The Next Step
Before the Last.
I was intending to
write a post on the narcissistic base of patriotism. The main notion is that we
naturally react negatively to all kinds of narcissism. With narcissistic patriotism
we seldom react so negatively, as if patriotism regarding one’s country is
natural and unquestionable. However, narcissism it the core of any identification
of which nationality is a prominent one. There are some aspects in identification
that could go astray when the subject of the identification is badly chosen. Psychoanalysis
could initiate that kind of stupid narcissism that stupid patriotism could also
create.
Reading Mark Solms’s
last book “THE HIDDEN SPRING” made me change my mind. I went [aF1] back to an old disliked if not even hated subject: “Is
old or even currant psychoanalysis still useful!!!!
Solms’s thesis
takes us to a new start for the understanding[aF2] of the Freudian thesis; no wonder he
was dedicated to revising the English (official) translation of “The
Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud”, which is due to
appear this year. Although this is a separate issue it raises many points: do
we know what to do to update our theory! Do we think that Freud’s text is a
‘passee’ issue and we should not be rereading it but concentrate on the more
recent works of the new generations of analysts instead? Is it a better
translation of Freud’s able to change anything regarding our present attempts
at modernizing psychoanalysis?
First, Solms’s
book is a very serious attempt at creating a new psychoanalysis. It is based on
recent findings regarding neuropsychology which astonishingly corroborates
Feud’s first publication (The Project, 1895). Solms’s neurological discovery
and integrating it in the whole context of Freud’s Text with the notion of giving
the Freudian text its veritable meaning. He is changing the idea that we have one psychoanalysis and
that it is the present psychoanalytic situation.
I think there are[aF3] an elephant and two monkeys in the room: Solm’s new
translation and what was behind that request. After almost seven decades, of The
Standard Edition: do we need verification and explanation of psychoanalysis?
The monkeys are: what is missing or flawed in psychoanalysis as it is thought
of now[aF4] and required revising? The second monkey is: are we
really going to reread Freud to qualify as psychoanalysts[aF5] ?
It is useful to make
a distinction between the SE. as the source of the psychoanalytic vocabulary
and as the psychoanalytic grammar. Something
we should underline; although the SE remained the undeniable index of Freud’s
work and translation, the European translations of the body or the works of
Freud corrected the foundational mistakes in the English Edition. I will
get to that later but for now I want to address this issue: what we have been
practicing till now in the English-Speaking world was not totally the real
Freudian psychoanalysis. Most the established analysts will reject this idea
vehemently, however, there are very important woks about this point in English (Laplanche,
Bettelheim, which brought to the attention of the “Anglo” analysts the
distortions in the SE.
The notions I will mention (to follow) will be
just unmasking the second monkey in the room. Psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis as
a verb and not nouns or adjectives. As an example: dealing with Trieb as
a thing (instinct). and not as a pressure put on the mind to make the subject
act turns psychoanalysis into a theory of functions not an act of analyzing structure.
The evolution of Freud’s work attest to the progressing unmasking of the human
subject.
If all that is gibberish
have the freedom to say I like psychoanalysis as is or I will go to a new
notion of psychoanalyzing.
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