A Way Out of Stagnation

Toward A Contemporary Psychoanalysis

I am quite sure this posting will not go well with the majority of old and contemporary psychoanalysts and candidates. It is not on psychoanalysis, but about it. I am going back to my choice of Freud’s four intuitions briefly, to demonstrate how the academic approach to psychoanalysis differs from the clinical one or the customary way we learn it and teach it to candidates in IPA institutes. I strongly advocate making the academic approach an additional requirement if we are proposing to open up and allow making radical changes to the way we understand psychoanalysis. This approach will gain the attention and inquisitiveness of a new generation of analysts, more than the mere repetition of the old terminology and vocabulary of psychoanalysis as if they are a theory of psychoanalysis.

The most compelling argument regarding making a ‘radical’ shift in the direction psychoanalysis has to take now, or close to now, is the stubbornness of the IPA, as the custodian of psychoanalysis, to acknowledge that the dropping of numbers of its membership is not because of a drop in the interest in psychoanalysis among young mental health professionals, or a general dwindling of interest in psychoanalysis in society, but because of the quality of psychoanalysis it is advocating and offering in its training institutes. It is pretty archaic and inadequate. The IPA has forgotten, and maybe ignores that originally and for six- or seven-decades candidates were seeking IPA’s membership everywhere in the world because it was the best and the only place to learn and train in psychoanalysis. The beginning of the IPA was founded on the birth of psychoanalysis; its continuation paralleled the changes and improvement Freud and the early analysts in psychoanalysis kept generating. Psychoanalysis was a novelty worth the membership of the IPA, and its membership meant that the member masters the knowledge and technique of that “fascinating” new understanding of human psyche. Today, any IPA member, whatever his level of mastering the theory or the art of its practice, would not have anything new or meaningful to say something new to a colleague. Even a lay educated person knows about psychoanalysis as much as the trained analyst. Only thinkers and phosphorus seem to know more and better that the best training analysts.

It was psychoanalysis that created and sustained the IPA not the other way around, as the IPA custodians still insist. I am quite aware of how difficult for the remainder of my generation of analysts to accept that what they learned and trained few decades ago in is no longer viable. I am also quite cognizant of the difficulty of engaging the new generation in a process of originating and establishing another psychoanalysis that fits their age. However, time and psychoanalytic experience make me firmly believe that psychoanalysis, the theory of us humans, will find the means for its continuation despite the IPA’s effort to make the past continue in the present and stay for the future. It happened before and will happen again.

A Very V. Brief Account of the Evolution of Psychoanalysis.

Freud’s psychoanalysis went through three or four stages (revisions) in its development during his own life.  After graduating from medicine he spent several years searching for some field of interest to make it his professional future. His experience in psychiatry with Meynert and his relationships with Breuer got him away from his undirected endeavours in the field of neurological research and got him in touch with psychoneurotic patients. However, his short encounter with Charcot and Bernheim had taken him by surprise because he never hesitated after that in what he wanted to do. His first insight about the wish came when he rejected that what is wrong with patients is not a ‘happening’ but something to understand. The evidence to that awareness is what he stated in Studies on Hysteria that patients suffer from reminiscences (things that happened to them in the past and when retrieved they make sense of their sufferings). The radical shift was making the disease and the patient one entity instead what was tried before to find a cause outside the psychical life of the patient. The patient became a human who has a psychical life which has entities to be analyzed (in Medicine the disease is external or a separate entity of dysfunctionality of an internal organ).

He extended his explorations of the newly discovered psychical entity to the world of dreams, which was not logical but an intuitive shift of focus. His view was that dreams do not happen to the person, but he makes them. There he states the foundation of all his work till 1939, and hopefully our work too. He says: “We see that the psychical mechanism employed by the neuroses is not created through there having been first a morbid disturbance affecting the mind, but is already present in the normal structure of the mental apparatus. The two psychical systems, the transitional censorship between them, the way in which one activity inhibits and becomes super imposed on the other show us one of the ways leading to knowledge of that structure”. (Cited in E. Jones, Vl. I, p. 297). What followed this insight was the Dream Book, then Psychopathology of Everyday Life, followed by the Book on Jokes and The Three Contributions to Theory of Sex. We could realize that Freud’s foundational insights were unconscious conceptions, vaguely mentioned before they took their verbal form and became functional concepts, i.e., become operational and working hypotheses.

For a first time the human subject was looked at as something that has meaning, and the meaning is implicit in his psyche, and could be sorted out by analyzing it. The riddle of the sphinx was solved [ Who walks on four, then on two and ends up walking on three. [The human person].

Freud’s intuition proved that the unconscious aspect of an intuition remains unconsciously active even after it mainly gets a verbal conscious format. He was unconscious that he has brought down the wall that kept the human subject a riddle till he saw the meaning of the human phenomena dormant within itself (the meaning of the dream is dormant in its visual scene and expresses ‘the dreamer’s personal wish). We laugh at jokes because the irony in them says something we refrained from acknowledging and verbalizing. A slip of the togue is not a happening, but a process in the mind of the person that he is not conscious of. As obvious as it is now it was noticed and ‘unconsciously’ understood by many before Freud. But he revealed it as a product of a psychical mechanism. Freud looked at dreams, parapraxis, symptoms, and other human manifestations as psychical mechanisms. Because he previously-in the phase of hypnosis- encountered regression and preconscious guilt especially in regard to sexuality he identified those mechanisms as defense mechanisms (Vol. III of the SE). The first phase in the history of psychoanalysis was spent by Freud and his disciples identifying and explicating the psychical mechanisms that created the symptoms. Thus, the wish was the first step toward the subject as the subject-matter of psychoanalysis.

The second phase in the history of psychoanalysis came when Freud revised the role of sexuality in the psychical life of the patient. Sexuality was the most prominent issue in early psychopathology and was considered the main cause of psychoneuroses. However, when Freud’s clinical practice expanded (SE Vol. nine and ten) to included other psychoneuroses than hysteria, he noticed that it is the psychoneuroses that distorts the patients’ sexuality and talked about other defense mechanisms that are not as the simplistic repression. His Three Contributions to the theory of Sexuality underlined that sexuality exists in the human subject since childhood, that it is not an instinct or a simple urge, but a Trieb (a complex integration of several bodily areas in reacting to their stimulations and are shaped by the subject’s own experiences through his childhood development. The most radical and shifting result of Freud’s analysis of sexuality was that sexuality is not the cause of psychoneuroses, but it is one of the main targets of the neurosis. Sexuality gets sick and does not cause sickness.

A third phase started when Freud shifted his attention from “mechanisms” and “things psychological” to psychical processes. In that period of expansion, change and new horizon for psychoanalysis, Freud became aware that what is unconscious is not so because some defense mechanism but because the unconscious is a psychical entity that has its own nature, which differentiates it from the conscious and cognitive functions. The unconscious is a distinct state in psychical life that it has a different system of functioning. Although his work on that subject (1905) was interesting particularly at that time, it revealed a new insight about the psyche and the development of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts (Freud and his colleagues) realized that they should not be distracted and deceived by the logical links between causes and effects, but they have to be aware that the unconsciousness is more than ‘just not being conscious’.

Between 1912 and 1920 Freud published two sets of papers that marked the period as the most inspiring and important in the history of psychoanalysis. The first is the papers on technique, the second is called the metapsychological papers. Those papers are seldom mentioned anymore, and my recent limited inquiry in a very small number of institutes shows that very rarely do the curricula of the institutes give them the deserved attention. The two sets of papers should be recognized as products of genuine and significant evolution in the history of psychoanalysis. The papers on technique put us face to face with the process of analyzing and the issues that emerge in the “office” not just in our minds. The second group called metapsychological dealt with the dual nature of psychical phenomena like repression, narcissism, and the changes to psychical due to fixations and maturation. The primary and the secondary of the same phenomenon revealed the significance of anxiety as a reaction to conflict and the existence of latent psychodynamics.

 Freud’s paper on the unconscious (1915) is quite intriguing. For none academic psychoanalysts it means very little. The clinical and theoretical implications of the three types of unconsciousness Freud that mentioned in the paper do not seem to foretell- in a clear way- what major changes in psychoanalysis could be predicted from the impact of that explication of unconsciousness. We will see, when we get to the protocol of practicing psychoanalysis that the tripartite meaning of the unconscious, especially the systemic unconscious, was actually the core of understanding the phenomenon of Transference. This might sound to the trained analyst to practice excessive theoretical sophistication. Yet, I did not find in the regular literature on the subject of transference mush dealing with the inevitability of a degree of unconscious transference in any relationship, healthy and unhealthy. The clinical trio of neutrality, anonymity, and abstinence has to be strictly observed so the analyst’s engagement in the process of analysis is limited to allow it to be more transferential than actual.  

 A forth phase-started quietly and slowly after 1923 (The Ego and the Id)- in which Freud did not come up with anything genuinely new, except his work “Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1926). Freuds slowed down in discovering new psychoanalytic finds and worked on consolidating his findings and some of his disciples’ insights. That forth stage had and still has a detrimental effect on the evolution of psychoanalysis. We, second and third generations of psychoanalysts, assimilated Freud’s endeavor to stabilize psychoanalysis and just kept polishing what is achieved till now. There are two negative results to that stand, which are behind the present deterioration of psychoanalysis as it is adopted by the IPA. The first is to stop at where Freud and ‘Freudians’ have reached and keep recycling what they have achieved. Recycling of anything deteriorates the original substance of the recycled. That is what happened with ego psychology, object-relations (the second phase of the Defense Mechanisms), and the almost total abolition of the ideas regarding the unconscious. The second, is when the core of the psychoanalytic insights is neglected it has to be compensated for or denied completely. This is what happened with the period of the new schools that was followed-after their failure- to compensate for the lost insights by preserving the institutions instead.  

Good deeds never get lost, and psychoanalysis will come back but with different psychoanalysts.