The Issue of Change in History and in Psychoanalysis.

Prologue:

There are some political events happening now in the USA, which some of us in Canada follow attentively, with great amazement and apprehension too. Those events have exposed several shortcomings in the current US democratic system. Overlooking those issues created a sense of confusion about the ways issues are discussed and solutions are suggested. The discouraging thing about that state of puzzlement is not  mentioning or suggesting the possibility of change.  Americans tend to idealize their 'forefathers' who founded their country, more than two hundred years ago, on principles that could have and actually had dazzled the world with their novelty and progressivity.  But after two hundred years , being now more than three hundred million people who are diverse even geographically, the USA's democracy still depends on two political parties that were formed over two hundred years ago, and were speaking for the issue of that time. Things need to be reconsidered because listening to the active politicians (not just the regular citizen) one cannot miss the uneducated understanding of the vocabulary they us, and the almost total denial that  two hundred years have passed since those concepts were misconstrued. Resisting the notion that things change, and could get better if they do, 'looks' to many as betrayal of the loyalty to the forefathers. 

The reason that this state of matters concerns us in Canada, and possibly everywhere else in the world, is the important place the US occupies in the world. The significance of this point was forcefully demonstrated during the last three years when an unqualified person took the helm in that important country. Although the American establishment was capable of curtailing his harm he still kept the world on the edge and caused a lot of harm and pain to some communities, worldwide. They are also resistant to acknowledging that the US now is member of a modern world and not what it was after the WWII: the leader of the 'civilized' world. 

Noticing the strong ambivalence the Americans are showing in regard to change made me think of the current events, and the phenomenon of Trump, in terms of both the patients' resistance to change and the analysts’ resistance to change their system of training. As analyst I understand resistance to change to be routed in a state of narcissism (self image). Self image, whether in a person, an organization or a nation is Narcissus's reflection on the surface of the pond which he fell in love with. That image, though it is just the image, replaces the actual body that engendered it. Even if the self image is the cause of great pain giving it up without a replacement creates a narcissistic void, which is filled with rage.  In psychoanalysis (if it is done properly) the work of analysis builds the narcissistic replacement for the vanishing one in a gradual way. So, giving up the image- partially- to include the real scenes of the self in one's narcissism also happens gradually and such change becomes a relief. This process is more difficult in the narcissism of organizations, because it requires willingness to get rid of the past, confidence that a replacement is possible, and available, and an equal willingness to acquire it. This difficulty is what is standing between psychoanalysts and getting rid of the IPA model of training. In nations, the possibility of giving up a national identity to get a new one depends on the political activists who would make that exchange palatable to most. 

This post is an attempt at examining the nature and fabric of change, which the political events in the US could benefit from if the psychoanalytic experience may be considered. Change in psychoanalysis starts with resistance (this is not the problem). When resisting fails to stop the process of analysis the patient rejects the the interetations. When rejecting the work of interpretation does not work either self deception tries to nullify the pain of the impending narcissistic void. Yet, eventually change happens whatever the means are to stop it from happening: change is not matter of preference or choice; it is unavoidable and sometimes it is a duty. 

Could we make sense of the events in the US in the way described, using psychoanalytic principles?

1. Past and Present in Psychoanalysis:

Clinical example:

A young female patient was unhappy about her loose moral standards that make her have sexual relations with the husbands of her female friends. Moreover, when she had a relationship with a man, she tried -almost compulsively- to befriend his wife. She came to a point at which her life was no longer manageable with rumors, rejections, and loneliness and bad sense of enjoyment. At the beginning of her analysis she always related her loose morality to her mother’s “immoral mothering”: openly favouring her younger sister because she was prettier and looked like the mother. She accused her mother of being a bad moral model: “Mothers are supposed to love their kids equally and it is immoral to make distinctions of that sort and ignore my feeling”. She kept repeating that her behaviour with men and friends is only looking for attention and feeling that she belongs to people. Her associations were mainly rhetorical and about her mother’s and sister’s embarrassing selfishness and social immoral neglect of other people’s feelings. She was always recalling two childhood painful memories: her mother refusing to make her hair and ordering the maid to do it, while insisting on making her sister’s hair, and overhearing her mother once making a negative remark about her looks to a visiting relative and predicting for her a life without marriage. Her immoral sexual relations started to make sense to me but I refrained from tackling that point for a long while, because she was emeched in her resentment of her family situation to a degree that needed more time to express and listen to herself doing that. She could not fathom yet or enough the circumstance that constituted the past of her present.

In a suitable moment I mentioned the difference between her immorality and what she considered immoral of her mother. She did not pay attention to my remark, but this led to a gush of bitter memories of her mother’s authoritarian nature and her failure to get close to her ‘rejecting mother’ because she was impatient with her, as she was with the maids and the driver. It took some time before mentioning her father whom she also described as domineering, but to her mind in useless matters.  She sarcastically mentioned how he was once furious and insisted on her going to the hairdresser with her sister.  I mentioned then that there are different kinds of authorities like her father’s and her mothers. She suddenly paid attention to my previous distinction between the two moralities of hers and of her mother’s.  Gradually, the meaning of morality expanded to encompass any sort of abuse of privileges, misuse of status or authority, and the patient realized that she was mad at her mother for all sorts of other things, not only her attitude toward her and her sister. Working through and interpreting matters in light of this expanded sense of deprivations revealed other confusions about anger and humiliation. Her puzzlement about anger and humiliation revealed preconscious aspects in the transference for a wish for her father to have done something about the situation. The analytic situation was reflecting a sense of desperation:  her persistent complaint was that the analyst, not analysis, is the solution to her confusions.It was easy to make translate that idea into an analytic insight that ‘only father could straighten the situation, but he is not paying any attention to what is happening in the family’. 

Her history became an unbearable transference present. Working on the confusions she lived and exercised in regard to matters of values, rights, power and authority resulted in some positive changes in family life. She reported that her relationship with her mother and sister improved, and, especially when her father – unexpectedly- noticed and showed some signs of interest in his role in the family. The patient’s sexual acting out was becoming less demanding. At that point the patient suggested termination and I agreed because I was not confident that opening the issue of her sexual improprieties will be dealt with properly within a reasonable period of time. Analysis ended at that time with the noticeable improvement mentioned but the link between the past and the present was not dealt with properly.

I understood what happened to lead to termination, but did not understand the rest of the patient. I was unable to understand the process that led to the father’s appearance in the scene, let alone the issue related to the patient’s sexual inclination. Termination did not really happen, because the past of the present was not revealed to exchange meanings with the present. Yet, something noticeable I could be mentioned in that regard (I could be deceiving myself): the patient’s past of confusing family dynamics determined that her psychoneurosis was going to be of a confused young woman about morality, and also determined that cure would happen when she learns the nature of an orderly perception of matters and and social demands.
                                                      >>>>>>>>>>>>>
After years of practicing psychoanalysis in the classical manner of: patients’ associations, interpretations that would reveal to the patient- bit by bit- the unconscious processes in his transference, and reconstructing the intrapsychical psychodynamics, also a bit by bit, I was left with a puzzling issue that was even problematic. How doing what I do as analyst initiates change? Parallel to that-as I will mention a little later: what instigates change in politics? This question was raised because -for me-the change in the process of psychoanalyzing was always unexpected, even the outcome seemed unrelated to what I thought I was dealing with. In other words: I did not know while I was working what instigates the change and how. Only retroactively it was possible to come to some insights.  Although I accept the parallelism between psychoanalysis and other human phenomena, which are also difficult to understand on the spot, and are always understood retroactively, I still could not accept that a practicing psychoanalyst would not know how his work works!

Few years of puzzlement about how to understand the process of psychoanalysis made me discuss the issue with a senior analyst of Lacanian leanings. I asked: why the process of cure can only be recognized after the fact and not during the work. He said that the primary process does not make distinctions between the three systems of Cs., Pcs., and Ucs.  Therefore, we do not know what system is affected by our interpretation. We cannot predict or correctly anticipate the reactions and the changes our interpretations generate, because each system has its own way of responding to a proper interpretation, and changes differently from the other systems.  Therefore, a good analysis (based on good interpretations) takes its course and declares its end without any fanfare. I took his remark a little further: trying to predict or anticipate outcomes of limited aspects of the material indicates that I am not doing good analysis. Analysis is a process that opens the way for all the sorts of freedoms that the psychoneurosis blocks. Analysis opens the way to freedom of sexual enjoyment and also of refraining from meaningless and destructive sexual relations. Psychoanalysis is a process of understanding but retroactively: that patient understands while and after associating, and the analyst while understanding and interpreting, not before.

Dealing with a past that is still lived in the present, as in the psychoneuroses, and aspiring to change it, raises this question: what happens to the changed past? In psychoanalysis we try to make the means for changing remain active and usable by the patient ‘for ever’.

In a nutshell: reading the present could reveal both the past and the possibilities of the future. This is the common issue in “psychotherapy”, i.e., to what degree the patient’s past will get better defined and is not going to remain a set of memories. This change happens when the patient realizes that his past was lived experiences that are compulsively repeated a distorts the present. In psychoanalysis we cannot free the patient from his past but we demonstrate to the patient how to avoid being misled by it and keeps alert to that possibility in his present.