I have areason to publish this very long post as one unit instead of dividing it into two or three parts. 

Time For a New Psychoanalysis

 

 

A Puzzling Question

          Is ‘our’ psychoanalysis replaceable with a more advanced version, or that would only be one of the many resistances it had been exposed to over the years? Is psychoanalysis a “text’ that has to be kept as it was originally delivered? Or is it just a psychoanalytic text?

Psychoanalysis is a more than a century old discovery. Hundreds if not thousands of capable analysts and thinkers expanded and explained it. Those contributions changed it in different ways and degrees. Yet, it maintained its original status as the most comprehensive understanding of the human being. However, lately it looked as if it needs to be retired as a theory of the subject. It lost its chine, has nothing new to add, and as it was previously considered a profession of sorts, it no longer appeals to many. Resuscitating it is like resuscitating a well-preserved Mummy.

          I am taking the position that psychoanalysis is an essential constituent of any cultured society. Therefore, a new psychoanalysis has to be discovered, created, allowed to evolve, and take its place in the social fabric of society (not only the medical professions). This call could be considered blasphemous by present day psychoanalysts because they think of psychoanalysis as the Freudian thing, and that makes it unreplaceable.

I think psychoanalysis is a theory of the human subject, and the human subject of Freud’s psychoanalysis is a duality of intrapsychical structures that create and shape his interpersonal relationships. Thus, the work on those two aspects of psychological life and the kind of links between them will always be needed. A new psychoanalysis should maintain that fundamental conception of the human subject, but it should consider that the human subject’s interpersonal relations change with social evolution and his intrapsychical structure get affected differently with experience.

 

          A Debatable Answer:

          Most psychoanalysts -with the exception of in some parts of the world- accept and agree that psychoanalysis was and still is more than a finding in the area of interpersonal relations or is merely a psychotherapy procedure. As such, analysts are supposed to be the leading authority for the inevitable change and evolution of psychoanalysis, i.e., psychoanalysis is their domain of expertise, and they know- better than any others- what requires change and how. Regrettably, in those same parts of the world, psychoanalysts were the main resistant power to putting it in the stream of change and advancement toward wider and better horizons.

The birth and death of ‘the schools’ revealed- without doubt- that analysts directed their whole attention to the issue of its practice as therapy. They did not appreciate that the crisis is in psychoanalysis not in its practice. They strived to introduce quite controversial modifications to the basics of its traditional method of practice. The three recommended principles of practice (anonymity, neutrality, abstinence) are founded on the principle of analysis of transference precedes analysis of content, and this is basic in ‘psychoanalyzing’ no matter of theoretical choice or preference of the school. Instead of looking into the substance of the crisis, which was the deterioration of training and trainees they looked at practice, blaming it for the crises.

Within that inverted attitude there was an insidious threat to psychoanalysis as a whole: theory and practice. Analysts turned analysis- as it was practiced in the early eighties of last century- into final and absolute (obsolete) statements that are not supposed to be interpreted, developed, or of course challenged. Freudian psychoanalysis lost its value as human thought and acquired a revered quality that turned it into a subject to accept or reject, but not to understand and develop.

          The insidious destructive issue in this attitude is that on one hand considers psychoanalysis a sacred doctrine, at the same time subject to any frivolous modifications to understanding its fundamental premise.

Through the first hundred years of its life, psychoanalysis went through several changes and corrective internal processes but remained unquestionably ‘Freudian’, even after his death. However, in the seventies of last century, psychoanalysis faced several calls and trends of radical changes to its practice (the schools). The main and common feature in those changes was abandoning the intrapsychical core of psychoanalysis, which was the real Freudian discovery- and adopting theoretical stances of interrelationships. Thus, the work of interpretation and reconstruction disappeared and was replace with nothing tangible to relate practice to a theory.

There is something at this point that requires special attention from all of us, regardless of our differences. Freud’s thinking was influenced by German idealistic philosophy, which could have begun by Kant’s distinction between the innate (a priory) and the acquired (a posterior). Freud’s claim to fame is considering a distinction between the intrapsychical (the basics of the subject) and the interpersonal phenomena (his experiences) and the unconscious disconnection between causes and their repressed origin. His work on what is latent, and what comes out in a disguised and the unconscious way became the core of the psychoanalysis. The whole world of the psychological world got a jolt that never recovered from till now. We-whoever the we is- are not the same as the generation before that Freudian discovery. Freud alone changed the basic conception of the human subject as an object of observation and proved that the human subject is not only what we observe of him but a significant part of him is subject to a different way of observing and discovering.  

The ‘schools’ minimized the notion of the veiled part of the subject. Psychoanalysis, since it was characterized as an object oriented, or psychodynamically oriented branch of knowledge, has seized to be Freudian. Yet, the psychoanalytical organizations hanged on to the term psychoanalysis irrationally and for lack of own characterization of what they offered to replace it.

Despite the absence of the significant idea of the intrapsychic from contemporary psychoanalysis (and as a result the significance of the Unconscious) psychoanalysis is still an entity of sorts. In other terms, it is psychoanalytic blasphemy to call for a new or a different psychoanalysis. The reason is that analysts made themselves believe the different psychoanalyses they advocated are one and the same! and that they are all Freudian psychoanalysis. However, I strongly believe that there is only one psychoanalysis (Freud’s), but only if it is based on a clear distinction and understanding of the intrapsychic and the interpersonal nature of psychical phenomena, and that they are the constituents of whatever is psychological about the subject. Discovering the link and the separation between those two poles is the core, and only core, of psychoanalysis. Therefore, a plea to work on a new psychoanalysis is not blasphemous, or a call for abandoning ‘our psychoanalysis’.  It is a call to save psychoanalysis from abandoning its original function: discovering the human subject in the way his intrapsychical shapes his interpersonal life.

Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis:

Freud was an unhappy neurologist but was also not a fully inclined physician. His short experiences in medically related work led him to the new (then) field of hypnosis. His search and contact with Bernheim, Charcot, and Breuer directed him to something those three pioneers did not notice or understand: hysterical patients (later all patients) ‘have two psychological lives’ separated by psychical dynamics. One is what the patient is aware of and report to physician, and another he is not conscious of but it shows its existence under hypnosis. The way Freud looked at the outcome of hypnosis revealed the special quality of his special analytic mind.  The split of the psychical life of the patient is product of what caused the split not caused by something else outside the same the split psyche. Without being aware of what he has started by saying “the hysterics suffer from reminiscences” (1895), he created a new way of thinking about the human subject: he moved the cause of the neurosis from outside the symptoms to consider it the structure of the symptom and, the nature of the symptom: she is hysterical not because she is sick but because her symptoms are her way of trying to get cured!!. 

I am emphasizing this difference, and Freud’s gifted conception of the psyche, for another reason than the common adulation of Freud. The birth of psychoanalysis came out of a man’s mind who understood psychic phenomena differently from the ordinary physicians. The ordinary physician -even up till now- would like to find a cause for the symptom. The discovery of psychoanalysis came as a natural outcome of a proper and intuitive mind that changed the process of thinking from functionality to structuralism. Freud moved the accent from the cause and put it on the nature (structure) of the pathological phenomenon.

Could that happen again? Could Freud’s genius be repeated in a different time and circumstance? Yes, but only if the thinker (s) identify what the old discovery has been about, and what our current difficulties are about. Our psychoanalytic experience made clear that early childhood and parental dealings with infantile and childhood psychological life creates a psychical entity that is what we later call the subject, healthy or sick. What brings someone to an analyst’s office is unconscious ‘intrapsychical’ formation that is affecting his interpersonal relationships. In other terms, if contemporary analysts listen and work with the unconscious elements that Freud’s psychoanalysis bring to focus new discoveries and understanding will rejuvenate a dying psychoanalysis.

New Psychoanalysis: Need and Possibilities.

The need for a new psychoanalysis comes from two sources; ‘our’ psychoanalysis of today is stagnant and is not offering anything substantially important (or even interesting) that would justify-anymore- its presence in our culture. This-in itself- is not a good reason to dismiss it before making some effort to revive it or renew it. But because psychoanalysis is a theory of the human-subject and its discoveries have changed us everywhere in the world [the Oedipus complex is a term that is as common in society as Starbucks]- it should continue changing and be updated. Moreover, psychoanalysis is not anymore a theory limited to psychotherapy or a specialty in other branches of science. Psychoanalysis is now like medicine, law, ethics, and many other necessities of our social life. Therefore, psychoanalysis as it is still promoted by the psychoanalytic associations -local or international- is useless and edging toward being redundancy.

The need for a new psychoanalysis comes from the necessity of having a theory of the human subject that replaces the old one. A theory of the subject could also have useful side-applications like psychotherapy without which there will be fables about the main concerns of humans. A main issue in that regard is the way psychoanalysts could replace the old theory with a new one without causing psychoanalysis to be lost in the process!

The first thirty years of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was influenced more by the clinical material and patients’ psychoneurotic conflicts. Both he and his disciples and coworkers were able to gradually step out of the clinic and put together a theory of the healthy subject, and to derive from their clinical practice general statements about the subject and place psychopathology in the context of a theory of the ‘normal’ subject. In other words, psychoanalysis was born in psychopathology, but it eventually found its subject matter: the subject whatever his condition is. Old psychoanalysis, having been originally derived from psychopathology, started, and remained attached to the notions of drives, resistance to certain drives, psychodynamics of conflicts, need for ‘revealing’ the defended against, correcting, and redressing and restoring defects. Thus, discovering a new psychoanalysis does not have to take the same course. We can go directly to its subject- matter, which is the coexistence of a duality of consciousness and unconsciousness. There are several possible venues to take in that regard, all emanate from the puzzle of the dual identity of the subject: being the knowing subject I, and the object of that knowledge Me. A new psychoanalysis will be regarding the coexistence of the duo of subject-object I, Me, and the duo the intrapsychic-interpersonal) and conscious-unconscious (interpersonal-intrapsychic).  

Conclusion:

Hundreds if not thousands of analysts have done analysis with patients for decades. They wrote about their findings and their personal views about those findings. They improvised special terminologies to convey their finding to their colleagues. In few years that terminology, that was meant to define psychical discoveries became discoveries in in its own right. Psychoanalysis expanded (gained more vocabulary) but did not progress (got more knowledge about those terms). For psychoanalysis to progress it has to do what Freud did: separate the intrapsychic from the interpersonal and study each independently. At the same time study their connections separately, to first consider what they reveal about the subject, second develop a theoretical conclusion about this link, third how they differentiate into conscious and conscious conditions. There will be a difference between todays psychoanalyst and Freud; we might rediscover what he has already discovered but understand them better.

Intuitively but also with his analytic mind he realized very early in his work that the relationships the child develops with his caretakers shape his biological and social and then his psychological identity [the innate Vs. the acquires again]. The formation of that identity happens before language registers them in consciousness and make them acquire a personal quality. The formation of the psychical identity of the subject happens outside the enfant’s (toddler’s, child) verbal ability to find its meaning. Moreover, most of time the caregiver, him or herself, does not have a clear (conscious)link between what they say and what they mean. This common state of affair confuses the child’s identity and the patient’s complaint and makes transference the central issue in analytic psychotherapy.

The main and most rich source of new starts for a more advanced psychoanalysis than the one Freudian Analysis has provided till now is the concept of the unconscious. Even though we all claim that we know what the unconscious is we cannot deny that that knowledge is influenced- in many ways- by the one psychoanalysis started with…. the repressed. However, the French school and some other European analytic centers (Dutch and Portuguese) were more inclined to approach the unconscious from the angle of language: language is the human facility that has the means to let meaning be present in what is stated without physically being there. The most particular about the unconscious is its link with the nature of language: we are a creature that could say two contradictory things at the same without even intending to do that. This is a complex subject and quite involved but to just to make it brief, I like to say that a new psychoanalysis has to deal with the complexity of consciousness\unconsciousness. After I was able to understand what I was hearing from my patients I was fascinated and puzzled by the nature of the vocabulary used: it normally conveys meaning but in patients (in normals too) the vocabulary carries another implicit meaning that is disguised in the firm of metaphor or metonymy, which is neither created intentionally or absent mindedly. The patients’ speech says things unconsciously in those two linguistic formations.

The dualities of conscious\unconscious, I\me, meaning\metaphor and metonymy, are very much related to another neurological duality of Broca/Wernicke areas in the brain. I am mentioning those dualities as an example of the issue in this posting: psychoanalysis as the exploration of the nature of the human subject has reached a point that it has to be renewed. Renewing psychoanalysis will come from psychoanalyst who through experience noticed characteristics of the subject that need exploring and making it leads us to a better and more advance understanding of ourselves.