Psychoanalysis: A Different Viewpoint

 

The position I suggest taking from psychoanalysis is that it is not a discovery of something about human nature but a discovery of human nature itself. It is not wrong to say that despite centuries of philosophical endeavors which resulted in very remarkable understandings of our minds and many aspects of ourselves, we still did not work out how we become who we are and who “you became”. This is not a silly aggrandized remark by a devoted young analyst. As my work and readings extended beyond psychoanalysis as a clinical endeavor, it became clearer to me that if it was not for the contribution psychoanalysis has made to the humanities and the human sciences, we would not have passed the stage of noticing, describing to be able to enter the phase of interpreting and explaining the human subject, in us.  What I mean is that psychoanalysis came at a point in time [the Nineteen Century] when all the efforts of the thinkers and philosophers before had led to novel points of view regarding human nature, but they only led to the widening of the ‘vista’ of the world of humanness. Psychoanalysis came about at a slightly later time but got the attention of most thinkers and philosophers for reasons that took a full century to gather.

The philosopher of modern times suggests that certainty is relative and just a temporary detail that requires a second look. despite that ‘uncertainty’ has become a cornerstone in philosophy it never even occurred to anyone before Hegel and Marks that we humans are always engaged in a silent process of dialectical thinking that we are unaware of. Uncertainty begot dialectics which proved to be the subject of thinking because dialectics is ‘thinking itself’.  Without a natural dialectical response to the world, we would have lived in a world of dogma, which sometimes we find ourselves struggling with.

Having reached the stage of post-psychoanalysis as an effective psychotherapy we psychoanalysts need to minimize its property of psychotherapy because psychological ‘facts’ have undergone basic changes since the birth of psychoanalysis as therapy. After abandoning hypnotism, the issue of recovering the past to correct it has been adopted from psychoanalysis without any questions asked. What I mean is that we -psychoanalyst-should by now- minimize the property of psychotherapy in psychoanalysis, because psychological ‘facts’ have undergone basic changes after the birth of psychoanalysis. This change is in the best interest of the ‘psychoanalysts’ because hence they can make all the necessary and demanding changes in the field of psychotherapy, and free it from the old and redundant ritualistic notions of a profession. Psychoanalysis is not a profession, though it started as such, and continued as so, and now it needs a serious and more significant revision.  Psychoanalysis is an issue of epistemology (Knowing)more than an item in some mental health specializations.

                        ……………….

It is normal and natural to be what we ‘know’ of who we are, and what we are not. Even when some thinkers recognized that we are not what we think of ourselves, or what others think of us, we still define ourselves as entities that we are familiar with, or not fully as needed. In better words, we are more than one entity, because we are comprised of entities, nevertheless. Therefore, if we exhibited the possibility of being the vessel of contradictions, those contradictions remain within the conflict between opposites within the one entity that is ‘I am’. This argument in such an issue is: how come we are always a duality giving birth to dualities and we are never a final entity? We are always the outcome of a dialectical duality (sometimes an excellent duality and in other times not of so good duality).

Hegel’s dialectics looked at human nature as a duality, and not composed of dualities. It is in our human nature that we deal with dualities and seldom that we accept non-equivocal issues. The issue of dialectics as the ‘honest’ state of being got a major push from what the existentialists of the twentieth century unraveled. The most intriguing issue in this regard was an insignificant revelation by an almost charlatan (Mesmer). He discovered an aspect of ‘the subject’ that took the world of psychopathology by storm: Hypnotism. The duality of consciousness opened a window on psychiatry that Freud made use of and expanded to become fundamental to any exploration of new or renewed problems of the sort. The duality of conscious\unconscious was not regarding psychopathology alone but regarding the human subject in all his states.

Psychoanalysis was the most important proper start to studying and learning about the human subject with openness to the prospect of his duality. It started with the basic condition that makes the human different from all other living entities. Man can only be in one of the two fundamental components of his being: conscious or unconscious. The degrees in-between those two poles do not change their specificity. The in-between states still relate to that polarity of knowing (conscious) or not knowing (unconscious) because consciousness is the seat of knowledge despite the possibility of knowing things badly. The main issue to care about in this argument is what knowing or unknowing does to consciousness as a state of being. Knowing and unknowing give birth to the knower, i.e., the subject. Thus, we are doomed to be, but it is up to the subject in us to choose to deal with what he should be like. All those issues pertained to philosophy and some of its derivatives (aesthetics, ethics, etc.).

Freud turned all the tables upside down. We are not made to be what we are because, by the time we could ask questions about who and what we are, we would have been already made of what we are by others. He underlined the significance of the impact of the ‘other’ in shaping our self-image since our childhood when we relied on the adult other to become conscious of who we are. Thus, we are “an alienation” by need and by force and the existentialists were correct in bringing to attention alienation and our ‘false’ identities.

At this point, we should appreciate Freud and psychoanalysis not as a profession of psychotherapy, but as uncovering psychopathology as an extreme condition of human alienation (human is neither what he wanted to be nor what we have become; false entities). If you go to Freud’s ordinary clinical work, you see that his patients were not what they were but were unsuccessful in being something else. The Rat Man was a sadist who failed to become ‘his self”. My patient Mark was over strict with his daughter not because he always said ‘it is good for her future but because his own feelings regarding women’s sexuality were affected by a few childhood experiences that scare him from His-Self. The main discovery of psychoanalysis is this unvisited dilemma: We got to be ourselves (but that would not agree with another self-imposed self. I am not arguing the moral issue in that regard; I am arguing just the structural dilemmas between what and why in our-selves. Is psychological sickness (psychoneurosis) a pathology or a separate condition of self-deception?

Hegel with his dialectics revealed-not only that the mind is not only a duality- but its function is to create its antithesis to properly deal with thought. Husserl was the pioneer of Freudianism even before Freudianism was coined.  Early existentialists regarded the falsity of existence as a state of being that demands demystification. Freud did that but without declaring his secret intention. Freud the clinician was a big disappointment. His clinical work is trivial in comparison to his work on the psychodynamics of the subject. Not only in the volume of publication but in the essence of teaching us how to do psychoanalysis. His first books were Dreams, Slips of the Tongue, Jokes, Sexuality, and other topics that relate to general psychological issues (Civilisation, Moses, etc.). The works on clinical issues (papers on technique) are great guides in what we should avoid doing, which in the hands of good clinicians are a treasure trough. Freud is better called the first person who knew what not to do in psychoanalysis: not to look for the cause of the psychological condition with the patient, but to find out how it happened. Doing that would reveal the dialectics of psychoneurosis, symptoms as alienation of real causes, and the relationship between causes and effects in psychoneuroses is distorted. Freud has a book that is least recognized “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” in which he tackles the causation of anxiety in the way I am describing here. It did not meet the acceptance of psychoanalysts for the same reason I am underlining.          To end this note that got too long I would conclude by saying that psychoanalysis has affected both our concept of the human subject indirectly and in the core. It also showed that understanding the human subject happens when we understand how and what we approach that understanding.

The change that psychoanalysis introduced to humanity is that the subject has the keys to all the vaults of being, and being is not something to take for granted but is the issue that has in its nature the answers we need.

 

 

The position I suggest taking from psychoanalysis is that it is not a discovery of something about human nature but a discovery of human nature itself. It is not wrong to say that despite centuries of philosophical endeavors, which resulted in very remarkable understandings of our minds and how it works and many aspects of ourselves, but remained an entity that could not explain its ‘self’, which proved to be a complex issue to tackle without analysis. I can say with reasonable confidence that the first breakthrough happened in 1900 when Freud came up with his work on dreams. The reason is that there was no one before him who thought of understanding a human phenomenon that could teach us something about ourselves as the cloud teaches us something about rain.  This is not a silly aggrandized remark by a devoted young analyst. It is a special moment in the history of mankind: we can use what we are to understand who we are.

As my work and readings expanded beyond psychoanalysis as a clinical endeavor, it became clearer to me that if it was not for the contribution of psychoanalysis- which Freud realized and actualized- we would not have passed the stage of noticing, describing, and speculating and eventually became able to enter the phase of interpreting and explaining the human subject, that is us.  What I mean is that psychoanalysis came at a point in time [the Nineteen Century] when all the efforts of the thinkers and philosophers before him had led to novel points of view regarding human nature, but they only led to the widening of the ‘vista’ of the world of humanness. Psychoanalysis came about at a slightly later time but got the attention of most thinkers and philosophers with a genuinely new perspective. The human subject hid himself from himself, therefore we could not understand what we are for reasons that took a full century to gather. The discoverer was the hiding agent; thus, a very ingenious way had to be found.

Strangely enough, almost a charlatan (Mesmer) found out that people can lose control over their mental faculties (hypnotized) and reveal things that pertain to them which would not allow them to slip from their mental control. Hypnotism revealed the gap from which a man like Feud could use it in a different and useful way. The rest of the story is known but its implications were not properly understood till Freud tried and removed the mystic about it. When he did it became clear to him that what is involved in the mystic of psychoneuroses is evident but needs reinterpretation to be dealt with. Thus, Freud conceived and developed free association to as means to go through resistance to admit something of negative content. If we accept this quasi-characterization, we could say that Freud was the first to notice that the repressed needed a suitable unrepressed material to link with it, thus it could be approached. Thus, psychoanalysis was about to be initiated: a suitable psychical element that could accommodate the repressed psychological phenomenon and is conscious enough to be managed. Freud started his endeavor by exploring psychical phenomena that could accommodate the “unconscious” and allow dealing with it. Let us see what this man worked on first: Dreams (1900), Parapraxes (1901), Jokes1905, Infantile Sexuality (1905).

Freud’s clinical work throughout his whole his life was insignificant and shows a lack of interest and little concern about the outcome. However, his remarks on his work outline the proper practice of analysis and somehow touched upon most of the main concerns that we, practitioners, faced and still face both as therapists and supervisors. He was the prophet who sinned most. This way-if do what said and not what he did we will still be psychoanalysts. The point is that psychoanalysis has shown and proved that psychical matters are always attached to other things: a dream has a meaning, a slip of the tong has double meanings, a symptom tells a story, consciousness contains unconscious issues, psychical life is in continuous dynamic changes and could be very good in telling us about other things. In psychoanalytic terms, in any human product, there is something about that human tells about the human subject who initiated it.

After abandoning hypnotism and its usefulness in dealing with some primitive hysterical disorders, the issue of recovering the past to correct it has been adopted by psychoanalysis without any questions asked. What I mean is that we -psychoanalyst-should by now- minimize the property of psychotherapy in psychoanalysis, because psychological ‘facts’ have undergone basic changes that we should not stop at recovering and reorganizing the past in those patients’ lives. This understanding of the work of psychoanalysis is necessary and is in the best interest of ‘psychoanalysts. We must go beyond the discoveries of hypnotism- which we still hang on to indirectly (recover the repressed). If we accept that the secret formula of psychoanalysis is sold now in comic books we can make all the necessary and demanding changes in the field of psychotherapy, free it from the old and redundant ritualistic notions of the early profession, and do what ‘reconstruction’ in psychotherapy requires. Psychoanalysis is not a profession, though it started as such, and continued as so, but it needs a serious and more significant revision.  Psychoanalysis is an issue of epistemology (Knowing)more and better than an item in some mental health specializations.

                        ……………….

It is true and expected from us as humans to be what we ‘know’ of who we are, and what we are not so be authentic. Even when some thinkers recognized that we are not what we think of ourselves, or what others think of us, we still define ourselves as entities that we are familiar with, even if not fully as needed. In better words, we are more than one entity, because we are comprised of entities that pertain to the situation (fathers, sons, good, accomplished, etc.). Therefore, even when we show that we are entities of contradictions we remain within the conflict between opposites within the one entity that is ‘I am’.

This argument in such an issue is: how come we are always a duality giving birth to dualities and we are never a final entity? We are always the outcome of dialectical dualities (sometimes an excellent duality and in other times not of so good duality).

Hegel’s dialectics considered human nature a duality, and not composed of dualities. He outlined our human nature as a duality looking for a settlement. We create or found them out and we seldom accept non-equivocal issues. The issue of dialectics as the ‘honest’ state of being got a major push from what the existentialists of the twentieth century unraveled. We are always in search of a solution to our dialectical existence. We are never one but one who searches his an alter one…I am good because I am not bad.  The most intriguing issue in this regard was an insignificant revelation by an almost charlatan (Mesmer). He discovered an aspect of ‘the subject’ that took the world of psychopathology by storm: Hypnotism. The duality of consciousness opened a window on psychiatry that Freud made use of and expanded to become fundamental of any exploration of new or renewed problems of the sort. The duality of conscious\unconscious was not regarding psychopathology alone but regarding the human subject in all his states.

Psychoanalysis was the most important proper start to studying and learning about the human subject with openness to the prospect of his duality. It started with the basic condition that makes the human different from all other living entities. Man can only be in one of the two fundamental components of his being: conscious or unconscious. The degrees in-between those two poles do not change their specificity. The in-between states still relate to that polarity of knowing (conscious) or not knowing (unconscious) because consciousness is the seat of knowledge despite the possibility of knowing things badly. The main issue to care about in this argument is what knowing or unknowing does to consciousness as a state of being. Knowing and unknowing give birth to the knower, i.e., the subject. Thus, we are doomed to be, but it is up to the subject in us to choose to deal with what he should be like. All those issues pertained to philosophy and some of its derivatives (aesthetics, ethics, etc.).

Freud turned all the tables upside down. We are not made to be what we are because, by the time we could ask questions about who and what we are, we would have been already made of what we are by others. He underlined the significance of the impact of the ‘other’ in shaping our self-image since our childhood when we relied on the adult other to become conscious of who we are. Thus, we are “an alienation” by need and by force and the existentialists were correct in bringing to attention alienation and our ‘false’ identities.

At this point, we should appreciate Freud and psychoanalysis not as a profession of psychotherapy, but as uncovering psychopathology as an extreme condition of human alienation (human is neither what he wanted to be nor what we have become; false entities). If you go to Freud’s ordinary clinical work, you see that his patients were not what they were but were unsuccessful in being something else. The Rat Man was a sadist who failed to become ‘his self”. My patient Mark was over strict with his daughter not because he always said ‘it is good for her future but because his own feelings regarding women’s sexuality were affected by a few childhood experiences that scare him from His-Self. The main discovery of psychoanalysis is this unvisited dilemma: We got to be ourselves (but that would not agree with another self-imposed self. I am not arguing the moral issue in that regard; I am arguing just the structural dilemmas between what and why in our-selves. Is psychological sickness (psychoneurosis) a pathology or a separate condition of self-deception?

Hegel with his dialectics revealed-not only that the mind is not only a duality- but its function is to create its antithesis to properly deal with thought. Husserl was the pioneer of Freudianism even before Freudianism was coined.  Early existentialists regarded the falsity of existence as a state of being that demands demystification. Freud did that but without declaring his secret intention. Freud the clinician was a big disappointment. His clinical work is trivial in comparison to his work on the psychodynamics of the subject. Not only in the volume of publication but in the essence of teaching us how to do psychoanalysis. His first books were Dreams, Slips of the Tongue, Jokes, Sexuality, and other topics that relate to general psychological issues (Civilisation, Moses, etc.). The works on clinical issues (papers on technique) are great guides in what we should avoid doing, which in the hands of good clinicians are a treasure trough. Freud is better called the first person who knew what not to do in psychoanalysis: not to look for the cause of the psychological condition with the patient, but to find out how it happened. Doing that would reveal the dialectics of psychoneurosis, symptoms as alienation of real causes, and the relationship between causes and effects in psychoneuroses is distorted. Freud has a book that is least recognized “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” in which he tackles the causation of anxiety in the way I am describing here. It did not meet the acceptance of psychoanalysts for the same reason I am underlining.  To end this note that got too long I would conclude by saying that psychoanalysis has affected both our concept of the human subject indirectly and in the core. It also showed that understanding the human subject happens but understanding the subject changes by understanding and requires more work. This is what good analysis does to the patient (the subject), to continue understanding because that is psychical helth as the understanding of humanity is not a job to be done, it is a job to continue. What is obvious in the American conception of themselves they are what they are and that is already achieved. 

The change that psychoanalysis introduced to humanity is that the subject has the keys to all the vaults of being, and being is not something to take for granted but is the issue that has in its nature the answers we need. As in individual psychoanalysis, the process of analytic work ends when the subject realizes that he can and should continue what he went through with his analyst. Psychoanalysis is the gift that we have and came from realizing that knowing engenders the facility for further knowledge because knowing changes the subject and the process continues.  Psychoanalysis introduced us to what is dormant in us and the need to not stop at a fixed definition of ourselves.