Social Narcissism and Social Phenomena:

In the process of psychoanalysis both analyst and patient have to progress to when they will notice, in the associations, a fusion of wish and fantasy. A wish is a direct expression of the speaker, but the fantasies about the wish are referrals to the speaker. “I wanted to tell him off is different from I looked for ways to let him know how I feel". However, most of the time the speech of the patient does not show if he is aware of his wish or only capable of turning it into a fantasy that he could  act it out (or not capable of more than daydreaming that).The gradual appearance of that fusion in the patient's speech is the sign that the analytic work  has started. Gradually too, the analyst manages to distinguish between the patient talking to him or talking to the analyst about himself. Reaching that point is necessary for the act of interpretation to gain its therapeutic effect. [Within the limitations of my knowledge this issue is not always discussed as a theoretical issue, but is dealt with in in supervision].

Talking to express a subjective matter is different from talking about a subjective matter to inform about it. “I did not want to come to the session this afternoon is not the same as I was tempted to cancel my session. A wish expresses a sense of being: I wish I was there or I wish I am not here. This states the wish directly. But saying it is frustrating that I could not be there is talking about me the frustrated one and not of his wish. When the subject slips into being an object to talk about- even to himself- he is then in a state of narcissism. We should always keep in mind that narcissism is a problem in the relationship of the subject with his image (an object) as the case is in the original myth of Narcissus. The libido theory of narcissism is a fantasy about it (something called libido will explain things to us).

The sense of fulfillment or frustration of a wish instigates a process of fantasizing the wish. Thus, the wish and its phantasy constitute the typical duality of the narcissistic condition: I or me (my image) are fulfilled or frustrated. The core of the complexity of the narcissistic state lies in how the subject acquires his image (s). The infant gets his image from the way his mother (in particular) treats him. It takes few years and a good mother for the child to build his own identity and keep his image under his own  check and control. Mostly, the subject gets his image from others, thus the subject’s image, which is the basis of his identity, has a core of fallacy that has to be corrected by the subject over the years (or by a psychoanalyst for years). Living and believing in the reality of the acquired identity from the others makes the subject, in many cases, a stranger to his true self. The result- a universal result- is that people search for other identities that could confirm the individual’s identity and complement it. Those identities are social identities (Father, Analyst, Canadian, Moslem, Socialist, etc.) Therefore, my identity as a psychoanalyst is a social identity that provides me with a sense of belonging, when my identity is not enough to identify me. We should not miss that a social identity has its narcissistic quality too. What complicates matters- in that regard- is the degree of dependency on the social narcissistic identity to get from it a sense value. We differ in the social narcissistic identities that we created and added to our original identity, and mostly in the degree of dependency on them to build our fundamental narcissistic structure.  It has to be mentioned, at this point, that an unconscious process of identifying with certain characters (persons) who gained a reputation of fame in social sphere we want to belong gives social narcissism its positive or negative quality. The extreme example in that regard is the religious identity. It is the most irrational in all the aspects mentioned above.

Saying all that in the more familiar language of psychoanalysis I would say: the psychoanalytic process starts when the patient realizes that sometimes he talks about himself and sometimes he talks directly as his self, and that the occasional fusion of the two selves say something else to the listener.

Recognizing the fusion of wish and fantasy (narcissism) usually happens in an early phase in the analysis, but it depends on the patient and to a larger degree on the analyst's experience. They should both arrive to that point together. It is usually characterized by an increase in misunderstandings, frustration and anger, and the emerging of rich transferiantial material. The reason is discovering that many old believes are doubtful, rigid self-perceptions are questionable, erroneous understandings of certain aspects of the events of one's daily life, but most of all, realizing that continuing living the past in the future is not an option, i.e., psychoanalysis is not psychotherapy of few flaws in the person but a process of freeing the patient from his fixations of the past. It is a stage that is reached in different speeds and successes by both patients and analysts depending on their nature, and to a larger degree to the analyst's ability to "be the analyst of that specific patient".

It is relevant now to mention here something is usually bypassed: analysts, whatever their experience, develop (unintentionally) some wishes and corresponding fantasies about their therapy and patients. They have to keep autoanalysis parallel and active to the analysis of each patient to avoid or minimize the interference of those wishes with the status of neutrality required for good psychoanalysis. This point was not highlighted enough in the discussions of the problems of the training analyst last year. In personal analysis the candidate -the presumed patient- has an undeclared wish with its own fantasies related to becoming an analyst. This wish conflicts with the wish for a therapeutic process. The training analyst could unconsciously be in that same boat and ignores the candidate’s idealization of him and do not analyze the neurotic nature of that idealization. 

The gist of the matter is that in any process of change, social or individual phenomena, we encounter "resistance" to change, because change is experienced as conflict between two wishes: one demanding immediate gratification and another requesting delaying that gratification. Although the psychology of the individual- deceptively- seems good enough to apply to the psychology of the social, it is a mirror image of it: it is its exact opposite (what is on the right in one is on the left in the other). In individual phenomenon, the personal identity with all its narcissistic qualities mobilizes the social identities to services it, while when the social identity is narcissistically injured it feels as if the personal identity is the one targeted. 

So, keeping in mind that the social phenomenon that makes Trump and mass shootings possible in the USA has a psychological interpretation but it is not related to our usual conceptions of motives, drives, and psychical mechanisms. Therefore, it is imperative to give the background of those social phenomena that are possibly acting behind the scene in that case. My summary of that social phenomena is likely to be unagreeable to some; I hope that people will not forget that I am dealing with social narcissism.

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 It is almost a universal phenomenon that individuals find in the identity of their countries a good support for their individual identities and their other minor social identities. It goes without saying that the dynamics of a national identity will not be stable and permanent because it reflects the historical phase the country that is going through. A country that build its identity on its military abilities and provide its subject with narcissistic support based on that distinction, is likely to lose that attribute either with changes in the importance of military strength in a later period of history or the emergence of other military powers.  The social identity of Germany before WWII was different from after the war. Nevertheless, some Germans remained identified with their country in the same manner regardless of the changes to its image. 

 The world entered a new era of evolution since the end of WWII. Political, social, economic and racial conflicts are no longer resolved by wars. The existence of the atomic weapons is a factor in that reality, but there is a new factor to consider. War was justified by the creation of enemies and the existence of imaginary competitions that usually lurked somewhere in the wrinkles of history. A good example of such old competitions and their irrational continuation is an old book (1835), by Alexis de Tocqueville (French Sociologist), entitled “Democracy in America”. He compares in it the two systems of governing in the USA and Tsarist Russia. He concluded that democracy the USA will prevail over Russia’s system. The competitions between the old empires (Russia, Hapsburg, British and the Ottoman) was the secret hobby of the politicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they played-with them- the games of enemies and allies and created the first and second world wars.

In spite of the international nature of that war it still settled- mainly in the Western World - on the exact concept of an old Russian empire replaced by the USSR, and the USA replacing the empires of the West (Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, etc.). Russia was a dangerous enemy before but was an ally in the WWII. Nevertheless, she was given back its status as an enemy (having or creating an enemy is a way of identifying a country: opposites!!). Churchill’s famous statement that 'We should build an iron curtain around the USSR to stop it from invading our world with communism" shows that social identities were founded on fictitious animosities and childish senses of superiority. The same thing happened in the East where there was a similar paranoid attitude that the Capitalists wanted to drown the great socialist revolution. Our great politicians, East and West created for the world very confusing narcissisms and insisted on imagining that they will continue running the world according to their personal identities.

However, societies change without the permission of the individuals. The Iron Curtain was supposed to protect the West from the East, yet growing up in the post WWII environment I witnessed the gradual change in this formula to be totally reversed by the early fifties of last century. The Iron Curtain was said to be built by the Russians to hide their terrible ruling of the USSR, and to stop the west from tempting the poor eastern oppressed people of revolting. However, social change happened in the East and West equally and concomitantly. The language of animosity between the two camps changed from ethnic and nationalistic attributes to ideological and moral identities. Instead of the usual love and hate of being German, Balkan, or Moslems they changed to be love and hate of being socialist, communist, labral, conservative, etc. This change confused the originally simple social narcissistic identities. It became difficult for the ordinary person in the street how to define himself or his political affiliation: American, Westerner, Capitalist or republican, because an American could not be a Democrat without being considered anti basic American values.  New terms were created to solve the problem of affiliations and identities by assigning new meanings to the new mixed and confusing narcissistic social identities. Tom Gould, a famous Canadian broadcaster in the seventies divided the world into the Free world and the Communist world. Sometimes he just called the west the Civilized world indirectly identifying the East as the uncivilized. The fact of the matter is that the WWII created a state of political confusion about who is the enemy and who is the Allie, which required a rearrangement of the political minds of people. Politicians-in the USA- proved to be quite limited in their knowledge of the emanating of the new terminology. Recently, Obama and Sanders seem to be the only two who know what they are talking about despite their different political stands.

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After the WWII the US was the only country in the world that had an economy, an army, a functioning government, industry, and could feed itself. USA lived for a long time enjoying the identity bestowed on her by "the other", and looked at its wish for greatness as a fantasy that became reality. The identity of the leader of the free, civilized world and the West as whole was taken by the Americans as a fact that does not need phantasies. Despite its concrete reality it was still a creation of 'the other' who dealt with it as a definition of her own reality too (being not great anymore). So, the world advanced its wishes and its fantasies; revived its potentials and wished and fantasied catching up with the USA (with the help of the USA) . In other word, the US took that bestowed- upon identity as fact not just a product of a historical moment. Eventually Europe (Russia, Japan, China) realized the fusion between their wishes and fantasies, and started reviving their dormant narcissism. The European thinkers and politicians (the psychoanalysts of the society) helped in making the wish master its fantasy, because they were politically quite knowledgeable and savvy and did not rely on their knowledge alone to free the wish from its fantasy. Ironically, the best and most effective ideology they used was the Marxist doctrine and the movers of European politics were the communist and the social democratic parties. European democracy, which is older and more sophisticated than its equivalent in the USA, emerged from the ciaos, and the West brought back the Parliamentary system of governing. Europe, Russia, China and many smaller countries freed themselves from the past and move to the future. The USA got absorbed in the fantasy of the wish of greatness and lived it as an unquestionable reality; and reality is not liable to change.  

It is peculiar that the advantages the USA had over the whole world after the war was being free from the weight of a long and established past (young history), which made her more progressive, free and keen to try new things. In my neck of the world growing up the USA was the ideal country because it was free and uninhibited. Then, the USA proved, in different ways, how it idealizes its very early days of forming the country.  Instead of getting in details all American know well, and I only I know it as a foreigner, I will just mention the warning flag that is raised by Americans to Americans whenever a demand to give up something old and adopt something new: OUR OLD FATHERS. To put it in a clear and definitive form. The main and important advantage the US had over the rest of the world- as we thought- is readiness and ability to change.

This introduction brings us to two serious aspects in the narcissistic base of the American identity: refusal and rejection of the notion that the US is not the greatest and better country anymore, and self deception that it still is. Self deception is concomitant of narcissistic mortification. The way it happens is when the subject realizes that he was not aware of self deception he insists on the deception and even exaggerates it to ‘negate’ its falseness. It was noticeable that in the last ten years, especially after nine-eleven presidents and politician were exaggerating the usage of the US is the Greatest………… Even Obama, who is the most sophisticated of them did that several times when he was facing some “un-narcissistic” events like police abuse of powers.  

  

All those details are of no value if they do not lead to the specific purpose of this posting: Why mass shooting and the election of someone like Trump are products of a social phenomenon that caused American a narcissistic injury?

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The gradual changes in the international political scene in the last thirty years witnessed the rise of Europe in a different shape, China relinquished the economy of Marxism, Russia followed suite and Japan regained its international status. Those national entities developed themselves to be great. In other terms the USA lost its status as the greatest but remained to be great and maybe the greatest among greats. Some politicians in the USA- mostly conservatives in the European political lingua and republicans in American vocabulary- understood that as demoting the USA. In fact, the republican president who witnessed the rise of Russia (R. Regan) considered the event of Russia becoming part of the greatness of the twenty first century an American victory. The whole matter in its basic and fundamental nature is putting order in the disorder that resulted from WWI. In spite of everything the USA still considers itself the leader of the Western World, and the enemy of communism the defender against it (communism does not exist anymore). The American Social Narcissism is shaken, threatened, and threatening.

Before reaching a conclusion about that change and using it to explain the link between mass shooting and the election of Trump it is imperative to highlight that not all American are affected by loosing the identity of the greatest the same way or to the same degree. The old USA is dying but a new USA is being born, a fact that pleases many and upsets many. Trump’s base is upset, very upset by that change. However, the supporters of this new change are still unable to replace the old with remedy. This leads us toe the link between Trumpism and mass shooting.

In state if narcissistic pain the phantasy prevails over the wish because the concerns about having to give up the wish if it is found that is no longer realistic to hang on to it. The result is and the tendency to regress, which fantasies encourage and support, and to replace the defeat with a strong sense of omnipotence. Put differently: narcissistic mortification results in regression allowed by fantasy life that replaces the reality of the wish, thus the subject lives a sense of omnipotence that replaces the reality of defeat.

Both mass shooting and electing Trump share a common base: narcissistic loss, rage at the loss, regression to fantasies of omnipotence, acting them out.

I would like to conclude this posting by reminding of the reverse mirror image of the psychology of the subject and the psychology of the social. The individual gets narcissistically hurt when the ‘other’ tinkers with his image and he loses or has to modify his fantasy about his wish. The society gets narcissistically hurt when it’s wish does not generate the usual fantasies of superiority, omnipotence, and encourages regression.       

Mass Shooting: A sad social event or a social phenomenon that needs attention???


Mass shooting could be taken as sad social events that could happen and had happened in different societies in different periods of time. But when they happen repeatedly in one place-as it has been happening in the USA lately- we have to consider them more than just sad events. They should be considered social phenomena. The difference between social events and social phenomena is not in the repetition or the gravity of the outcome; it is a difference in the meaning they carry and convey about something grave happening to the society. Mass shootings in Iraq few years ago, or in Afghanistan now, are sad social events because they are merely direct manifestations of an ongoing sectarian divide aiming at victory or defeat. Mass shooting in the US has no common denominator like being against a particular enemy, or seeking an identified objective as scaring the immigrants. They are also mostly without known common motivation and blatantly illogical to both the doer and the victim. Events are “understandable” when put in their proper context, while social phenomena should not be just understood; they need to be interpreted because their causes are not defined and explicit in the act itself. Another difference is that social events are understandable by knowing and retrieving their sources that might not be understandable. Mass shooting in Iraq was understandable although the sectarian war itself was understandable.The were the declared aspect of the phenomenon, and ere not  not events.
The last mass shooting in the USA in Texas and Iowa was understood, explained, and defined by the media and the members of the current active political situation as a result of Trump’s racist public statements, his setting sections of the society against others, dividing the society to better his chances to get reelected. However, the man is mentally incapable of thinking to make a plan of any kind, or to execute a plan designed for him to perform. In clearer words, Trump is part of the phenomenon of mass shooting in the US not its cause. It is only needed to say that the mass shooting events in the US are bizarre, illogical, look to be emotional reflexes, showoffs, etc., to realize that there must be a link between Trump and mass shootings but not the link of cause and effect. Selecting him from amongst 18 respectable politicians is a puzzling phenomenon in its own right. Electing Trump coincided with a substantial number of internal political crises and encountering several constitutional flaws that were not uncovered before Trumps method of ruling. Trump is a figure in the phenomenon of mass shooting. 

What is the phenomenon that could create mass shooting in a society like the USA, and to make electing a man like Trump possible? What is the phenomenon that ‘interprets’ one of the most weird election in the USA history and makes it coincide with one of the most active phases in the phenomenon of mass shooting? It is not right for me (foreigner) to venture and answer this question. However, what drives me to raise this warning flag is what happened in Toronto (Canada) yesterday and also few weeks ago. A small-scale mass shooting happened in sober Canada. Hopefully, what is happening south of us will not justify emulating our big sister. Maybe there are hidden reasons for what happens in the US but to happen in Canada too  should be scary to all of us.

Addendum 

The response to this posting made me think of adding an addendum to it. It is about few things to consider if there is an intention to approach the local university about introducing psychoanalysis to its interested students. The addendum is not a set of advises but only mentioning things to consider.

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Approaching a university department to allow few lectures on psychoanalysis is better done through the local psychoanalytic institute or society rather that by individual initiatives. It makes it an organization addressing an organization.

The involved local psychoanalytic body should discuss and design an approach to the departments of psychology, sociology and social work (psychiatry !) and prepare:1. Individual lectures- at the beginning of the academic year as 'general knowledge'. 2. if there is interest in the subject the local psychoanalytic body should design and advertise a series of 3-5 lectures in certain topics to be offered in the different social and cultural activities in the allied departments (Dreams, transference, interpretation, etc.). 3. The involved analysts should make themselves available to the faculty in the concerned departments to help in post graduate theses, both with ideas, theoretical suggestions, and readiness to help with the literature. 
This last point demands from us some humility and desire to know more about certain areas that we actually know very little ( the emergence  of the sense of being in children and how it evolves.  It is an invitation to cooperation.  

Having a framework of cooperation and performing it without making the revival of psychoanalysis our ‘hidden’ purpose of approach could lead in a natural way to making psychoanalysis a valuable addition to the academic program that is accepting it as a guest or as a trial.

I am worried-though- about three things:

A. I expect good immediate response, which could make the analysts in such project to quickly think that students are future patients, and they start upholstering their couches. This will kill the project instantly. Our lectures in such a project should be about psychoanalysis, what it has discovered about us\them, and not about the neurotic cousins.  It is important not to let our present predicament colour our approach to introducing psychoanalysis to academia. We have to be aware that it will take few years to make it natural to be part of the curricula of those departments. Most importantly, moving toward academia is a step in the direction of changing psychoanalysis as it is learned and be trained now and finding a new and better psychoanalysis.  

B. Young and recently trained analysts did not learn psychoanalysis well because both they and their training faculty were interested in the contributions of the new schools. We have to agree or disagree about this point to decide what is  fundamental in the psychoanalysis we will introduce and avoid creating confusion about us. My view is that there is nothing psychoanalytic of any form in the new schools of psychoanalysis (since Kohut). The basic and foundational is the theory of psychodynamic is: the centrality of the working of the primary processes, interpretation, analysis of transference; NOT of relations, reconstruction that links the past with the present, revealing to the patient the presence of his childhood fixations in his present conflicts.  Those points could be the source of very interesting lecture to the public, and could show that psychoanalysis is about our daily life, and there is more to learn about it and more contribution it could offer other human sciences.

C. It is VERY important that the faculty in those department know that we are not there to compete with them, find new patients, belittle their specialties, etc. we are there to contribute in an educated way to their efforts.

3. Where to Learn Psychoanalysis:

A.    Deviating and Getting Lost:

The reason I wanted to emphasize that psychoanalysis is not a profession is a wrong attitude we take from the training we get in IPA institutes. For us-trained psychoanalysts-whenever the term psychoanalysis is mentioned it meant what we learned in the institutes of psychoanalysis. The fact is that we were supposed have learned everything about psychopathology and many aspects of psychoanalysis in our professional degrees, so what we would learn in those institutes should have been the technique of practicing psychoanalysis. In other words, the institutes were for training us in the skills of psychoanalyzing. The skills are how and what to listen to (notice, observe, sense, etc.) in order to discover the unconscious elements in what we are hearing. Listening like psychoanalysts should lead to interpreting the new psychical meaning that emerges from what we discovered during our listening, and use it skillfully to make the patient recognize what else he has said (painted, did, meant, etc.) without being conscious of it. In addition to leaning this skill we learn how to reconstruct to the patient his psychical life as one comprehensive LIFE. Without noticing the difference between learning a skill and training in a new profession we created a major distortion in the concept of training; training became an objective not a means to an objective. This was the downfall of psychoanalysis as the subject matter of our professional endeavours and the worsening of the practice of that deteriorating (deteriorated) theory.

The IPA institutes were not and still are not the ideal place to learn psychoanalysis. The candidates of sixties and the mid-seventies learned most of the theory of psychoanalysis before they applied to the training programs. Most of us had training- analyst who were actively participating in expanding and sophisticating ‘psychoanalysis’. They stimulated in us the interest in learning what psychoanalysis has added to our knowledge as psychologists and psychiatrist. Therefore, we never lost our connection with our original formation and became more interested in the theory psychoanalysis. Sadly, this attitude changed when training in IPA institute became a short cut to a practice in the mental health profession. Psychoanalysis changed from being a skill that could complement our original professions to a profession in its own right. There is something basically wrong in that change: psychoanalysis was supposed to be the source of the knowledge that we seek training in the skills to use it, to understand the patient and make the patient understand himself. What happened instead is a major mistake: training analysts ignored the difference between learning and training and gave themselves the right to be both: trainers and professors. This point was not examined thoroughly enough when the problem of the training analysts was highlighted last few years in desperate efforts to solve the negative impact of that created status on training. 

Unconsciously, we sleepwalked into a trap we set for ourselves: we blurred the difference between psychoanalysis as knowledge and as practice (in ALL respectable professions the clear and sharp difference between knowledge and practice is a fundamental feature). The outcome was a gradual deterioration in both psychoanalytic knowledge and its practice. As I mentioned in the last part of this posting: psychoanalysts referred the crisis of the continuing drop of interest in psychoanalysis to misconceptions about it, due to people’s ignorance of MODERN psychoanalysis. The issue is that the crisis of psychoanalysis is due to the poor quality of modern psychoanalysis, which is a result of the poor quality of training in the IPA institutes; what else!!!!!

B.     The Restoration of the Reputation of Psychoanalysis:

Psychoanalysis was born with a very good reputation. From the beginning, which we all know, the initial refutations on moral basis and the medical professions attacks on its findings, did not sway people and the many young aspiring physicians from seeing something futuristic in it. In a nutshell, psychoanalysis had all the features that made people realize that it talked to them about what they knew to be right, because they could see it in themselves and in other people. Psychoanalysis was a theory of the subject and not a theory of “something” and needed to have the evidence to prove its believability; it was a theory of us and them and that did not need to look for confirmation of its discoveries. After a short while Freud introduced metapsychology and was tempted to use its language to create a new vocabulary for his observations, and to give them some abstract meaning. It still was relevant to people’s direct observations and understanding of the subject. Close to the end of being in charge of theorizing for psychoanalysis Freud formulated a metapsychology that was basically a reification of his findings (ego-psychology). Yet, unnoticeably, he corrected that deviation in his work “Inhibition, symptoms, and anxiety”, a work that did not catch much attention, mainly due to it heuristic discussion of the cause-effect nature of psychological phenomena. Freud’s psychoanalysis was a theory that was stemming partially from his clinical experience and mainly from true and valid observations and understanding of the subject (there is no clinical reason for Freud to have discovered the super-ego, except that the presence of the Ego was not enough to explain all the conscious faculties of the subject. The ego had to have a metapsychological addendum to explain other function its direct presence in the subject. Thus, he had to work out a place for that addendum in his metapsychology.

In my view, psychoanalysis until Freud was alive and a little after his death was distinguished and deserved its respectability. Psychoanalysis’s main concern was knowledge about a subject. Even when the conflict between the Freudians and the Kleinians emerged the subject matter remained the same and psychoanalysis preserved its distinguished status. The controversies did not reduce the value of the arguments; in a subtle way the issue was what would explain the other: does metapsychology explain psychology (Anna explains Melanie) or does psychology generate metapsychology[aF1]  (Melanie as the basis of Anna)?  Even the French controversies did not reduce psychoanalysis to mere personal disagreement: Lacan was trying to give psychoanalysis its ‘Structural’ identity and dissipate the functional point of view but went about it in provocative way.

   It is when some of Freud’s early and ardent supporters (Stekel, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, etc.), started to argue about technique that psychoanalysis entered into a downward spiral. There are ‘possible’ causes for that feature in psychoanalysis. The first is that analysts who narrowed their views and limited them to matters of practice were usually either victims of over confidence in their knowledge of the foundational knowledge of psychoanalysis, and argued from a false position of regarding psychoanalysis a theory that has reach the point where it stopped growing, and they knew it well enough to ignore evolving it further.  The second, matters of technique relate to training and not knowledge. IPA institutes are not built to graduate psychoanalyst, they are supposed train psychoanalyst to practice psychoanalysis; their function (with time) changed to graduating clinical practitioners presuming that they also learn psychoanalysis in the process. Training in those institutes in the best case is to teach enough of psychoanalysis that makes training in the technique possible.

Where then could someone learn psychoanalysis?

C: Psychoanalysis as an Academic Issue:

 Answering this question is not a simple one. To evaluate answering this question properly we need to clarify the attitude of the ones who answered it: do they believe that psychoanalysis could be learned without the clinical aspect considered, or there is no psychoanalytic knowledge outside or without the clinical component. If the answering person believes that learning psychoanalysis is meant to prepare the candidate for clinical practice then the IPA institutes, or the equivalent, is the place to go. If the answer comes from an intellectual (physician, social worker, psychologist, drama teacher, etc.) it will be: go to an academic institution that has intellectuals with various interest in the human subject to study psychoanalysis well, where they know how to transmit knowledge to their students. Although some academic institutions did and still do that (though mainly for psychoanalysis as a therapeutic act) they did not take it as a branch of the humanities, or as a significant aspect of psychology in general. 

Psychoanalysis is knowledge that hast to be protected and given the opportunity to be recognized as such, expand to reach its own extent of capability and eventually change psychology as it is taught now in universities, and is involved in psychiatry and social work. By adding psychoanalysis to the existing psychology in academia makes the nature of the human subject more coherent and easily shared by all the branches of sciences that deal with the human subject. However, this kind of change and its extent is not possible without a radical change unrelated to the   psychoanalysts. We, the old and older generation, have to realize that a change in direction in the way psychoanalysis is understood, transmitted to newer generations, setup to relate to other burgeoning human sciences, branching out into different areas of interest outside the clinical aspects, and becoming ‘knowledge’ in its own right and it is not just those mystical things that are available only in the IPA institutes training system, those changes have to happen to us first with sincere intention to give up the present system and make psychoanalysis an academic issue.

However, it is a challenge to expect such thing to happen. Twenty-five years ago, IPA acknowledged the existence of the present crisis. It did nothing more than convened committees ‘puzzled’ about it till now. It resorted lately boosting our moral and suggesting that it is trying and succeeding in containing the crisis. But the most glaring failure in its efforts is not telling the membership what its findings about the causes of the crisis (curing a disease without a diagnosis).  I cannot help wondering what is the undeclared opinion of the- elected- leadership of the IPA, and if they see hope in things improving spontaneously.

I think that sincere and serious analysts about the future of psychoanalysis should just bypass the psychoanalytic organization (s) and go ahead and try with acts of good faith make contacts with the academic institutions in their locations. In other terms we should admit and announce that we the analyst will save psychoanalysis without the permission or approval or even the support of its organizations. The individual attempts will prove to the hesitant analysts that nothing tangible is coming from the IPA; it has stand or opinion about the crisis.

What is of the utmost importance is to keep in mind that taking serious measure in this regard is to save psychoanalysis and not save us and our livelihood. We can survive without psychoanalysis but psychoanalysis cannot survive without well learned and trained analysts.  

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 [aF1]

2. The fallacy of Psychoanalysis is a Profession:

The concern about the survival of psychoanalysis in North America is directly related to the numbers of patients seeking psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The numbers have dropped and are still dropping. The drop in other parts of the world, maybe, not as bad but enough to raise the alarm about the future of psychoanalysis. The concern about the future of psychoanalysis goes back to 1995 when the IPA tried-officially- to understand the reasons for that drop and could not do anything about it for the last twenty-five years. Therefore, my argument about the issue is that the shrinking status could be more serious in some parts of the world more than others, but the crisis is universal all the same. The crisis as it has been raised is clearly related to psychoanalysis as a profession and not psychoanalysis itself (as body of knowledge), because what concerned the IPA all along and the regional and the local societies is the dwindling numbers of analysts, candidates, and patients without any concern about ‘what is practiced as a profession of psychoanalysis’.

The IPA has a membership of forty-eight (48) societies (one fourth of the countries in the world). It has 12797 member and 5434 candidates in training. This means that in average each society has 267 analyst and 113 potential future members. Could those figures qualify psychoanalysis to call itself a profession; or even a profession that might have future? No. By no means we can claim that psychoanalysis is a profession, in the real sense of the word, with those numbers. Not even when the number jumps few hundreds or a couple of thousands in a society it still not qualified to be called a profession. This rigidity is because those figures were double, and in some places triple the present numbers, i.e., if psychoanalysis is a profession, it is a dying profession. Any successful profession grows stronger with time as when psychoanalysis did the first forty years of its history but started to die forty years ago. In my opinion, reviving psychoanalysis is not difficult but restoring psychoanalysis as a profession is not possible anymore, unless something be done to psychoanalysis itself.  It was wrong from the beginning to pay attention to the practice of psychoanalysis and neglect the looseness in regard to the modification introduced to the theory in the guise of developing and improving its practice.

We have to solve an additional problematic in the crisis. We-the clinal psychoanalysts- are the ones who turned the fundamental discovery of the twentieth century and the pillar of the Western civilization into something very unidentifiable as a body acknowledge. Better, we analysts kept working on therapeutic of psychoanalysis claiming to improve it, turning it into a profession. We became contented with having an international organization that gave memberships to the practicing psychoanalysts without any examination or investigation of the quality of the theory they practice. Assuming the right to training analysts, the IPA was happy to increase the number of training institutes without any serious examination of the nature, content and quality of the training offered and the training faculties. No wonder we realized the serious problem with the status of the training- analyst and were unable to deal with it.

  Psychoanalysis in its mightiest time as a profession in the sixties and seventies of last center was-in fact and better judgment- less important or significant compared with the discoveries it generated during that period of time. It continued rejuvenating the Western culture. In that period of time psychoanalysis penetrated all the cultural and social aspect of the culture. It positioned itself in the midst of the revived intellectual life after WWII. To clarify what I mean I would that discovering that dreams are wish fulfillment is far more important than interpreting a dream in a psychotherapy. Realizing that symptoms have meaning gave the society a new sense of the structural nature of our psychological nature, instead of the previous preoccupation with causes and effects. Psychoanalysis and some psychoanalysts positioned structuralism in the humanities and created the advancements we are enjoying right now.

It is a moral obligation to revive psychoanalysis before it totally dies because it belongs to our civilization and not to us as clinicians. Morality and moral obligation are offshoots of responsibility. Our moral responsibility to save psychoanalysis from its impending death comes from the fact that we, and nobody or anything else have caused it to go dying: who or what else? Psychoanalysis, as was conceived by none clinicians and we did not consider ‘real’ psychoanalysis kept changing, getting better and more comprehensive. The changes in education, in child rearing, accepting the idea of latent meaning in ordinary speech, etc., kept developing, expanding and improving its basic premises, without input from the organization of psychoanalysis (the IPA). The theory of psychoanalysis was shaping the society while we stagnated or went afar from the essential discovery. There is an undeniable fact related to that: when we stopped building the theory of the subject there was nothing left for us to do but to turn our attention to its practice as psychotherapy. We lost our bearings. Clinical psychoanalysis as practice has a profession and practitioners, but psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and a theory of the subject has thinkers, philosophers, scientists, practitioner in a wide range of other specialties. Just to give a glaring example: it has movies and theater to practice.

Psychoanalysis is not the profession of psychotherapy.

All analyst without exception have professions that preceded bestowing on themselves the title psychoanalysts. We all have obtained university degrees that qualified us to apply to training in IPA institutes of psychoanalysis. This is not facetious remark or just an argumentative ploy. We have to have professional rights in the mental health field to have access to training in psychoanalysis. Therefore, we mislead, mostly ourselves, when we do not acknowledge this fact. If we miss this fact, we should then allow anyone with a recognized profession (psychology, law, history of arts, commerce, etc.) apply and get training in psychoanalysis and bestow on himself the title psychoanalyst; and practice it. The criteria for accepting people in training was loose but got tightened up gradually to be limited to mental health professionals: psychology, psychiatry and social work (the details are not relevant to what I am to underline). However, some institutes, when they felt the pinch, and under some pressures from the training committees and the influence of some senior analysts accepted some none health providers in training (I know few cases in the Canadian Society). Those members, if they are truly good, are wealth to any society and this trend should be encouraged. But they should not be permitted to see patients based on their training in the IPA institutes only.  

Discussing this point is of crucial importance, because it puts psychoanalysis in its proper place. If the mental health provider, who is trained in psychoanalysis feels competent to do psychotherapy he should do that on his own initiative that is rooted in his own professional background. However, there is more to psychotherapy than what the IPA institutes provide. Practicing psychoanalysis (psychotherapy) should not be authorized by the IPA and its institutes. What I mean is that we should not link practicing psychoanalysis to training in IPA institutes but to really learning psychoanalysis both theory and technique and having the right to deal with patients. This issue should addressed this point: is 2000-2500 hours of training in IPA institutes (excluding personal analysis) enough to make ‘anyone’ learn psychoanalysis (as a body of knowledge and technique)? I training in IPA institutes adequate for all of us-irrespective of our backgrounds- be learn what it takes to practice psychoanalysis?  The answer is no, not enough whatever the numbers are. This is not a matter of how long training has to last to reach its objective. The issue is that when we go for training, we should integrate psychoanalysis with what we already learned in our specialty, not adapt our specialty and basic profession to psychoanalysis. I learned psychoanalysis when I was already a clinical psychologist. My profession as diagnostician by way of psychometric testing did not change or was modified by psychoanalytic training; maybe I became more particular in interpreting the patient’s psychometric profiles, and maybe I improved my understanding of some of the cognitive functions that I deal with in interpreting the patient’s associations. But, training in psychoanalysis was to learn the body of knowledge called psychoanalysis, which could allow me do psychotherapy in a special way. Psychoanalysis was never my profession.

1.The Moral Obligation of the Contemporary Psychoanalysts

In my opinion psychoanalysis in North America is living under a false name or already dead. In Europe and South America, it is living on low heart beat. If I do not have the statistics or the proofs to support my opinion the challenger of my judgement does not have the evidence to prove me wrong either.   

Being an old psychoanalyst, I strongly believe that my generation of psychoanalysts have a moral obligation to persuade, guide, and actively help getting psychoanalysis out from its current rot, to where it should flourish. It is difficult, yet there is no substitute for trying. The difficulty is that- we the old guys- have to recognize that we resisted the inevitable development and evolution of psychoanalysis and some of us (particularly in north America) preferred to come up with their personal views and claimed them appropriate to replacing the old with the new. They still call them psychoanalysis. In other parts of the world different things happened, but each area had its own style in modifying psychoanalysis and improvising its method to keep it breathing. They do not disclose easily its status and the IPA too keeps that as secrets. The psychoanalytic institutions hide the facts about psychoanalysis from the psychoanalysts !!!!.  Those attempts to replace a dying psychoanalysis have failed to actually fill its vacant place or revive it as substitutes. The most they did was postponing the inevitable.

I will address that point in another posting. But for now, I would say that we-psychoanalysts- helped preventing the death of psychoanalysis but did not do what should have been done to revive it. We always claimed that we are the custodians of psychoanalysis and limited any input from none analysts (none clinically inclined intellectual). Their contributions might have been useful but we did not take full advantage of them.

Secondly, there are two possible venues to revive psychoanalysis: to tinker with the present way analysis is transmitted from generation to another (training), make some tweaks in the its practice and use publicity to declare its improvement. The other venue is changing completely the way analysis is transmitted (education), declaring it a science and not a profession, then looking into what is left off it that could still be of significance. To do that we must move its base from the IPA accredited training institutes to academia, and making it either a program in the departments of humanities or even make it one of the departments of the humanities in the university.In a very recent posting it was found out that the programs of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic subjects in some universities were in big demand in the departments of human studies that was offering them. In some large and reputable universities there was waiting lists to register in those programs. I had an old experience (1964-1969) that convinced me- in that early time- that psychoanalysis would have a very welcomed and prosperous place in the departments of psychology at universities.

Experienced and old analysts like me oppose making the shift from training (acquiring a skill or a trade) to learning and obtaining an academic degree in a branch of knowledge (enough to qualify for a licenced profession). We -old analysts-cannot forget that when we went to learn psychoanalysis, we were already highly reputed professionals in our fields. Teaching psychoanalysis in universities will let teenagers do what we considered for a long time a privilege that we should cherish. We do not notice that those youngsters have to learn much more than what was available to learn in our time, and they will be the analysts who will do the real research in psychoanalysis. We also resist to acknowledge that psychoanalysis in academia (with the graduate and post graduate levels of studies) will open it to more than just the field of psychotherapy. In Europe some universities were dedicated to open doors for psychoanalysis but mainly in psychotherapy. The IPA institutes in those countries maintained their traditional functions, which blurred the difference between learning and training. A leap from training in parochial and archaic institutes to learning in open well-connected departments of the humanities will be faced by our resistance, but eventually the resistance will collapse. When that happens, it will be our duty to participate in introducing good psychoanalysis to the universities. It will be our duty to participate and contribute to putting psychoanalysis where it should have been three decades ago.

An additional thing to do is to give the IPA a specific period of time to wind down its role in psychoanalytic education and  to improve its function as a membership institution.

In the same spirit of my post about the present glorious times of a world going through change I want to add a couple of short paragraphs.

I was in Portugal lately. I followed a very significant European political event: the electing of the Parliament of the EU 28 countries for the next five years. Over 500 million subjects (old friends a foes) electing more than seven hundred representatives based on each country's independent political system. No procedural glitches, whatsoever. The dazzling thing is the role of the young is playing in the  different countries and changing the face of the world there. The greens got rid of the central right and left parties. One of the leaders of the new movement is a 16 years old young woman with all the bright, mature, self confidence that we did not see in the "seasoned" politicians of Brexit  and anti-Brexit. A child of Eight manged to make Starbucks stop plastic straws. In the US we  watched something similar but on a smaller scale when school shooting happened and issue of the climate were mentioned in opposition to the knowledge and wisdom of Trump and his likes. The call for free education, health services, substantive changes in social justice is gaining recognition and strength in the States by pressure coming from teenagers and young people.

This is more than a phantasy for a guy who lived and still remembers the war in Europe and in East Asia, initiated by "old experienced politicians" (Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, Franco, Charles De Gaulle, Mao, Minh, etc.). In history, the history of of any human issue, the young start the revolutions and  pressure for change but the old usurp the revolutions, and here we go again. But it seems that this is not happening anymore. The young are moving and holding to the reigns of power.

 Could we see something similar in psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis is also dying like old politics. We, old analysts,talk about the need for change and we just give it a lip service (maybe this the only part we could still move). Young analysts  learned only the old analysis we taught them, in the same archaic institutes system, and infused in them the distorted image of the training analyst. The desperate needs for modernizing psychoanalysis expressed in "schools" were even more destructive because the schools were not dealing with the subject of analysis; they were distortions in its practice: from empathy to inter-subjectivity. The schools are the old hanging on to the straws that were  the first indication of a sinking psychoanalysis.
  
Young analysts have no ideology to call a revolution and renewal. How could they assume the leadership in changing psychoanalysis or holding back the old dying psychoanalysis? They should know that we have nothing to offer, so they have to look at two things: why they want to be analysts, and that analysis is not matter of training. It is a knowledge, a theory of "something", and they will find it in psychoanalytic literature not in training based on transmitting knowledge from a person to person. Is it too much to expect a generation of psychoanalysts who say that we will stop doing analysis as psychotherapy and we will look for new, different, meanings to the act of psychoanalyzing? "We want to be analysts because it is knowledge we aspire to learn, not a profession we want to practice. It is too much to find enough young analysts who are trained by us-the old parochial-training analysts, who would say out loud: analysis is not psychotherapy?? Analysis is....something else and we will find ways to learn it. There are some actual analysts who are knowledgeable of what psychoanalysis is who would extend a helping hand.

The hope-and there should be some left- is some psychoanalysts who hold academic positions will bring it where they work as academics, making it an academic issue and not a 'professional' matter. The hope is to take reign  of matters and not leave it to us the old cadre. We will not allow But even resist) our ways to be pushed aside and a new true knowledge of psychoanalysis emerge.
Things change, that is the normal course of events. Change needs new and daring people who know what is wrong with the present and take that as the starting point of finding the future. 
Why not psychoanalysis too?