Idealization and Psychoanalysis

The Underlying Basis of Our Bewilderment

            Are we bewildered! Yes, we are. The proof to that is lacking a textbook (s) on psychoanalysis. No profession could teach and train its new generations without a textbook (s) to make those youngsters pay their attention to the subject matter of their profession and not to the individuals involved-in their apprenticeship and training- whether they and their teachers, their analysts, or their patients. You cannot teach and train a physician without textbooks in the branches of medicine he uses (anatomy, physiology, etc. etc.). Textbooks are the legitimate bridge between the profession and the professionals. There could be some distinguished practitioners and professors in the field, but they will not be idealized as the only source of knowledge if there is a solid textbook in the subject. Idealization is when a quality, characteristic, a feature, etc., stands for the real subject (human or material). To turn someone like Freud or your analyst into an idea, and idealize him, changes the relationship between the you and that someone into mini enslavement. Idealizing a person or any other thing blocks one from realizing that he is not relating to the idealized issue but to an idea about the issue, which is his creation.

I dare to say that we -psychoanalysts-do not have ordinary people in our professional life, but leaders and mentors who are only different in the degree of their idealization. This issue is a basic dilemma in psychoanalysis. Because we do not have textbooks in psychoanalysis, we only have degrees of idealizations of old or new people and think only in terms on pro-anti.

[I happened to know one book entitled ‘Textbook of Psychoanalysis’ edited by G.Gabbard . It is not a textbook that has chapters on psychoanalytic topics like interpreting and reconstructing, analytic diagnosis and deciding the frequency of sessions, or dealing with acting out some implicit meanings in interpretations, I mean issues of psychoanalytic work that we should be teaching and making sure candidates ‘learn the psychoanalysis’ we believe that we train them to practice. 

The ridiculous thing is that after more than a century of psychoanalysis we are still unable to have textbooks on the subject. The rare occasions I spoke to colleagues about that issue they were all against it and raised the flag of ‘free association (which does not exist in the first place) and regulating psychoanalysis which is against its basics. Some even commended the life of idealization instead. I personally believe that we defy, refuse, even sometimes resist giving up idealizing [ Dr. so-so] and direct our efforts instead to build textbooks based on his ideology (Bion, Laplanche, Bouvet, Arlow and Brenner, etc.). People like those are not the only source of Textbooks of psychoanalysis. In Europe, thinkers, philosophers, academicians, and people from other but related fields joined the psychoanalytic movement and made contributions that were of terrific value. After some inquiries and direct knowledge (I am still living in Canada) I found out that the psychoanalytic institutions were actively against none- trained psychoanalysts- participating or contributing to the psychoanalytic movement.  I think it is as it was a reciprocal stand from each other.

The nonexistence of textbooks of psychoanalysis says something about psychoanalysis itself. Psychoanalysis-in the Americas- has not taken its normal course of evolution to become an academic subject. In my opinion. It remained captive of being a psychotherapy and not a new and unique venture in exploring our nature (humans). The analytic psychotherapists are standing lately on very shaky grounds. Whatever they do to improve the reputation of psychotherapy will fail, because the issue is in psychoanalysis that gives psychotherapy its suture.