#analysand

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

A psychoanalysis, consists in speaking freely, in not hushing the ideas that go through your head, like we’re doing right now. Little by little, from within your own words, another meaning forms and surprises you, then falls apart, taking the pain with it.

A psychoanalysis, consists in speaking freely, in not hushing the ideas that go through your head, like we’re doing right now. Little by little, from within your own words, another meaning forms and surprises you, then falls apart, taking the pain with it. Usually, you discover just how conditioned you had been by apparently minute elements encountered in hazardous circumstances: things from childhood, meetings, certain words said to you, and we keep coming back to them until the malevolent charge of these elements softens. Each case is different.

Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Response to the Anti-Freudians’, Le Point, 22.09.05.

[winterfable]

Dreams and the unconscious, transference and countertransference, analyst and analysand

[...]

Sometimes the new analysand will bring a dream to the initial interview; sometimes the first dream does not appear until after the first session, or after several sessions. It is not at all unusual for the initial dream to be a significant one, putting into focus either the condition of the patient or else his feelings about the analysis or the analyst.

Gina, a young woman of Roman Catholic religion, came into analysis in a desperate situation. She was about five months pregnant by the first man with whom she had had sexual relations. He had no intention of marrying her. She was the sort of woman who seemed ideally suited for the role of wife and mother, but circumstances were against it, and she blamed her own impetuousness for not having avoided the pregnancy. Yet she said with conviction that she was unwilling to compound her guilt by adding murder to her crime of carelessness. She would have the child, and she would have to find an attitude toward it that would be consistent with what she understood as the meaning of her life. This did not permit the negation of a life for which she was responsible, her firstborn. Gina brought the following dream to the first analytic session: I was thinking about coming to you. I had a guide. She said you do all sorts of weird things. She said you told one lady to throw her car into the water. She said you told another lady to jump into the cold icy water of the lake and swim across.

This dream contained Gina's fears of the analytic process. The whole thing was mysterious to her. She expected to have demands made which would be extremely difficult for her to meet. In the course of our discussion of the dream I asked her what a car meant to her. Her car was her most valuable possession; she had worked very hard to pay for it. It was a source of great pleasure. When I questioned further, the car turned out to be the place where she and her friend had had sexual intercourse. So, evidently, the car represented the treasure (her sexuality) that she felt she had misused, and therefore it would have to be sacrificed. All her guilt was bound up in this painful realization. Her guilt also resulted in her having withdrawn her tender feelings into herself as she had become somewhat hardened to the world. This was understandable in the face of what she expected to find in the attitudes of friends and relatives.

The second lady in the dream represented to her the absence of sensitivity to emotion that she was experiencing. “It is as though all my feelings have gotten turned off and I feel nothing for anyone, I just don't care. And still I miss my feelings, painful as they are, and wish I could get them back.” Jumping into the icy water would be a great enough shock, she said, to make her feel again. The analyst would demand that from her, and the analysis would be like icy water. The dream shows her attitude: the sacrifice will have to be made, the risk will have to be taken, and the hope is that she will be made whole with her feelings once more.

The beginnings of transference are also present in this initial dream. Gina brings into her analysis an unconscious relationship to the analyst, upon whom she had placed the image of a stern task-mistress. Since she had not yet met me, these expectations had to come from within herself; they were reflections of her own unresolved conflicts, unconscious emotions and problems with relationships. These were activated at the prospect of entering a new and intense relationship. Transference means that something from elsewhere is transferred or redirected into the analytic relationship. Thus we have attitudes and behaviors coming up in analysis which carry with them more emotional charge than would seem to belong to the situation being explored. Behind the facade of the analytic dialogue, however, stands the life history of the patient, with all its personalities and conflicts and the feelings associated with them. The experiences of the individual and, more than these, the bases upon which the life experience takes place, namely the archetypal foundations of the personality, all infuse the analytic confrontation. Much of this process happens unconsciously, but it gives rise to feelings and emotions that then become conscious.

I want to return to the first session with Gina not only because it contained an important initial dream, which illustrates how transference can be present even before the analysis begins, but because another very important aspect of analysis entered into this case in an especially dramatic way. This concerned the attitude of the analyst toward the patient, an attitude which, like that of transference, has a strong unconscious aspect. Countertransference is the term used to describe the unconscious analyst-analysand relationship as experienced subjectively from the side of the analyst.

Here are some of the countertransferential factors in the case of Gina. I had a very powerful emotional reaction to her the first moment I saw her. Gina’s youth and her long straight brown hair, her dark eyes with the mod glasses, reminded me with excruciating sharpness of my only daughter who had died just a few months before. My daughter had been newly married, and had no child, and so my hopes ever to have a grandchild had been demolished. Now Gina’s coming, wondering whether to keep her child, hit me very strongly; I felt rising in me a determination that she should not under any circumstances give up her child for adoption. Because I am close enough to my own unconscious, I could feel the “mother-tiger’ rising within me. So all the while as I was listening to and speaking with Gina, I was dealing with the uproar in my own unconscious.

I had to recall what I had learned in my own analysis when I had been training, shortly after I had begun to work with my first cases under supervision. I was, like all neophytes, exceedingly eager to achieve a successful outcome, and I tended to become quite active in leading, rather than gently guiding the process. My training analyst had gently tried to restrain me, but when that failed she shocked me one day by saying, “You are not supposed to want the patient to get well!”

At first I could not quite believe this, for I surely did not understand her meaning. But gradually as it sank in I was able to see that if I acted out of my desire to heal the patient, I was setting myself up as the miracle worker. I would be doing it for my own satisfaction, for the joy of success, and possibly for the approval of my training analyst. My own needs would be in the foreground then, and the patient’s needs would revert to the secondary position. Besides, the possibility for healing lies in the psyche of the patient, the place where the disunion or split exists. The psyche, as Jung has taught, is a self-regulating system, containing within it all the elements which are necessary both to produce a neurosis and to transform the neurosis into a constructively functioning attitude. If I, as analyst, impose my concepts of the direction into which the analysis should go and what the outcome should be, I am doing violence to the potential unity of the patient’s psyche. My task is to use myself as a vehicle for clarifying the patient's dilemmas and for helping her learn to interpret her unconscious production. My task is not to contaminate the analysis with my own problems. And it is for this reason that I constantly need to be aware of my own needs and my own biases.

The twin problems of transference and countertransference in the psychology of Jung are given a position of great importance in the analytic process. In this, analytical psychologists are in full agreement with analysts of other schools. Jung has stated in “The Psychology of the Transference,” “that almost all cases requiring lengthy treatment gravitate round the phenomenon of transference, and that the success or failure of the treatment appears to be bound up with it in a very fundamental way.””

The nature of the transference in Jungian analysis develops along with the style of the analysis, and especially as fostered by the individuality of the analyst. Jung long ago “took analysis off the couch,” with all the meaning that implies, symbolical as well as otherwise. “The couch, with the analyst sitting behind the patient, clearly aims at establishing as far as possible (I don't believe it is very far, in fact) an ‘impersonal,’ ‘objective’ analyst figure. That it also forms one of the defense mechanisms used by analysts for self-protection is evident,” we are told by a Jungian critic of the couch technique.’ In the Jungian analysis, the analyst and analysand sit face to face on the same level. This gives greater flexibility to the analytical situation and to the active interchange that goes on between the two participants. I, as analyst, am exposed and I expose myself deliberately to the observing and scrutinizing view of the analysand. This puts us immediately on the same plane, and we are therefore part and parcel of a mutual relationship.

Jung has warned the analyst with respect to countertransference:

“Even the most experienced psychotherapist will discover again and again that he is caught up in a bond, a combination resting on mutual unconsciousness. And though he may believe himself to be in possession of all the necessary knowledge concerning the constellated archetypes, he will in the end come to realize that there are very many things indeed of which his academic knowledge never dreamed. Each new case that requires thorough treatment is pioneer work, and every trace of routine then proves to be a blind alley. Consequently the higher psychotherapy is a most exacting business and sometimes it sets tasks which challenge not only our understanding or our sympathy, but the whole man. The doctor is inclined to demand this total effort from his patient, yet he must realize that this same demand only works if he is aware that it also applies to himself.”

The analysis of the transference is the crux of the analystanalysand relationship, for the unconscious patterns come into play here where we can see them directly and do not have to rely on the patient’s recital of things past. Transference material is presented spontaneously by dreams, and so in looking at the dreams we can see the outcroppings of unconscious processes, disengaged from any conscious purposes of the analysand. In this way the analysis of the dream has a certain advantage over the analysis of the defenses and resistances; for the latter may be all mixed in with the will and other conscious notions.

In my own experience I have found that the transference material is not necessarily disguised to the degree that it becomes necessary to interpose concepts like that of a “dream censor’ who twists the message of the dream into something quite different, even opposite from what appears. Some transference dreams can be taken quite literally, for their meaning is evoked by images and symbols with beautiful clarity.

For example, a male schoolteacher in his late thirties who is bound to his mother by hate and fear, and who occasionally takes a hallucinogenic drug, brought the following dream: J am visiting the zoo and am in a giant outdoor bird cage there looking at plants and birds. I wander down a steep path and find Dr. S. cooking what smells to be chocolate fudge. There, in an earthen room below the birds, are twelve huge vats of gurgling, bubbling chocolate candy. She tells me that it is a kind of a grain candy, completely non-sugared and very non-habit-forming. She then offers me some and I taste it, remarking that it tastes like regular fudge to me. She says, “See, what did I tell you about drugs?” I leave to walk out of the bird cage, and my mother is there, fat and ugly. She starts wrestling me, saying, “You're going to stay in the cage, you're going to stay in the cage,” in a singsong kind of way. I grab her and begin shaking her. As I shake her I keep saying to myself the same thing I once thought when I really shook a student in my class, hard, “Migod, you're shaking the shit out of this kid!”

Bill, the dreamer, feels encapsulated. His life is like a big cage, so large that he can go about with apparent freedom, but go too far and he suddenly finds out where the bars are. He feels comfortable enough among pubescent children, partly because in his emotional life he is still stuck somewhere in that place. He has never been able to enjoy a sexual relationship with a woman, and the few sexual encounters he has had with males have had a puerile quality. It appeared to me that his sexual development was retarded, and I was not sure whether his mild interest in sex with men came from a natural homosexuality or from an inability to make the necessary break with the overpowering mother to approach a romantic encounter with a woman of his own age without being terrified. My impression was that his sexuality was still undifferentiated.

As a young child he had been surrounded by prohibitions against enjoying any sensual pleasures. He was informed in no uncertain terms that his body and everything that came out of it was filthy and untouchable. He recalls his mother standing over him and shaming him when he was two or three, but can’t remember why. He must have repressed suddenly all the good feelings associated with the “making” of warm, soft, pungent feces. Bill recalled that he was kept at home a great deal of the time with minor ailments while the other children were out playing. He had no early experience of body contact or sex play with other children. It seemed to him that wherever he went, his mother was watching him, that he was never out of her sight. He grew extremely shy and, not surprisingly, failed to form any close attachments outside of the family. Much of his time was spent in solitary activity: practicing the cello, reading, and compulsive masturbation surrounded by guilt feelings and fear of divine retribution. All through his growing years Bill was dogged by a sense of failure in personal relationships. As a young adult he related to others mostly on a superficial “talky” level, without any sense of concern about the other, and without ever feeling that he himself was held in high regard.

In his analytic “confession” he described his masturbatory fantasies; they were oriented toward boys and men and full of unending streams of urine and inundations of feces; there were all sorts of scenes of sexual abuse being heaped on him, or performed by him on other people. I listened to it all without much comment, primarily interested in understanding what it meant to him. Since there was no judgment from my side, he had felt freer in going ahead to explore his actual relationships of various kinds. These were brief impersonal homosexual encounters.

My appearance in his dreams showed that he experienced me as being involved with him and committed to the process in which we were both engaged (were we not in the same huge bird cage?). My acceptance and participation in his reliving of his repressed experiences allowed him to convert the disgust he had learned back into its original context of something natural—to him that was sweet and delicious, like “regular fudge.” But the old suspicion was not gone from him; he felt that my acceptance of him could not be altogether real, it must carry a moral judgment, perhaps referring to my having questioned the wisdom of his sometime use of LSD or mescaline. He associated me in his mind with the image of the childing mother. In other words, he had projected that image onto me. So even while consciously and rationally he saw me as myself, on an unconscious level he saw his mother—and he transferred his feelings of fear and distrust of his mother to me. Therefore, in the dream he tried to escape (and in reality this preceded his attempt to flee from analysis because of the tensions it produced), and then we were able to see what it was that he was resisting. I was really his mother after all, it appeared, and he saw any attempt on my part to hold him within the discipline of the process as a ruthless effort to control him, which he must avoid by a counterattack. The aggressive behavior which could not be lived out with his mother, except in dreams, had found its way into his daily life, where he had taken on the mother role himself and found himself “shaking the shit out of this kid.” The permissiveness which my activity in the dream symbolizes is something he missed in his childhood and would have liked to attain now, but he was unable to because he could not trust it. It would be a task in the analysis to give him the opportunity to test out freer attitudes and to discover that these attitudes, which appear in his dreams, represent not only elements of unfulfilled wishes or incest fantasies, but a still more important element in them.

The other element of the dream, which we have not yet considered, is that which is suggestive of the potential for future development of the dreamer. In this case the symbol of the cooking provides the clue, for obviously “cooking” here is not the ordinary occupation of whipping up a batch of fudge in the kitchen. The cooking is an extraordinary procedure, taking place on a subterranean level which has to be approached by going down a steep path and entering an earthen room. Here, in the place that symbolizes the depths of the unconscious, twelve huge vats are boiling and gurgling. Cooking means changing or transforming a substance from one form into another to make it edible, that is, assimilable. It is as though the dream were saying, “Look here, there is a tremendous job to be done, but look, this substance has within it all that is needed to produce something valuable and highly desirable!”

Often in the process of analysis the unconscious yields up symbols of transformation, like this one. The appearance of the symbols does not mean that a transformation of the personality is imminent; it only means that it is a possibility. For some individuals, if these symbols appear at a time of psychological readiness, they may be taken as a challenge to advance beyond the stage of concern with neurotic symptoms and their causes, and to begin to consider the deeper meaning of the symptoms, that is, their constructive aspect. A constructive view of a symptom means trying to see what it is that the symptom is symbolically attempting to accomplish—to what psychological need is it responding?

Looking at a symptom in this way corresponds to Jung’s “purposive view’ of neurosis. Jung accepted first of all the important psychoanalytic precept that neurotic and psychotic symptoms rest on a base of conflict between the instinctive nature of people and the demands imposed upon them by the society in which they live. He then moved on another step. He was not content only to analyze every neurotic and psychotic symptom from the point of view of determining where it came from, why it got started, and how it worked, as he perceived that Freud had done. Jung also wanted to know where the symptoms might be leading the patient, that is, what unconscious purpose might be operating. He believed that the way to uncover meaning in events and developments was to observe the direction in which they were pointing, that is, to look for the purposive aspect of the symptom.

Thus Jung was willing to consider and probe the early history of the child, not as an end in itself, and not even to discover clues leading back to traumatic events that, being repressed, acted to sensitize points in the psyche which would form the grounds for later psychic disturbances. His major interest in infantile experience was to discern patterns in it which, established at a very early age, proceeded to give form to future thought and behavior. His concern was not alone to establish the causes of neuroses, but rather to be able to find in them some hint as to the direction in which they were leading the patient. The “cure” of the symptoms was not necessarily the most essential matter. In earlier times, and still among some people today, homosexual behavior is regarded as a symptom of an illness that needs to be cured. It seemed to me that cessation of homosexual behavior for Bill at that time would have been anything but a “cure,” even if it could have been accomplished. I thought of it as possibly an effort on Bill’s part to enter into relationships where he felt relatively safe instead of being isolated from any kind of social life. That he did seek out some relationships seemed to be a positive thing, as it left the way open for whatever sexual orientation might prove to be natural for him when he became less inhibited. In any case, one could say that Bill’s neurosis had a purposive aspect, namely to lead him out of his social alienation; therefore it could be allowed to play itself out until such time as it would no longer be needed.

I made the statement earlier that the reasons a person gives for wanting to enter analysis are rarely the true reasons. They are, without a doubt, the conscious reasons, and the would-be analysand is completely sincere in advancing them. Whether he offers marital problems, or coming to terms with the death of a member of his family, or not being able to succeed in his work, or drinking too much, or sexual impotence, or a generalized feeling of anxiety—it all boils down toa truth which seems deceptively simple but is in fact complicated and all-encompassing. It is that he has looked at himself and does not like the person he has become, and that he believes that somewhere in him is rising the possibility of being another sort of person, the one he was meant to be.

That second entity was united with the first at some point in time, perhaps in early childhood, perhaps in adolescence under the aegis of an admired friend or an inspiring teacher. It may have been recognized as a peaceful way of being, or a way of seeing the world that was wide and full of wonder; or it may have been seen in terms of devotion to some idea, some purpose. In the struggle for material possessions, for personal achievement, for social position or for the favors of an entrancing lover, the second entity was sacrificed—the birthright for the mess of pottage. For some this meant the determined putting away of the dreams of youth, and sometimes in that process the unique promise of the personality simply slipped away unnoticed, leaving a sense of quiet despair. Primitive people have termed this “loss of soul.” Those people of an ancient tribal culture would try by their own means to call back that mysterious entity that gave life its zest and energy but, failing this, they would seek out the witch-doctor or shaman for help. Such a man or woman was one who had been chosen for a life of dedication to the world of non-corporeal reality-—chosen for this not by any group but by some psychic or spiritual manifestation of a particular quality of being that set him or her apart from the other members of the tribe. It could be an illness, a physical impairment, an ability to see visions. The shaman had to be prepared for this vocation by undergoing an arduous period of isolation and personal sacrifice, taking into herself or himself the sufferings of the people and living them through until they could be exorcised or transformed.

Contemporary people experience something very like the feelings of ennui, lowered vitality, being “boxed-in” that sent primitive people in search of the wise one of the tribe to get back their souls. Today, there are many self-proclaimed wise ones, from the Pied Pipers of instant intimacy to the purveyors of instant salvation. Yet how many are willing to involve themselves with one suffering individual for as long as it takes to help that person come together again, and to reunite the splintered fragments?

Besides, the task is not merely to restore what is lost. In becoming lost, the “soul” (I do not know a better word for that central guiding aspect of the unconscious, the nature of which we may have only a dim awareness) has ceased to be the connecting ribbon of a road between the conscious individual and the vast unknown and unknowable. It needs not only to be restored to what it was before, but it needs to serve as a travelers’ highway in which a continuous and busy intercourse between the ego and the unconscious may take place. In this active and reciprocal relationship neither the ego nor the unconscious will remain as it was in the past.

The change that may be brought about in the analytic process, the dialectic between the ego and the unconscious, may come close to its true potential; if so, it will result in a transformation of the personality. This transformation is not achieved through the efforts of an outside agent; the analyst, for instance, does not “make it happen.” Rather, the analyst is there to help in enabling the self-regulating aspect of the psyche to function. The analyst will take the side of the unconscious when the ego of the analysand is in the foreground attempting to control everything. On the other hand, when the analysand is floundering out of control in the grip of overwhelming unconscious material, the analyst may align on the side of the ego, and offer whatever strength may be needed to enable the totality of the personality to survive.

The intervention of the analyst, however, is a subtle matter, for the analyst may not allow the initiative to be taken from the analysand. The analyst is there, with strength, when the situation demands more than the analysand is able to muster. But, for the most part, the process is carried on by the analysand, and by following the leads provided from the unconscious as well as from the data of the daily living experience. Contrary to what many people believe when they enter analysis, the analysand is encouraged to lead the process. Analysis is not something that an analyst “does to” a person. I am reminded of an initial dream which was brought by a patient to his second analytical session: J was lying on a huge butcher's block, naked, with my hands tied to the corners above my head and my feet tied to the opposite corners. Someone was standing over me with a great knife, poised to draw and quarter me. This dream suggests that the would-be analysand conceived of analysis on the medical model, with psychotherapy as a form of treatment—a radical form to say the least!

Another initial dream was more optimistic, yet to the point: I had bought a new car, but I did not know how to drive it. A woman told me to get behind the wheel and she would show me what to do. At first I was frightened, but she said, “We will go slowly at first until you get used to it, and after a while you will get the feel of it.” I followed her instructions until I was convinced that I would soon be in control. After a while she said, “Now it is time for us to look under the hood.”

Gradually throughout the analytic process, analysands learn to recognize the many and varied aspects of themselves that were unconscious before. These vary in their acceptability—those which come from the dark repressed side may be fought intensely, while those which offer promise may be embraced with joy. The excitement of analysis is that one never knows what may be presented—but this fact is sure, the most evil and disgusting images are capable of being redeemed, while the treasures that were hard to attain may easily be lost again to the unconscious. Perhaps this suggests one reason why the analysand at times exerts so much resistance to the analytic process.

Resistance disguises itself behind many masks: they range from minor symptomatic actions such as being late or missing appointments, to raising spurious arguments to rationalize behavior, forgetting to bring dreams or swamping the analyst with dreams, tight-lipped silences or compulsive talking, rejecting the analyst’s interpretations out of hand or accepting everything the analyst says like a “good pupil” who is looking for teacher’s approval.

Psychotherapists of certain schools confront their patients immediately and excoriate them for their resistance to the therapeutic process. I would hesitate before doing so. I often wonder, when I become aware of resistance in patients and find in myself the tendency to call them to account, whether it is possible that secretly I feel rejected by the patients. Could I, unconsciously of course, be asking myself, “How can this person who is so disturbed and who functions so uncertainly feel anything but eagerness to listen to me and learn from my wisdom? He has to be broken of this dastardly habit.” I hope Iam able to avoid this hubris at all costs, and if I sometimes do, it is only that I am acutely aware that I could easily commit this sin were I to forget for a moment that I am fully capable of it!

It seems to me that I, as analyst, must regard my analysand as though I were an anthropologist, and he a native, exploring the unknown regions of his psyche, where the territory is as yet unmapped. As psychotherapist, I may have a wide variety of experience gained from other expeditions, and I may know in general what sort of equipment to take, and for what kinds of dangers I must be on the lookout. But the person with me is the one who knows, and knows in depth, the terrors of his particular wilderness, and where they may be lurking. Therefore, I as psychotherapist, am open to being led by my patient, to allowing my patient ample opportunities to structure the forays. There will be a preliminary period in which each participant in the search must learn the rudiments of the other’s language, in order that we may communicate to each other the ways in which each of us may contribute to the joint endeavor. Sometimes a patient, inexperienced in leading the search, may be reluctant to expose the secret places. I must accept in my own mind the reality that the native has been there a long time, and knows all the paths and the terrain, also all the places to hide. The native may have his own way of doing things, and one day he may not arrive at the appointed time at the anthropologist’s hut, with his burden balanced on his head. What then?

A therapist, with this image before her, will ask herself while she is waiting for the knock at the door, why is he still not here when it is so late? Is there something in his life which is distracting him from our arranged appointment? Or is it possible that J may have done something to put him off? Did I frighten him last time? Did I ask too much from him? Did I in some way insult him? Did I fail to give him credit when he cleared a new path? Did I fail to take his hand when he reached out to me? So then the therapist does not approach the patient next time only with the questions: Why did you make yourself late; or dodge an interpretation; or forget to bring your dreams. She will also ask, What could I have done to bring this about? She will seek out information from the patient at such times as to how he reacted to the last session, what he took away from it, how he understood what occurred, and what happened in the interim between the sessions.

There is a time in the process of analysis when resistance on the part of the patient may be a welcome sign for the analyst. This is a fact that I did not learn from any book, but from one of my analysands. I was discussing the question of resistance with a perceptive young woman, and I was saying that I did not think the analyst needs to be in a hurry to break down the patient’s resistance. To this she heartily agreed, and added: “What the patient often is resisting is a therapist’s attempt to get her to give up her independent responsibility for how she conducts her life, and her independent standpoint.”

--June Singer en "Boundaries of the Soul"

[horsesource]

What’s crazy is how fucking boring and stupid this is

[grandpasessions]

In his early period, Lacan worked within the opposition of empty and full speech.

Empty speech is speech situated among the imaginary axis.

For Lacan, subjectivity is founded upon identification with a false image of unity.

The subject perpetuates this imaginary self by choosing relationships which confer upon him or herself the sense of sameness, relations which are in effect 'narcissistic embraces.'

This is because it is far easier to construct oneself on the basis of another, incorporating his or her tastes or desires, rather than confront the lack that resides in each of us.

And because the subject has constructed him or herself on the basis of another, he or she is unable to enjoin in the assumption of desire.

In other words, in constructing our desires on the basis of another we reinforce our alienation from desire.

As Lacan says: 'For in the work he does to reconstruct it for another, he encounters anew the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and that has always destined it to be taken from him by another.'

This is the meaning of Lacan's enigmatic phrase, 'Man's desire is the desire of the Other,' we desire what the Other desires.

Speech is empty therefore to the extent that it is ironically filled by the Other.

As Lee puts it: 'From the subject's own perspective, then, his speech has been in an important sense "empty": it has been emptied of the subject by being filled with his alienating moi [ego] identity.'

In a clinical setting, a subject whose speech is empty will tend to objectify himself in the following ways:

'I think that I'm the kid of person .. ' or alternatively, 'My teacher thinks that I'm ...'

The art of analysis is to break the analysand's imaginary identifications, 'suspending the subject's certainties until their final mirages have been consumed.'

It is not difficult to see how empty speech corresponds to the objective standpoint.

The objective standpoint seeks to ground itself in sure and certain foundation; it relies on a universally accepted standard of rationality, so that given the same premise we can all arrive at the same conclusion, thereby conferring a collective self-same identity and propagating the illusion of the whole.

As Kierkegaard says: 'The objective way is of the opinion that it has the security that the subjective way does not have' because our thoughts are buttressed by a collective Other.

Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma

Marcus Pound

[eesirachs]

yahwist child sacrifice happens in topheth, a valley named from the vocalized bōsheth (shame) and its assyrian calque, bašum (to father). no child sacrifice happens, in the bible, unless it is by the father. like freud hanging brouillet’s leçon above his analysand's couch, or, like what they did to that boy from nazareth, this ritual needs the father

[onetwofeb]

“The subject is precisely the one we encourage to utter stupidities. For it is with those stupidities that we do analysis, and that we enter into the new subject - that of the unconscious.

It is precisely to the extent that the analysand is willing not to think anymore that we will perhaps learn a little bit more about it, that we will draw certain consequences from their words - words that cannot be taken back, for that is the rule of the game.”

Lacan

[elektramouthed]

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who “feels” things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.

Joan Didion, from Where The Kissing Never Stops in: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

[ravenkings]

If the shadow is not reckoned with, it runs the risk of becoming a vast dark forgotten expanse which blocks one's inner creativity from being fully available to the conscious mind. This is why some people strive with Herculean strain to keep a tight lid on their shadows, concealing their private "demons" with a thin veneer of moral perfection. The spiritual fortress they construct around themselves is nothing more than a synthetic buttress held in place by force and ever in danger of structural failure should the wind change direction. "Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for a headache." It is for this reason that confronting the shadow is the first step in Jung's method of individuation. To do this means taking a starkly critical and objective look into the nature of one's own being. Unconscious content is usually experienced in projection upon something that is outside of us. In the case of unwanted psychic content, some people will readily project their shadow onto someone else. Thus, we have a tendancy to shift the blame onto an appropriate scapegoat–"the other guy did it," or as a comedian once insisted, "the Devil made me do it!" It is extremely difficult for some analysands to accept the fact that they do indeed have a deep, dark side. The therapist, who tries to bring the shadow out into the open, often meets with enormous resistance because the client fears that the artificial structure he has carefully constructed to protect his ego will come crashing down. This is in fact the point at which many analyses fail and the client, incapable of facing his unconscious self, stops the process cold and withdraws into his comfortable old self-deceptions.

–Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero, "The Balance Between Mind and Magic," The Middle Pillar: The Balance Between Mind and Magic by Israel Regardie

[chicago-geniza]

Have been reading a lot at work and surprised myself again, in the sense that. If I split the project into parts it might actually be workable:

On the locus of the "I": cogito/reason, memory, Geist, psyche

On the invention of nation + public; philosophical geography; "civilization"; assimilation

On the conceptual, practical/legal, + discursive tensions between individual & collective a) self-determination, b) representation + expression, c) memory, d) psyche

On aesthetic empathy, Kunstwellen, "Empathy & Abstraction," Jung, early psychoanalysis, Bergsonian metaphysics & anthropology, ethnography, folklore, "authenticity" (circle back to "civilization," nation-building, etc.)

THE INTERWAR AESTHETIC/SOCIOPOLITICAL CONFLICT: REPRESENTATION VS. ABSTRACTION

WITHIN ABSTRACTION CAMP: Paris avant-garde (and Polish/French overlap); THE BIG TL;DR--HOW JUNG, BERGSON, VIENNA SECESSION ART CRITICS, IDEA OF NATIONAL GEIST (IMMUTABLE), IDEA OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS (PSYCHOANALYTIC SENSE), SYMBOLISM, "CIVILIZATION," AND FEAR OF ABSTRACTION AS TRANSCENDING REPRESENTATION'S INEVITABLE SIGNIFIERS OF DIFFERENCE (RACE SCIENCE IS ALSO HERE) COME TOGETHER: THE BELIEF THAT ABSTRACT ART CAN BETRAY IN ITS USE OF COLOR & FORM THE ARTIST'S SUBCONSCIOUS FOREIGNNESS, UNCIVILIZED NATURE, ETC., & THE BELIEF THAT ONE'S INDIVIDUAL (SUB)CONSCIOUS IS A) IMMUTABLE/ESSENTIAL, B) ETHNO-NATIONAL IN CHARACTER. This was expressed mostly about Jews

In Poland, during the interwar period, these aesthetic discourses re: abstract art corresponded to what were, imo, related debates: one about the Polish language (another variation on content vs. form, representation vs. abstraction, and How To Clock Jews & Ukrainians When They Speak Perfect Unaccented Polish), one about the "right to choose one's nationality," i.e., assimilation and self-determination

CODA: "MY OTHER HOMELAND IS THE IDEA OF EUROPE" - on Stefania, the postwar world order, the emergence of trauma theory, the psychoanalytic turn in historiography, and the contemporary prominence of memory studies, collective memory, collective consciousness, collective guilt, collective national affects, and the politics of commemoration - how "memory culture" can be seen as an encounter between the post-Enlightenment, fin-de-siecle Idea of Europe and the post-WWII, post-imperial Idea of Europe - the nation as collective subject, imbued with reason + will (self-determination), memory (the basis for identity, pro/contra Hume), consciousness in the psychoanalytic sense (experiences via historical process trauma, guilt, even return of the repressed). The staging of history as a psychoanalytic working-through of memory and the transformation of that staging into ritual commemoration become, by extension, constitutive of "civilization" (the nation as civilized person & LITERALLY analysand!!!!!!)

I have to learn German and French, unfortunately

[eligalilei]

Precursors of the Symptom:

‘57 - Symptoms as communicative/semiotic

1. ‘Inscribed in a writing process’ (presumably dynamic, conversational)

2. Ciphered message

‘63 - The symptom does not call out, it is not addressed or conversant, it is an enjoyment

‘74 - "the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys [jouit] the unconscious, in so far as the unconscious determines him.

We might see this as an alliance, or axis, or administration of the domain of the Subject. It is about the internal economy of the Self, for itself. Perhaps it is, in fact, what the self does not surrender, rather than what it demands be heard.

Might then the symptom come with defenses? Is the symptom always a substitute satisfaction, or is it a way to hold on to a satisfaction that was never domesticated?

Here, as a manner of enjoyment, rather than interpersonal effect (or even intrapersonal?), the symptom/sign (what occurs with the disease, and cries out to the healer, the mother, the father… wearing whichever of their masks,) is established as sinthome: what allows one to live, presumably with-in the role-network of the castrated subject, who has lost the ability to express demand for love, itself a response to the trauma of birth. I use this word too much, but this would assert the sinthome as suture.

The sinthome is maybe, in some sense, then, regressive, or is a re-seizure of the lost jouissance… or is an umbilical link thereto? The symptom cannot be simply the sinthome exterrupted, derailed, or it would have no particular character; would only be… a return to polymorphous perversity.

(We have, then, the sign given by the Other, perhaps a demand, a cry for help, a magickal ritual, and, contrarily, private enjoyment, unsignified, mute, autistic.

Clearly, in stitching the orders together, this is insufficient, since it would put the sinthome outside )

If the end of analysis is to identify with the sinthome, this would seem to separate it from the sign-symptom/signifier. I could a psychoanalyst claiming that one need only listen to oneself, or grow such ears as to be able to hear inwardly, so as to only then be able to develop in the ego a model of the unconscious.

Does one, to retraverse Lacan’s pathway, begin with the phantasy that there is someone listening? And then, ultimately, just resign to dance while no one watches? (this sounds…. cliche-edly existentialist. Clearly enjoyment has been traversed, besmirched, encoded, by words)

Maybe Lacan begins with this loop, in the Freudian way, wherein the secret of the Other’s surplus can be returned to him, and the message can be made whole with-in the suffering subject. The Knowing analyst gives the analysand what he does not know he has, it is submitted in toto as a gift to the ego, and the whole is reconstructed by the education of the toxicosis of his lack (this is preliminary and falls flat, of course).

What is clear about the sinthome, is that it is not reducible to the orders RSI, but has rather to do with their (manner of) enbeing. Of course, one of the orders is itself characterized as an absence to intelligibility, so the sinthome must knit together representable and unrepresentable. It is a relation to the Other, and a tangling filigree on our hol(e)y recursive (inter)faces.

To return toward hinting at the, even spectral, shape of a banal summary, which never seems far from any summary of Lacan, one must ‘accept the sinthome’ - ‘accept oneself’. But is that to assume that the symptom is the same as the symptom? Or, is the symptom transformed in its reception? Is there, here, a conversation that needs to be heard? It seems foolish to assume the sinthome to be…. what… primeval autism?

If the sinthome is unanalysable, but productive of analytic satisfaction, is it, in fact, gnosis/tic?

If the symptom begins as a trace, is it in fact a solution in utero (c.f. Gnosticism). Maybe the purpose isn’t to eliminate it at all, but align with it as a means of enjoyment. The sign is not a request, or even maybe a demand, but rather a thread, Wegmark, of Thelema? It is how the Subject/Self/Mind enjoys so far as it is determined by the unconscious and is not mastered by, nor masters, its constitutive enjoyment.

((moments of central holdure))

______

Simply put, the sinthome is at least a stable or metastable deformation and reterritorialization of the symptom, possibly by desire, and perhaps its enjoyment, perhaps constructed around analytic satisfaction and enjoyment.

Specifically, it can name the target of that process as well, as a process which guides processes.

Maybe a locus is this ego model, but one espousing another relation in the constitution of the models, one that turns it into a Klein bottle, so desire's traversals cross the exterior of discourse.

[jacobwren]

"Maybe you're thinking I should take everything my friend Lun-Yu tells me with a grain of salt. She also told me that day one of her favorite psychoanalytic theorists was Wilfred Bion. I'd never read Bion before, so after she left I read a bit about him, and I found online the complete text of a seminar he held in Paris in 1978. The beginning of this seminar is very interesting. At least it was to me. Bion says that he wants his listeners to imagine a scenario: they're seeing a new patient, a twenty-five-year-old man who comes in complaining of some dissatisfaction in his family life. Bion says he's not sure what family the man is referring to, and asks his age, which the man gives as forty-five. Bion is confused. He just said the man was twenty-five, and then he notices that the patient has wrinkles, and appears in his sixties. He asks his listeners to consider this confusing state of affairs and to determine whether they would, under the circumstances, take on such a patient.

He says the question is much like the question of what you would do if you walked into a bookstore, picked up a book, and read the scenario he just described. He asks you if you would continue reading this book. Then he says, imagine it's not a book, but a piece of music. Or a building you're in, and you see the way the light falls, you see the colors coming through the window. Do you want to think about the window some more?

I imagine these questions were somewhat perplexing to some of the participants in the seminar. At one point in the transcript, someone in the audience makes an "inaudible reference" to "psychotic experience." Bion calls that a very "cerebral" question, not a practical one to the analyst. He says that analysts shouldn't be blinded by labels like manic-depressive or schizophrenic. Rather, they should be asking themselves what kinds of artists they are and whether there's an interesting spark that occurs with a potential analysand that might lead to something productive in the consulting room or, as he puts it, the "atelier." Somebody asks what an analyst is supposed to do if he's not really the artistic type, and Bion says that if that's the case, then the person's in the wrong line of work. In fact, he says, he doesn't even really know what would be the right line of work, since a person needs to be an artist in everyday life.

The he throws out the term artist, which has obviously become meaningless. The point is, he tells them, that reducing things to "scientific" diagnoses or narrow definitions is really the death of things. "You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable."

Obviously I loved that. I wrote Lun-Yu and told her about the seminar I'd read and how it had moved me. She said, "Oh, that's the 'bad' Bion, from his mystical phase. That's also the part I love best." Apparently sometimes he wasn't quite so wacky."

- Barbara Browning, The Gift

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Lacan said that when an interpretation was right, one felt it pass through your gut. An interpretation is neither right nor wrong. It is not judged by the response of the analysand deeming it right or wrong. It is judged on the effects it produces…

In Psychoanalysis how do we judge an interpretation to be right?

Agnès Aflalo: Lacan said that when an interpretation was right, one felt it pass through your gut. An interpretation is neither right nor wrong. It is not judged by the response of the analysand deeming it right or wrong. It is judged on the effects it produces, i.e. the return of memories, of events pinned down by master signifiers; or else the interpretation can disturb enjoyment enough for the subject to perceive his complacency towards it all the while suffering from it. When the interpretation causes a real stir, the subject can draw a series of consequences and construct the axes of a fantasy which imposes its iron law on the symptoms. Speaking is within everyone’s reach. But for the analyst, the use of speech is unparalleled. It is unique.

Interview with Agnès Aflalo. Alexandre Gilbert Gallerie Chappe. 2023.

[winterfable]

Battle against the unconscious

[...]

I let the analysand know from the beginning: “you- will face the dark, ugly, and tawdry aspects of your life which you have been avoiding, and since these contents are and have long been unacceptable to you, something in you will take every possible means to frustrate their disclosure. As for the positive, developmental trends which up to now have remained unconscious, these by their revolutionary nature have the capacity to disturb the established patterns you currently hold; hence you will resist them too.”

The beginning analysand will say, “I understand, and I am willing to go through all this,” but in fact most analysands do not yet understand what it will be like, and when it comes to going through it they will fight it with all the intensity of their beings. Yet I will have to warn them about potential resistance. Later in the analysis when they have fought their way through it, they will probably say, “Now I understand what you meant by resistance, whereas I did not really understand before.” The only possible way to know what is real is to discover, first, what has been unreal.

[...]

--June Singer en "Boundaries of the Soul"

[horsesource]

When the participants are figuring something, psychoanalysis can be the scent tracking of therapeutic work. But a lot of would-be analysts and analysands are happily stuck in a closed game of Daddy’s Gotcha

[grandpasessions]

In his book on the Fundamentals of Lacanian Psychoanalytic Technique, he [Bruce Fink] states that the analyst’s first task is to listen carefully. Moreover, although many therapists and authors have high lighted this point, he argues that surprisingly few practise this art of listening effectively.

Fink explains that this is because listening is always framed in relation to ourselves. Imaginary listening imposes meaning on the analysand’s words. He goes on to explicate that listening and understanding are two different things. Moreover, when someone tells the analyst their story, we are tempted to start framing these tales in our own experience.

Mutual experiences become the supposed seat of analytic wisdom. We annul the multiple interpretations within the symbolic network by starting from the premise that we must know what the other person experiences by putting our selves into their shoes. ‘In other words, our usual way of listening is centred to a great degree on ourselves, our own similar life experiences, our own similar feelings, our own perspectives. He explains that the concept of understanding is based on the imaginary dyadic structure of human existence rather than the symbolic aspect.

The projection of the imaginary takes place when the analyst states things like, ‘I know what you mean,’ ‘I feel for you,’ or ‘I feel your pain.’ At these moments, we assume that the feeling of sympathy allows for real connection.

In more detail, our normal process of listening is usually loaded with imaginary obstacles that close down the operation of the symbolic. Analysts assimilate narratives in such a way that they become an extension of our own life-world. In the tendency to ‘understand,’ we close down essential differences within the story of the analysand by reducing it to our own experiences and knowledge.

It is a much more difficult task to listen without understanding to allow ‘the new’ to arise in its otherness. Put differently, Lacan, through his method of communication, was helping the analyst to read the unconscious, not as a hidden affective depth but as a mode of speaking one needs to be trained and formed in. It was to listen to the directee from the position of difference rather than sameness.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

[xjmlm]

The moment it becomes a symptom for us is when, as a patient once told me, she was perfectly able to sleep on the sofa in the living room. Once she got to the bedroom her ability to sleep vanished. This has a structure; it says that beds are for something other than sleeping. It poses the question of what beds are for. The most popular of the diagnostic categories that obscure the symptom is the borderline personality disorder. If you read a good description of the borderline personality disorder you will discover that this patient has a representative from all of the categories of symptoms. A borderline is anxious, depressed, phobic, hysterical, obssessive-compulsive, perverse, psycho-pathological, and even has psychotic episodes. In the first place, the category tells you nothing about the patient, except perhaps that the patient has a demand to be taken as Everypatient. Certainly, the use of the word "borderline" is a misnomer since the patient is trying to be everything. Now this is very appealing to psychiatrists because it implies that the therapist will become everything for the patient, assuming that he responds to the demand, something that he does if he accepts that the patient is borderline. The mods of self-presentation is a demand and it is only by refusing the demand that one may arrive at the symptom, to say nothing of the desire. As my supervisor told me when I was beginning to practice, these patients do not have to show their symptom. And if they do not show their symptom you aren't going to analyze anything.

This ought to give an idea of how we see a certain limit in the dialectic of analysis, and how the patient offers material to oppose the analyst, not to consent to his judgment.

The dimension of the symbolic, in other words, is the place from which the analyst directs the reorientation to the real. It would, however, be entirely false to think that this should all be reduced to what Lacan once called a semiotic delirium, the kind of thing that structuralists were doing when they broke everything down into plusses and minuses. It is not that we disparage such efforts, because if there is going to be any gain of knowledge on the part of the analysand in analysis, it will necessarily be in terms of some sort of structure, some sort of ordering of material. Otherwise the material is simply not intelligible.

The idea is that the signifying or phonetic elements of spoken language do not always have a fixed meaning; it is the listener who precipitates meanings through his punctuation or through other forms of responses. The unconscious desire that the patient is attempting to gain access to is present in his speech as well as in his dreams and symptoms. And the only way to gain access to whatever is encoded in dreams and symptoms is through the language that structured them in the first place. That language is present because the patient speaks it, not because the analyst provides a meaning for it. He should be brought to see that his speech is an act, that it produces an effect on the analyst, and this is beyond the idea that by an interpretation the analyst shows the patient what he really means to say. The effect produced in the analyst is represented by all the variations the analyst introduces in the way he acts during sessions. Since the patient assumes that it is he who has produced these effects, his effort to interpret the analyst's gestures, to decipher the enigma, will lead him to his own desire. This means that the analyst's antics, if you like, the fact that he is not always the same from session to session, cannot be entirely haphazard. There is a considerable difference, Lacan said, between reading hieroglyphics and reading coffee grinds. Since analysands have a tendency in the transference to read almost everything, it is an interesting question of how they know which effects are produced by them and are there for them to read, and which are not. In lieu of answering the question, let us say that when an analysand in the throes of the transference reads coffee grinds, what he is looking for is what most analysts are trying their best to give him: love and/or affection. They are, in other words, looking for a sign from the analyst that he is willing to accept as valid some part of their ego, some aspect of their personality, at least one of the several self-images that they present. To vary the theme of a popular song, when you are looking for love you will be looking in the wrong places.

Stuart Schneiderman,

"Affects", from Acts (1988)