#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.

[horsesource]

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

[ninetyminutes]

Brillstein, Chase's manager as well as Michaels's, negotiated a raise, but Chase didn't think it was big enough, so he hired a Harvard Law School friend of his brother. The new lawyer brought in an agent from William Morris and fired Brillstein. They cut a $2 million deal with NBC for Chase to make three prime-time comedy specials for the network. It wasn't clear where that left Saturday Night.

Michaels was gutted when he heard the news. But the deal hadn't been made public, and he hoped that Chase might have a change of heart, or figure out a way to do the specials and Saturday Night. One night after dinner at Elaine's, Michaels poured his heart out to Buck Henry as they walked down Park Avenue. "I don't know what to do," he moaned, feeling like a spurned lover. Chase had been there from the beginning. A veteran analysand, Henry offered a psychological take. "Chevy doesn't want to be the kind of person who would leave a friend in the lurch," he said. "So he has to do something provocative and obnoxious. It's like in a breakup: you pick a fight, and then you feel justified in walking away. It makes the separation bearable— because he loves you."

Michaels decided that he wouldn't fight with Chase, or beg him to stay. His public stance would be: "The show would take a hit but we'd still be okay." He took another walk, up Sixth Avenue, with Marilyn Miller one afternoon. "I remember Lorne repeatedly telling me, every block, that he wasn't mad at Chevy, he wasn't mad at Chevy," she said, but she could tell that he was devastated.

[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

[taylorappalachia]

Psychoanalysis isn’t just an experiment of seeing how much the patient can say, free associate. But also how much the analyst, who is to be the agent of the psychoanalytic discourse, can commit to this by standing the patient’s speaking, free associating, freedom (dare I say a word I don’t think Lacan liked), and help them continue speaking and finding Real words, Full words. It is an experiment in the analysand’s speaking and the analyst’s listening. It is too, becoming an experiment of my own to see how long I can listen without turning to interpretation as my first response. How long can I ask questions and make observations, to help someone keep finding their speech. Is psychoanalysis more about finding words than being given them? The act of speech and learning to speak, first words as I like to say, rather than being spoon-feed an answer? A process of finding one’s mind, one’s word(s)?

[chaotic-history]

"It can be argued that a man who writes a lot gives himself up in his writing in the manner of one who speaks 'at random' on the psychoanalyst's couch, even if, like Voltaire and unlike the 'analysand', he always controls what he expresses. The author of Oedipus certainly offers elements for a psychoanalytic critique."

bro i'm tired. why we gotta go to oedipe

[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

[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

[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

[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.

[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)

[onetwofeb]

“If one were to give a phenomenological description of the experience of the analysand, one would end up formulating what Lacan enunciates at one point in his Instance of the Letter; namely that there is the experience of an other that ‘moves me at the heart of my utmost self-identity’.

I am there nothing of what I perceive can hold me back, there is only me, and yet there are thoughts which occur to me, thoughts of which I am the seat, the transmitter, and which are motivated solely by this psychical reality itself.

The analytic session, when it is considered in this very basic way, induces an experience of extimacy. In other words, within what is most interior to me there appear elements that I cannot answer for but which are there. They sometimes link up back to me, or on the contrary flood in, and dispossess me of my initiative.”

Jacques-Alain Miller, The Analytic Session