Is There Future Psychoanalysis

     The evidence of sincerity of any criticism is to have an alternative to offer, or at least a suggestion of an alternative. My criticism of the situation in psychoanalysis comes from stagnation and desperate attempts at covering up its deterioration, in both status and condition. Forty years ago, psychoanalysis has had a rich volume of vocabulary of novel discoveries about the human subject. After several decades, two generations of analysts, and no serious evolution of the psychoanalytic discoveries, that vocabulary acquired the status of a theory. Analysts used that vocabulary as if it conveyed an established theory of psychopathology and psychotherapy. However, that vocabulary was the regular speech of the daily life of ordinary people but some of its words were given additional connotations that were derived from discoveries in the field of psychical phenomena. We, psychoanalysts used common words to connote psychological processes, along with their daily usage. For instance, defense got an additional meaning of avoiding psychical pain that accompanies revealing something objectionable. We still should not forget that psychoanalysis is vocabulary without a theory that distinguishes it from lay-man’s speech.

    There are gaps in any standard way of learning psychoanalysis. They come from its vocabulary, because it always has two meanings: the direct simple daily meaning and another implicit connotation of a psychical nature. This bland banal observation puts us face to face with a complex issue. Is there profound commonality amongst us about our vocabulary, which is now treated as concepts in a theory. Do we all agree on the meaning of the analytic terms we use? How much do we know about the implicit psychological meaning of our vocabulary?  Do we ask once in a while: what do we mean by transference? (what is projection, narcissistic identification, etc.)? Without visiting those connotations and the meaning of our terminology we would not know what we are talking about. Even Freud, when he noticed transference in practice, he was undecided about it. He could not be definite if to consider it resistance or an additional source of revealing unconscious material (1912). But few years later he said: “This transference alike in its positive and negative form is used as a weapon by the resistance; but in the hands of the physician, it becomes the most powerful therapeutic instrument and it plays a part scarcely to be overestimated in the dynamics of the process of cure”. (1923,247).  The issue I want to raise is that the necessity and also benefits of revisiting the terminology of psychoanalysis as it is coined by Freud, and very few analysts who came after him. This effort could be like Rediscovering psychoanalysis anew.     

The Old Psychoanalysis: Overcoming Stagnation.        

    If not out of reality it would be out of self-respect that we should admit that psychoanalysis has changed over the years, advanced and regressed, but possibly also improved. Therefore, explaining its current crisis should address the possibilities of taking the wrong direction in our progress, or maybe just reluctance to examining its concepts (vocabulary) in light of all what has transpired in the last decades about their meanings. I will give a personal example of rediscovering psychoanalysis with and implicit permission from you.

    After mentioning that narcissism is a condition that exists in the gap between the I and the ME, or between the subjective I and the objective me, and the variety of its pathological conditions depending on the depth and nature of that gap, I received a comment from a very experienced respectable colleague wondering what would have happened if the myth of Narcissus had been the central myth of psychoanalysis instead of the Oedipus myth. This comment made me think of how much we could have taught ourselves if we looked at narcissism in the Oedipus ‘complex’, and how narcissism is better in explaining ‘castration anxiety’ than castration anxiety explaining narcissism.    

    I mention this personal experience in regard to two important issues my colleague has opened up for further thinking and reconsidering: Why does the phenomenon of transference brings the past in the present in every psychoanalytic work (no analysis without transference)? Why when that happens, and we bring that to the patient’s attention, he changes not only the transference but with it the psychopathology undergoes radical changes (the most powerful therapeutic instrument). I will give here a brief account of the thoughts that came to my mind about that issue to emphasize that there a vast amount of new knowledge awaiting discoveries and ‘our’ old psychoanalysis could be replaced easily, safely, with much better psychoanalysis if we let the old terminology evolve and gain from the accumulated experience we gained.    

    The first thing that came to my mind is that the patient-the I speaks talking about his me. If I listen to the gap in his speech, I will find out another person who was formed by his psychological history; meaning that I am not listening to history but the history of forming the narcissistic entity of my patient. Eliciting that history and giving it back-interpreted-to the patient it will change the narcissistic gap. Both I and me will get better acquainted. I wanted to just give an idea how the vocabulary of old psychoanalysis is full of new meanings that is the new psychoanalysis we aspire to have. The hope is groups of young, motivated, perceptive psychoanalyst and thinkers, and ‘knowledgeable’ middle aged psychoanalysts cut loose from the current systems of learning and training in psychoanalysis. They review the old past, look into the recent past, and do away with the present, to work on a new theory of the human subject. The hope is that this new breed of analysts will not forget or repress that the vocabulary of the old theory, which at its time was a very significant breakthrough and built a theory the of psychoanalysis and was that we-the old generation- learned. It was a brilliant effort to discovering latent meaning in the regular daily language of the time. But now, if the latent meanings that are taken as concepts of in a theory psychical phenomenon that need explanations and expanding its connotations, those same words will be the way to progressing toward a new psychoanalysis, if and only if a new system of training is adopted.

    This is an important point that needs more space, time, and interest raise.