The Future of Psychoanalysis and Future Psychoanalysis

The Difference Between Evolution and Change

1.The Discovery of the Mind 

Dealing with this topic again could easily cause a feeling of boredom and considered useless if not even harmful. Psychoanalysts- at the present time and maybe more acutely in North America than in other parts of the world-are dealing with serious issues about the curricula of learning psychoanalysis and modernizing its training. They also face as partitioners issues pertaining to restructuring the organizations they belong to. Psychoanalysts, after three or four decades of worrying about the declining interest in psychoanalysis, are awaking to the fact that cosmetic rearrangements of issues will not bring any improvement to the dire condition of psychoanalysis, whatever the term psychoanalysis means to the discussant. However, there is no doubt that now psychoanalysts acknowledge their uncertainty about a solution or the right way to pose the main questions regarding psychoanalysis as a field of interrelated issues, not just a a problem with apprenticeship. A preliminary aspect of that question is: should we confront the topic of the future of psychoanalysis instead of ‘negating' the issue by just thinking that we are making the necessary adjustment in its course of evolution? Is psychoanalysis changing or just evolving?

Psychoanalysts might claim to differ theoretically about psychoanalysis, but most of them if not all, never differ in considering it –basically-a profession of psychotherapy. This attitude creates two unfavorable attitude that were behind every crisis psychoanalysis has gone through. A. Although we are not an independent filed of practice (certifiable like medicine or law), and we are also not a well identified field of knowledge (economics, history), we consider ourselves distinct from our original academic foundation or any other academic entity. B. The second attitude is that psychoanalysis could evolve and change but not as result of external factors or new knowledge, or a need for revising one of its old points of view.  In other words, psychoanalysis to the psychoanalysts is a closed system of knowledge and an exclusive filed of practice. After my colleagues reject to this assessment of our silent nature, I should ask them: what is your counter argument to that characterization of our field. As the saying says: it takes a thief to catch a thief. I am a psychoanalyst, and I was of that same nature for many years if not most of my years in practice and in the organization. It is the failure of the organization since 1995, and the haphazard and even bizarre suggestions made by some colleagues that claimed to have come up with 'a natural evolution of the theory of practice’ pushed me to revisit the topic of this posting several times before. This time I am not suggesting solutions but revealing the risk of dealing with psychoanalysis as an issue that has no link to its history or limit its history to the history of psychotherapy.

Whether we like it or not psychoanalysis is not a spontaneous independent discovery or creation. Our pride in Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis has to be put in its historical context, because without that context it looks like just a silly act of a great mind that was searching for a specialty in medicine that he could not find. Psychoanalysis is a product of and a contributor to the ongoing thinking endeavors of its culture. Therefore, when we say that the history of psychoanalysis goes back to the birth of German Idealism it means that without looking at what we practice as part of something bigger we will end up with a self-perpetuating narrow-minded view of ourselves. That self-perpetuating idea is that we are psychotherapists. This fixed idea is the reason we remained captive of the primitive model of apprenticeship that controlled our training and caused its deterioration. We do psychoanalysis within a wider scope of knowledge that gave birth-for the first time-to the notion of psychotherapy, to replace prayers, holy waters, apothecary, and even physical punishment in forcing corrections of pathological behaviors.

In the Middle Ages thinkers engaged in a litany of explorations, investigations, discussions, analyses of the main problematics that occupied the human mind for centuries without any conclusion.  Thinkers gradually became aware and systematic in studying the works of the mind. Religious issues and the religious texts were not only included in that undertaking, but they were also the main and best issues in the field for such an exercise. Priests who were dealing with that material were the best educated in that time and place. The human mind was examined through its responses to what was previously Givens which did not raise any questions. Scholastic philosophy discovered that “man has a mind”. Translating this axiom into spoken languages it meant that the human being is not an object like everything else the world, but a subject that is distinct in his being. This might sound facetious now but then it was a foundational shift in our psychological life. Man was defined by his manifestations: Christian serf in lord W’s estate. So, a human could redefine himself to others as others define themselves to him. But, at that moment came Descartes to as the Question of all questions: I prove myself to others but how could I prove myself to myself.  If it were not for Descartes’s Cogito it would have been impossible for the practice of hypnotism to result in discovering the unconscious, or for psychoanalysis to have been born. Psychoanalysis could not have been discovered before the Cartesian cogito, and the nature of the issue in ‘I think therefore I am’ is that the human subject needs himself to both define him to himself ad to conceive of that defining of the self. The cartesian Cogito reveal the true nature of the subject that is no more an object of nature: he is a duality: thinker and thought of. As analyst we can see the significance of stating the duality of the subject: the birth of the objective and the subjective pronouns needed for the subject to exist I have to notice that the thinking is me.

Reaching this point in the argument takes me to a common question that is always asked by practicing psychoanalysts: do analysts need to know those things, and maybe other things of the same nature? Yes, a psychoanalyst who does not know what psychoanalysis comes from will think, believe, and limit his idea of psychoanalysis to being merely a discovery achieved by a genius [called Freud] who if not created it, it was his brilliant mind that figured it out. A short support to this direct answer to the question is: could any analyst specify one or few works by Freud that are enough to learn from them Freudian psychoanalysis? No. Freud’s text or the Standard Edition is one essential journey in the mind of that man, and one-way continuous step by step unmasking of unconsciousness. Similarly, the history of German Idealism is one journey that led to psychoanalysis. Analyst do not need to read Hegel, Kant, or Nietzsche but should know what those thinkers were dealing with in the nature of the human subject. Analyst should know that when Freud worked on Anna O, he did not work as a physician but as a thinker who learned from Bernheim about the dual consciousness of the subject and from Hegel the dialectics of opposites.  

In the next part of this posting, I will try -as an amateur- to show how after the scholastic philosophers explored the existence of a mind in the human subject Western thinkers carried the ball further to show how that mind works. I will try to reach the point when it was time to reveal the presence of ‘unconscious’ aspect to all their revelations.