A Psychoanalytic Quandary

Academia or not Academia

I am back to my blog because either I am misunderstood or misrepresented. 

    My files show that I introduced my view about training in psychoanalysis in mid-2018. I started carefully because Iwas. critical of my own training. As a training analyst I was also seeing the ineffectiveness of the IPA apprenticeship system of qualifying candidates to work independently. I was leaning more toward the academic model of learning but was convinced without doubt that psychoanalysis should not be. just part of a university program (like psychology or sociology) but has to be a program in its own right. At the same time, when the weaknesses of the apprenticeship model of training were on my mind a new issue started to catch the attention of the American Psychoanalytic Association: the issue was the training analyst. That issue took most of the attention in the psychoanalytic communities (in north America) and the issue of the quality of training took a back seat. The most interesting thing about which is of greater importance to occupy the center of attention was this: apprenticeship requires if not demands and depends on the concept of the trainer. Apprenticeship is founded on the function of the “master crafts man” who is at the end has to qualify, certify, and license the trainee. The issue of the training analysts is still a problem in psychoanalysis, when the real problem is apprenticeship itself, which demands the function of the trainer.

    My call for moving psychoanalysis and its requirement to academia was met with serious and hard rebuke. Only in the last eighteen months that the notion of moving analysis to academia has been accepted and now has advocates who a few months ago were against changing anything in the training of psychoanalysts. It is annoying that some of the old adversaries to idea of moving psychoanalysis to academia came out now to claimed being advocates of that opinion from the beginning. It is more annoying to assert that claim without having an idea of how it could be done. This is more than annoying (what??). The best of them did not come up with anything more than just moving the address from an IPA institute to the nearest agreeable university…just get anew postal code.

     No. I did not mean to ‘house’ psychoanalysis in the nearest buildings of academia: I meant change psychoanalysis from some bizarre kind of knowledge (I will argue that a little later). into an academic branch of knowledge: Do not move psychoanalysis to academia, move academia to psychoanalysis.

 Degradation of Psychoanalysis:

    If in learning LAW, you get it that not all are equal in front of the law it is better then not studying the laws that differentiate between people on other bases than their rights. Similarly, in psychoanalysis, if transference manifestations are ignored, interfered with as in the current trends of intersubjectivity or did not underline that transference is the material that will eventually be reconstructed to effect the desirable changes in the patient, you will be better off to avoid training in psychoanalysis and seek another modality of psychotherapy. Transference is a natural outcome phenomenon of the neutrality of the psychoanalyst.  Therefore, the lack of ability to find in the patient’s free speech (not free association) the early features of the formation of his intrapsychic structures of his psychopathology, means that there is no psychoanalytic work that exists in that case. Transference is the material of psychoanalyzing and restructuring which are the basis of therapeutic work.

    A new development in the developing psychoanalysis in North America is called intersubjectivity. It is gaining. favored pace among some analysts. It is defined as giving the subjective lives of both analysts and analysands an equal place to participate in the process of psychotherapy. From whatever I have read and concluded from the writings of those analysts they missed the point in the logic of the neutrality of the analyst. The analyst should be neutral to provide the same screen to all patients to project their own issues. Intersubjectivity encouraging the analyst to engage the patient into their own intrapsychic issues. It does not take long for the two to enter a very unproductive situation. Moreover, letting the patient in on the analyst own issues is an undesirable imposition on the patient’s relationship with ‘his’ analyst. Strictly speaking, the patients come to talk about themselves not anyone else not to listen to the analyst’s chagrins. In a recently published clinical paper the analyst was confronted by the patient asking at a point: “what about me”.

    The idea of moving analysis to academia is now accepted in Europe and probably in other places in the world. However, what I know about its acceptance in Europe is limited and could not generalize from it a unified approach to examining the details of the suggestion. Nonetheless, logically I think that academia will provide a better environment for psychoanalysis because of an obvious reason: psychoanalysis itself has evolved beyond the limited boundaries of its original field of competence like psychotherapy of neurotics, and ineffective attempts at dealing with a wider range of psychopathology. In fact, and interest, the widening scope of psychoanalysis came from the academic description and formulations of psychoanalytic ideas and hypothetical constructions. The notions of psychosomatics, psychoses, and personality disorders are academic reformulations based on core psychoanalytic concepts like libido and cathexes. In better terms academia did to psychoanalysis more than what it gained from it.

Academia and Proper Psychoanalysis:

As a psychoanalyst my work is to find within the patient (or the subject matter of my work) something that is implied within what is consciously expressed. If I stick to psychopathology and psychotherapy, I might get to the point more clearly.

    The patient talks about issues that are related to HIS self. Within what he says I hear what was not said but the patient is unconscious of them and unconscious that he said them withing his normal speech. The unconscious as is the case relates to older order of things or his intrapsychic entity. The next part of my job is to be able to understand that unconscious entity. That comes from the way the patient treats me (transference) and the verbal way he expresses himself (his linguistic peculiarities). The significance of paying attention to this aspect of free speech is that each patient uses LANGUAGE in a way that could reveal when and what happened in his childhood to contribute to his intrapsychic entity. Language is the best but also the only key to understanding the unconscious. I mean here by language the cognitive and metal link between humans. I Give an example of that from a piece of Freuds. In Volume 10 of the S.E. and on page 200, Freud interprets a dream by his famous patient the Rat man. The image of the dream: SAYS”: I would marry her for her money not for her ‘beaux yeux”.

    We need to learn the intricacies of language. This is not available in the IPA system of training and requires the expertise of a specialized academic.

    The unconscious material is always or could always be noticed in the patient’s usage of metaphorical and metonymical expressions of ideas. The most important and neglected aspect in learning psychoanalysis is that we do not learn language from our parents or adults; we learn from them how to use it to express ourselves. We learn from our caretakers how to express ourselves and then get to develop our own way of talking. It is quite easy to understand that point by acknowledging that we usually talk like one or more of our care takers. The significance of this observation is in revealing the importance of the unconscious linguistic modes we learn to say things we are unconscious of. This too, is not available in the IPA system of training and requires the expertise of a specialized academic.

    We come then to learning about childhood where the origins of the linguistic phenomena start. It is possible to give transference a verbal connotation (the patient treats me as a not accepting father, or as demanding mother, etc. This is usually where countertransference seeps in with little attention from the analysts. However, what I want to underline at this point is the good and very good conception of childhood to be able to see what transference brings to the analysis. Learning about childhood in psychoanalysis is different in important ways from just knowing simple facts as when toilet training should begin. What we need to learn about childhood in learning psychoanalysis, and the complexities of each stage in development. What is meant is that looking at several things that happen together at a certain period of growing up and not isolated features that appear at the same age. For instance, Eric t Erikson’s child psychology combines the biological demands, the structuring of identity, the object relationship, the mechanism of defense, in a stage that he gives a specific significance to, like the anal phase. Learning child psychology this way put the transference relationship with analyst in a context…in a meaningful psychoanalytic perspective. THAT is not available in the IPA system of training. We need to learn how to deduce from the style of speech the patient uses the point of fixation, the kind of fusion between the conscious and the unconscious to help the patient to put himself together. All that has to be done by academics in academia. This needs a few years of full-time dedication to learning. We should by now have realized that psychoanalysis is not just what therapsits learn in their isnstitutes.