In two weeks, my last book will be available in book stores and book depots. The book is entitled:

Psychoanalysis: A Theory of the Subject.

Overview:

The current literature of psychoanalysis- English and some French- suggests that psychoanalysts are satisfied with what they have already achieved, and are not expecting or aspiring for any considerable changes in the present situation.   There are some  ‘novelties’ in contemporary psychoanalyses that are mainly  related to issues of practice, presumably considered, by some, theoretical advancements too. Some of those novelties are reactions to some legitimate criticisms that psychoanalysts should have look at carefully, but did not. Notwithstanding, the natural advancement of any knowledge has to come from learning from its history and maintaining its established course of advancement. We-psychoanalysts- should identify what constituted the point of birth of psychoanalysis, understand the nature of that birth, look for other similar points of advancement in its history, and know what could be a false advancement in its evolution to avoid misleading ourselves. That is if the future of psychoanalysis is a concern.

Psychoanalysis started with Freud’s attempt to understand three ordinary features in the life of the subject: dreaming, making unintentional mistakes in speech and other ordinary activities (Parapraxis), and joking. From examining those three-none clinical- features Freud revealed the workings of a process that deceives the subject and misleads him away from his real intentions. Those three features in the life of the ordinary subject where the point of birth of psychoanalysis. The interest in knowing more about the subject increased the interest in the subject himself. More observations and discoveries turned into the new movement of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis started as interest in the subject and should remain a theory of the subject, not his psychotherapy or any other appropriate speculation. Freud and his contemporaries continued adding to our knowledge of the subject by examining and interpreting more of the subject’s attributes, including psychopathology. Freud’s rich literature attest to that fact. His work varied from the clinical to the historical and from the banal to the most specific. However, gradually the literature-including his own- dropped in quality and variation.  A new interest in the nature of the subject had to emerge for psychoanalysis to maintain its importance.  Although their were attempts at making changes in the foundation of the Freudian doctrine (Rank, Ferenczi, Steckel, etc …) they were not of much significance and had no lasting impact. They were calls for changes in technique and practice, not additions to the theory of the subject.

The semblance of a new phase in defining the ‘subject’ came with Klein’s views in regard to early infancy and the structuring of inner reality (the intrapsychical). Yet, Ego Psychology was considered by most analysts the natural extension of Freudianism. Klein’s pioneering intuitions and endeavours were not properly appreciated at the beginning but R. Winnicott came up with a most simple and common observation that turned the psychology of the subject upside down. I would like to remind ourselves of Winnicott’s paper on the ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’.

Winnicott brought t focus a very simple observation about an infant’s innate oral response. From the first hours of his life the infant makes his hand or fingers objects and source of satisfaction and pleasure. Winnicott considered this most known observation an expression of the existence two separate realities that constitute a basic psychoanalytic duality: subject\object. The hand is an external reality that deals with an internal reality regarding oral demands. That distinction gave Klein’s intrapsychic psychodynamics an access to psychoanalytic meanings and interpretations. The recognition of the subject’s intrapsychic life released psychoanalysis from the inherent limitations of Ego Psychology, which was a functional theory of causes (drives) and effects (explanations).

Winnicott’s observation established the duality of subject\object, thus, psychoanalysis reoriented itself and got on a remarkable course of evolution. His observation is a landmark in understanding how psychoanalysis had advanced in the fifties beyond any Freudian expectations. One of the major outcomes of the notion of an intrapsychic life was the creation of psychosexual model development of the subject. In that model the subject  goes through and predetermined stages of development from one the autoerotic zones in the body to the next (this concept and its model of development is a vanished landmark in the journey of discovering the nature of the subject).  However, familiarity breeds boredom.  A slow down and even some distortion of the core meaning of the duality of the subject\object started a process of deterioration of psychoanalysis. The time was ripe for a new leap in understanding the subject.

Jacque Lacan in France put psychoanalysis right in the midst of the structural movement and made several ‘brilliant’ remarks about the subject and his unconsciousness (maybe up to his tenth Seminar). Lacan’s remarks -complicated as they are rightly considered- were the smartest regarding a perspective of the subject and his attributes.  The result of Lacanianism was controversial: most analysts did not appreciate his structural thinking and remained hopeful for a comprehensive functional theory of the subject, while some realized the limitations of functionalism in psychoanalysis. Others, especially in Europe adopted his views and produced a lively version of structural psychoanalysis (French Psychoanalytic Association).The irony is that most the analysts who rejected functional psychology (drives theory) replaced the theory with a poorer form of functionalism (the schools of psychoanalysis, starting from Kohut).

We ended up with different points of view that are allowed and semi-condoned by the IPA in the eighties. The glaring cause of that twist in the history of psychoanalysis is the absence of any subject-matter of the discipline, while complete shift to the profession and the therapeutic modalities became the main concern of most of the struggling societies. We are now psychoanalysts without a subject-matter but with various psychotherapies for the lost subject (literally and figuratively speaking).

What is needed now is variations on the theme of Winnicott’s observation, and his way of unfolding its core. We need to make more observations about the subject and formulate psychoanalytic understating of those attributes. We need new discoveries of the subject’s attributes, and eventually a theory that interconnect those attributes in one theoretical ‘interpretation’. In other words: we need to work toward a theory of the subject based on simple and complex observations of his nature, instead of improvising therapeutic modalities for none existing theory or patients.

This argument brings me to another point that is related to the issue of the vanishing theory of the subject.

The most difficult task I dealt with in my experience -as teacher and supervising analyst -was to make the candidates and young analysts recognize the difference  between using the lexicon of psychoanalysis (or a preferred school of psychoanalysis) as interpretation or part of an interpretation, and Interpretation as a separate act in the practice of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic terminology is limited to giving us a vocabulary to talk to each other, nothing more. Thus, we should consider psychoanalysis a language that pertains to the issue of the subject. It is a description that leads to, but does not explains the process. There is no better example to that distinction than Winnicott’s concept of the transitional phenomena. After separating reality into inner and outer he says: “. . .  it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world which can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war. This helps, but is it enough?”.

Explaining processes in the physical world is good enough to be called a theory. But in the psychological world we need to interpret the process not just identify and explain it. We interpret a subject’s attributes by deriving their meaning from the lived experience of the subject and from his own words (not a theoretical vocabulary). Interpretation transforms a psychological process into something lived. An example is the term projection. We can talk about it n two metapsychological terms, but still we have to answer this question: what is ‘projecting”. There are two reasons to bring this point to attention because using a psychoanalytic term in an interpretation means the analyst is neither showing the patient has unconsciously revealed something when he was talking, nor showed him how he- the analyst- got to the interpretation of projecting. A patient says: my father had bad temper tantrums that scared me all my life and made me very mad at him. I hated him and wanted to scream back but I was always scared. This could be understood within the conscious connotation of the words the patient used. He would get nothing from an interpretation that his rage at the father made him ‘similar’ to that hated father. But if he is shown that his speech indicated that his fear of the father made him unconsciously become like the feared father, he would understand the notion of identification without using the psychoanalytic terminology. Making that distinction obvious stops turning psychoanalysis into mere communication between two people: one sane and one less sane.  

The evolution of psychoanalysis and the changes that it has to be introduced to it is not matter of having better lexicon, newer terminology, more sophisticated concepts; it is to learn more about the subject himself. Learning more about the subject makes us listen to the patient more than looking for the right mechanism that describes the content of the associations.  A patient reports (complains) that she has, and always had, bad relations with people whom she loved most. She came to realize that she did and still does say the wrong thing to the, even though the right thing would be clear in her mind. It was pointed out to her that she says that she is of two, and the wrong one responds first before she stops it. This remark led to exploring the issue of her duality, narcissism, and problems in separation and individuation. Thus, what the patient said was used to show her that she also says other things without noticing and they would be the right things to say. This remark got her into a process of exploring her unconscious intentions. However, the analyst had to know more about the nature of psychical dualities and the structural core of narcissism to extricate what to interpret. Talking to the patient about the meaning of her symptom instead of improvising dubious ‘motives’ behind her social reactions can only be done when the analyst knows more about the nature of the subject..

Turning psychoanalysis into an act of interpretation for the patient, and an act of explaining among the psychoanalysts requires developing a theory of the subject. We need to know more about the Subject and about the subject we work with. We work to make the patient learn about himself as being that particular subject and not an abstract person who ‘identifies with others, project his undesirable intentions on them, and introject the analyst’s character in order to get cure.

I promoted the idea of a need for a theory of subject to get psychoanalysis out of its rut for sometime. I reached now the point where I am able to put my ideas in a book:  Psychoanalysis: A Theory of the Subject.

If the theory I am proposing is not good, not convincing, or would not mount to anything of value, the book still could achieved its purpose. Write a better theory. There is for sure better theories of the subject than this one; just let us have a theory of the subject.

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I am attaching the Preface of the book and its Table of Content.

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Preface

 Early analysts and several weighty thinkers, with penchant toward psychoanalytic thinking, recognized and documented a great deal of facts about the nature of the human subject. Learning about the subject – as such – was triggered by psychoanalysis in the first place and it remained its core endeavor for several decades. However, it gradually seized to be the only source of that knowledge because of the psychoanalysts’ insistence on limiting psychoanalysis to the profession of psychotherapy, meanwhile the theory of the subject was getting expanded and enriched by contributions of other human sciences. A worrying gap opened, and is getting wider, between psychoanalysis and the facts about the subject that other equally capable authorities are gathering. A genuine interest in this issue would reveal a major problem that is rarely addressed. Although psychoanalysts claim to be the legitimate heritor of psychoanalysis, by virtue of being its only practitioners, they did not and still do not have a defined theory of their practice. There are few recommendations about practice in the theory, and the analyst has to rely on his experience in didactic personal analysis and rare remarks usually exchanged in the rest of the training activity.

However, the rest of the theory of psychoanalysis has all the elements of a theory of practice, but only if analysts notice and accept that psychoanalysis is not a theory of psychopathology but a theory of the subject as an epistemological entity. In better terms, psychoanalysis is a theory of the subject that could succumb to psychoneurotic conditions in the course of his life. When that happens, and the subject seeks psychotherapy, the therapist has to know first what the healthy condition of the subject is. Physicians have to learn the anatomy and physiology of the healthy person before they advance to the stage of medical practice. Without a theory of the subject – as a healthy being and a subject matter in his own right – psychoanalysis is a useless base for any practice of psychotherapy.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Introduction: A Point of View 

Chapter One:  Functionalism and Structuralism in Psychoanalysis

               Learning or Training?

Chapter Two: Psychoanalysis: The Issue of Its Subject Matter

               A Brief Account of Misguided Efforts

               The Gradual Birth of the Subject

                The Subject in Philosophy

               The Need for a Theory of the Subject

               The Intrapsychic and the Subject

Chapter Three: The Roots of Psychoanalysis in Philosophy

               The Search for an Origin for Psychoanalysis

               A Brief Account of the Western Philosophical Movement

               The Cogito and the Subjects

               The Forerunners of Psychoanalysis

               Conclusion

Chapter Four: The Subject’s Basic Duality and Narcissism

               I and Me

               The Place of Psychoanalysis in Epistemology

       I, Me, and the Other

       The Counterpart and the Particularity of the Psychoanalytic Theory

      The Counterpart and the Intrapsychic

Chapter Five: The Psychology of the Wish

      The Wish as the Prototype of the Psyche

       Thinking in Functional and Structural Theories

      Dreams and Wish Fulfillment

      The Interpretation of Wish       

      The Wish and Its Antithesis

Chapter Six:  Sexuality and the Trieb (Instinct)

      Sex as Trieb

      The Libido Theory: Problem or Solution

      Sexuality and the Wish

Chapter Seven: The Duality of Life and Death

      A Basis for Narcissism

      Life and Death of Trieben and Narcissism

       A Brief Account of the Myth

      Back to Psychoanalysis

       Addendum

Chapter Eight: The Subject and the Unconscious

      The Aconscious

      The Puzzling Unconscious

      The Solution of the Puzzle

Chapter Nine: Reconstituting the Subject

      The Subject Matter of Psychoanalysis

      The Subject in a Structural Theory

      Three Basic Dualities

      I and Me Duality

      The Manifest and the Latent Duality

      The Conscious-Unconscious Duality

Chapter Ten:   Psychoanalysis: A Science of the Subject

       The New Subject of Psychoanalysis

       Psychoanalysis: Skill (Practice) or Science (Education)?

      The New Subject of Psychoanalysis

       Psychoanalysis as a Human Science

       Psychoanalysis and Research

 Chapter Eleven: Psychoanalyzing and Psychotherapy

      The Essentials of Psychoanalyzing

       Interpretation and Reconstruction

       The Freudian Clinical Protocol in Perspective

       The Conditions of Psychoanalyzing

       Freud’s Insight and the Issue of Training

 Epilogue:

 Modern Psychoanalysis and the Issue of Training

 Psychoanalysis and Academia

 Index

References