This is the Last Posting:

 

2. The Need for a New Psychoanalysis:

The issue I am dealing with in this last posting is my belief that the psychoanalysis that existed for more than a century, and I (we) witnessed its loss of identity has to be replaced by a new psychoanalysis and not by a modified version of the old one. Two reasons for my belief. Old psychoanalysis had a subject matter that does not exist anymore: the study of the human subject that happened to come from his psychotherapy. We are now aware of our nature and psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not effective as it used to be because we are treating ‘a new human subject’. If most of us do not know what I mean by a new patient (new human subject) they only need to consider the quality of the clinical papers that were published in the last twenty years and the criticism of the old system of Neutrality, Anonymity, Abstinence, interpretation\ Construction, and Transference. The second reason for considering a new psychoanalysis is that patients are dealing more with actual and real social and interpersonal issues than the intrapsychic issues of the faulty upbringings that were prevalent in the past.

However, I have to make a short calling to mind about some key features of the past to get to the new. Psychoanalysis started with answering the question Why (the symptom), followed a little later with the question How (repression and unconscious means to satisfy the blocked desire or wish), but did not touch the question of What (what is a symptom, what is an imaginary fulfillment in unconscious acts). Answering the What question required a radical understanding of what is unconscious?

The first two questions pertained to the function of therapy while the third question comes from the existence of language as the means to understanding to make understood. Obsessive-compulsive rituals used to ‘say’ something and imply another thing at the same act [those old symptomatic acts still exist but we are not able anymore to make the nature of the human subject the core of psychotherapy]. Although hypnosis was a very successful beginning it was Freud, and only Freud, who realized that the issue is not resistance to talking about certain matters and overcoming it by hypnosis, but it was the nature of those matters themselves: they were unconscious to the subject because of their nature and their structure (Why a bout of jealousy creates depression or loss of sexual desire). The unconscious is so because it is not amenable to the rules of regular thinking to enter consciousness. It also uses language differently. At that stage in the discovery psychoanalysis, it began a new journey: naming the states of unconsciousness and creating the ‘vocabulary’ of psychoanalysis, i.e., defense mechanism. The Why Question found the answer in the notion of the unconscious and got answers from the vocabulary that was improvised to explain the defenses, such as repression, splitting, projection, etc. But the question of what unconsciousness is was not touched or ‘most’ analysts were unable and uninterested in getting that specific answer. I believe that the disregard of addressing the issue of what is unconsciousness required a different kind of analysts who were not therapists- analysts (those analysts existed but were not permitted to call themselves psychoanalysts). Even the psychoanalysts who showed interest in explaining how splitting or identification happen in the process of the development were not met with enthusiasm (like Bion).  Psychoanalysis was captive of the definition of psychotherapy with a subtle resistance to showing any of its other characteristics.

After more than a century of psychoanalysis it is still neither a theory of the subject whom we treat nor a theory of psychopathology we deal with nor a theory of practice that we claim to be our claim of fame. I could be understood as condescending to psychoanalysis, but the fact is that I am blaming ourselves for the condition of psychoanalysis now.  The evidence is the diversities in hypothesizing in all those three areas without a campus for direction. All the attention in the official circles of training, which also the domain of improving and advancing psychoanalysis is directed to preserving the numbers high!! and   thought saving the practice from vanishing.  I am just mentioning the result of forgetting psychoanalysis and concentrating on psychotherapy and the institutes.

To my astonishment and disappointment when there was a faint response to moving psychoanalysis to academia. However, it was just the notion of changing the addresses of the institutes and their postal code. MOVING PSYCHOANALYSIS TO ACADEMIA IS GETTING RID OF THE TRIPARTITE SYSTEM OF TRAING IN INSTUITES AND INTRODUCING THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (STRUCTURAL PSYCHO ANALYSIS) AS ISSUES OF ACADEMIC STATUS THAT REQUIRE THE INPUT FROM THE DIFFERENT BRANCHES OF THE HUMANRIES.  

The notion of conscious\unconscious (the earliest and most basic tenet of psychoanalysis) demanded two things: A. learning the structure of the unconscious (what is unconsciousness?), B. how a type of ordinary thinking gets affected by repression. To give an example of those two ‘repressed questions that baffled psychoanalysts up till now I will discuss “The Interpretation of Dreams” as the earliest attempt at theorizing an aspect of practice.

Freud was torn between functionality that could provide help to psychotherapy and structuralism which is the means to understanding the human subject. Thus, he managed to get a thread of knowledge from his own dreams and the most well-known is the Irma Dream. From that dream he conjures up the idea that the ‘dream scene’ is a scene of A Wish Fulfilled. He followed that with his book on Parapraxes, which was also regarding the disguised wish fulfilled in a slip of the tongue. But the book on sexuality which follows Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality was the first jump to structuralism. He followed the main trend at that time to consider sexuality an instinct, but the made a distinction between the Aim of that instinct and its Object. The significance of that distinction was very intuitive in explaining the richness of sexual life of the human subject. We recognize in that dissection he made that the intrapsychic aspect of the subject (intrapsychic instinct has external objects but is more important is the structural duality of every psychological issue in the human subject.  

This duality indicates a gap that is occupied by our psychological life. Thus, psychoanalysis is the work that reaches that gap, examines, and makes changes based on knowledge of the nature of the gap, and reconstruct the analyzed material. This is far more essential, complicated, involved with several other issues the subject deals with and most of all no IPA training institute could manage with its apprenticeship concept conveying knowledge from one generation to the next.  

Then What?

The thing that requires re-examining and re-thinking: is there a future for contemporary psychoanalysis? Contemporary psychoanalysis is the outcome of a few transformations over the years that make it quite different from it even up till the mid-sixties of last century. It has all the features of an exhausted branch of knowledge in addition to all the features of an obsolete system of treatment of psychoneuroses. In the last two years I had the chance to review the training programs in two institutes: one her in the USA and one in a relatively new European institute. The structure of the traditional tripartite system of apprenticeship was preserved with insignificant additions and eliminations. But, But the obvious thing to notice is that the training body is the source of the strongest resistance to change which means that we psychoanalysts are obstacle in the way of catching up with change. There is something in the psychoanalytic movement that reminds me of the TALIBANS.