Psychoanalysis: Between Improving and Changing

3.The Failure of Improving Psychoanalysis:

There is an intrinsic difficulty in answering the question of improving or changing psychoanalysis: the term has two points of reference: the Freudian meaning which the IPA does not consider in its mandate, and the IPA meaning, which is limited to  the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Most analysts, because of training in IPA institutes, consider what they learned there is the only psychoanalysis that is. Few consider none clinical psychoanalysis merely applications of psychoanalysis in another fielded, but not ‘truly psychoanalysis’.  This attitude- which I remember myself being ‘afflicted’ with it early in my career- was stemming from the status of the clinical psychoanalyst compare with the nonclinical psychoanalysts whom I encountered few of. I liken it now to the graduates of private schools to the graduates of public schools.

The Freudian meaning of psychoanalysis has to derive from the way he developed psychoanalysis and spoke about. In 1892 Freud failed to induce a hypnotic state in his patient (Fräulein Elethebeth von R.). Instead, he resorted to reading in her symptoms the ‘meaning’ of her hysterical complaints. He called this first attempt of treating without hypnosis ‘psychical analysis’ (Jones, 1953). He did the same with the case of Katharina and another he alluded to in a letter to Flies (May 30, 1893). In those cases, his main concern was ‘psychoanalyzing’ the speech of the patient, as a discovery coming from within the acts of hypnotherapy. In other words, psychical analysis was not psychotherapy but a discovery that could replace hypnotherapy. He even alluded to his confusion about what to call those discoveries in another letter (March 1898). Freud was still unable to understand what he was doing in his therapeutic work, and asked Fleiss if he should call his work “metapsychology”. This query is evidence that Freud was not using the practice of psychotherapy as the discovery of psychoanalysis but as the means to discovering something (a new psychology) in the act of psychotherapy. Freud’s main discoveries and reformulations of his discoveries were products of practicing his psychical analysis, not that practicing psychological analysis was the discovery.

When Freud abandoned hypnosis totally, he was already close to the notion of ‘interpretation’ as the objective of psychotherapy. The idea of listening and reading the unconscious in what the patient says or does- while awake- made him pay attention to the link between consciousness and unconsciousness as the core of psychotherapy. He said (1919): “Psycho-analysis, in fact, more than any other system, is fitted for teaching psychology to medical students”. Thus, the Freudian meaning of psychoanalysis was more than a technique of psychotherapy; it was a new ‘brand’ of psychology. But what Brand? He proceeded to say: “. . . psychoanalysis pursues a specific method of its own. The application of this method is by no means confined to the field of psychological disorders, but extends also to the solution of problems in art, philosophy and religion. the philosophy of religion. .  . The fertilization effects of psychoanalysis on these other disciplines would certainly contribute greatly towards forging a closer link, in the sense of a universitas literarum”. The Freudian meaning of psychoanalysis is that it is a psychology of the human subject in his varied capacities and his self-revealing in multivariant forms expressions. This angle of identifying psychoanalysis yields new points of view and throws light on aspects that complement the findings of most of the other human sciences. In simple terms, clinical psychoanalysis is the usage of psychoanalysis in a clinical setting and nothing more. It has what is useful to make it applicable to do psychotherapy and only if the clinician has the right conception of psychopathology.

Psychoanalysis is thus subject to change because the more knowledge about the subject we gather, and the better our understanding of psychopathology psychoanalysis has to change to include all that in the process of interpretation\reconstruction. For instance: after two decades of a theory of sexual repression and cathartic abreaction Freud had already learned more about the primary process and role of infantile sexuality in the formation of symptom. He abandoned hypnosis and depended on free association and interpretation to psychoanalyse symptoms.  Therefore, psychoanalyzing changed from revealing incidences to exposing meanings of psychical manifestations.

I want to underline an important aspect of changing psychoanalysis which distinguishes it from improving it. Changing psychoanalysis relates to both the subject matter of the psychopathology (the complex formation of consciousness and unconsciousness in a symptom) and the method of dealing with it (interpreting in order to reveal what is unconscious). This kind of work is not improvement because improvement affects either the subject matter separately from the method of dealing with it. I will come to the detrimental effect of the desperate improvements of psychoanalysis that were tried in the time since the birth of the schools.   

The IPA’s claim to be both the institution of psychoanalysis and its educational arm restricted its function to training. The only meaningful and actual link between the IPA and psychoanalysis was determined by the training institutes, which was unfunctional, i.e., graduate its new membership. The IPA had to regard psychoanalysis just a clinical discipline and nothing else because that is its institutes could train for. The natural outcome of limiting the IPA to such meagre task created two major negative results:

A.   The function of the IPA as the sole training means of psychoanalysis created a closed group of narrow-minded practitioners who formed sort of a cult. They did not accept to open their membership to nonclinical cultured people, and did not want to add to their restricted program any cultural elements. Naturally, the psychoanalysis that the IPA was teaching and training became less encompassing of what is psychoanalytic and training became a relic of an old glorious discovery.

B.    Psychoanalysis was limited (till the seventies of last century) to Freud, very few other analysts of the old generation, and few of the contemporary analyst of the period of the splits in France and the controversies in England. At that time there was clear efforts to study those sourced scholastically to expose the implicit differences between psychoanalytic thinkers who did not create their own schools. However, it did not take long that analysts with little background in the original discoveries took the liberty to reinvent psychoanalysis with the blessings of the IPA.

Those two results that are engendered by the silence of the IPA in regard the changes done to basic and traditional psychoanalysis are continuing to erode and distort psychoanalysis. The deterioration of psychoanalysis is an issue that I will deal with in the next part of this posting. In the last part will be on the main point I want to highlight: Psychoanalysis and Academia.