Is it Psychoanalysis or it is the Institutions of Psychoanalysis?

I have lived the last fifty years of my career as a psychoanalyst and witnessed its perpetual crises over those years-even in different countries- without seeing something similar, or closely akin to what is happening to it now. Before I get to that, I have to admit that I was critical of the condition psychoanalysis has reached since the acceptance of a distinction made between intrapsychical and interpersonal psychoanalyses. My criticism was based on a conviction that psychoanalysis is a theory of the intrapsychic, and its application as psychotherapy is to free and readjust the intrapsychical deformities of childhood fixations. I firmly believed that psychoanalysis is not a discovery that will one day be overtaken by another theory or another theoretical improvement; its subject matter-the human subject-might present the analysts with different intrapsychical concerns in the future, but psychoanalysis in itself will remain the theory of the intrapsychic. What is happening now is analysts shifting their endeavors to the crisis of the shrinking interest in psychoanalysis and the falling membership of the psychoanalytic institutions. Instead of looking at psychoanalysis or into it, as the real concern, the dropping memberships of the societies has become the concern. Better, the container and not the contained is the preoccupation of the IPA and its branches. I am tempted to liken that to funny metaphors, but I leave room for you to do that. Never before, did the concerns of the IPA and its regional and local psychoanalytical institutions about the shrinking numbers of their membership, shifted their attention from psychoanalysis to merely the survival of their institutions. It should be clear to the clear minds of psychoanalysts and the guardians of their institutions that their efforts to make psychoanalysis ‘interesting’ and ‘exciting’ by engaging it in social matters is trying to jump out of the sinking ship of psychoanalysis. Our duty is to the save the ship and not the passengers, because saving the ship saves the passengers, not the other way around. Never before the institution of psychoanalysis came so close to considering the term psychoanalysis not a noun but a pronoun, or it could mean other things too.

This risk comes from ignoring the very important reality of what we call the discovery and evolution of psychoanalysis. Freud’s discoveries are many and vary in their importance. Only one stands out as astonishing and outstanding: the psyche. He was able to separate from the human subject what is called his psyche and talk about him in terms of his psyche (we have no definition of ‘psyche’ because it does not exist but stands for the nature of the homosapien). His discoveries were about the nature of the psyche and he called his endeavours psychoanalysis, i.e., analyzing the subject. What we know now of the psyche reveals an aspect of Freud’s genius that is not clearly appreciated. The psyche is a term that allowed talking about the subject as a presence in whom opposites coexist (primary and secondary processes, primary and secondary repression, etc.,). I can see and hear some of my colleagues respiring in desperation, yet if they are doing analysis as they like to do it the duality of the subject is the only way we could talk about the unconscious coexisting with consciousness in every psychological manifestation of our life.  Duality is the basic condition of the existence of psychical life.

Those notions are fundamental in understanding psychoanalysis and reviving it. It is obvious to me that the desperate attempts at reviving psychoanalysis by inserting ideas like schools and changes to its core premise to intersubjective or object relations etc., were a reaction to the gradual but continued decline of the notion of the intrapsychic. The seemingly declined essence of the intrapsychical in psychoanalytic work is caused by the difficulty to teach and train in working with the psyche and not with the person. That distinction also separates the neutral analyst from the engaged analyst, which to some analyst is detrimental to psychotherapy. I attended a discussion between Brenner and Kernberg (in time of the glorious Walldorf Astoria) where the background of a difference between an ego theory and a libido theory was proffering a glimpse of what we are talking about now.

The difficulty of reviving psychoanalysis after almost almost thirty years of learning, training, writing, educating in matters that do not relate to psychoanalysis as a noun but as a pronoun (psychoanalysis is such and such, but what is it !!??). This question will not get its answer in a seminar in an IPA training center…. It will though, in a university program that gets few enlightened professors of the humanities together for few years, with renewed groups of young intelligent students who want to learn psychoanalysis not just get some instructions to do psychoanalysis. What is promising is that we are reading now about academic programs in different universities and less bout the training institutes of the IPA.

My blog sometimes attracts the attention of some individuals in other countries of other continents. I am not a household name to improve that situation. However, there are more analysts now who realized that the IPA and its system of training is unsuitable for the new horizons of learning psychoanalysis (and maybe improve psychotherapy too). It will be really a good thing if the Amercas engage in a discussion about psychoanalysis with their peers in Europe, and maybe in few years with the Asians psychoanalysts.