The Unyielding Psychoanalysts'

Resistance to Change and its Advantages

 

I firmly believe that there is no psychoanalyst who would not admit that psychoanalysis is in bad shape, even if he would not agree on whether it is its condition as a profession or in its premises and theory (or both). Putting this in a different perspective: psychoanalysis is not what it was before, whether for people, thinkers, patients, practitioners, or aspiring young people. They will differ in their views about what to do with it; revise it, replace it, consider it past its competency to still exists, or analysts are not as competent as the old generations, and we should ameliorate its training. The variations and degrees of disagreements among present-day analysts- in regard to the solution for this quandary is unique in one implicit way. Any suggestion of making genuine and drastic changes in the way training takes place is opposed by the faculty in charge of training or learning, graduating, or has the authority to proffer its professional affiliation based on those changes. Any suggestion of changing the isolation of psychoanalysis and the absence of links between it and other fields of knowledge; any suggestion of making changes in those aspects is resisted implicitly and explicitly too. Analysts want to defend the past and not look to the future.

Being an old analyst who witnessed several major breakdowns in the analytic field, which happened after Adler\Freud and Freud\Young conflicts, I can say that psychoanalysis was never an agreed upon subject: Klein\Anna Freud, Lacan\ French society, Ego\object relations, Latin\Anglo, West\ East and more and still happening out of my present limited engagements. Therefore, it is sensible to say that psychoanalysis is not a tight field of knowledge; it is only a tight field of personal identities. There are psychoanalysts but there no real psychoanalysis.

Does psychoanalysis need to change and become the ‘main issue’ instead of the psychoanalysts with their vague identities? Not really. We are twelve thousand analysts in the entire world. But the resistance to change in the field relates to both issues: analysts do not want psychoanalysis to change as they also resist changing the way they are trained and acquired their cherished title of Psychoanalyst. The resistance to change by ending the IPA professional domination and moving psychoanalysis to academia will require ending the old fashion training of psychoanalysts in poorly supervised institutes.  It will also demand learning new kinds of theoretical fields and exposure to the richness of other fields of the humanities, i.e., taking psychoanalysis seriously, and also taking the discoveries in the other fields in the humanities equally seriously. Put in a clearer way; there is no place for apprenticeship in academic psychoanalysis because if psychoanalysis is not a new branch of the humanities it is a branch of one of the humanities that has more than one applied reach. Analysts resist change because of the ease with which they are trained now. The academic milieu put us in supervised training for a long time. It declares the end of the apprenticeship morality. The issue here is not the length of time required for a good psychoanalyst to become, but the sense that who and what you will be your making as we did with our basic degrees. This is making psychoanalysis more of a respectable academic subject not a side issue in an apprenticeship. We old-fashioned analysts find it difficult or self-injurious to admit the less desirable training we got. Analysts of today would resist the end of apprenticeship and the beginning of an academic psychoanalytic framework for both their sense of independence and false sense of superiority.

The Advantage of Resisting Change:

The resistance to giving up the old-fashioned psychoanalysis has its positive aspect. Psychoanalysis has changed just enough in some parts of the world (USA for example) to still call itself psychoanalysis, based on the classical psychoanalytic model. Although the changes that are made- once in a while- were happening quietly, they were cosmetic changes to allow giving an old system a new appearance. The new trend now is to move training centers that are still IPA to universities, and some are even giving that same training a university degree (name). This is not more than housing training at universities and just changing the ZIP CODE of IPA institute. The system of self-analysis, studying certain theoretical landmarks and supervision of few cases did not enable questioning the apprenticeship concept of learning. The result would be graduating a candidate when he satisfies one or more training analysts’ expectations, and not when he fulfils leanings judged by academic standers and by academicians who have their standers of acquiring objective knowledge.   

The resistance to the demand of progress and insisting on not giving up the old psychoanalysis or at least its training system will in the end go two ways. The end of any psychoanalysis of IPA nature due to its basic and obvious deficiencies, then starting to build a new academic psychoanalysis that is modeled differently (learn, understand, apply, be assessed, and judged by equals). So, the unyielding psychoanalyst will make us get rid of the IPA poor psychoanalysis and keep our minds open to the new human science of psychoanalysis. Th inevitable has to happen and psychoanalysis will find its way to the academic human sciences, will link with several other human sciences like psychology and sociology, and progress to reach the point that it will re-approach psychotherapy from a different point of view.

Academics in the humanities will introduce and integrate psychoanalysis in their programs when and if the are sure the tripartite system of training is disregarded. Psychoanalysis will gradually be accepted as a viable knowledge. Thus, the unrelenting psychoanalysts will help uproot the old-fashioned psychoanalysis and cause it to be ignored.  However, this progress will be founded on to basis:

A.   Reaching out or pulling in the suitable sources of knowledge regarding child development and similar and related topics from other branches of the humanities. Language and psychical functions will be part of the novelty in learning psychoanalysis.

B.    

 Psychopathology of the new fields of studies, which gives life to some neglected or misunderstood phenomenon like psychosomatics, will acquire new identities and the input of the Other (parents, social life, etc.) will be meaningful.

C.   Transference and narcissism will gain new their proper place in psychotherapy and a new system of psychopathology.

The advantage of the rigid and unexplainable insistence on keeping an already dead psychoanalysis is good for te future of psychoanalysis: weeding out the useless system and perspective allowing a new era to start.