Analysis of the Subject and Analytic Material:

 

What ‘psychoanalyzing’ means is very important, yet it is neglected, and its literature is relatively not impressive. The immediate response to this query is that we analyze the patient’s free association with the assumption that ‘free’ associating reveals the unconscious. This basic assumption needs to be reviewed because created an attitude that we analyze the human subject in our patient when we actually try to get to the subject through his verbal and mental expressions and presentations. In other words, in effect we analyze the patient’s psychoanalytic material (association, memories, slips of the tongue, dreams, etc.) and not the subject himself. Then comes the question:  what else is the subject but his ‘psychoanalytic naterial’!!

A vignette might help:

A new female patient noticed that that that in coming up the elevator to her session there was a nice-looking woman who usually comes  down from my floor. She just mentioned that casually twice or three times. After few weeks she noticed that woman is not doing that anymore. In a casual way she mentioned that and made the comment that she must have finished her treatment. As she was familiar with the process she did not expect a response from me about her observations.

After a while she noticed the pretty woman coming down the elevator again. She made several remarks and did not get a response from me. The issue became a persistent issue in her analysis. As I was not responding to her disguised curiosity she expressed her thoughts that there must be some truth to her suspicion that there is something personal in the matter. After another period of agonizing curiosity about that woman and thoughts about jealousies she suffered from in different events in her life, I responded by saying that the presence of that woman in her association made her think and talk about aspects in her life that she did not tell me about before. She dropped silent for a while and then gave some confused memories about a childhood family situation in which her mother was unhappy and ended with her parents’ divorce.

Her parents’ divorce and the surrounding events was disclosed in my assessment interview and was not new material. My response to the repeated mentioning of that divorce was basically that there is some link between her thoughts regarding a personal relationship with that woman and the events that led to her parents’ divorce.  I followed that with saying that she is now talking about other people and not only her complaints. The outcome was a fundamental change[aF1]  though in a very subtle way. She was more expressive as a patient talking to her analysts than just ‘reporting’ things to him about herself., Put it another way: she became a living subject taking about a lived life; instead of a patient reporting a neurotic existence to her Shrink.

The idea is that in psychoanalysis we analyze the patient, i.e., the subject that appears to us in his associations. However, we should always consider that what we hear has to be interpretable to the subject who said them. In a different way, the subject has to relate what we interpreted to his own associations. Most of the time (in my experience) analysts depend on the way the theory of psychoanalysis understands the associations[aF2] . This kind of interpretation is not therapeutic interpretations because it misses the obvious fact that the patient is going to take it back to his own ‘theory’ of it.

If we remain on the level of interpreting the patient association we would not be doing psychoanalysis because we aim at restructuring the intrapsychic condition of the patient. We should be keeping that in mind when we do in interpreting because what we interpret has to be re-constructed. Therefore, the process of reconstruction has to be clear in the “consciousness’ of the subject. In other words, the associations are our windows to the nature of the subject’s intrapsychic structure.

This patient was not telling me what she thought of me as a professional; instead, she created a painful scene from her life that was not fully worked through. Transference is the return of the repressed but with the implicit meaning that it is in a ‘lived moment in the analysis. Analysis of the patient’s childhood experience is not the analysis of remembering it. Analyzing a remembered experience is very different from analyzing a transference event. Analyzing the patient’s memory, is not as analyzing the patient himself. Solms’s subject is a livening human event and not a representation of a subject.

 Interpretation as a Step Toward Reconstruction[aF3] :

The most important thing in our continuous questioning of psychoanalysis is missing the difference between A. Theory and Practice, B. Learning and training.

Theory and Practice:

Psychoanalysis began as a practice looking for a theory. This is the reason we are very much lost when it comes to the theory of psychoanalysis. I will dare we say it: We do not have a theory of psychoanalysis because we refrained from recognizing or realizing that “psychoanalyzing” is endeavored to discover the subject, and every subject is a theory in his own right. Thus, a theory of psychoanalysis should be a theory of the subject (See Solms). The practice of psychoanalysis is a different issue: it is the way we listen to patients giving us a picture of their intrapsychic dynamics and the way make them have a look on the way they are psychological structured with some help from us to add to their effort to change themselves. This is the work on -interpretation-reconstruction (base on the discovered subject). 

 

Learning and training is more of a political issue than I naively though thout at the beginning. So!!!!!!!

---

 [aF1]

 [aF2]

 [aF3]