Is There Future Psychoanalysis

     The evidence of sincerity of any criticism is to have an alternative to offer, or at least a suggestion of an alternative. My criticism of the situation in psychoanalysis comes from stagnation and desperate attempts at covering up its deterioration, in both status and condition. Forty years ago, psychoanalysis has had a rich volume of vocabulary of novel discoveries about the human subject. After several decades, two generations of analysts, and no serious evolution of the psychoanalytic discoveries, that vocabulary acquired the status of a theory. Analysts used that vocabulary as if it conveyed an established theory of psychopathology and psychotherapy. However, that vocabulary was the regular speech of the daily life of ordinary people but some of its words were given additional connotations that were derived from discoveries in the field of psychical phenomena. We, psychoanalysts used common words to connote psychological processes, along with their daily usage. For instance, defense got an additional meaning of avoiding psychical pain that accompanies revealing something objectionable. We still should not forget that psychoanalysis is vocabulary without a theory that distinguishes it from lay-man’s speech.

    There are gaps in any standard way of learning psychoanalysis. They come from its vocabulary, because it always has two meanings: the direct simple daily meaning and another implicit connotation of a psychical nature. This bland banal observation puts us face to face with a complex issue. Is there profound commonality amongst us about our vocabulary, which is now treated as concepts in a theory. Do we all agree on the meaning of the analytic terms we use? How much do we know about the implicit psychological meaning of our vocabulary?  Do we ask once in a while: what do we mean by transference? (what is projection, narcissistic identification, etc.)? Without visiting those connotations and the meaning of our terminology we would not know what we are talking about. Even Freud, when he noticed transference in practice, he was undecided about it. He could not be definite if to consider it resistance or an additional source of revealing unconscious material (1912). But few years later he said: “This transference alike in its positive and negative form is used as a weapon by the resistance; but in the hands of the physician, it becomes the most powerful therapeutic instrument and it plays a part scarcely to be overestimated in the dynamics of the process of cure”. (1923,247).  The issue I want to raise is that the necessity and also benefits of revisiting the terminology of psychoanalysis as it is coined by Freud, and very few analysts who came after him. This effort could be like Rediscovering psychoanalysis anew.     

The Old Psychoanalysis: Overcoming Stagnation.        

    If not out of reality it would be out of self-respect that we should admit that psychoanalysis has changed over the years, advanced and regressed, but possibly also improved. Therefore, explaining its current crisis should address the possibilities of taking the wrong direction in our progress, or maybe just reluctance to examining its concepts (vocabulary) in light of all what has transpired in the last decades about their meanings. I will give a personal example of rediscovering psychoanalysis with and implicit permission from you.

    After mentioning that narcissism is a condition that exists in the gap between the I and the ME, or between the subjective I and the objective me, and the variety of its pathological conditions depending on the depth and nature of that gap, I received a comment from a very experienced respectable colleague wondering what would have happened if the myth of Narcissus had been the central myth of psychoanalysis instead of the Oedipus myth. This comment made me think of how much we could have taught ourselves if we looked at narcissism in the Oedipus ‘complex’, and how narcissism is better in explaining ‘castration anxiety’ than castration anxiety explaining narcissism.    

    I mention this personal experience in regard to two important issues my colleague has opened up for further thinking and reconsidering: Why does the phenomenon of transference brings the past in the present in every psychoanalytic work (no analysis without transference)? Why when that happens, and we bring that to the patient’s attention, he changes not only the transference but with it the psychopathology undergoes radical changes (the most powerful therapeutic instrument). I will give here a brief account of the thoughts that came to my mind about that issue to emphasize that there a vast amount of new knowledge awaiting discoveries and ‘our’ old psychoanalysis could be replaced easily, safely, with much better psychoanalysis if we let the old terminology evolve and gain from the accumulated experience we gained.    

    The first thing that came to my mind is that the patient-the I speaks talking about his me. If I listen to the gap in his speech, I will find out another person who was formed by his psychological history; meaning that I am not listening to history but the history of forming the narcissistic entity of my patient. Eliciting that history and giving it back-interpreted-to the patient it will change the narcissistic gap. Both I and me will get better acquainted. I wanted to just give an idea how the vocabulary of old psychoanalysis is full of new meanings that is the new psychoanalysis we aspire to have. The hope is groups of young, motivated, perceptive psychoanalyst and thinkers, and ‘knowledgeable’ middle aged psychoanalysts cut loose from the current systems of learning and training in psychoanalysis. They review the old past, look into the recent past, and do away with the present, to work on a new theory of the human subject. The hope is that this new breed of analysts will not forget or repress that the vocabulary of the old theory, which at its time was a very significant breakthrough and built a theory the of psychoanalysis and was that we-the old generation- learned. It was a brilliant effort to discovering latent meaning in the regular daily language of the time. But now, if the latent meanings that are taken as concepts of in a theory psychical phenomenon that need explanations and expanding its connotations, those same words will be the way to progressing toward a new psychoanalysis, if and only if a new system of training is adopted.

    This is an important point that needs more space, time, and interest raise.         

 

Evolution, Change, and Training in Psychoanalysis

In recent exchanges among members of the American Psychoanalytic Associations there is soul searching about matters related to training and its discontents. They are coming in different forms of memories, hesitations, conflicts about maintaining the old and the necessity of giving it up. It also shows that we all have a difficult time for another more serious reason: recently we discovered that some of the ‘unquestionable’ fundamentals of psychoanalysis- as we knew it and practiced for mor than a century- are dogma that we did not know the logic behind them. We adopted the psychoanalytic protocols regarding practice (# of sessions, the couch, silence, distance, etc.), training (Eitington’s model), and some theoretical dogma (free association) without any rational effort to-at least- know what decided their import in the first place. Eitington’s model of training was firstly decided because the practice of analysis at that time had to be learned in a modality of apprenticeship (there was little to teach and more to learn). The number of sessions was also dictated by the need for quick training and more trainers who were to return to their countries to create training facilities. All that had to be done in a short period of time as a result of the novelty of psychoanalysis and its fast expansion. Free association was and still is a cognitive impossibility (transcendence of consciousness and consciousness of consciousness). I do not have to say more; just try free associating and see what will come out of it. But, if we go back to the immediate phase after abandoning hypnotism, we could clearly see that Freud meant by free association just talking freely or talk first and then see what you wanted to say (talk to know not about what you know). Free association is not what Carl Young attempted in his ‘word test’.  

The tripartite protocol was a very intuitive clinical gesture, like the intuition about Wild Analysis, (Freud, 1910). It was a stroke of ‘genius’ in which Freud condensed in that protocol the whole gamut of the distinctions that latter made ‘psychoanalyzing’ different from any current or future psychotherapies. However, there is very little, in the literature, that explains their significance (as far as I know in English and French literature). Psychoanalysis was an identifiable entity till the early fifties of last century.  The ‘controversies’ in the British Society, and the troubles between Nacht and the rebels in France around the same time, revealed that psychoanalysis is not one definable matter, but a field of an evolving and developing epistemology that could give birth to conflicting points of view. Furthermore, psychoanalysis could not stop its own evolution, and its natural process of changing, thus it is unsettled on one stable, definable connotation, especially in the area of its practice. Therefore, the term psychoanalysis does not mean the same to all of us. Our loyalty to psychoanalysis (adhering to tradition) should be to it as a term and symbol not as a fixed connotation of somethings analytical, because it is clear and obvious that most of us use the terminology of psychoanalysis as the tool to explain psychical matters, while they are- as fact- issues that require explanations based on what we understand now, which is better than the ones who coined that vocabulary. 

What was there before the controversies of the British Society was not psychoanalysis but a new understanding of us (humans) that was called ‘psychoanalysis’. However, that understanding was an understanding that initiated further understandings and different ones.  The controversies revealed that the field of understanding, and misunderstanding is open for points of view, which revealed diversities and many personal conflicts.  In other words psychoanalysis stopped being psychoanalysis from the time the controversies created two groups, then one more, declaring the opening of the gates. It was never one psychoanalysis since then. As such, any assertion of something about psychoanalysis that is not relative to what is relevant to furthering its discoveries is a false loyalty. In a more comprehensive sentence: the discovery of the person in his psychical condition started a theory that is in continually progressing and evolving, and also facing relentless resistance to those necessary changes, which result from its evolution. A good example to this sentence is the emergence of the schools of psychoanalysis in the eighties and nineties of last century: they were not new discoveries in the theory of man or in the field of the tripartite protocol of practice; they were attempts at replacing psychoanalysis without any substantive evidence of its inadequacy, or of a substantive evidence to the adequacy of the new proposed protocols.

The Evolution of Psychoanalysts and the Stagnating Training:

I will discuss three issues concerning training because all the training institutions of psychoanalysis irrespectively share the interest in those three issues: The Training Analyst, the Psychoanalytic Setup, Personal Analysis.

1.The Training Analyst:

 After over a hundred years since the establishment of the first training institute of psychoanalysis in Berlin we find ourselves, still stuck with the apprenticeship modality of training: knowledge owned by someone (or more), and one can only acquire it by personal contact with that person or persons. Regardless of all what happened to psychoanalysis and the psychoanalysts over those hundred years, the IPA -as the legitimate voice of psychoanalysis- still does not acknowledge that we have gained a wealth of knowledge about the human subject that exists independently of the training analyst, and beyond the capacity of one ‘training’ analyst to deliver. Worse, creating the status of “training analyst”, which suited apprenticeship training, ignored that the contemporary psychoanalyst needs to learn more than the limited literature of psychoanalysis, which training analysts do not have. For an example, the disappearance of the diagnosis of hysteria, nowadays, is a result of basic changes in the sexual attitudes of societies, the place of metaphor\metonymy in everyday life speech, the evolution of the identity of females. Training analysts are not expert enough to lecture or train in those areas, which are vital to keep psychoanalysis a viable theory and stop its stagnation. Previously, the training analyst knew more about what the candidate needed to know, but now what the candidate needs to know is the functions of a whole educational system and institution. Furthermore, previously training was limited to practicing psychoanalysis in psychotherapy. This is not possible anymore, if not because limiting training to that task would not appeal to the eager candidate, it will be because it limits training to dealing with problem that do not exist anymore.

Candidates do not need someone to train them in psychoanalysis; they can learn it directly and from each other. A good syllabus and a god academic team of thinkers could do a much better job than few training analysts put together. The reason is that psychoanalysis is in continuous process of evolving while analyst seem to prefer stagnation. Thus, eliminating the status of the training analyst is long overdue and should be replaced by ‘educationists’ in certain areas of the humanities because as the human subject is changing the theory about him must have changed also. Yet, there is an aspect in the “formation” of the analyst that requires the input of a good well informed and skilled psychoanalyst, not necessarily a training analyst. It is personal analysis.

2. Personal Analysis:

Eitington’s model of training reflected the situation of psychoanalysis at that time, a hundred years ago: new and simplistic, theoretically very tentative, and provisional, and lacking clear guidance to how it is done. It was in demand by unorganized groups of people of different backgrounds and inclinations. Personal analysis- the third requirement in training- was an important way of qualifying the new commers, because there were no tested ideas about the method or the theory of practice to present to the new seekers of psychoanalysi. The candidate had to go through the experience of analysis as a patient to learn how to do it with patients. Naturally and unfortunately the objective and meaning of that part of training got distorted and confusing: is it therapeutic or didactic? Is it therapeutic because analysts are expected to be psychologically healthy, or is it didactic, which means that going through the process is a learning experience that could not be properly explained to teach and learn from the literature? Although we now have a clearer idea of the workings of the psychoanalytic processes, we still do not agree on most of their connotations, because we do not know the logic behind them. We obviously prefer the familiar because it is safe and looks sure. That is why we want to stay with a psychoanalysis that is outdated, and out of synchrony.

Another serious matter in training is what and when to interpret, and what and when to reconstruct the material interpreted? Why not answer a question by the patient when he is clearly expecting a response etc.? Maybe, this should be left to the personal skill of the analyst. Nevertheless, the difficulty in that issue sheds light on the issue of a training analyst. Only in personal analysis do we encounter those situations and witness the analyst style in dealing with them (style but not reason). This point leads directly to the issue of the didactic analyst (not the training analyst) and his ways of conducting the personal analysis of candidates. There is no way, method, or teaching guide that could introduce a candidate to the practice of psychoanalysis but going through it personally. But this statement has to be qualified. The analyst has to know what he is doing and not doing, not just intuited in his doings, i.e. able to explain verbally what he does. The analyst has to also have in mind how his work is effecting in the patient, thus has a responsibility of knowing beforehand what to be said decide how to say it. Better, personal analysis is the cornerstone of training if done by a special kind of analyst that has nothing to do with whether he is Training Analyst or not.  It is obvious that this part of personal analysis has a therapeutic value in addition to its didactic value, and the analyst who does that is de facto a training analyst (his analytic work teaches the candidate\patient something). Nevertheless, selecting the proper candidates for training should not be linked to the issue of personal analysis.

I hope that my emphasis on the lack of need for training analysts and our dependency on good analysts highlights the gap between formal and informal training.

3.The Analytic Setup.

The basis of Freud’s ingenious intuition in the psychoanalytic protocol, particularly regarding transference extended to the setup of practicing the psychoanalytic act itself. He proffered a setup to be applied with all patients; thus the differences in outcome could be referred to the patients and not considered reactions to the circumstance but of practice.

When I gained confidence in my understanding and my practice of psychoanalysis (26 years) I decided to actively use that change ((three more years). I put to the patients the issue of selecting what suit them best in terms of the setup of their analysis, with the understanding that there will be no changes at a later time, or as they wish. The choices were the couch or the seat, three or four sessions per week, vacations, cancellations, payments, termination, length of sessions (mine were 45 minutes). My view was to eliminate using projection, at a later time, as means to manipulate the analytic setup. I did not emulate my two previous analysts in doing that, and I was also aware that I was breaking what seemed like an absolute tenets of psychoanalysis, when there were actually none (Freud improvised the couch position because He felt less stressed when the patients were not looking at him sitting during the sessions).

This point requires some elucidation because it will likely be misconceived by most. Since the original setup of the analytic situation was not decided based on any psychoanalytical principles or requirements, thus the analyst along with the patient should decide and stick to their decision about what is more convenient for both. This could be done with the proviso that there are requirement, limitations, consistency, and mutual understanding that the analytic set up and observing it is part of the process itself. Requesting changes to the original setup was subjected to analyzing and material for examination and analysis. The other aspect in the managing of the setup was what the protocol of practice is emphasizing. The analyst’s neutrality, anonymity, and abstinence, if strictly observed in his reactions to the patient’s attempt to use them in his relationship with him he would be preserving the place of transference in interpreting the patient’s material. If the patient has a factual issue about the analyst and the analyst does not confirm it or deny it the transference material will eventually reveal itself.

Evolution of Psychoanalysis and Training Change:

The endeavor to carrying on with leftovers of old psychoanalysis (vocabulary) is useless, if not detrimental. The most it could do is giving a skeleton for a poor system of psychotherapy. In other terms, the vocabulary of psychoanalysis that is currently used, and in most cases considered the theory of psychoanalysis, is just terminology of no specificities. Therefore, most of the leftover vocabulary of the old psychoanalysis was-or should be- a stop gap until we understand what things are. As an example: identification, in the original usage of the term, meant a process of self-definition based on assuming an identity that goes beyond the subject’s own authenticity: “identified with his father or the aggressor”. However, after decades of dealing with the subject in more than one capacity, we amassed a vast knowledge about identification that could (should) clarify that psychical process in a different and clear way. We learned few things about narcissism, projection, love\hate relations, interpersonal and intrapsychic structures. We cannot or should not understand identification in the same old meaning because it is not a simple process of introjection. We would be doing ourselves a great favor if we examine the human subject’s Grief reaction to loosing an object of identification.

Psychoanalysis has evolved to get closer to understanding its subject matter; the human being, but that is not clear to the naked eye because its training is stagnant at a backward point. Its training has to match that progress and not keep recycling the old. It has to because the humanities are modernized and have commensurate systems of learning and training, and we need to join them. We still in owe of our forefathers… or are we?! A possible answer to that question: no we are not. It is just that we have no analyst with vision to see, prepare, and work on moving forward to let our forefather rest in peace.    

 

 

A Way Out of Stagnation

Toward A Contemporary Psychoanalysis

I am quite sure this posting will not go well with the majority of old and contemporary psychoanalysts and candidates. It is not on psychoanalysis, but about it. I am going back to my choice of Freud’s four intuitions briefly, to demonstrate how the academic approach to psychoanalysis differs from the clinical one or the customary way we learn it and teach it to candidates in IPA institutes. I strongly advocate making the academic approach an additional requirement if we are proposing to open up and allow making radical changes to the way we understand psychoanalysis. This approach will gain the attention and inquisitiveness of a new generation of analysts, more than the mere repetition of the old terminology and vocabulary of psychoanalysis as if they are a theory of psychoanalysis.

The most compelling argument regarding making a ‘radical’ shift in the direction psychoanalysis has to take now, or close to now, is the stubbornness of the IPA, as the custodian of psychoanalysis, to acknowledge that the dropping of numbers of its membership is not because of a drop in the interest in psychoanalysis among young mental health professionals, or a general dwindling of interest in psychoanalysis in society, but because of the quality of psychoanalysis it is advocating and offering in its training institutes. It is pretty archaic and inadequate. The IPA has forgotten, and maybe ignores that originally and for six- or seven-decades candidates were seeking IPA’s membership everywhere in the world because it was the best and the only place to learn and train in psychoanalysis. The beginning of the IPA was founded on the birth of psychoanalysis; its continuation paralleled the changes and improvement Freud and the early analysts in psychoanalysis kept generating. Psychoanalysis was a novelty worth the membership of the IPA, and its membership meant that the member masters the knowledge and technique of that “fascinating” new understanding of human psyche. Today, any IPA member, whatever his level of mastering the theory or the art of its practice, would not have anything new or meaningful to say something new to a colleague. Even a lay educated person knows about psychoanalysis as much as the trained analyst. Only thinkers and phosphorus seem to know more and better that the best training analysts.

It was psychoanalysis that created and sustained the IPA not the other way around, as the IPA custodians still insist. I am quite aware of how difficult for the remainder of my generation of analysts to accept that what they learned and trained few decades ago in is no longer viable. I am also quite cognizant of the difficulty of engaging the new generation in a process of originating and establishing another psychoanalysis that fits their age. However, time and psychoanalytic experience make me firmly believe that psychoanalysis, the theory of us humans, will find the means for its continuation despite the IPA’s effort to make the past continue in the present and stay for the future. It happened before and will happen again.

A Very V. Brief Account of the Evolution of Psychoanalysis.

Freud’s psychoanalysis went through three or four stages (revisions) in its development during his own life.  After graduating from medicine he spent several years searching for some field of interest to make it his professional future. His experience in psychiatry with Meynert and his relationships with Breuer got him away from his undirected endeavours in the field of neurological research and got him in touch with psychoneurotic patients. However, his short encounter with Charcot and Bernheim had taken him by surprise because he never hesitated after that in what he wanted to do. His first insight about the wish came when he rejected that what is wrong with patients is not a ‘happening’ but something to understand. The evidence to that awareness is what he stated in Studies on Hysteria that patients suffer from reminiscences (things that happened to them in the past and when retrieved they make sense of their sufferings). The radical shift was making the disease and the patient one entity instead what was tried before to find a cause outside the psychical life of the patient. The patient became a human who has a psychical life which has entities to be analyzed (in Medicine the disease is external or a separate entity of dysfunctionality of an internal organ).

He extended his explorations of the newly discovered psychical entity to the world of dreams, which was not logical but an intuitive shift of focus. His view was that dreams do not happen to the person, but he makes them. There he states the foundation of all his work till 1939, and hopefully our work too. He says: “We see that the psychical mechanism employed by the neuroses is not created through there having been first a morbid disturbance affecting the mind, but is already present in the normal structure of the mental apparatus. The two psychical systems, the transitional censorship between them, the way in which one activity inhibits and becomes super imposed on the other show us one of the ways leading to knowledge of that structure”. (Cited in E. Jones, Vl. I, p. 297). What followed this insight was the Dream Book, then Psychopathology of Everyday Life, followed by the Book on Jokes and The Three Contributions to Theory of Sex. We could realize that Freud’s foundational insights were unconscious conceptions, vaguely mentioned before they took their verbal form and became functional concepts, i.e., become operational and working hypotheses.

For a first time the human subject was looked at as something that has meaning, and the meaning is implicit in his psyche, and could be sorted out by analyzing it. The riddle of the sphinx was solved [ Who walks on four, then on two and ends up walking on three. [The human person].

Freud’s intuition proved that the unconscious aspect of an intuition remains unconsciously active even after it mainly gets a verbal conscious format. He was unconscious that he has brought down the wall that kept the human subject a riddle till he saw the meaning of the human phenomena dormant within itself (the meaning of the dream is dormant in its visual scene and expresses ‘the dreamer’s personal wish). We laugh at jokes because the irony in them says something we refrained from acknowledging and verbalizing. A slip of the togue is not a happening, but a process in the mind of the person that he is not conscious of. As obvious as it is now it was noticed and ‘unconsciously’ understood by many before Freud. But he revealed it as a product of a psychical mechanism. Freud looked at dreams, parapraxis, symptoms, and other human manifestations as psychical mechanisms. Because he previously-in the phase of hypnosis- encountered regression and preconscious guilt especially in regard to sexuality he identified those mechanisms as defense mechanisms (Vol. III of the SE). The first phase in the history of psychoanalysis was spent by Freud and his disciples identifying and explicating the psychical mechanisms that created the symptoms. Thus, the wish was the first step toward the subject as the subject-matter of psychoanalysis.

The second phase in the history of psychoanalysis came when Freud revised the role of sexuality in the psychical life of the patient. Sexuality was the most prominent issue in early psychopathology and was considered the main cause of psychoneuroses. However, when Freud’s clinical practice expanded (SE Vol. nine and ten) to included other psychoneuroses than hysteria, he noticed that it is the psychoneuroses that distorts the patients’ sexuality and talked about other defense mechanisms that are not as the simplistic repression. His Three Contributions to the theory of Sexuality underlined that sexuality exists in the human subject since childhood, that it is not an instinct or a simple urge, but a Trieb (a complex integration of several bodily areas in reacting to their stimulations and are shaped by the subject’s own experiences through his childhood development. The most radical and shifting result of Freud’s analysis of sexuality was that sexuality is not the cause of psychoneuroses, but it is one of the main targets of the neurosis. Sexuality gets sick and does not cause sickness.

A third phase started when Freud shifted his attention from “mechanisms” and “things psychological” to psychical processes. In that period of expansion, change and new horizon for psychoanalysis, Freud became aware that what is unconscious is not so because some defense mechanism but because the unconscious is a psychical entity that has its own nature, which differentiates it from the conscious and cognitive functions. The unconscious is a distinct state in psychical life that it has a different system of functioning. Although his work on that subject (1905) was interesting particularly at that time, it revealed a new insight about the psyche and the development of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts (Freud and his colleagues) realized that they should not be distracted and deceived by the logical links between causes and effects, but they have to be aware that the unconsciousness is more than ‘just not being conscious’.

Between 1912 and 1920 Freud published two sets of papers that marked the period as the most inspiring and important in the history of psychoanalysis. The first is the papers on technique, the second is called the metapsychological papers. Those papers are seldom mentioned anymore, and my recent limited inquiry in a very small number of institutes shows that very rarely do the curricula of the institutes give them the deserved attention. The two sets of papers should be recognized as products of genuine and significant evolution in the history of psychoanalysis. The papers on technique put us face to face with the process of analyzing and the issues that emerge in the “office” not just in our minds. The second group called metapsychological dealt with the dual nature of psychical phenomena like repression, narcissism, and the changes to psychical due to fixations and maturation. The primary and the secondary of the same phenomenon revealed the significance of anxiety as a reaction to conflict and the existence of latent psychodynamics.

 Freud’s paper on the unconscious (1915) is quite intriguing. For none academic psychoanalysts it means very little. The clinical and theoretical implications of the three types of unconsciousness Freud that mentioned in the paper do not seem to foretell- in a clear way- what major changes in psychoanalysis could be predicted from the impact of that explication of unconsciousness. We will see, when we get to the protocol of practicing psychoanalysis that the tripartite meaning of the unconscious, especially the systemic unconscious, was actually the core of understanding the phenomenon of Transference. This might sound to the trained analyst to practice excessive theoretical sophistication. Yet, I did not find in the regular literature on the subject of transference mush dealing with the inevitability of a degree of unconscious transference in any relationship, healthy and unhealthy. The clinical trio of neutrality, anonymity, and abstinence has to be strictly observed so the analyst’s engagement in the process of analysis is limited to allow it to be more transferential than actual.  

 A forth phase-started quietly and slowly after 1923 (The Ego and the Id)- in which Freud did not come up with anything genuinely new, except his work “Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1926). Freuds slowed down in discovering new psychoanalytic finds and worked on consolidating his findings and some of his disciples’ insights. That forth stage had and still has a detrimental effect on the evolution of psychoanalysis. We, second and third generations of psychoanalysts, assimilated Freud’s endeavor to stabilize psychoanalysis and just kept polishing what is achieved till now. There are two negative results to that stand, which are behind the present deterioration of psychoanalysis as it is adopted by the IPA. The first is to stop at where Freud and ‘Freudians’ have reached and keep recycling what they have achieved. Recycling of anything deteriorates the original substance of the recycled. That is what happened with ego psychology, object-relations (the second phase of the Defense Mechanisms), and the almost total abolition of the ideas regarding the unconscious. The second, is when the core of the psychoanalytic insights is neglected it has to be compensated for or denied completely. This is what happened with the period of the new schools that was followed-after their failure- to compensate for the lost insights by preserving the institutions instead.  

Good deeds never get lost, and psychoanalysis will come back but with different psychoanalysts.

 

The Third major insight is the existence of primary and the secondary states of affaire in every aspect of our psychological life. The paper On Narcissism (1913) was almost an obituary of the libido theory, and the formation of a need for either a new ‘dynamo’ for functional explanations of psychological life, or new conception of psychological life that could be explained neither by the libido theory nor anything external to the psychological phenomenon itself. Freud went back to the concept of Trieb which the libido idea emerged from (The Three Essays on Sexuality 1905) and to the concept of Repression; his first psychoanalytic concept. Those two concepts got two major shifts, in his thinking in his Papers on Metapsychology (1915). His dormant intuition made him rediscover that “…  ‘an instinct’ appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimulus originating from within the organism an reaching the mind …”. He also distinguishing between two phases in repression: primal repression which “consists in the psychical(ideational)representative of the instinct being denied entrance into consciousness. Then comes repression proper, when primary repression seems to be failing in keeping the instinctual out of consciousness” (1915, 148). Freud’s third intuition-like his foundational intuition of the psychical representing the subject- did not catch the attention of psychoanalysts because they did not have an obvious or direct impact on clinical work, though, anything ‘psychological’ is a transformation of something somatic or mental. Therefore, the intuition that there are primary and secondary operation behind whatever we deal with as psychoanalysts (regardless of our specialty) is essential in our understanding of “analyzation”. We should not be searching for something unconscious about the patient that is not in his free association; find the unconscious in the patient’s conscious speech. I have to interrupt here to make a point: it is not important if Freud recognized fully or consciously the extent of his intuitions. It is our duty to bring out of his intuitions what we could and might be able to develop and advance our specialty. It is a duty to keep advancing psychoanalysis and avoid being fixated on something old. Freud’s greatness is exactly this.

The duality of repression’s make-up is very significant and instrumental in giving the unconscious the qualifications for its existence. Th duality of repression suggests that there must be a quantitative or qualitative gap between them. That gap is as part of human’s nature, because without it there would not be a psychical life. A wave of rage has to be primarily repressed and to be turned into psychical or mental representation of that rage. The facility of representation is what turns the urge to respond into a wish to react to the repressed rage. Thus, the rage could be properly repressed. The gap in the duality of repression is either the facilitator of the birth of psychological life, or the manifestation of psychological life. We do not differ in our somatic needs, but we differ in what wishes those needs generate. Our specific need could be shared by others but its transformation into wish is quite difficult to be exact like another person’s. Our differences start with our wishes, the unconscious condition of its repression, or finding the proper language to express it. The unconscious is a constant and inherent part of psychical life because there is a continuous process of repressing urges into wishes and generating gaps between the conscious and the repressed, i.e., the unconscious.

The forth major insight is the duality of human subject; heis a dual being, i.e., everything the subject is, is a duality. Dealing with this attribute of the human subject requires keeping in mind that although psychoanalysis is a human science it is very unique in a subtle way: Psychoanalysis studies the human subject directly through his personal attributes, while other humanities study the subject via his manifestations, like social institutions, politics, morality, religion, his reactions to new technology, etc. Psychoanalysis educes the subject from his condition, while the rest of the humanities deduce the subject from his social displays. Better, while the subject in the humanities is a unit in a social act, like marriage for instance, the subject’s marriage in psychoanalysis is sort of a ‘text’ about him. It tells things about him. This distinction makes us confront something about the psyche that psychoanalysis, or Freud’s forth insight, introduced to the world of the humanities. P. Ricoeur (1970.p475) said: “A reader familiar with Hegelian [dialectical philosophy] cannot help but notice the constant use of opposition in the structure of Freud’s concepts [which are consistently dichotomous] …it is true that dichotomy is not necessarily a dialectic, and that each dichotomy has a different sense. But his [Freud]style of opposition is ultimately involved in the birth of meaning; his dichotomy is already dialectical”. Freud, intuited that whatever we try to understand about the subject, deductively or inductively, imposes on us to put it in the context of a duality. In my last publication I stipulated several dualities as part of our psychological inheritance. I will mention here three:  I-Me, consciousness- unconscious, and manifest and latent. The subject is ‘his’ self and also an object to himself. When he speaks, he uses the pronoun of the first person, I; but when he speaks about himself, which he could and does all the time, he uses the objective pronoun Me.  He can be his-self and an object to himself. We can not be able to understand ‘sadism’ without mentioning (thinking of) masochism, because if we do not, we will confuse sadism with simple aggression. Even consciousness has to be defined by contrasting it with unconsciousness, so it would not mean awareness or cognition. We never deal with any message that comes to us from our external world-even our internal world too- that we do not give it our own twist of meaning. We are constantly trying to find, create, improve our conception\perception. So, we live in a world that is conceive of as a duality of manifest issue and latent meaning. In general, Freud’s forth insight is giving the obvious of ourselves the not so obvious meaning. 

Freud’s insight about the duality of the subject-with all its implications-is still a feature that is rarely noticed, and less so, in its importance in the practice of psychoanalysis (clinical and none clinical). The next and last part of this post will be dedicated to convincing the current retiring psychoanalysts that it is more sensible to give a chance to a new psychoanalysis that comes from the academic style of thinking. This call will show that we need to revive the intuitions that gave birth to psychoanalysis, and to only reveal its latent and neglected attributes that were fundamental in the past. It is illogical that an ideology of the subject that was largely very successful for 80-90 years to vanish-or deteriorate that badly, without leaving behind the seeds of a new one. This is our test: to replace contemporary psychoanalysis with a better and new one that comes out of it, but through academic thinking. We-the old generations analysts- have to refuse accepting current psychoanalysis, because it is already dead, not just in clinical practice and IPA experience but as a viable theory of many human characteristic. We are not able -since the time of the schools- to revive it. Something else has to be taken care of the new generation of seekers of learning and training have to understand that the easy way to become psychoanalyst in the IPA system of learning and training would only lead to fakeness and frustration. Psychoanalysis is knowledge that is worthy of an academic program and full-time dedication.

 

Is it Psychoanalysis or it is the Institutions of Psychoanalysis?

I have lived the last fifty years of my career as a psychoanalyst and witnessed its perpetual crises over those years-even in different countries- without seeing something similar, or closely akin to what is happening to it now. Before I get to that, I have to admit that I was critical of the condition psychoanalysis has reached since the acceptance of a distinction made between intrapsychical and interpersonal psychoanalyses. My criticism was based on a conviction that psychoanalysis is a theory of the intrapsychic, and its application as psychotherapy is to free and readjust the intrapsychical deformities of childhood fixations. I firmly believed that psychoanalysis is not a discovery that will one day be overtaken by another theory or another theoretical improvement; its subject matter-the human subject-might present the analysts with different intrapsychical concerns in the future, but psychoanalysis in itself will remain the theory of the intrapsychic. What is happening now is analysts shifting their endeavors to the crisis of the shrinking interest in psychoanalysis and the falling membership of the psychoanalytic institutions. Instead of looking at psychoanalysis or into it, as the real concern, the dropping memberships of the societies has become the concern. Better, the container and not the contained is the preoccupation of the IPA and its branches. I am tempted to liken that to funny metaphors, but I leave room for you to do that. Never before, did the concerns of the IPA and its regional and local psychoanalytical institutions about the shrinking numbers of their membership, shifted their attention from psychoanalysis to merely the survival of their institutions. It should be clear to the clear minds of psychoanalysts and the guardians of their institutions that their efforts to make psychoanalysis ‘interesting’ and ‘exciting’ by engaging it in social matters is trying to jump out of the sinking ship of psychoanalysis. Our duty is to the save the ship and not the passengers, because saving the ship saves the passengers, not the other way around. Never before the institution of psychoanalysis came so close to considering the term psychoanalysis not a noun but a pronoun, or it could mean other things too.

This risk comes from ignoring the very important reality of what we call the discovery and evolution of psychoanalysis. Freud’s discoveries are many and vary in their importance. Only one stands out as astonishing and outstanding: the psyche. He was able to separate from the human subject what is called his psyche and talk about him in terms of his psyche (we have no definition of ‘psyche’ because it does not exist but stands for the nature of the homosapien). His discoveries were about the nature of the psyche and he called his endeavours psychoanalysis, i.e., analyzing the subject. What we know now of the psyche reveals an aspect of Freud’s genius that is not clearly appreciated. The psyche is a term that allowed talking about the subject as a presence in whom opposites coexist (primary and secondary processes, primary and secondary repression, etc.,). I can see and hear some of my colleagues respiring in desperation, yet if they are doing analysis as they like to do it the duality of the subject is the only way we could talk about the unconscious coexisting with consciousness in every psychological manifestation of our life.  Duality is the basic condition of the existence of psychical life.

Those notions are fundamental in understanding psychoanalysis and reviving it. It is obvious to me that the desperate attempts at reviving psychoanalysis by inserting ideas like schools and changes to its core premise to intersubjective or object relations etc., were a reaction to the gradual but continued decline of the notion of the intrapsychic. The seemingly declined essence of the intrapsychical in psychoanalytic work is caused by the difficulty to teach and train in working with the psyche and not with the person. That distinction also separates the neutral analyst from the engaged analyst, which to some analyst is detrimental to psychotherapy. I attended a discussion between Brenner and Kernberg (in time of the glorious Walldorf Astoria) where the background of a difference between an ego theory and a libido theory was proffering a glimpse of what we are talking about now.

The difficulty of reviving psychoanalysis after almost almost thirty years of learning, training, writing, educating in matters that do not relate to psychoanalysis as a noun but as a pronoun (psychoanalysis is such and such, but what is it !!??). This question will not get its answer in a seminar in an IPA training center…. It will though, in a university program that gets few enlightened professors of the humanities together for few years, with renewed groups of young intelligent students who want to learn psychoanalysis not just get some instructions to do psychoanalysis. What is promising is that we are reading now about academic programs in different universities and less bout the training institutes of the IPA.

My blog sometimes attracts the attention of some individuals in other countries of other continents. I am not a household name to improve that situation. However, there are more analysts now who realized that the IPA and its system of training is unsuitable for the new horizons of learning psychoanalysis (and maybe improve psychotherapy too). It will be really a good thing if the Amercas engage in a discussion about psychoanalysis with their peers in Europe, and maybe in few years with the Asians psychoanalysts.

 

The IPA: A Solution that Became the Problem.

There is an Arabic proverb that goes like this; the one who reveals the truth to you is your friend (Sadeekak mun Asdakak), Notice the rhyme in the two words of friend and truth.

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I am starting this post with a proverb because I expect, if not rejection it will be resentment toward the main idea I am promoting here. I think the IPA is an obstacle in the way to getting psychoanalysis a place in Academia, and extending its life in the field of the humanities.

I am aware that the subject of the IPA is of no of interest to psychoanalysts anymore; members and none-members. I am also aware that tackling that subject will not bring any changes to the ‘ongoings’ of psychoanalysis in any local or regional psychoanalytic institution. In my limited research of the status of psychoanalysis in some countries, I could not even sense that the IPA constitutes a problem to deal with. On the contrary, in some regional branches there are more concern about the IPA than the IPA causing concerns. Because the IPA is the final point of authorization in psychoanalysis it is not sensible to ignore its real current status. The IPA is in trouble everywhere. Maybe it is not an issue in practical terms, but it is important in terms of reflecting the true image of psychoanalysis anywhere it exists. Its trouble has been felt for many, many years (since 1995), and it was and still is the dwindling numbers of its membership. However, I did not come across any real effort or attempt at understanding the nature of the problem by looking at the declining interest in the membership of the IPA as the right thing to expect and to happen. Quite the reverse. The IPA custodians seem to think that the lack of interest in its membership is caused by lake of shared interests and poor interaction between its members. I have the impression that lately, the IPA hired a marketing company that suggested a competition in short stories writing between the members, and other things of the same nature to create an atmosphere of camaraderie between the members. The most obvious in those attempts is the avoidance of dealing with the issue in trouble: psychoanalysis.

The existing and symbolic status of the IPA brings to focus three chronic problems that psychoanalysts refrain from confronting and dealing with. The three problems are: apprenticeship as the means of qualifying the psychoanalysts, training and certification, and the vague link between membership and professionalism.

1.      Apprenticeship and Qualifying the Psychoanalysts.

Back to history. The unchanging function of the IPA as the legitimate authority of psychoanalysis conceals (camouflages) the natural changes that are inevitable in any evolving thought like psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was not a Freudian discovery; there was no psychoanalysis to discover. He discovered few new and radical things about the ‘psyche’, which were later called Psychoanalysis. Professionals, mainly from the medical profession, and from different parts of Europe got interested, and they started meeting regularly to exchange ideas. During those meetings interested physician and none-physicians were learning from Freud and from each other. Some genuinely and important matters started to emerge, and the meetings were in bigger demand. The promising nature of those meetings got formalized, and an IPA was the solution. In 1910 the IPA was formed. It became  both a membership body and an apprenticeship club (by the nature of the novelty of the subject that required transmitting new knowledge through others who knew more and better). Ten years later both training and membership became practically the twins that the IPA produced to make psychoanalysis a movement; not just a local endeavor. The notion of training and organizing the membership qualification gave birth to the psychoanalytic movement that expanded nationally and internationally to become a new addition to Western Culture.

Unfortunately, the double functions of overseeing training in the IPA training centers and accepting the newly trained candidates as members of the same institution fused, or rather confused, the two acts of training and membership. In spite of the expanding of the psychoanalytic movement and the practical impossibility of maintaining standards of training in psychoanalysis in the system of the IPA training centers, the ‘guardians’ adopted the idea of duplicating the same modality in the newly opened frontiers. They just keep exporting the Berlin ethos to the new center. There was nothing wrong with the Berlin model except that it was just a starting point and not the end line. The IPA should have separated the two functions or kept them together with the understanding that they should not be confused so the same training analyst will not serve in both capacities ever, or at least not at the same time.  

In the glorious time of the guilds and apprenticeship in the middle ages the line that separated the apprenticeship system from the guild functions was strictly preserved and respected. The training part of a profession was kept independent of the professional part of belonging to the guild. What difference does it make? The apprenticeship part of any fundamental profession was under the authority that was creating the requirements and standards of the training needed, and the innovations that were introduced to those professions. On the other hand, the membership body of the professional “Guild” was independent, as the condition to secure its neutrality and objectivity in accepting its members.  In psychoanalysis, the apprenticeship part is assigned to the training institutes, which is supposed to meet the standers defined by the Association (the analytic guild).  In other words: the training institutes of psychoanalysis are responsible for the standards of education and training of the psychoanalysts. The Association is the body that oversees those standards of psychoanalysis and decides if the quality of the graduate is good enough to qualify him to become member of the guild. The separation of the two bodies is fundamental and elemental.[aF1] [aF2]  Without their separation the IPA will accept all the graduates of its training institutes (do you notice where the problem of the training-analyst starts from?!) and the institutes will guarantee the graduate the acceptance in the IPA, thus qualifying him as a certified analyst (again do you see where the training analyst status could be corrupted). The difference between fusing the two functions of qualifying and certifying the psychoanalyst and separating those two functions is the ‘common sense’ of professionality.

The other inherent problem in the IPA being the training body and the accrediting authority at the same time is the functional interdependency between the training side of the IPA and the membership of the Association. For the association to survive it needs to increase its membership and that could be done by managing the institutes in certain ways. The training faculty of the institutes could also manage training in a way that will attract more candidates to training, thus the membership will have more members. Moreover, the membership institution could lower its standards of training for the same purpose. Am I talking about things that could happen and are actually happening in our revered psychoanalytic profession!!

2.      Training and Certifying the Trainees:

The IPA- officially- recognizes only its training centers as the qualifying place to its membership. However, the graduates of its training centers are not allowed to see patients unless they have a recognized clinical degree from a recognized university. Instead of going through the many contradiction the IPA membership creates I will just remind   the readers that we are dealing with a situation created close to century ago regarding psychotherapy, which was an unheard-of term, let alone a term that had a meaning. The contemporary contradictions the IPA embodies are coming from the very limited changes done to that old conception and system, which was conceived in the first four or five decades of last century. What we have to ask and answer and finally decide is: should we end the old conception of psychoanalysis as it is engraved in the IPA’s protocol, or just tinker with it a little? It also clear that we are facing another more profound question that is implicit in the first one: Could there still be psychoanalysis if we do away with IPA) if we decided to do away with the concept of psychoanalysis which the IPA still adopts?  

The answer to the first question is not supposed to be an expression of attitude or personal preference. In my very modest survey of the status of psychoanalysis in different local and regional IPA branches it was evident that there was not one psychoanalytic society that membered the IPA, that had one society (except in North Europe). The splits within the psychoanalytic community are always the same: a training analyst and his followers (previously private patients in training) disagree with the controlling figures of the society and split, claiming theoretical disagreements. Not one (according to only me) was ever capable of articulating the points of difference he claimed to make him think of saving psychoanalysis from other psychoanalysts. Even Lacan who was and still is the most articulate innovator in psychoanalysis did not say something convincing about what was wrong with Lagashe. All IPA sub-associations are made of more than one local society (with its own ideas about training) and there is no justification offered for that split. I did not find two branches that had one and the same definition of psychoanalysis. Practically and pragmatically speaking, the IPA as a global association answers our first question this way: we could do away with psychoanalysis, but we cannot do away with the IPA if we want to keep psychoanalysis living. That answer highlights that belonging to an organization is the gist of our identity

3.      Membership and Professionalism:

Psychotherapy is no longer a frivolous matter or unverified method of dealing with a major need of many people. It is also impossible to talk about psychotherapy without psychoanalysis coming in the picture, because all psychotherapies are offshoots of psychoanalysis, one way or another. This is a very subtle but important issue to examine when we talk about the IPA. IPA was the beginning of the profession of psychotherapy and it was natural that gaining its membership implied that the member is a psychoanalyst. It was the dream of so many young people at the beginning of the twentieth century to become, one day, member of that reputable organization. The gradual emergence of other types of psychotherapy on the one hand, and on the other, the gradual deterioration of the standards of the IPA training, which is not considered or confronted by the IPA Guardians, created a very confusing situation in the field which IPA considered its backyard. The impossibility of checking the standards of few hundred centers, scattered all over the world, resulted in a multifaceted deterioration of psychoanalysis.

The old idealized link between the professionalism of the psychoanalyst and earning the membership of the IPA hardly exists anymore. The vanishing unified meaning of “psychoanalysis” in the different IPA branches makes that link impractical. Most analysts would not accept this characterization of the situation and refute my judgement of the quality of contemporary psychoanalysis, if not because of lack of concern by the leadership of the IPA, it will be for narcissitic reasons. In the narrow field of psychoanalytic activity, which I live in in North America, psychoanalysis is a generic term of psychotherapy. To put in a more precisely: psychoanalysis is the grammar of the language of psychotherapy, and we could have good grammar and bad grammar. But the IPA that was once strictly psychoanalytic, and its function was limited to learning, training, practicing, and professional certification and accreditation of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts has diversified. A couple of years ago a strong call for adapting the functions of the IPA to the needs of the public so the IPA would accommodate those needs failed in making any change in the dropping care about its basic function. That attempt that started west of the USA proves that psychoanalysis as it is now has no appeal to people anymore. At any rate, it is not correct to certify a practitioner in psychoanalysis that does not have the basic shared qualifications required to work with patients, in the field. In other words, the IPA could be considered a fraud because it certifies people- as psychoanalysts- who are not allowed to see patients because they do not have the right to that.

All those ‘real’ issues against the present status the IPA shrink if compared to the emerging-if not the already established – systems of training and qualifying psychoanalysts away from the influence of the IPA. Universities -notably- almost everywhere- are open to include psychoanalysis as an academic program or part of a psychotherapy program. This development changes the IPA from the solution to organizing the psychoanalytic movement for most of the last hundred years, to makes it a problem because its coemption with academia. If someone wants to become a psychoanalyst where would he go? IPA or a university program? Officially and traditionally he should seek training in an IPA training center. Practically he should go to a university program to get a better education and possibly some practical training. The difference is that in academia the aspect of apprenticeship would not be considered favorably.

From a Solution to a Problem:

The IPA, or the international institution of psychoanalysis was the solution to the burgeoning movement of psychoanalysis up to maybe the sixties of last century. It created a sense of commonality and internationality. However, it should have been expected that with time, psychoanalysis, the demand for it, the cultural factors and social evolution will change it, and the need and the structure of an international institution will be in need for revision. The IPA was a solution to a situation that needed it. That situation changed and the need to maintain it became more undesirable to the practicing psychotherapist. However, both candidates and training analysts maintained a fixed idea that there is something called psychoanalysis. As such, the IPA had to be preserved and remain the shelter for that ‘thing’. If there is any truth to that untested belief it should be ‘there is psychoanalysis of the subject that should emerge from him and not applied to him. For instance, sexuality of the present subject, and even aggression, are very different from what they were ninety years ago and fifty years ago. Therefore, psychoanalysis and its institution have to be put in the context of the time. I do not think anyone would miss that internationality now-a-days is not the same as it was in the time of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

If this point is missed by the guardians of the IPA psychoanalysis will suffer in its way to die. It is now suffering –differently- in different parts of the world because the IPA does not accept that it is psychoanalysis that need to change, not the organization or the membership. Changing psychoanalysis is not as it was thought about in the early years: making it psychotherapy (which is now nothing but…). No, changing psychoanalysis is changing the notion of the repressed and the psychodynamics of defense and resistance into a psychology of expression and the sophistication of the human phenomena: psychoanalysis not anymore the message that Freud came down with: it is the message that we need to decipher, interpret and understand.

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 [aF1]

 [aF2]

 

The Political Leader and the People: Who Leads and Who is Led?

1.       Prologue

In this posting I am thinking and writing about the events of January 6 on Capitol Hill in Washington not as an American (I am not American) or an expert in the subject, but as an educated person who has a point of view that comes from his background as a psychologist\psychoanalyst.

I have to clarify that what influences my approach to this subject is my background as a psychologist-more than being a psychoanalyst. However, understanding and interpreting the phenomenon is purely derived from my psychoanalytic training experience. My attempt at that is not based on what psychoanalysts say about the phenomenon; it is how psychoanalytic clinical thinking -not psychoanalytic theory- approaches the link between causes and effects in nonclinical issues like social phenomena.

 

Psychologists study and work with cognitive functions, which they consider the core of psychological life: perception, memory, development and evolution of affective responses, memory, etc. Thinking is one of the most significant topics in that list. People differ greatly in their abilities and inclinations to think; sometimes innately (intelligence) and sometimes personally (preference and bias). Trump is an extreme and rare case of a subject who is not able to think either ways. He is not even insightful and inclined to manage anything mentally as some of his kind sometimes do. He even does not fall in the category of selective thinking potentials. He just does not think, period. One example: when he suggested to the team of physicians in the White House to use detergents as injection against Corona Virus, he did not think what could have stopped all physicians over the last two centuries from doing that with other epidemics (I do not mean that he should have thought medically but just to engage his mind in a process of thinking, asking himself a question?). In my opinion, Trump, in most cases of being accused of lying did not lie, because lying requires remembering, evaluating, thinking, and having a conscious intention to lie. He is not capable of activating all those human gifts to use them either together or in coordination to deal with the facts that he manages.

 

People like Trump assume that they think and get ideas about things. What they get is only allusions of ideas. The distinction is between thoughts that a person knows that he has created- in his own mind- and thoughts that seem to have been created by reliable others who got them the same way he gets them [just whims]. Trump’s ideas were mostly the making of others (God knows what kind of others!!!) and he claimed to have been their origin. The “USA first, let us Make America Great Again” are not his thought. His thoughts (if we could think of any of his) were expressing psychological pressure that did not go through the thinking process to give him feedback needed to judge them. In other words, with people like Trump the task is not to deduce from what they say or do some implicit meaning, but to understand the person because he would be only responding to internal pressures.

2.Understanding the Subject:

In normal life we react to others with the belief that we can understand them. Yet, in most cases, it takes some time and several corrections to know whom we are dealing with. The person within the subject has to be firmly defined to be predictable enough to know. We usually accept the discrepancy between the subject and the person behind him if it is within reasonable period of time or significant change of circumstanced. With people like Trump, and because of the absence of any ability to think the task is not to understand him as a subject via his idiosyncrasies and strangeness, and mostly through event by event. The task is to force accepting him as an odd person (difficult!!). We all recognize and remember Trump’s shiftiness between the best in the history of the USA, and never worse than ever before. What is unique in dealing with those people is the absence of what we call ‘unconscious’, because nothing in those people is conscious in the first place to permit contrasting it with unconsciousness. Everything to them is either present or absent but never an issue of where it should belong: present, past, or ever at all. In dealing with North Korea there was nothing existing beyond the moment of being with its leader. The whole event was judged based on how the meeting went, contrary to his meetings with the leaders of Europe. They came up with topics other than Trump himself to discuss, thus he had no interest in the meetings.  Trump’s issues have one entrance (it is also its exit): it is the psychological pressure of a need or a demand, but just not demanding thinking. This point gets us close to the issue of narcissism. I do not think Trump is narcissitic because a narcissist thinks of himself, about himself, his duality as an I and a Me, which Trump has no clue that such things existed. He has no image to embellish or protect, he is an imageless entity.  

The event of the Capitol Hill was Trump’s last chance to do something about being ousted from the presidency and facing the darkness of a world empty of any issues but also still full of issues for thinking. The psychological pressure he was experiencing made him think of a solution: paralyze the democratic system of the USA so they will not find but him to solve the problem (Easy!!). [An intervening sentence: The USA used insurgence successfully in managing the governments of South America, for decades]. As usual, psychological pressure in people like Trump is good for protecting themselves from unmanageable depressions. Trump tried-with the limitations of his thinking -to turn his helplessness into imaginary potency- by fantasizing the collapse of the collegial verification of the result of the election. His imagination did not even go beyond the breakdown of the meeting. What then? Too much thinking needed to answer that question which he was not equipped to do.

The rioters of January six were not much better than trump in regard to thinking. They were very confused and muddled about the objective of their rioting, then they became disoriented about invading the Capitol. They were without any sign of leadership that thinks for them. Without a thinking leadership they got violent and destructive (even murderous). The vagueness was “clearly obvious” in the nonexistence of a defined achievement to reach by their actions. There was no thinking or signs of knowing what their rioting could specifically bring about. It is easy to say that their instigator-Trump- is the kind of leader who could not deliver to the rioters a demand that has process of thinking behind it. This it is too simple a solution for something more complex. He did not think of how the uprise of three or four thousand rioters would make a nation, a system of government, a constitutional legitimacy, and a history of elections and several millions other American who gave their choice of presidency already in their traditional democratic heritage. No one in the USA, a thinker or a no thinker could have moved those thousands of Americans to that senseless uprising by seducing them to adopt his own personal grievances. The rioters were following their own grievance, which happened to agree and overlap with Trump’s. It is also impossible for those thousands to have moved- toward a definite failure- by themselves. In other terms neither the leader (Trump) alone could have moved that crowd, nor the crowd could have encouraged the leader to lead them to a definite failure. The relationship between the leader and the masses-in general- is a relationship that could be a match or a fit. Germans were egging with anger since Versailles. Hitler was ‘A pollical vagabond”; thus were a good fit, but not a good match. A good match at that situation would have been between a capable nation that wants to take her place in Europe and a leader who knew the potential of his people (which happened in the person of Edenauer and the rest of the German leaders.. That fit requires good timing. The timing of the link between leader and people is not studied enough to give some good answers. However, a hasty observation would miss something obvious: people are there in the scene years before the fitting leader appears to ignite them. Therefore, we could say that the insurgency of January was caused by a problem of timing. Although the rioters and Trump are of the same nature (no thinkers) the timing was very wrong. The USA has gone through foundational changes after the impressive rise of China, the creation of the EU, the fall of communism in Russia. It also had to face internal changes in the fields of gender equality, revision of some basic believes regarding race, social equality, international superiority some of the old values.

What happened on Capitol Hill has to be ‘interpreted’ and reconstructed in order to make it subject for deliberation and maybe change, instead of repetition.  From the slogans used and the other mementos that came with the rioters we could conclude that the memory of the civil war of 1861-1865 was lurking in their minds waiting to be announced. The repressed about that major historical event seem to be pushing for return to be worked-up its repression and to announce its presence. The sense of hurt pride and a wishful attempt at reversing an old and a present defeat answers the questions of what, how, and when, but the why question is the difficult one to find an answer for in the same context. Better, January 6 was a return of the after effect of the unworked out repression of the civil war memories. The why question has to deal with two things at the same time: why the hurt of civil war is still living, and what is the link between it and the present sense of defeat?

If I am not mistaken (and it is difficult to not be) historians did not work out a good and proper understanding of the civil war: was it just to emancipate the slaves?!This interpretation takes us to the possible absence of good construction of the past (political working through). Another factor in the event is that replacement of the south’s sense of pride by a new sense of pride reached the point of replacing fact with imaginary thinking. The four years of Trump’s presidency were life in the imaginary both on the side of the president (he took little time to believe that he is really the president) and for his supporters to think they are back in power. Losing power and status after the civil war engendered unconscious and preconscious feelings of self-hate. With self-hate anger is the comfortable twin. Going back to self-love (living with one’s self) is possible if the individual finds a target to hate to free the self in order to be loved again. The search for that hateful other to re-love oneself is possible and easier if someone loves the person. Exteriorizing self-hate and interiorizing selflove - is almost like saying please find me someone to hate to be able to re-love myself.  This is a change that is very fragile and also very demanding because they could happen jointly.

3.       Psychoanalysis and fact of inevitability of change.

 

The inevitability of change is a complex biological, historical, philosophical, social,issues. Putting that aside is necessary to keep this posting moving forward. The end of WWII was a time stated that the world as a whole has to change. True enough, the world started to undergo and is still undergoing unprecedented changes. In the last few years, especially after 9\11 the USA went into a mode of changing too with all the expected resistance to “giving up” what is familiar and American, and adopting what was once anathema. Giving up racial discrimination is a good example of social change. After few decades of quiet and gradual rejection of racial discrimination, determined in some cases by the location and place like north\south, a sudden revival of the old tendencies of the past happened in special forms (police brutality, mass shootings, etc.). Yet, the most important and impressive change was in the rise of the support the white population of the colored population rights and equalities.  Another change was that the movement for the rights of the colored expanded to include more right for more people (immigrants). Racial discrimination was losing its firm grip on social life when it was previously the norm. The call for social justice and change in class distinctions was not looked upon as communist ploys to destroy capitalism as it was judged before. Social change encompassed gender, sexual choices, social, class few more aspects of life. Those changes happened silently over the years (maybe since the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King).

 

It is not only natural but even normal that change to a more advanced point in development would elicit some temporary regressive reactions to maturation. What happened in January sixth is a convincing sign that Americans are changed and changing, and some are just objecting in a desperate and frantic way to that change. Psychoanalysts and child psychologists could give valuable insights in that regard and confirm the possibility of regression after progression in a process of growing up. The maturation of Europe after WWI was followed by regression in WWII war, which was obviously just a glitch in a remarkable movement to peace in that unstable continent. In other terms: January Six is a glitch in the history of the USA and almost a declaration of an advancement and progress.  The Capitol event takes us right to the relationship between the leader and the people. The most evident feature in the relationship between the racially inclined masses and Trump what looked in 2016 as a coincidental match between an unexpected (even just a temporary) leader and a long dormant old grievance. Neither Trump could have expected to win the election, nor the dormant racial issue could have found a contemporary leader ready to adopt the long-neglected subject of racial discrimination. He was an empty container that was ready to be filled with anything that needed to be contained. The rest is what we witnessed few days ago. Before moving to the next point I would like to bring to attention that grievance of the time of civil war seems to still has a part to play in what is discussed here and should be addressed because the war was not just a noble gesture to free slaves; it has other dimensions that are very active till now.   

 

4.       Psychoanalytic Approach to a Current Problem.

How could psychoanalysis contribute to a discussion about some phenomenon that is void of unconsciousness, and its leader is mentally inadequate!? This phenomenon still needs interpretation and construction because it has a distorted meaning that should be made distinct and clear to make changes-if possible- to its understanding.

The act of psychoanalyzing is an act of interpretation and construction. Interpretation is to elicit the meaning behind obvious expressions (verbal, symptoms, dreams, transference, memories, etc.), thus a new or another meaning emerges and comes through the previous manifest- usually rigid meaning. Construction is putting the patient’s psychological life, including the unconscious material that was revealed by interpretation, in context; the patient’s context’. Psychoanalytic work is interpretation in the service of constructing a past to make it amenable to change. For that work-to-work, analysis should avoid looking for the causes of what is discovered (why), because the answer will always be influenced by the patient present conscious function and not by the past conditions when the event really happed. Psychoanalyzing should be limited to what, when, and how the associations the analyst is dealing with materialized. I would also add that leaving the best interpretations without construction, when the opportunity appears, makes the psychoanalytic work worthless.

Working with candidate in supervision of their early practices raised two questions in mind: one I mentioned before. I was able to articulate clearly to the candidates that the vocabulary of psychoanalysis is not the theory of psychoanalysis and using that vocabulary does not mean that we are talking theory. The other, which I only got it clearer in my mind lately and after I finished work as supervisor. ‘When we listen to a patient it is to interpret and elicit the unconscious meaning in it, not to find out what psychoanalysis says about it. I noticed that Kleinians are more inclined to look first for the mechanisms that explain the patients’ association and derive and formulate their interpretation based on that finding. This remark relates to the quick application of psychoanalytic ideas in understanding social and historical phenomena.

How can we look into the January sixth events to find an interpretation for it? It was an act of desperation because even if the rioters managed to kill few of the ‘enemy’, stop the certification of the result of the election, and prevent the transfer of power, they still would not have been able to fulfill their leader’s ambition (stay in power). It was also an act of abreaction of rage and the pain of depression, but not a recent and lived one; it was rage and depression of a time passed. The way they appeared and acted indicated that they are living another time in history. The most obvious, but negated thing, in the whole matter, is the actual and factual discrimination the rioters were expressing in the material destruction of the building… this is not ours. The rioters were American of a time passed. This is the danger that should not overlook. Those events could be repeated in the same exact manner because they are not time-related if the problems are not addressed.

I would end this endless discussion by making two observation only a foreigner could make nonchalantly. The USA needs to look at the greatness of its beginning as a past that affected its present decade ago, but now with the whole world solving the problems of pride, nationalism, patriotism, and distinction in different ways. I know more and firsthand that the distinction between the Sunnis and the She’ates is based on two historical lies, and much of their history is the reactions to activating those lies every now and then. I would not be surprised if Americans have similar things in their history that could correct many flaws that politicians use for their own benefit.