Psychoanalysis: Between Improving and Changing

The Failure of  Improving Psychoanalysis:

In a previous posting I expressed my idea that the existence of the IPA is a hindrance to the development and improvement of psychoanalysis. At the present time, and for sometime now, the IPA is in a crisis of the dwindling down of its membership, and the inability to show a comprehensible function that justifies its existence. In North America psychoanalysis, consequently, psychoanalysts too, are going through a very difficult time: do they really exist outside their own minds (exist to people) and what could they call themselves: psychoanalysts! psychotherapists! Could they specify a sensible link with the psychoanalysis that the IPA claims to represent? In other parts of the world this puzzlement that is faced in North America is not as severe or demanding, but it should not be ignored just because it does not exist or form a crisis there. If the organization that identifies a profession does not maintain its identity by the professionals who constitute its membership, it loses its reason d’etre. Linking psychoanalysis and the IPA is the fundamental crisis because the IPA is comprised now of several (too many) psychoanalyses, and too many “presumed” psychoanalysts, and varying degrees of deterioration. The current unsettling situation is an intrinsic basic fault in the formation of the original and previously magnificent IPA, of the first half of the last century.

The IPA started in 1910 (more of a century ago) as a membership organization: a society of “belonging”. It was natural that when the issue of training a new generation came about the IPA assumed the responsibility of managing that task. Just as a reminder: training was MAINLY a response to the continued bickering among senior psychoanalysts then. With the enthusiasm and naivety of a new generation of psychoanalysts there was a belief that personal analysis will solve this problem.  Personal analysis was supposed to deal with the “members neuroses”, therefore it was made the spinal column of training. It was also made the most important quality that distinguishes psychoanalysts from “those who were not psychoanalysed”, therefore we could argue that we are different (better). Training became a requirement to be ordained a psychoanalyst. This matter attracted the ones who want to “belong”,  hence it had the additional purpose of keeping the IPA in existence. Early training was very little more than therapeutic personal psychoanalysis. This aspect of training remained its core under the guise of being necessary for didactic reasons. Two other aspects were added: practicing under supervision and learning the fundamental theoretical basis of the analytic discovery and some of the contemporary new theoretical additions and modifications.

None of those three aspects of training requires building the system of training institutes, because practically speaking training according to those rules does not require more than the candidate’s desire to get training. All the three aspects are available without any input from the IPA as an organization (mentioned in two previous and old postings). However, for the IPA to continue existing it was important to keep the training and the educational aspects under its auspices. To certify “the real psychoanalysts” the candidate has to go through the IPA institutes system because its organizational purposes was gradually eroded. Instead of existing because of our wish to belong, the IPA became the creator -by obligation-of that wish.  Nevertheless, delegating training to unsupervised training institutes created more problem and not resolving any.

Rationalising the existence of the IPA created three stubborn misconceptions about psychoanalysis:

1.     Psychoanalysis is a clinical discipline of psychotherapy.

2.     Psychoanalytic discoveries are special and different.

3.     Accrediting training in analysis has to come from the IPA system of training.

Instead of going into fruitless arguments about those points I will mention three observations to reflect upon:

A.   Freud’s 23 volumes of work, which contain the most revealing facts about the human subject- since the combined works of the Greek philosophy- has a scanty body of clinical material that no candidate of psychoanalysis would pass his candidacy if he presented it to a training committee. The other gifted psychoanalysts also left us rich knowledge of the human subject but similarly were stingy with their personal clinical material. Therefore, it is not correct to presume that psychoanalysis is a clinical discipline, although most of us made it our

profession!

B.    Many if not most of the Freudian discoveries of the human subject were reached before him by thinkers, philosophers, religious texts (the Talmud in particular), common sense of the common people, and some old physicians. Therefore, to assume that psychoanalysis is product of clinical work, which is a stubborn conviction of most psychoanalysts especially in North America, is incorrect (misleading the new generations of psychoanalysts). Psychoanalysis opened our eyes to the hidden meanings in our daily psychical lives. Freud’s adage “Dreams are Wish fulfillment” is not better that Joseph’s interpretation of Pharos’s Dreams. However, so early in his voyage of discoveries he showed that our intrapsychical life does not sleep. While ‘the all of us is sleeping’ a new way of expressing the not sleeping intrapsychic (the primary process) shows its nature.  This process was the language of infantile sexuality psychoneuroses, parapraxes and jokes too. The most glaring evidence of this fact is the banality, the insignificance and even hurtful clinical modifications suggested by “the new schools of psychoanalysis” which missed that what we try to configure in our work as analysts is “there” in the patients’ speech and not in their interpersonal or intersubjective relationships.

C.    The third stubborn misconception is that clinical psychoanalysts are entitled and free to produce any theoretical bases for their clinical methods of practice. Notwithstanding, only Freud was able to give a clear-cut protocol of clinical practice, which was in its basic nature boundaries to what should not be done, and nothing important regarding what is to be done. As a clinical analyst I knew what not to do, yet under that restriction I got material that makes the theory of psychoanalysis properly fitting to reveal to the patient the psychodynamics of his intrapsychical structure. This means that clinical psychoanalysis does not have a theory of practice but has a theory of the subject matter of the practice under its possible different conditions. Surgery has no theory but anatomy is the guideline for its practice. Therefore, psychoanalysis is a practice of listening to the patient talking consciously about himself and implicitly but unconsciously about his warped intrapsychical difficulties. The analyst also brings to the patient’s attention what to listen to saying in order for him to make the needed changes. Therefore, there is no local, regional, or international measures to qualify a training in the IPA institute as the accredited training. Moreover, the professors of clinical psychiatry and psychology are qualified to judge their graduates’ proficiency to work with patients.   

The answer to improve or change psychoanalysis is clearly decided by the condition it reached. For justifiable and obvious reasons when psychoanalysis and most analysts- in North America in particular-exhausted ego psychology and brought psychoanalysis with it to a stand still- psychoanalysis faced what it faces now: improve or change!

What happened is that analysts did not make much of a distinction between the subject matter of analysis and the suitability of the psychoanalytic method used in analyzing that subject. When ego psychology’s theory was exhausted to be useful in conducting analysis analysts thought that changing the subject matter of clinical analysis would be the solution. They went on a long trip of moving from relationality to intersubjective-calling and calling every change a school of analysis- assuming that they were improving psychoanalysis. Although most European IPA institutes seem to be less prone to go via the ‘school’ route they I do not know if there much change in the status of analysis there.

Therefore, my answer to the question is that the attempts to improve psychoanalysis is showing in the already failed schools that are useless and even damaging to psychoanalysis. However, this is what IPA still sponsors and it is evident that its membership has nothing else to offer: more schools. The Institutes that did not fall in that trap are not showing signs of looking seriously into the realistic solution of Academia.

Let us talk about that next time.