has implications on many aspects of life such as love.
The fear people have when in romantic relationships isn’t really about abandonment or some wish for death, it’s a fear of being the other’s object of desire which is further complicated by the fact that any act of closeness or love unconsciously arouses the spite and vengeance towards the original object which, despite its best efforts, is always disappointing.
Sharing, loving, pleasure, tolerance, etc. cannot be created in us by an object alone. An internal drive is always required. These drives get mixed up when we are in romantic relationships. People think they are achieving satisfaction of their own drives when they’ve really resigned themselves to leaving their drives unsatisfied while getting enjoyment out of satisfying their couple’s drives. That is, you believe you are being fulfilled in a relationship but you have sacrificed your own fulfillment for the fulfillment of the other which masks itself as fulfillment of yourself (a repetition compulsion of the early Winnocottian false/true self conflict). In short, object love does not facilitate drive autonomy. Being loved precludes one from the risk of loving another and the important maturational event of realizing that the object is already partially lost. This is part of the function of the analytic situation.
The analytic situation is ‘negative’ – the analyst is quiet, out of sight, in order to bring out ‘positive’ symptoms. Green writes “instead of searching for it actively, it turns out to be better to arrange things in such a way that it reveals itself spontaneously. This is the invention of analysis” (pg. 164).
To prepare us for getting back to psychoanalysis in general, and in relation to this negative/positive dichotomy, here are the values of psychoanalysis:
- representation over perception (we model the Outside and use the model to mediate the Outside)
- psychic reality over external reality (the former is an articulation of the later but it is all we know of the later)
- absence over presence (symptoms lie in or are generated from absence, psychoanalysis identifies and interprets symptoms)
- memory over presentation (what in literature they would call an unreliable narrator)
- fantasy over observable world (our model and our unreliable narration - our psychic reality - is bound up with imagining the object of our desire often in a way that is flush with the world that might grant us such an object).
Entry 21: OCD...
There's a lot of jargon in the media about what it means to 'have' a mental illness.
OCD is one of those mental illnesses that people colloquially claim to have - 'Oh, I'm so OCD.'
Let's throw out everything we know about OCD and start over. Forget it.
What is OCD? Obsessive compulsive disorder.
Obsessing is just what you would think it is - ruminating, get stuck on ideas, being unable to stop thinking certain intrusive thoughts, etc. Compulsion is the feeling that you have to do something in relation to the obsession. Disorder means it gets in the way of your everyday life.
Nothing more, nothing less.
The stereotypical OCD case? Excessive handwashing. The thought one cannot shake is that one's hands are dirty, filthy, infected. The compulsion is that due to that thought something needs to be done to negate that thought, i.e. washing.
The psychoanalytic insight is simply 'why is it that the patient is able to cognitively and intellectually understand that their hands are not dirty, that cleaning them to that extent in fact damages them, but that they are still driven to commit the obsessive compulsive impulse.'
The answer to the insight is that that the superficial phenomenon is a symptom of a deeper conflict. Here's a few deep conflicts based on theory and my own clinical experiences.
To understand the symptom lets split the obsession from the compulsion and explore each one and its related deep conflict.
Obsession is often about controlling things beyond our control. I know because I used to be an obessive (more on this later...). The narrative, whether conscious or not, is 'if I just think hard enough about this, If I just figure it all out in my head, then the uncomfortable reality I can't tolerate will dissipate or change.' It's a matter of trying to replace or manipulate reality - the outside - by hyperfocusing on the inside, fantasy. This stems from the early stages of infancy where the infant, unconsciously, and in a mode of 'pre-thought,' 'believes' (we need to disinvest all these terms of their anthropomorphic overtones) that they can control the outside world (the mothers breast and its nutrition, her comfort, etc.). If you don't buy this, extend the age to 1 and a half to 3 years where potty training starts. It is common that obsessional behavior is associated to anal retentive behavior, wanting to control what comes in and out of the body, wanting to control who (parents or self) gets to decide where someone does what (poop on floor or in toilet). Take 3 to 7 years. Agency issues (power struggles between reality and fantasy) between adults and children continue. Agency is constantly stripped from the child that wishes to be able to contain within it the ability to give itself pleasure (mother's breast gives me pleasure, I wish to contain mothers breast; food gives me pleasure, I wish to be able to produce my own food.)
This last wish (self sustaining production in-body - producing food, producing shit) gets us to another aspect of obsession, the reaction formation to intrusive thoughts (thoughts become intrusive because they are regular natural thoughts but are guarded against by the ego and superego, i.e. the prohibitions the parents put upon the child and how those prohibitions get internalized into the child). For example, the wish to poop and eat one's own poop (which many troubled children will actually do) turns into a reaction formation - a sort of opposite - that of intense fear of filth and a fear that one is dirty. To this effect, and synthesizing our previous idea (above about control and reality), it is important to highlight that OCD is often an attempt to control or dismiss intrusive thoughts are in themselves reflections of a disturbing reality (think away bad thoughts, think away reality).
Compulsions arrive on the scene when one somewhat unconsciously becomes aware of the fact that thinking alone will not get one out of the discomfort and frustration of reality. Action is then imposed to discharge the discomfort of the failed attempt at abolishing the discomfort.
For a quick and dirty connection to reality: How was I an obsessisve and why does it matter? I believed for many years - without knowing it - that if I did well enough at school, was smart enough, had good enough arguments, that I could change others or the world. What a narcissistic, omnipotent fantasy. How did this effect my life? I couldn't allow myself to experience reality (true outsideness as opposed to what Nick Land calls 'alterity in advance.' i.e. narcissism...) and part of my obsession prevented me from accepting reality as it was and as a result I was often disappointed and resentful.
No need to say more than this, and that part of what helped me was learning (through emotional experiences) that I can't control the outside and that any and all thoughts and feelings I have are OK...no need to moralize.
...
I'm gonna roll this reader suggestion into another reader suggestion.
Diagnosis. OCD is a diagnosis.
Why diagnosis?...
(tune in next time)
Entry 22: Group Psychology and Herd Morality
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud illustrates the following: within a group, the responsibility of the individual vanishes due to the sense of anonymity (I can do something and get away with it, others are acting the same way so I don’t stand out, etc. – mob rule). This, coupled with wide spread emotional contagion whereby feelings in the self are experienced as being in the other as well - something which intensifies affect to a fever pitch - creates a sort of ‘group mind.’ This loss of responsibility and subsequent identification with others, along with the heightened affect, leads to a letting down of repressive/inhibitive defenses and therefore to more freely mobilized instinctual action (in sociological terms, certain risks and behaviors are legitimized as the threat of receiving critical or shaming responses by peers/authority is lessened due to the alignment of values between group members – if we all agree that X is permissible, X is less likely to be an action / idea which warrants exile or attack from the group, and therefore is less inhibited/prohibited and threatening to the self).
Put simply, feelings are heightened while 'moral' (second order self administered adjustments to behavior) responsibility and intellectual activity are lowered. Though, paradoxically, as the ‘primal instincts’ rise with (natural and spontaneous) moral inhibition falling away (what people tend to do that makes societies work - mutual self interest and cooperation), a disintegration anxiety arises related to the more freely mobilized instincts and their threat of self-destructive or in-group violence (if we are all charged up and ready to do something ‘bad,’ this could quickly turn into Hobbes’ state of nature – we could turn on each other!), and thus a desire to reassert a minimum sense of unity therefore also arises. This takes the form of a new group morality through a libidinal investment in an actual person (intellectual, general, prophet, daddy, fuhrer, etc.) or an idea / ideology (any form of narrative centrality even if that centrality emphasizes de-centrality). This is a positively framed investment – a corner stone idea or leader. This need for discharging violent tension while also maintaining a sense of unity – sometimes explicitly moral, sometimes implicitly - also takes a negatively framed investment, that of an unconscious move towards a structure of reifying, homogenizing, and normalizing internal group beliefs while aiming violence outward, at someone outside the group, someone ‘other than’ us – an other or out group.
The basic idea is that a person or group of people outside of the group is used to direct in-group intolerable feelings outwards. This serves the function of preserving the homogeneity of the group through removing the negative factor (destructive in-group violence) while at the same time interspersing a positive factor into the ‘neutral’ gap created by the recently removed negative factor. This positive factor is a unifying cause in which the group can bond over, strengthening their ties (in primitive psych terms, an internal loved object and external hated object, other). Thus, in a Freudian stew of contiguous process (non contradictory – Freud’s Kettle Logic, Deleuze and Guattari's schizo position), we arrive at an enjoyable moral position of hatred towards someone outside the group, an other. Here, the reader may have an initial reaction – ‘how is hatred of an other for no objective reason a moral position?’ It’s not a constructive ethical position, but it is one that is grounded in what one group would have other groups believe to be indisputable moral superiority.
Entry 23: Notes on Diagnosis
Diagnosis is a strange thing for mental health / illness.
It is well known in clinical circles - psychoanalytic or otherwise - that it isn't always helpful to diagnose a patient transparently, or talk to a patient about their diagnosis.
Why? The patient begins to consciously or unconsciously identify with the label and symptoms that were previously not present appear. Or patients try to take matters into their own hand and seek internet cures. In short, diagnosis can reinforce illness.
So what, after all, is the purpose of diagnosis?
Diagnosis, like most mental health concepts, comes from the medical model. A physician diagnoses their patient as to better know how to proceed with a treatment or cure. That is, a diagnosis is a byproduct of conversation between practitioners who have shared their resonate findings - 'So and so displayed X and in most cases Y worked to help X,' a finding that is verified by 6 out of 10 (give or take) other people with similar situations, therefore X can be called 'diagnosis X' which means when someone has X they can be treated with Y. So, diagnosis is a concept based on a community of positivist scientists sharing information about likelihoods and probabilities.
Diagnostic methods like these - positivist ones - worked in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Given the state of technology, collective cultural knowledge traveled less overall, when it did travel it traveled less distance and suffered from much more information degradation, and when it did travel despite its lessened distance and information quality, it was believed if it was consistent with prevailing knowledge. Now, in our technologically advanced, postmodern era, information travels worldwide often with little to no noticeable degradation or lag. At the same time, information can constantly be challenged. The 'marketplace' of information is oversaturated and offers all kinds of alternative beliefs and the authority of the source of information can always be compared and contrasted with other sources. In short, unified authority - for better or for worse - is dead and techno-global fragmentation is in.
This change in authority effects the function of diagnosis. Before the narrative was something like 'if the Doctor says I have X and Y is helpful, then I will follow the treatment and do Y.' So when Freud asked questions, you answered. When Freud gave an interpretation, you made sense of it and believed it. Now, when the Doctor says something you check WebMD, or, considering culture has undermined the concept of authority, one has recourse to an even softer, more elusive resistance - 'That's not what my family does,' or even softer - 'That's not my experience.' Some combination of all of these may be sought in the form of seeking a 'second opinion' which can either be a good move or get one tangled up in the infights between disciplinary or financial rivals (this shift in how people think about and respond to authority is present in the literature in the form of the rising interest in treating narcissistic disorders as seen in the Modern Psychoanalytic schools of Vermont, Boston, and New York, and the Self and Ego Psychologists of Chicago and the East coast).
Considering, as I have pointed out here and elsewhere in an upcoming article for the MVU and a recent podcast with Cooper Cherry, psychoanalysis in large works through creating a hermenutic loop between the analyst and analysand where meaning is created very locally in the room between the mind of the analyst and the words and actions of the analysand. As Bion - a Kantian interested in epistemology - showed, the analyst makes sense out of the analysand's talk and relays the sense back to the patient. Knowledge and meaning is created in the relationship between the two people. This renders the concept of a diagnosis relatively useless in both its functions as a shared understanding about predictability and as a way of conveying to a patient what they need to do to get better.
This is why, for better or for worse, diagnosis is a second order after thought. After treatment is over, an analyst may say to a friend or colleague - 'Ah yes, I had a patient just like that, and here's how things ended up.'
If there is a takeaway here, it is both that one should not identify with a diagnosis and not rely on a diagnosis and also not trust the the vulgar anti-psychiatric discourse that looks to disparage the underlying hope of diagnosis.
Entry 24: Short Fragmented Notes on Lacan's Mirror Stage
Lacan begins with the notion that the psychoanalytic formation of the I or ego – a sense of self – is opposed to the philosophical notion of the Cogito which, though Lacan does not explicitly mention, is the Cartesian notion that there is a purely ‘thinking substance’ or a sort of essential mental thing separate to the body that can objectively observe the body and external world (Pg. 502).
For Lacan, the I comes out of an “ontological” (pg. 503) structural process of reflection, what he calls a “symbolic matrix” (ibid), wherein a ‘real’ body is perceived by itself (the real eyes), the perception signal of which is sent back into the ‘real body’ creating an ‘imago,’ a representation on the inside of what appears on the outside. Echoing back to Lacan’s example of a monkey (pg. 502), this process is related to ethology, as it is a sort of human ‘mimicry’ with itself, rather than the way an animal mimics another animal to learn a gesture. To this effect, Lacan writes that the imago (mentalized idea of the body as known through reflection in the mirror) acts to establish a relation between the outer (bio-physical organism, what in early Lacan is ‘the real,’) and the inner (imaginary and symbolic realm) [pg. 505].
Through this process, the fragments of the body must be integrated into a whole (the infant moves in jerking motions, noticing a possibly lag between his body and his wish for what his body should do – she moves her arm and the minimal ontological gap between immediate outer action and less than immediate inner process allows for the self-reflective notion that body parts are just that, parts, parts which are sometimes semi-autonomous of the controlling ego). Next, the ego or I which is coming into being through this mirroring comes to be cathected to. As a now invested concept (there is a me, I am this person), the need to defend this ego arises (I am me, and I shouldn’t be fragmented as that is scary – the fear of breakdown or schizophrenia - so I should keep myself whole form a scary outside). From this arises paranoia (One may think again of paranoid schizophrenia; others are out to get me and get rid of my sense of a whole-self). From paranoia arises jealousy via an inversion of the paranoia (I am paranoid of you, you threaten me, thus I want whatever it is I lack that fills me with the feeling of being threatened by you; if only I had what you had I would be truly complete and not threatened, and thus omnipotent). Then, desire (filling the perceived lack, protecting the self) becomes entangled in the other (autre, or object petit a) [pg. 505-507]. The mirroring process has now come full circle: through a mirror a sense of self emerged; through the eyes of another the sense of self is entrenched and reinforced.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud illustrates the following: within a group, the responsibility of the individual vanishes due to the sense of anonymity (I can do something and get away with it, others are acting the same way so I don’t stand out, etc. – mob rule). This, coupled with wide spread emotional contagion whereby feelings in the self are experienced as being in the other as well - something which intensifies affect to a fever pitch - creates a sort of ‘group mind.’ This loss of responsibility and subsequent identification with others, along with the heightened affect, leads to a letting down of repressive/inhibitive defenses and therefore to more freely mobilized instinctual action (in sociological terms, certain risks and behaviors are legitimized as the threat of receiving critical or shaming responses by peers/authority is lessened due to the alignment of values between group members – if we all agree that X is permissible, X is less likely to be an action / idea which warrants exile or attack from the group, and therefore is less inhibited/prohibited and threatening to the self).
Put simply, feelings are heightened while 'moral' (second order self administered adjustments to behavior) responsibility and intellectual activity are lowered. Though, paradoxically, as the ‘primal instincts’ rise with (natural and spontaneous) moral inhibition falling away (what people tend to do that makes societies work - mutual self interest and cooperation), a disintegration anxiety arises related to the more freely mobilized instincts and their threat of self-destructive or in-group violence (if we are all charged up and ready to do something ‘bad,’ this could quickly turn into Hobbes’ state of nature – we could turn on each other!), and thus a desire to reassert a minimum sense of unity therefore also arises. This takes the form of a new group morality through a libidinal investment in an actual person (intellectual, general, prophet, daddy, fuhrer, etc.) or an idea / ideology (any form of narrative centrality even if that centrality emphasizes de-centrality). This is a positively framed investment – a corner stone idea or leader. This need for discharging violent tension while also maintaining a sense of unity – sometimes explicitly moral, sometimes implicitly - also takes a negatively framed investment, that of an unconscious move towards a structure of reifying, homogenizing, and normalizing internal group beliefs while aiming violence outward, at someone outside the group, someone ‘other than’ us – an other or out group.
The basic idea is that a person or group of people outside of the group is used to direct in-group intolerable feelings outwards. This serves the function of preserving the homogeneity of the group through removing the negative factor (destructive in-group violence) while at the same time interspersing a positive factor into the ‘neutral’ gap created by the recently removed negative factor. This positive factor is a unifying cause in which the group can bond over, strengthening their ties (in primitive psych terms, an internal loved object and external hated object, other). Thus, in a Freudian stew of contiguous process (non contradictory – Freud’s Kettle Logic, Deleuze and Guattari's schizo position), we arrive at an enjoyable moral position of hatred towards someone outside the group, an other. Here, the reader may have an initial reaction – ‘how is hatred of an other for no objective reason a moral position?’ It’s not a constructive ethical position, but it is one that is grounded in what one group would have other groups believe to be indisputable moral superiority.
Entry 23: Notes on Diagnosis
Diagnosis is a strange thing for mental health / illness.
It is well known in clinical circles - psychoanalytic or otherwise - that it isn't always helpful to diagnose a patient transparently, or talk to a patient about their diagnosis.
Why? The patient begins to consciously or unconsciously identify with the label and symptoms that were previously not present appear. Or patients try to take matters into their own hand and seek internet cures. In short, diagnosis can reinforce illness.
So what, after all, is the purpose of diagnosis?
Diagnosis, like most mental health concepts, comes from the medical model. A physician diagnoses their patient as to better know how to proceed with a treatment or cure. That is, a diagnosis is a byproduct of conversation between practitioners who have shared their resonate findings - 'So and so displayed X and in most cases Y worked to help X,' a finding that is verified by 6 out of 10 (give or take) other people with similar situations, therefore X can be called 'diagnosis X' which means when someone has X they can be treated with Y. So, diagnosis is a concept based on a community of positivist scientists sharing information about likelihoods and probabilities.
Diagnostic methods like these - positivist ones - worked in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Given the state of technology, collective cultural knowledge traveled less overall, when it did travel it traveled less distance and suffered from much more information degradation, and when it did travel despite its lessened distance and information quality, it was believed if it was consistent with prevailing knowledge. Now, in our technologically advanced, postmodern era, information travels worldwide often with little to no noticeable degradation or lag. At the same time, information can constantly be challenged. The 'marketplace' of information is oversaturated and offers all kinds of alternative beliefs and the authority of the source of information can always be compared and contrasted with other sources. In short, unified authority - for better or for worse - is dead and techno-global fragmentation is in.
This change in authority effects the function of diagnosis. Before the narrative was something like 'if the Doctor says I have X and Y is helpful, then I will follow the treatment and do Y.' So when Freud asked questions, you answered. When Freud gave an interpretation, you made sense of it and believed it. Now, when the Doctor says something you check WebMD, or, considering culture has undermined the concept of authority, one has recourse to an even softer, more elusive resistance - 'That's not what my family does,' or even softer - 'That's not my experience.' Some combination of all of these may be sought in the form of seeking a 'second opinion' which can either be a good move or get one tangled up in the infights between disciplinary or financial rivals (this shift in how people think about and respond to authority is present in the literature in the form of the rising interest in treating narcissistic disorders as seen in the Modern Psychoanalytic schools of Vermont, Boston, and New York, and the Self and Ego Psychologists of Chicago and the East coast).
Considering, as I have pointed out here and elsewhere in an upcoming article for the MVU and a recent podcast with Cooper Cherry, psychoanalysis in large works through creating a hermenutic loop between the analyst and analysand where meaning is created very locally in the room between the mind of the analyst and the words and actions of the analysand. As Bion - a Kantian interested in epistemology - showed, the analyst makes sense out of the analysand's talk and relays the sense back to the patient. Knowledge and meaning is created in the relationship between the two people. This renders the concept of a diagnosis relatively useless in both its functions as a shared understanding about predictability and as a way of conveying to a patient what they need to do to get better.
This is why, for better or for worse, diagnosis is a second order after thought. After treatment is over, an analyst may say to a friend or colleague - 'Ah yes, I had a patient just like that, and here's how things ended up.'
If there is a takeaway here, it is both that one should not identify with a diagnosis and not rely on a diagnosis and also not trust the the vulgar anti-psychiatric discourse that looks to disparage the underlying hope of diagnosis.
Entry 24: Short Fragmented Notes on Lacan's Mirror Stage
Lacan begins with the notion that the psychoanalytic formation of the I or ego – a sense of self – is opposed to the philosophical notion of the Cogito which, though Lacan does not explicitly mention, is the Cartesian notion that there is a purely ‘thinking substance’ or a sort of essential mental thing separate to the body that can objectively observe the body and external world (Pg. 502).
For Lacan, the I comes out of an “ontological” (pg. 503) structural process of reflection, what he calls a “symbolic matrix” (ibid), wherein a ‘real’ body is perceived by itself (the real eyes), the perception signal of which is sent back into the ‘real body’ creating an ‘imago,’ a representation on the inside of what appears on the outside. Echoing back to Lacan’s example of a monkey (pg. 502), this process is related to ethology, as it is a sort of human ‘mimicry’ with itself, rather than the way an animal mimics another animal to learn a gesture. To this effect, Lacan writes that the imago (mentalized idea of the body as known through reflection in the mirror) acts to establish a relation between the outer (bio-physical organism, what in early Lacan is ‘the real,’) and the inner (imaginary and symbolic realm) [pg. 505].
Through this process, the fragments of the body must be integrated into a whole (the infant moves in jerking motions, noticing a possibly lag between his body and his wish for what his body should do – she moves her arm and the minimal ontological gap between immediate outer action and less than immediate inner process allows for the self-reflective notion that body parts are just that, parts, parts which are sometimes semi-autonomous of the controlling ego). Next, the ego or I which is coming into being through this mirroring comes to be cathected to. As a now invested concept (there is a me, I am this person), the need to defend this ego arises (I am me, and I shouldn’t be fragmented as that is scary – the fear of breakdown or schizophrenia - so I should keep myself whole form a scary outside). From this arises paranoia (One may think again of paranoid schizophrenia; others are out to get me and get rid of my sense of a whole-self). From paranoia arises jealousy via an inversion of the paranoia (I am paranoid of you, you threaten me, thus I want whatever it is I lack that fills me with the feeling of being threatened by you; if only I had what you had I would be truly complete and not threatened, and thus omnipotent). Then, desire (filling the perceived lack, protecting the self) becomes entangled in the other (autre, or object petit a) [pg. 505-507]. The mirroring process has now come full circle: through a mirror a sense of self emerged; through the eyes of another the sense of self is entrenched and reinforced.
Entry 25: Notes on Mental Illness, Drive Theory, and Reality TV
In the entry before the last, I commented briefly on the heuristics of diagnosis.
What I didn't touch on there, and what is a long standing issue in psychoanalysis and its related psychiatric fields, is the discussion of whether or not mental illness is 'real' or not.
It's a poorly framed question. Even mistakes, errors, lies, etc., are real, to some degree (unreal, hyperreal, etc.). So what does it mean when we ask if mental illness is real? We mean to say - is the concept of 'mental illness' functional in its goal of understanding people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to the extent that it can be used to aid people who want aid, or give insight to other care providers. The question is whether it helps or huts.
Along these lines, Thomas Szasz - who denies being an 'anti-psychiatrist,' but for our purposes here can be considered about as close to one as one can get - famously asserted that mental illness is a myth. Since then, social critics, postmodernists, post structuralists, etc., - Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, R.D. Laing, - all riding the antipsychiatrist wave, have toed this line one way or another.
Let's switch gears for a second. I've been watching a lot of reality TV love shows with my girlfriend such as the UK's Love Island and the US's Love is Blind. How is this related? Watch these shows and you will no longer question whether or not mental illness is real.
In Love is Blind, people go on literal blind dates, that is, they meet many people but are obscured by a barrier from seeing one another. Eventually they must decide, based only on their conversations and sound of voice, which person they want to choose to marry, at which point they meet in person and reveal their physical appearance to their new 'fiancee.' Obviously, this can cause conflicts - 'the person I got to know and like talking with is not physically appealing to me, what know?' kind of conflicts.
For example, we watch Jessica struggle with being unattracted to her choice. Unfortunately for Jessica, she seems completely unable to have any insight into her conflict which results in very strange behavior. Jessica appears unable to tell her partner she does not find him attractive except in ways that are totally cruel followed by a guilty retraction of her statements (or sometimes a complete denial she even said that). For example, she tells her partner that she finds him second best to another man whom she finds "sexy and attractive," only to laugh off and reject this 'sexy' man when this he approaches her asking if she is interested him. She smiles when she is angry, a forced smile that seems to indicate she cannot tolerate her own anger (incongruent affect); she fails to synthesize contrasting ideas or feelings such as joyfully pronouncing the beauty of a dress while also saying it feels "wrong" and crying.
All of this would be OK if Jessica seemed to have some insight into her rapidly fluctuating feelings, but she seems to really believe each contrasting feeling or idea in that moment, only to switch, seemingly without noticing she had previously felt differently, to the opposite feeling or idea. We could talk more about others - such as Jessica's partner who seems to intuitively understand that Jessica does not have any interest him yet still insists that they are "on the same page" without asking Jessica if she is, in fact, on the same page as him - but we get the idea.
This is mental illness in the flesh. Jessica (and her partner) seemingly gets nothing of what she wants or needs from whatever game she is unconsciously playing out with these men. It seems she is unable to allow herself to have feelings one might think reasonable to have given the circumstances, and it seems she drastically lacks continuity in her feeling states and ideations. In clinical jargon, she seems to lack a stable ego; she seems fragmented.
The idea, at least for Freud, is the materialist hypothesis that the mind is an extension of the body; an attempt to transform bodily forces - instincts, functions, processes - into symbols. We have all kinds of instincts, some of which are socially acceptable, some of which are not. Therefore, as 'social' 'animals' we are in conflict between our body and its needs and our outer world. In addition to these internal stimuli that always exert pressure, there are external stimuli - social pressures, other people and their wants and needs (Sartre's 'hell is other people') etc., that create further conflict. For Freud (and Nietzsche), when an internal or external stimuli presents itself, one needs to act with one's body accordingly, otherwise one suppresses the instinct unnaturally, throwing the body out of cycle. However, because we 'live in a society,' to reference the great meme, we cannot always act on our instincts and therefore we must find alternative ways of 'discharging' the instinct. This way is through talking. Instead of doing, we talk about how we feel and what we would like to do. This helps develop narrative continuity (ego) and provide a higher feeling of relief than not acting and not talking.
In short, if you are not getting what you need or want - or rather, your own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors are preventing you from getting what you need or want - and you are unable to recognize how you feel and how your feelings shift in relation to your instinctual responses to internal and external situations, all of which result in conflict, and if you are unable to resolve this conflict and it further impedes your getting what you need or want, and if this feedback cycle feedbacks out of control and becomes common place to the extent that it impedes personality or dynamic response to the world, then you are experiencing mental illness.
This is what, in clinical jargon, is called a personality disorder. You wouldn't use the same tool to approach all tasks, would you? Then why would you use the same limited responses, give or take, for all situations? But these metaphors run the risk of preachy cognitive behavior...we don't want this.
With this in mind, and if we don't like the terminology - given it is harsh, almost critical - we could always say 'mental-dynamism-challenged' or 'those with dynamic difficulty.' You think I'm being cheeky - I am not. This is what mental illness is. Conflicts over dynamism.
Entry 26: Getting the Juices Flowing Again
It's been a while.
It's been a while because I am sick to death of psychoanalysis.
24-40 hours of work at the clinic, 12-15 hours in the private practice, 3 hours of supervision and 3 hours of analysis or so a week. Not to mention class. That's over 60 hours of thinking, feeling, analyzing, etc.!
It's exhausting. By the end of the week the last thing I want to do is write about it.
Enough of my whining. I am back to say two things;
1: All that psychoanalysis amounts to is the idea that people have thoughts and feelings about things that happen, and for many reasons people are not permitted to honestly express these thoughts and feelings, and thus they experience subjective conflict that effects behavior, intentions, motivations, etc.
You can forget all the fancy structural and post structural theory, all the appeals to this or that form of authority, all the muddy concepts, and just remember that - psychoanalysis is a theory of conflict. It is pragmatic, and experience-near.
2: A good Twitter friend and frequent reader of the blog has suggested I write something on production, specifically the emphasis many cultures place on the need to be productive.
We see it in the gurus and snake oil salesmen of our time; youtubers obsessively documenting how they make the most of every minute, how to maximize, optimize, etc.
Why? The simple answer - one that may be right but neglects psychodynamics -is that its a very basic biological mastery-enjoyment circuit.
Developmental psychologists talk about how the child learns to have healthy self esteem, and work towards goals (i.e., live and enjoy life as opposed to becoming mentally ill at an early age) - it involves the child developing a sense of 'mastery' over its environment.
The child learns how to manipulate its body as to manipulate its world, and from this it gets positive feedback (either from its self in the form of a feeling of being able to change or experiment with objects, get nutrition, play, etc., or from others who encourage behavior) which reinforces positive self image (which translates to 'I am someone in this world who can do something meaningful').
Vignette: a young boy asks his older brother if he can help with the dishes. The older brother gladly gives up the task which for him is tedious. The younger child reaps enjoyment from the basic task - the basic feeling of being able to do something in the world.
Productivity - or maximizing manipulation (as in corporeal, the using of the digits, the body, the moving of objects, not emotional manopulation) of self and other - is a way of ensuring the most enjoyment out of the least work, which is a basic biological function, one that is consistent with healthy growth (we learn to economize our thought and behavior as to get smarter and stronger).
This is so far all on the register of Ego and Id (if we are to use Freud's topological model). Id are our impulses and instincts we are born with as an animal organism, Ego is the mediating surface (the thing we think has agency which figures out how to process the Id). However, things get more complicated when we introduce the Superego.
The superego becomes fixated on not only ensuring enjoyment is achieved in a certain way - i.e., a good and proper way (boy is scolded by brother or parents for washing the dishes too fast and thereby not washing them well) - but also by maximizing enjoyment as to not feel 'guilt' for 'wasting' time.
In other words, the child develops a mastery-enjoyment circuit through self and other given positive feedback, but as the child grows, the child must modify this mastery-enjoyment circuit by navigating negative feedback - things that he cannot control, and boundaries / criticism from the parents - which can results in 'feelings' (in another post I will elaborate on why I don't consider them feelings) of guilt and shame, or behaviors and thought processes meant to avoid criticism (projection, delusions, etc.).
This, of course, is in full force in potty training where the child's productive forces (peeing, shitting) are curbed and limited to certain times and places (impulse control).
Tl;Dr: a general psychoanalytic perspective on the pressure to be productive would necessarily take into account the basic enjoyment of producing, and the way super ego injunctions (or law) modify this enjoyment process, and if we were to be reductive Freudians (just for the fun [fuck] of it) we would have to describe the pressure to be productive as a sublimation or synthesis of the Id impulse to produce (shit and piss), the ego drive to achieve mastery (master potty training) and the super ego wish to please and follow rules (not be 'wasteful' with time).
Entry 27: Some Notes on Dream Analysis as Materialism
One morning I stirred from my sleep for a few moments, slightly awake, only to fall back asleep.
Upon falling back to sleep I had an interesting dream.
Sitting in a meadow, I could feel sun warm on my face intermittently cooled by a fragrant mist. Sun showers, my favorite weather phenomenon, filling my eyes with glint and my ears with the calming drone of white noise that only rainfall can generate. Cradled by calm comfort. A peaceful dream.
So what produced such a nice dream for me?
Well, precisely after waking up, and right before falling back asleep - in my brief waking period - I remember feeling the warm comfort of my blankets, looking to my right, through my shades and seeing the morning sun begin to peak over the treetops while at the same time hearing the sound of the bathroom fan from my left.
My dream is a synthesis of these disparate events; disparate sensorily, temporaly, and spatially.
For Freud the body's material processes and how those processes produce feedback through the body's own system, and how that is then translated into affects, thoughts, and feelings (ex: body is in need of nutrition, stomach produces signals, signals are felt as a grumble or as a hunger pang, hunger pang is translated into feeling - perhaps frustration at hunger - or conscious or unconscious thought - I should eat - etc.,) is the engine that fuels all mental processes. From this it follows in Freud's theory of dreams that the mind creates a narrative or a story to make sense of the senses that arise from the body. A story is a symbolic grid that pulls together disparate elements (an assemblage of enunciation).
Here, in my situation, I briefly experienced disparate, disconnected sensory experiences - the sound of a fan, the sight of sun, the feel of warm blankets on my skin - and upon falling back asleep, my 'mind' synthesized these disparate elements into a story - I was laying comfortably and warmly in a meadow (sense of touch and blankets) during a sun shower (sense of sight and sun + sound of bathroom fan that reminded me of sound of rain).
I like sunshowers. I always have. I have not analyzed why, but if I had been a different person, perhaps these disparate sensory experiences would be synthesized into a different mental story. For whatever reason, the positive memory or experience of a sunshower served as a symbolic grid pulling these disparate sense experiences together.
When a psychoanalyst analyzes a dream he or she is looking to trace back the story to its sensory experiences, and the symbolic grid that underlies it (part of the reason why asking 'what feeling did you have directly upon waking up' is a good diagnostic question to ask!).
Entry 28: Blog-Reader Response
Cool Twitter follower Jens (@Jenkly) asks
"How is psychoanalysis different from the pursuit of self-knowledge via diving into your past experience, noticing your feelings and journaling? What tools does it have that the latter doesn't possess?"
Another commenter responds "Transference?"
This commenter is right! But this answer is not likely to convince Jens.
I share a clinical vignette before delving into theoretical mumbojumbo:
Patient: "I keep putting in job applications and not getting calls back - - I bet they.." [patient devolves into a paranoid theory of how the job hirers must be hiring people with money or connections over him, etc.].Me: "Have you tried calling back?"Patient: "No, I haven't"Me: "If you'd like to test your theory that you are being neglected due to not having connections or money, then you might want to try calling back and seeing if you can't get an interview"Similarly, later in the session:"All my friends are successful in [job field]. I'm in the same field and I can't seem to be as successful as them. It must be because [patient devolves into a paranoid theory of how and why these people have achieved success, etc.].Me: "Have you tried asking them what makes them successful instead of theorizing to me about it? You have these people as a resource - - they are your friends, they will answer you, why not ask them?"
Like it or not, most people are like this patient. If left to their own devices they - not unlike narcissisus staring into his pool - would slip deeper and deeper into their own confirmation biases, their own fedeback loops, their own fantasies. This is one understanding of Freud's death drive - a return to the familiar, a rejection of growth, a turning away from the reality of the outside.
If this patient were to journal - and he does journal - or seek 'self knowledge' - and he tries this through over-intellectual thinking - he would always come up with the same answers. The self and its patterns begets more selves and their patterns. Grooves. feedback loops, etc. sameness.
This is because when one attempts to get outside of one's self, one always encounters more of one's old, stale self. And the old self says 'why bother escaping yourself, you're OK, just keep doing what you're doing.' Real growth has to - to some extent - come from an 'other.' If I had not asked these questions - can you ask your friend? have you called back? - this patient would have never thought of these questions as his pre-conceived fantasies preclude or exclude the very thinking and feeling processes that would impel him to ask himself these questions.
When I work with addicts at my hospital they try to tell me all the right answers; try to speed through treatment by feeding me the right answers, try to rush things along. I tell them 'You seem to accept treatment on your own terms, but to get better you need to accept treatment on someone else's terms.' It's one thing to accept your own idea of reality, its another thing to accept another person's idea, and its a whole other thing to accept the reality of the idea of reality.
This is the strength of the Lacanian approach of accepting the law of the analyst, accepting 'the real' (the overbearing interpretation, the variable length session that terminates at the analyst's will). What Nick Land refers to as 'the real Outside' (throughout his career) as opposed to 'alterity in advance' (in Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest).
In other words, without an analyst - an other - and the psychoanalytic setting, you get the neurotic who finds out that in the end it was all just the other person's fault the whole time, the world's shortcomings; you get the Nazi - or paranoiac - who finds out in the end it was the Jew or alien-other the whole time (see Zizek's understanding of ideology and anti-Semitism in his first book Subliime Object of Ideology); the addict who choses the bottle over something else; the ... etc. etc.
Another way of thinking about this in less psychoanalytic terms;
Cybernetically: the incentive towards self-reinforcing confirmation bias outweighs the incentive towards change.
Epistemologically: we don't know what we don't know, and our lack of knowing what we don't know prevents us from seeking what we don't know.
The analyst pulls one out of their loop by leveraging their loop, and can see what is missed and introduce it into the loop gently. This is after all the psychoanalytic object-relations model - that a patient comes to us with certain object impressions (schemas), and that the analyst is integrated slowly over time, loosening up schemas and objects.
As I wrote in The Minor Science of Caninepistemology / Doggypsychiatry
"As ethologists show, behavioral structures or stereotypes / schemas take in and sort out noise and signal over time, and thus develop more precise models and therefore more precise parameters for triggering a behavior.As developmental psychologists similarly show, a child learns 'dog,' sees a dog, says dog, gets positive feedback from the parent. Next, a child sees a cat, says 'dog,' and gets negative feedback from the parent - 'no, that is a cat.' The child uses negative and positive reinforcement - or feedback - to modulate parameters, and learns to exclude the aspects pertaining to the 'cat' model from the 'dog' model. The dog model is now honed, and more precise. This process continues on and on until our internal working models are more and more precise and therefore better at mapping the outside."
So, analysis offers difference and outsideness through the vehicle of an other's body. The analyst stands in for the scientific process of self correction, non-neurotic self critique. Growth.
Entry 29: 'Lacan Ruined Psychoanalysis'
I recently tweeted ‘Lacan ruined psychoanalysis’ and had
some folks asking me to expand.
To begin, see Entry 19 from this Psychoanalysis Blog (Ctrl+F to search for it). It’s
from at least 2 years ago which means its poorly written and permeated by a
tone and rhetoric mixed of naivety, snark, and self-entitlement I no longer
endorse. With that said, it’s still right (ok, maybe I still endorse the snark…).
In this entry 19 I argue that Psychoanalysis’ integration of revolutionary
spirit and Marxism in the 60s and 70s pushed psychoanalysis further into the
realm of ivory tower academic battles and therefore further away from the hallowed
‘praxis’ so highly esteemed by revolutionaries and Marxists (see my other blogpost on Marxism as a strategy of delegitimizating psychoanalysis).
I don’t do a good job of getting into it all in that entry, so
I’ll expand here:
This shift away from praxis under the name of perusing praxis (a properly Nietzschean slave morality move) is because – as Guattari mentions in various places throughout his career, as Sherry Turkle points out in her excellent book Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution, and as many psychoanalysts speak about in conferences – Lacan (who did not complete his training, for better or for worse) opened his own school where he loosened the requirements to be a psychoanalyst to the point where just about any stranger on the street could call themselves an analyst; a school of loosely trained analysts whose success or failure was oft decided on whether or not Lacan liked them, a method which incentivized consensus with the master and disincentivized critique - which is why many compare him to a cult (which Tutt overlooks in his response to this critique) – and whose poorly trained analysts were encouraged to pursue ‘pure theory’ (which Lacan justified with appeal to Freud's position that psychoanalysis is not a psychology but as a theory of mind and theory of technique of which the therapeutic benefits come secondarily, if at all. For Lacan, pure theory was a historical reaction against what he thought was both Sigmund’s intention and daughter’s ‘perversion’ of his intention into a bastardized therapeutic program).
When you remember that the supplanting of ethereal religion with a scientific materialist critique is the the bread and butter of Marxism and Marxism coupled with psychoanalysis (don’t take my word for it, see Tomsic’s The Capitalist Unconscious) - usually of the Lacanian brand we should add as Freud, the classic Hobbesian, Rousseauan and closeted Nietzschean that he was polemicized Communism – one is forced to ask ‘how is it again that the theorist who published nearly no clinical case studies (work with actual people) and who, by some people’s accounts (personal communications with lecturer at conference) leveraged his own theory of the ‘variable length session’ to make himself what would be a millionaire by today’s standards, how is it exactly such a figure is one of revolutionary, Marxist praxis?’ The answer is he was not. As Dosse points out in Intersecting Lives, Lacan partook very little in the revolutionary action.
I should note I'm not aiming to discredit Lacan as a revolutionary or leftist here. I don't care about thoe games. I am aiming to show Lacan did not practice, he theorized, and then attempted to valorize theory as a form of practice.
This 'theory vs practice' bit is not worth arguing, as many others have already done this. What we will say instead is that in short, under Lacan’s leadership, people weren’t really prepared to deal with other people, nor were they encouraged too, and nor were they encouraged to critique confirmation bias, and if Marxism and psychoanalysis – whether together or apart - has taught us anything, it’s that theories that are not tested in reality – and reality is intersubjective, a relation between groups and their minds and bodies – are theories that are highly vulnerable to confirmation bias, and that it is very likely for the ‘subject’ to simply and in paranoiac or narcissistic fashion assume their own position to be right and the other wrong.
This gets us back to my Entry 19. I argue that built into clinical
psychoanalysis – which bases its epistemological models on the communications
from and observations of patients – is a feedback mechanism that corrects superfluous
theory and hones in on what 'works' (a recurring theme in Guattari's pragmatic schizoanalysis). As I mention, when you apply Lacanian
psychoanalysis to a film, the film cannot speak back to you – ‘no, that’s not
it, you idiot!’ Neither can the director or author, as the Lacanian theorist has
infinite recourse to the ‘no, dear (dead) author, you think you meant that,
think you intended that, but you really meant this, surely!’ There really is no
measure of what makes a Lacanian reading of a film 'good' – worthwhile, helpful,
functional, etc. – and that’s ok, film analysis (which I do plenty of) is about
exploring possibilities, imagining alternatives, etc. But with that said, it’s
not really psychoanalytic practice, its not even necessarily critical theory - its closer to non-critical theory.
* * *
In that Entry 19 I quote Andre Green’s interview with apsychoanalytic journal
" An exceptional intelligence and the ability to produce some very interesting works do not necessarily imply his adherence to the psychoanalytical experience...in psychoanalysis, we are committed to an alliance between practice and theory...We cannot regard a psychoanalyst in the same way we regard a philosopher. A philosopher’s only concern is himself and other philosophers: a psychoanalyst must also deal with people outside his field...
How is it, you might ask, that someone who for seven years was an associate and an admirer of Lacan could suddenly abandon him, and become one of his foes? [Green talking about himself] My answer is that it requires time to completely deconstruct Lacan’s theoretical mechanism and to relate it to his practice in general. At the time, I limited myself to a kind of compromise. I said: “I cannot approve of your practice, but your theory interests me”. Only in 1984 did I realize that theory and practice were considerably more interwoven than one would have thought. It is impossible to say: “His practice was debatable, but his writing is sound..."
The comparison between Lacan and Heidegger doesn’t work. We can not say that Heidegger’s practice is Nazism. Insofar as he is a philosopher, his thought originates from texts. But you cannot put the psychoanalyst in a similar position: he is responsible for the patients in his care. Every now and then I see some “couch-scarred” patients, people who have undergone all sorts of abuse by Lacanian analysts. Here we are not talking about theories! And patients have to pay for this! This is their practice, this is how they earn their living!" "
(Green has also said elsewhere that Lacan’s popularity is not
a sign of Lacan’s strength, but of the weakness of the world).
This is important. I let you the reader give it a charitable
interpretation, rather than have me dilute it or bore you with what it clearly
says.
So how did Lacan ‘ruin’ psychoanalysis? He loosened its
boundaries until it collapsed into the popular intellectual trends of the time –
and I mean that nonpejoratively - making
it a kind of ‘theory of everything’ that could fit with or subsume any other
theory; he defanged its critical bite while simultaneously claiming it to be
critical. Anyone can do it, and you're part of the revolutionary vanguard - and not to mention scientific community too! - if you do it!
This all a lot to say that Lacanian psychoanalysis is not a
praxis, it is a theory, and that psychoanalysis is primarily concerned with
praxis and secondarily so with theory. You need to be working with people to be
a psychoanalyst, or do psychoanalysis. Grand theories that cannot be tested - or confirmative theoretical biases that can only be endlessly argued about in the halls of academia - these are not
new, and are in fact what psychoanalysis attempts to escape and remedy through
its actual real encounters with other people (alterity, a theme so pertintent to Lacan, and so 'lacking...').
With this said, to be charitable to Lacan, Daniel Tutt (Lacaniantheorist) is right when he says you should read Laplanche and the other Lacan defectors,and not rely on resentful writers like Webster whom I mentioned above – though I don’t agree with Tutt on much else.
And to continue to be charitable to Lacan, much of what he was trying to do by loosening the training requirements, introducing the variable length session, choosing students based on who liked, etc., was enacting or ‘practicing’ his theory of desire. A Lacanian I consider a Friend - Neil Gorman - works with patients and utilized the training and its practice of desire well.
This is something I utilize in practice as well. Sometimes
when I am working with folks and they are stuck I share an idea with them. When
they ask me why I want them to do such a thing I playfully retort ‘is not my
asking it simply enough?’ The idea here is that I do not need to justify my wish
for them, and in this moment I am spontaneously allowing my impulse to guide my
intervention which models for them the senselessness of the real. I am not giving them therpaeutic advice persay, but sharing with them a split off part of themselves that I become burdened with. This is
working with the transference instead of some ‘other’ outside the analytic room.
Why play around and pretend I have a good reason to do something other than
wanting to have done it? Some neurotics – seized up by their superegos, by anxiety,
etc. – some of them need this. But this kind of irreverent intervention must be
balanced with Bion’s understanding of ‘revery,’ that is, a method of
letting unconscious thoughts come to the surface of one’s mind while one is
sitting with another person and sharing those thoughts with the person.
So Lacan ruined psychoanalysis, but its not all bad, and what are we to expect from desire but ruin?
Entry 30: Epidemics, Epistemics, and Ethics - or Praxis
In this entry I make the case that for psychoanalysis - which is a Gay Science - ethics is a special kind of practice (or 'praxis' which I provide my own definition of) which are indissociable.
It is as banal as it is true to say that the history of psychoanalysis is rife with conflicts; both internal and external; practical and theoretical, personal and political; sexual, ethical, etc.
From its very origins psychoanalysis is both an ethical and transgressive project that emphasizes actual practice with real people, and from this it follows that the other conflicts mentioned – be they internal between sub-schools of psychoanalysis or external between psychoanalysis and the surrounding culture - can be subsumed under ethics, the reversal of which cannot be said to be true.
In other words, for the practice of psychoanalysis, the big conflicts that haunt psychoanalysis and its fragmentation into subschools - sexual transgression, theoretical divides, political schisms, etc. - are all downstream from ethics which is indissociable from practice; how we think psychoanalytically is derived from how we act with people.
So, ethical and transgressive?
Ethical because of its concern with the fundamental question of how one can live harmoniously with one’s self (given the ‘self’ is produced by conflicting ‘internal’ forces which are themselves cordoned and off and internally regulated external forces), as well as live harmoniously with one another (as in a group setting we make the other the object of our internal forces as well as become ourselves this object for the other).
One could of course respond to this question with an unethical answer – Why bother? Who cares? We should simply act on our impulses! Kill ourselves and each other, etc.! – but it is precisely the point that psychoanalysis does not take this position that is indicative of its ethics, as one does not need to attend analysis to be murderous or nihilistic, but one might need to attend to not be.
In other words, psychoanalysis is concerned with ethics as it encourages talking about impulses in place of acting on them, and it’s safe to say that one only takes the time to meaningfully talk about these ethical quandaries if one has at least some hope for or faith in an answer that is in any way better than nuclear holocaust.
Transgressive because in concerning itself with the above ethical question psychoanalysis impugned the answers offered by other contemporary projects: philosophy, religion, and tradition were all on the chopping block now as possible obstacles to a healthy existence as a civilized animal.
This is of course readily observable in the series of psychoanalytic ‘discoveries’ that conflicted with the mores of Victorian society and the world beyond such as: female sexuality in 1895-1898 (Studies on Hysteria 1895; Sexuality in the Aetitology of Nueroses), origin of sexuality in childhood in 1905-1909 (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality - Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy), violence as an inexorably aspect of our biological and social existence in 1923-1930 (The Ego and the Id - Civilization and its Discontents 1930), and God, religion, and philosophy as an elaborate psychological defense in 1927-1939 (The Future of an Illusion - Moses and Monotheism).
That is, by attributing children and women the same complex inner world as men and adults and therefore the same right to shape society, and by placing emphasis on understanding violent fantasies and treating violent behavior rather than dismissing both as sinful aberrations, and by in large demystifying and desacralizing worldviews and instead rooting their origin firmly in the flesh and blood of bodies, these discoveries challenged the traditions of Victorian society.
This tension between the ethical vector and transgressive vector of psychoanalysis can be captured by looking at two famous quotes.
Freud in conversation with Jung at the start of their nautical journey to America to meet philosopher and psychologist William James:
“They don’t realize we are bringing them the plague”
“I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow. I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures…required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.…I tread with care in matters of life and death…Above all, I must not play at God. I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick…I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure…”
Freud’s comment to Jung is symbolically rich.
Freud and Jung were both avid readers of Nietzsche, and it is precisely Nietzsche who is the unsaid ‘analytical third’ (to use Thomas Ogden’s intersubjective and intertextual concept) in this conversation. In this nautical moment, Freud and Jung are talking as proud fathers of their new child, a ‘psychology’ of bodily passions, instincts, and drives the goal of which is to secularize and therefore revitalize human life – what Nietzsche would call a ‘Gay Science.’
To employ Nietzsche’s own adages: to spread the plague of psychoanalysis is to play God and philosophize with a hammer, as God is dead and replaced by man and his creative and destructive drives, and the hammer is the tool that both destroys and builds; to spread psychoanalysis is to spread a cultural virus that will destroy old ways in order to introduce new ones, not with swords or guns, but with words as hammers. And to beget widespread infection is to transgress a very basic totem of our civilized world, that of the impetus to remain clean and outsource filth, and on the chance that one is to get sick, to avoid the aggressively anti-social act of carelessly spreading the sickness.
As a provocative aside: if Psychoanalysis is indeed a ‘Gay’ science and a plague that destroys tradition through transgressing the taboo against willing or uncaring infection of others I claim it is then one cannot help but drawl parallels to the 1980s AIDs epidemic. Whether lbidinal excess, uncomfortable truth or conservative boogeyman, the most 'abhorred' character in the narrative of the AIDs epidemic was the ‘bug chaser,’ a homosexual who willingly sought out AIDS in order to accelerate its spread!
In other words, it’s not by accident that psychoanalysis is likened to the secret spread of a dangerous and destructive natural force! To those who wish not to have their societal traditions disturbed, psychoanalysis is indeed a threat (see my other blog entry on viruses and psychoanalysis here).
Meanwhile, in opposition to Freud and Jung’s Gay, Nietzschean plague, the popular Greek oath encourages us not to be an immanentized God who creates and destroys in and by the same gesture; where spreading the plague implies a sort of libidinal excess, or creative recklessness, the Greek oath encourages a cautious, almost conservative balance. In other words, likening psychoanalysis to a plague, if only metaphorically, is at odds with the idea of the most basic and well-known ethical proclamation, the Hippocratic Oath.
If we consider that both the implicit Hippocratic Oath and the possibility of spreading the plague are present and perhaps encouraged within the textual body of psychoanalysis, we can say that the figure of the psychoanalyst is both the plague and the plague doctor - or ‘plague-doctor.’
It is this tension – what Nietzsche in his early work would conceptualize through Greco culture as ‘Dionysian (passionate psychoanalysis) vs. Apollonian (rational medical science)’ – that defines the subtext of psychoanalysis. *
Jacques Derrida – who refers often to Nietzsche, and whose wife was a psychoanalyst - developed a conceptual tool known as différance to investigate and understand textual tensions such as the one above (Freud and Jung vs. Hippocratic Oath).
Différance is not what we think of as simple ‘difference.’
A model of simple difference assumes that a word means something and then looks for how a word or concept is employed in various alternating ways throughout the text. In this way, difference assumes there is a stable, core meaning of a word in theory with several less-perfect variations in practice which are rooted back to a single word’s theoretical ‘essence.’ Thus, simple difference glosses over textual tensions, grammatical glitches, and authorial artifacts by presuming an underlying theoretical unity, and in this motion, praxis (how a language is practiced, or its pragmatic aspect) and theory (the underlying structure of a language, as in how it should be written and spoken) are arbitrarily split via the concept of ‘essence.’
Difference assumes a language with a relatively fixed lexicon or generative structure from which a language can be produced. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, critiquing models of simple difference, and along with it the Chomsky generative model of linguistics, write that ‘there is no mother tongue, or major language, only a collection of minor languages.’ In this sense, language is always practical first, theoretical second (see my other blog on minor languages).
On the other hand, the tool of différance is an attempt to test the internal consistency of a word or concept within a text by comparing the ways a word or concept is used throughout the text, thereby exposing the underlying tensions of the word or concept. This is what Derrida refers to as ‘deconstruction,’ which, in his 1993 text Specters of Marx, he likens to a particular kind of Marxism.
Similarly, in The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, Samo Tomsic argues that a defining aspect of both Marxism and (Lacanian) Psychoanalysis is that tensions and conflicts are exposed and analyzed to reveal ‘the real’ thereby allowing us to know how to act, as opposed to mysticism or philosophy which, as Marx pointed out, uses universal categories to smooth over conflicts in reality thereby precluding actual understanding or change.
For this Marxist-deconstructionist approach, theory is not separate to practice – or ‘praxis,’ as one will see commonly employed in Marxist literature - but rather a means to more practice; a tool that privileges conflict thereby allowing access to ‘reality’ so reality can inform us how to act, or ‘practice,’ which thereby further informs our theory.
Consistent with Marx’s attempt at developing a theory of ‘scientific materialism,’ and the ‘postmodern’ critique of the field of science for its essentialism, the practice or praxis would then be an attempt at reconciling philosophy with scientific method, whereas ‘theory’ would be critiqued for its bias towards confirming its own correctness by avoiding conflict and thereby avoiding autocorrection – i.e., critiqued for being unscientific. As Tomsic argued above, and as the Freudo-Marxists therapists and activists of the 60s and 70s attempted to enact, this is same the case with psychoanalytic practice and ethics. This is one of the main understandings of the difference between theory and practice which psychoanalysis endorses, and which is imperative to the link between psychoanalysis, ethics, and the transgressive narrative we have thus far presented.
To be precise, ‘differences’ in psychoanalytic ethics arise mainly from différance in psychoanalytic practice, not differences in psychoanalytic theory (we are looking at conflicts within the 'body' of text of psychoanalysis, between sub-schools of psychoanalysis, not at conflicts between psychoanalysis as a pure theory with variations of lesser or more correspondent, or conflicts between psychoanalysis and other epistemological / treatment models).
This may seem obvious, but the implications of thinking and practicing along the lines are far reaching.
First, more must be said on science, and the difference between theory and practice.
It is here I return to what I began to suss out in Entry 29, above, regarding practice or 'praxis.'
In the human services – medicine, therapy, etc. – practice is the provision of a service that has effects measurable enough to be corrected as to meet the needs of the person who is being serviced (feedback to improve models). This is opposed to mere theory which arguably contains little to no self-correcting mechanism other than the venue of scholarly debate or the philosopher’s late-night solitude of sipping scotch and pouring over dusty, sun-bleached tomes in a search for ‘pure’ logic. The former too often devolves into tenure jockeying or ad hominem polemicizing while the latter comes indissociable from dubious susceptibilities to confirmation bias, kettle logic, and no true Scotsman fallacies (I recognizes this definition is not likely to be accepted by philosophers or theorists; that this itself needs to be critiqued for its biases).
A practice is formed to treat a living person, and if the practice works on a personal level - i.e., meaningfully services the person in a way that incorporates self-correction as to meet the person’s needs – then there will likely be an incentive to extend the scope of the treatment to treat a living population (large scale group of people). In this way, what works locally is set up to work globally. Why? If a practitioner’s motivation is purely scientific, he will want to test and hone his practice on the widest possible sample size; altruistic, he will want to help as many people as possible; greedy, make as much money as possible; egomaniacal, be as famous and powerful as possible. Freud was perhaps all four, and as we will see later, psychoanalysis spread like the plague (which makes it all the more important to understand it in terms of ethics!).
Differences in a practice that follow the scientific method in using feedback to correct itself arise mainly from successfully treating different populations, as unsuccessful treatments or practices - i.e., ones that do not actually have a meaningful effect on the population and do not self-correct to fit the populations needs – are not ‘selected for’ and are therefore pruned from propagating in the ‘global market’ of practices, so to speak. This can occur passively: people in need of treatment tend not to seek a non-working treatment thereby leaving practitioners of this non-working treatment with no one to treat at which point they may take up another more successful practice; or actively: other practitioners of more successful practices mount efforts to run the other less successful guys out of town.
Thus, differences in practice that are not pruned - ones that ‘pass the test of time’ so to speak - then amount to differences in scientific methodological self-correction feedback processes. This means that per the scientific method, the population a practitioner treats or services directly reflects the practice itself. Therefore, the population treated has a somewhat significant dialectical effect on the practice. This is how feedback loops tighten – a model aimed at understanding a population, a population that informs the model.
Ethics, then, is an attempt at maintaining the honed feedback loop; an attempt at establishing some kind of mechanism - guidelines, rules, methods, etc., - that semi-autonomously encourages, enforces, reinforces, and incentivizes what ‘works’ (what is selected for, not pruned, stands the test of time, etc.) between the practitioner who treats and those who are treated (two nodes of dialectical feedback) while also discouraging and de-incentivizing what ‘doesn’t work’ between the practitioner who treats and those who are treated (if a colleague misbehaves, we might chide them, or worse, suspend their license!).
For old philosophers – especially the Greeks whom we owe not only our concepts of ethics and practice or ‘praxis,’ but also our early medical models – this is where the ‘moral’ value-judgement aspect of ethics comes into play. A ‘good’ practice is one that confidently and efficiently gives a person or population something that is helpful to them. In this sense, ethics then aims at economizing and optimizing the ‘good’ service received by a population.
As discussed above, a widely known example is Greek physician Hippocrates who, consistent with the theologians of his time and before, developed a sort of catch-all oath couched in an apophatic or negative register - ‘do no harm.’ That is, just as the Torah does not list all the things one should do to be good and instead provides 200 plus things one shouldn’t do (which the Bible later reduced to ten) in the form of ‘thou shall nots,’ Hippocrates too formed an ethical mandate that required one ‘do no harm’ thereby more confidentially and efficiently indicating all the things one should do. This aspect of logic – that sometimes much more can be implied with a negative than said with a thousand words – perhaps hints at an origin of ethics’ obsession with ‘thou shall nots’ for centuries to come.
This is to say that a good code of ethics is indissociable from that which it is intending to enforce – the very science that produced it - and therefore that ethical values a practitioner holds are a reflection of a material relationship between a certain local population that participated in the self-corrective scientific method feedback process that shaped the scientific practice. The implication here is that if we look at the various subschools of psychoanalysis – which we will cover in a moment – then we must consider that particular theoretical differences between these schools are derived from a practice and ethics that arises from the concrete treatment of the population it is in contact with.
In other words, when a sub-school of psychoanalysis has a certain ethical value, that value makes sense based on the practitioner’s (or group of practitioner’s) personal – and auto-critiqued - experience with a population. This is consistent with both the Nietzschean theory of values and the Psychoanalytic theory of transference / counter-transference.
Ethics are local and in flux. They develop out of a practical relationship between a practitioner or group of practitioners and a person or population. What works for one may not work for another. On the other hand, for Nietzsche, and to some extent – following the theory of counter transference resistance – for psychoanalysis, an ethic is a local value that comes out of a person’s own development.
Again, what ‘works’ between a population and a group of practitioners is scientifically honed into a ‘practice.’ The function of an ‘ethics’ is to enforce what ‘work’s in the practice, and therefore what is ethical is that which works in practice with a group of people (and from this what is 'moral' is maximizing the 'good' that comes from using ethics to enforce a practice). So, not unlike how Freud describes the superego as a special part of the ego that has split off to monitor the ego, ethics – which serves a similar function as the superego, though less rigid - is a special articulation of practice. Ethics and practice are indissociable. Thus, as Andre Green is quoted as saying in Entry 29, in psychoanalysis one cannot easily seperate out one's theory from one's practice.
*(If you're wondering if the hippocratic oath really shows up in analytic literature: Several analysts of varying significance across varying time periods engage with the Hippocratic oath. In 1970 Erik Erikson claims psychoanalysis has a Hippocratic obligation. Berger (2011) wonders if analyzing her patient’s psychotic defenses, thereby removing them and making the patient vulnerable to the outside world, is not in violation with the Hippocratic oath. Burston (2012) argues that psychiatry, and in part psychoanalysis, in becoming too occupied with making money strays from the Hippocratic principle of ‘do no harm.’ Blechner (2014) makes reference to the oath to emphasize the fact that an analyst should not sexually act out with his or her patient. Clulow and Wallwork (2015) make the point that publishing a paper composed of case material may contradict the Hippocratic oath).
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Entry 31: Some Thoughts On JA Miller's 'Docile to Trans'
"But you have to be familiar with the place, as I am and as Guattari once was, to allow yourself such profanity." - J.A. Miller
It is fitting that my last two blog entries in the psychoanalysis section are centered around the unethical practices of Lacan as JA Miller's recent essay, which describes Lacan's abuse of Miller, could easily fit right into each of the above entries.
That is, Miller has - to a lesser extent of course - joined the dissident ranks with the likes of Guattari, Green, and Laplanche. However, juicy psychoanalytic drama aside, as folks on twitter have pointed out, more importantly the text also covers trans culture and wokeness.
Though the text set out to mainly to respond to Paul B. Preciado's lecture turned Semiotext(e) book 'Can the Monsther Speak,', what is more important is that the piece acts as a junction for significant divergences within the history of psychoanalysis and an important lesson in 'what psychoanalysis is' or 'what it should be today.'
*
The history of divergences in psychoanalysis and what psychoanalysis 'is' or 'ought to be' essentially amount to two parts of the same discussion which I will attempt to cover.
Haunting JA Miller's text is an inherited and neurotic resentment for May 68 which - as psychoanalytic theories of embodiment, whether Nietzschean, Freudian, or something else might suggest - is nothing more than a sublimated rivalry between himself and Felix Guattari.
To be preicse, 'nothing more' sounds too polemical, reductive. What we should say is that some of the subtext of Miller's text can be interestingly explored and framed by looking at Miller's relationship to Zizek, Lacan, and Guattari.
Sp what's the Guattari connection?
Let's start with the text and then move beyond it:
Preciado's book is published by Semiotext(e), the main publisher of Guattari's work, which was of course founded by Guattari's personal friends Sylvère Lotringer.
Miller mentions that his grandson - a supposed woke-scold who lectures Miller on gender - names his favorite book as In Search of Lost Time. As any good Freudian knows, if someone takes the time to include a fact or detail in speech or writing, it has some sort of significance to the text (even if it is itself insignificant and the purpose is to detract and distract...), so one must conclude (especially if one is a good Lacanian) that the inclusion of this book is not insignificant. Though it is a well known text, and even if Guattari himself came to love the book through Lacan, my first association is that it is Guattari's self-admitted favorite book of which he wrote on at length in most of his works.
The Proust book stands in as a signifier for Guattari, just as Preciado does.
Both are treated with a modicum of disdain in the text, just as Guattari is treated in general by the psychoanalytic and philosophical community alike, which we will get to in a moment.
Zizek makes a similar move to Miller in his short text First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, where he claims to respond to 'post-Hegelian neoliberal' Antonio Negri (pg. 52-60) but does so by mainly putting DeleuzoGuattarian language in scare quotes.
"egalitarian-emancipatory 'de-territorialization' "(pg 129)
"radical nomadism...the standard post-Hegelian matrix of productive flux...nomadic 'molecular' ...'molar'... "(139-141).
Of course Negri, a friend and co-author of Guattari (Communists Like Us), utilized Guattari's conceptual language, but the language Zizek mocks in these moments is more readily noticed as Guattarian, not Negrian. I can imagine Zizek or his editor suggesting Ziz respond to a more contemporary thinker who is carrying the Guattarian torch, rather than Guattari himself who Zizek thinks too lowly of to even respond to (which we will show in a moment).
Again, as is the nature of the (Lacanian) signifier, one name stands in for another, even right down to the level of phonemes: Neg'ri' really means another '-ri,' - Guatta'ri.'
Three disdained authors all stand in for Guattari.
But why?
As is now common knowledge (myth or legend will also suffice) – and I will spare the details as they are already fully documented elsewhere (Intersecting Lives, Lacan Was a Phase in My life, Anti-Oedipus Papers, etc.) - Felix Guattari, esteemed by the master, was set up to be the next Lacan – set up to carry his torch. Unfortunately, at the 11th hour Lacan retracted his support and opted instead for his son-in-law Jacques Alain-Miller who was is in good standing with the then influental Maoists. JA Miller of course would go on to be Slavoj Zizek’s ‘psychoanalyst’ and teacher. In fact, what Lacan did to Guattari is mirrored by what Miller did to Zizek: As the story goes, Guattari was going to publish a text in a journal whereupon Lacan convinced him to publish it in his journal only to then reject the piece leaving Guattari with nowhere to publish it (part of what prompts Guattari to link up with Deleuze, and the rest is history...); Zizek was told he was to be published by Miller only for Miller, at the last minute, to reject the piece causing Zizek to look elsewhere.
In classic Lacanian arrogance, in his text JA Miller imagines an interlocutor so that he may respond to the imagined position. Let us do the same with Zizek here.
Let us imagine a universe in which Lacan did not pull the rug out from Guattari’s feet. In this universe, Guattari would have been in the position of Miller and thus in the position to be Zizek’s psychoanalyst and teacher. Of course, there is no telling if it is not the case that in this counterfactual universe that Zizek would not still have chosen Miller as his analyst while still rejecting Guattari, but what matters is that there would’ve existed the possibility that Guattari could have been Zizek’s superior in an authority structure (could there a more Lacanian duo of words than 'authority and structure!') of importance to Zizek. That is, the counterfactual lets us rhetorically imagine a possible world in which Zizek was subordinate to Guattari in ranking with the master, Lacan.
Let’s imagine a different counterfactual. Let us base this one on a fact: it is undeniable that Guattari was more blessed by the father / master than Zizek himself. Guattari, analysand and student of Lacan even before it was fashionable (to the extent that he was jokingly called Lacan around La Bourde), had an intimate relationship with the master. Now for our counterfactual: Imagine a universe in which Zizek recognizes this fact. What necessarily comes next from his recognition of this fact? Perhaps the idea that not only did Guattari have a closer relationship than Zizek to his idol Lacan, but that Guattari, from Zizek’s perspective, squandered this. Let us imagine a world where Zizek thinks “It should have been I who was chosen to be Lacan’s torch bearer, I would appreciate it in a way that Guattari did not!” Now, what feelings are thoughts like these often bound up with? We would probably say jealousy or envy, feelings -or psychodynamics, rather - that are commonly associated with betrayal, the word Zizek himself uses to refer to Guattari:
“Deleuze was a mega genius – Guattari, now he is the real traitor here. Like a true Stalinist would say, he should be brought out back and shot” (Žižek. “Ontological Incompleteness in Film” The European Graduate School lecture Dec 1 2012)
Now, considering Zizek would never have been in the place to bear Lacan’s torch, he has settled (as both the Kleinian depressive position, Freudian resolution of the Oedpial complex, and Lacanian castration requires) for the next best thing – having Miller as his analyst.
To get back to Miller's text - this envious or jealous and resentful streak is captured only briefly in the text when Miller writes "But you have to be familiar with the place, as I am and as Guattari once was, to allow yourself such profanity," meaning 'in order to critique Lacan(ianism) you have to had been through it. Interestingly, this is not unlike the inclusivity ritual or signing ethnic or racial groups enact around certain slurs, or the way an older brother draws the line on who can name-call his younger brother; both are name calls 'hey, I can say that to him because he's my family, but I'll beat you up if you say it!' Sibling rivalry anyone?
It is this historical drama that is playing out in Miller's piece. Guattari is an implied signifier standing in for the 'disorder' of hsyeric discourse introduced into and thereby undermining psychoanalysis.
This helps us get to our other point - discussing how the text helps us see 'what psychoanalysis is.'
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Psychoanalysis changed from a medical adjacent therapeutic clinical technique for helping people to a theoretical template for understanding culture. Lacan achieved the latter by making efforts to remove the notion of medical or healing authority from psychoanalysis, making it 'a science of understanding how subjectivity forms' of which the therapeutic benefits were purely secondary, if at all. He did so by bankrupting the value of the training institution by letting anyone in, and making the criteria for graduating analytic training based on immeasurable, individualized, and moving goalposts (which is why Deleuze and Guattari refer to him as 'the first schizoanalyst' which we wills ay more on in a minute).
Over the course of my training I have weighed both the strengths and weaknesses, alternating between the therapeutic and theoretical approach. I have - like most of the Lacanian defectors (Laplanche and Green, among others) - settled on the therapeutic approach.
Regardless, the the purely theoretical approach of listening to a patient on the couch without the intent for caring or curing, or the act of viewing a film through a psycho analytic lens - both being an exercise in how someone understands their own subjectivity, and how their subjectivity might have formed along certain lines - this 'pure' approach is merely an intensified version or extension of the basic therapeutic technique Freud developed.
In other words, no matter how you cut it, psychoanalysis is a way of understanding how people understanding themselves, and how that understanding effects behavior and thought which is measured by the way the person relates to the analyst under certain circumstances (an other, transference).
The question then is a tricky one - is this specific frame and method of listening and deducing one's subjectivity through a careful relationship applicable to trans folk?
The quick and easy answer is yes, but things are rarely quick and easy, and especially not when it comes to psychoanalysis. Here's the longer answer:
I don't think psychoanalysis should try and cater itself to trans folk; Neither analysts nor trans really want each other for who they are (which is one understanding of Lacan's 'there is no sexual relationship'), and so I think psychoanalysis and the trans population are an ineffective match. This is not because of a fault with trans folk, nor a deficit of psychoanalysis, but rather because of a limit or set of limits pertaining to both psychoanalysis and trans people.
My experience is that most trans people do not want or need psychoanalysis because the theory and model is derived from non-trans folk subjectivities and therefore it seeks to achieve different goals than those of trans subjectivities, and it seeks to achieve these goals by means different than those of trans folk.
This is because psychoanalysis, in addition to being a frustration model that presupposes someone has enough gratification in life to withstand continued frustration (the analyst prohibits action, reflects questions, encourages laborous thinking and the expression of hard to express feeling, etc.), psychoanalysis is in part predicated on the acceptance of things out of one's control, or the idea that there is such a thing as being in and out of control. This acceptance takes various theoretical myths from different sub-schools of psychoanalysis:
- The Kleinian depressive position of accepting appropriate accountability as opposed to paranoically projecting blame;
- the Freudian settling for a stand-in object that is inherently inadequate from the sought after object, such as a woman outside of the family in place of the mother,
- or the Freudian letting go of the already-always lost object in an act of mourning rather than becoming mired in melancholia or mania (the latter being the fantasy that the already-always lost object is able to be recreated if one tries hard enough);
- the Lacanian castration and barred subject, etc.
I call these myths of acceptance because we don't have to subscribe to their contents; don't have to believe them to be true or effective in anyway. They are values psychoanalysis attempts to inscribe into its patients; a frame of acting and understanding.
Additionally, psychoanalysis is about having a relationship - even if it is a simulated relationship that reveals 'there is no (sexual) relationship' - with another person.
Let's be real. Trans folk don't need - or want - a paid simulated relationship with another person where they reflect on their understanding of their self and the historical experiences that contributed to this understanding, they need or want someone to clear them legally to get a surgery or chemical administration to move on with their life.
In this sense, psychoanalysis is inefficient to the needs of the trans folk. Trans folk need or want surgical and chemical intervention to feel less dysphoric. Some psychoanalysts believe that dysphoria can be worked out through the transference. I don't believe this, nor do I see any evidence that this is true. Additionally, the trans folks I have worked with do not tend to express an interest in exploring how their experiences contributed to their own understanding of their self (despite there being some good content worth exploring!). For the folks I've worked with, or continue to work with, it doesn't matter, and in many cases, it feels invalidating or counterintuitive to their attempt at carving out a space for themselves in this world.
Simply put, what psychoanalysis offers and what trans folk need or want are at odds - so bother reconciling the two?
This is not say that I do not believe trans folk seeking psychoanalysis should be turned away - that psychoanalysis should exclude trans.
No, not at all. And rather than elaborate theoretically, let me explain clinically. I have some trans folk currently in my outpatient practice, and have worked with additional trans folk in the past who have cordially and politely left treatment after we came to a mutual agreement about trying something different. I have also worked with a number of trans folk at the hospital I am employed at. With these people I do not make an attempt to foster transference or explore someone's self understanding. Rather, I work to help them solve conflicts through playfully challenging moral prohibitions they have internalized, or work to try and expand rigid thinking about what one needs to do to feel affirmed in their gender.
One AFAB (assigned female at birth) patient who identifies as male fears that if he peruses cis females - the population he is attracted to - that they will feel betrayed or duped and retaliate physically or socially when they discover, when it is time to be intimate, that he is a male without a penis. I suggest perhaps if his life is not truly in danger it does not matter, what does he care anyways? They'll either like him or they won't, and if they don't, fuck it. Can't he handle the feeling of rejection? Why should that fear prevent him from perusing his desired object? etc. Another patient insists he must starve himself to achieve the male body he needs to feel gender affirmed. Surely there are other ways that not cause as much harm and distress? Other ways that do not land you in the hospital? Have you seen most men? Isn't gender in part a set of social performances? etc.
Thses patient do not want to understand himself - what contributed to their values, their behaviors, their thought structures - nor do they want to accept - or learn to accept, the unchangable. Nor is the much incentive for them to do so! Rather, they wants the world to be different, and though this may cause unnecessary exhaustion or despair at times, there is ultimately 'nothing wrong' with that. Nothing wrong indeed, just may not be suitable for psychoanalysis! And the question then is, is what I am doing with these folks psychoanalysis? Some will say yes, some will say no. Andre Green has a history of saying this kind of work is 'pre-analytic' or 'not really analysis.' I think Miller would agree.
This brings us to a bit from Miller's essay. He writes
"Before trans people, the monster was the hermaphrodite. He too disturbed sexual public order. But hermaphroditism is only a matter of organs. A hermaphrodite is a biological case, a rare one at that. Androgyny, on the other hand, is a creature of myth, a matter of look and lifestyle. An androgynous person is someone whose appearance does not allow you to determine to which sex he or she belongs. This was already the case in ancient Greece or Rome: see Luc Brisson’s Le sexe incertain. It is not as such a sexual identity disorder. Trans is something else again."
Miller is both right and painfully wrong here. I would say to him, 'Yes, precisely - the 'something else again' is the emergent quality known as subjectivity that psychoanalysis aims to study!
This again gets us back to Guattari vs. Miller. This is precisely why Guattari developed schizoanalysis, a process of helping people act on their desire rather than reflect on it. A method of circumventing representation and encouraging action.
With Guattari's distrust of linguistics in mind, the ultimate question is not 'can the monster speak' but 'does the monster want to speak, and if so, under what circumstances?' Does the monster want transference and reflection, or do they want a need met so they can live their life? Yes - not can the monster speak, but can the monster do.
