Once More

Psychoanalysis and the Academy:

Three:

This Post is a response to a recent discussion of the subject of psychoanalysis and the academy in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Volume 64. #3, June 2016). It should have properly written it as a paper on the raised issues in the volume, but I did not find the energy and the endurance to engage in a well vetted paper. However, I will try my best to avoid the temptation of being slack in raising issues and expounding them. I will make sure that scrutinizing this paper will prove that it came from documented literature and not be put to shame.

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Psychoanalysis and structuralism:

My aim in this section of the post is to argue that academia is the right place for psychoanalysis- as a theory of psychical structures- to evolve and develop further. I made a prelude to this idea by making a distinction between functional theories and structural theories.  Therefore, I need to make a short introduction to structuralism in general, because structuralism has become the main framework of the humanities, to the extent that it is almost unmentioned anymore as the framework of the humanities or a separate issue in the field. It goes without saying that now sociology, anthropology, history, literary critiques, etc., are structural endeavors and their methodology is structuralist. This introduction might seem to most clinical psychoanalysts superfluous because they are not totally convinced that psychoanalysis is an ideographic science and not part of the nomothetic sciences. This point, which seems irrelevant to a degree, is the main problem with Kernberg and Michels’ argument in their project to save psychoanalysis by housing it in universities.

In 1725 Giambattista Vico (Italian Jurist) brought to attention that regardless of the degree of civility or education humans have a natural proclivity to organize their societies and their perception of reality, and structure them spontaneously (unconsciously !!) creating, thus, organizations and categories. In all societies, primitive or developed, the tool to create and maintain its structures is intrinsically linguistic. His observation was neglected for over a century but eventually some thinkers, Hegel and Marx in particular expounded Vico’s observations and acknowledged the existence of a duality in every structural quality in human society: an apparent content and a latent process that governs an unconscious course of changes. The apparent content seems to be ‘things’ like kinship relations, and creates the vocabulary that gives it stability, stagnation, and invariability (mother, cousin, brother, etc.). The latent, on the other hand is unnoticeable processes that structure those relationships according to principles like incest, for instance, thus creates the organization of the family. Moreover, the latent is a process that effect change in the organization that was created before, and structures it according to those changes. Both Hegel and Marx identified that spontaneous processes as dialectical, like the role of the mode of production in creating new social classes. The significance of this development in the perception of human society is recognizing that humans live a reality of their own making, although unconsciously. It is useful if not indispensable to give some explanation to the terms used. Saussure says that what is important about humans is not oral speech but the faculty of creating languages. Sapir emphasizes that the real world is, to a large extent, the product of the social language that structured it. That means, analysis of that kind will quickly reach the level of those unconscious categories that create our worlds. But all the efforts made before to have a good idea of that latent unconscious process failed because it was noticeable no one managed to identify it or identify its immediate impact on the apparent and the manifest. The functionalist who were aware of the limitation of their theories, but the pioneer structuralists were unable to get to two cardinal things in structuralism: the link between the denotations of apparent ‘things’ and their implicit connotations. They were aware of metaphoric expressions and metonymic representation but did not know their working in creating the world of the human subject.

This is where Freud and psychoanalysis got into the fray. Freud started revealing the workings of those two processes thus was able to begin the voyage from the manifest to the latent. The most impressive and eventually fascinated the intellectual world was showing the workings of metaphor and meronomy in action. He started by interpreting dreams and showed those things in action. In the Irma dream, he honed in on the structure of the chaotic scene of re-examining Irma, which was the ignorance of all the doctors except him. This was a first structuring idea in the dream. Then relating it to the day’s residues demonstrated the workings of a primary manner of saying things and the expression of his exoneration.  Yet he sensed that all what is manifest is right and functionally linked, but the roundabout way of saying what it said must be an old childhood wish, without which a dream was not possible to form. The Interpretation of Dreams, was the first true structuralist work on a human phenomenon. It was followed by Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality. Freud kept on demonstrating his discovery and showed how it various human phenomena including social, mythical, historical and even literary phenomena. The most remarkable thing that dazzled the world was his ability to read the unconscious in what is conscious, thus crossing the barrier between the unconscious and consciousness by letting the primary process provide him with intuitions. Thinkers of all walks of life were shocked and fascinated by Freud’s intuitions. A good evidence to that is how intuitions look less impressive now that we think psychoanalytically in our daily life.

A last detail about structuralism that we learned from Freud is the difference between functional thinking (deduction) and intuition (induction). In simple terms ‘deduction’ is concluding a cause-effect relationship between of the details of an event and making a statement about that deduction (moving from the parts to a total). Induction is inducing from the total of details the event a structural principle (dreams are wish fulfillment). Intuitions were always the starting point in the main human discoveries. Once they were established to be intuitions and not merely a bright whim, they open the gates for the discoveries that become nomothetic sciences. Darwin’s’ intuition that changes in the forms of organs are product of evolution and not of mere chance created more than just the biological sciences of our time. Likewise, turning an unconscious structuring principle in a human phenomenon starts as some intuition and proceeds to become a science. Since psychoanalysis is the dealing with unconscious material then intuition and inductive thinking plays a major part in our daily work. As the case in structuralism: discovering the structural principle of a phenomenon leads to seeing and uncovering more of the individual details-conscious and unconscious- in the phenomenon, and keeps us putting order in the details. We reach a stage where we need a new intuition to reconstruct what we constructed. Is this not a reminder of what we do in therapeutic psychoanalysis.

This condense introduction brings us to few central questions about psychoanalysis:

1.      Is psychoanalysis a trade that one can be trained in, learning how to master the skill of making functional sense of its parts, a profession that needs to learned and know how its parts need structuring effort?

2.      As a trade the system of training institutes is sufficient, but as a profession that system is not adequate to form the psychoanalysis. Does the academic system the proper place for the formation of psychoanalysts? How it will differ from the training system of the institutes?

3.      If the structural nature of the psychoanalytic theories depends on the intuitive ability of the analysts is it reasonable to think that we could train people to be intuitive?

4.      Is psychoanalysis a trade to learn or a profession to study?

Answering those question would be done properly when we review Kernberg and Michel’s proposition for improving training and delegate that to academia.