The Future of Psychoanalysis and Future Psychoanalysis

The Difference Between Evolution and Change

2\a. The Discovery of the Subject and the Psyche

 

Discovering the mind or better, noticing its existence, came from noting that our relationship with the world is basically and fundamentally interpretative. Either we individually interpret what we deal with or follow the interpretation of another. The separation between ‘mind’ and ‘objects’ in the act of interpretation brought the subject out of its hidden existence in dogma (I believe psychoanalysts could understand easily and better how the act of interpretation brings out the real subject and frees him from his own neurotic dogma). The evolution of human thinking and reaching the point where it could think of thinking itself is not just an advancement; it is a change that implies an evolution. The issue is not a matter of better interpretations and usage of the mind; it is a change in the subject matter of the interpretations (something analyst would understand better). The difference between that evolution and other changes is in the subject-matter  of thinking not thinking itself. Discovering the subject as the antithesis of the object triggered the philosophical movement of the Western world because noticing the gap between thinking and the thinker revealed that the most significant processes of interaction happen within that gap. Thus, came the first philosophical discovery of the complexity of the world of knowledge: is knowledge a given or acquired? How do we “know”? Is knowing innate and inherent in the mind, or an act we spontaneously do because we can do that? Another indirect finding about that point is the fact that we differ greatly in the thinking processes that leads to knowing. I am tempted to say that the birth of western philosophy came when Emanuel Kant proffered the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori. It is a distinction that we psychoanalysts very much need in order to understand the nature of the systemic unconscious. Analysts do not have to learn philosophy or read the great works of the great thinkers in western philosophy, but they have to remember that psychoanalysis was not an offshoot of medicine but of philosophy. With this modest adjustment of orientations, we gain two things: there are great modern thinker who added substantially to psychoanalysis (P. Ricoeur as an example). There are also great psychoanalysts who contributed to Western philosophy in remarkable ways -J. Lacan for example- who created philosophical sensitivities to matters that pertain to the leftist movement and thought.

Does an analyst who knows philosophy do psychoanalysis better than one who does not know it? No, but if he is a good analyst, he will perform a different kind of psychoanalysis that is more consistent with the aim of treating intrapsychical distortions.

Western philosophy has two revealing discoveries that are outstanding because of their unique effect on the rest of its revelations: the concept of interpretation and the concept of the subject (as a unique form of human existence). Those two concepts are the core concepts of psychoanalysis too. The formulation of those two concepts led to the identification of the psyche, in psychology first and then in psychoanalysis. The psyche was not originally differentiated from the mind or the subject. Even if that distinction was made earlier in the cultural medium of the West, the practicing analysts might not have paid attention to it, or probably they would have said we already know what psyche means. It is not true that we know what the psyche is, let alone its link with Mind and Subject.  The psyche is not something or an entity but a manifestation of something. It is a manifestation of intra-dynamics dealings of childhood experiences, wishes, thoughts of which some are not conscious, etc. The psyche is the subject in his ideational relation with the world around him, therefore the psyche is the agent that interprets the world (the other) to me the subject. To simplify matters to practicing psychoanalyst and avoid the reason to deny the centrality of philosophy in our knowledge and profession I say: I, my subjective pronoun, uses my mind to understand and then interpret what the Me the objective pronoun has to deal with. The outcome of this natural and continual process is the formation of a concept of the self, my psyche. My psyche is what I say to me about my world including my own consciousness.  

Discovering the psyche was part of a process of evolution in western thinking (mind-subject-psyche). Evolution is a law of existence; it is the force of change and improvement in all aspects of life. Psychoanalysis is an evolved aspect of philosophy which depicts it in features of change and improvement. Ignoring that puts psychoanalysis in a precarious place both epistemologically and professionally; it would be either a dead end or the cause of a dead end of the continuing discoveries in human nature. Third, if we exempt psychoanalysis from the process of evolution  we make the discoveries of the sixties the guidance of our work in the twenties of the following century. Kernberg work on the borderline personality disorder and the narcissistic personality were turning points in discovering more and better things about narcissism in general despite keeping it in sphere of the libido and its theory. Therefore, we should look at psychoanalysis as an evolving and changing knowledge. If it remains stagnant it should not be called psychoanalysis because it would the be a set of dogma (if we stop exploring our vocabulary and understanding its connotations better we will be practicing what Priests practice in the ritual of confession.   

My objective in this posting is to underline how the psyche discovered in Western culture and how the philosophical background of psychoanalysis makes a big difference between psychoanalysis as a method of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as a theory of the psyche that made it possible to introduce psychotherapy as one of its off shoots. The discovery of the psyche led to the birth of psychoanalysis. Without acknowledging that the philosophical discovery of the subject was critical in the discovery of the psyche our psychoanalysis would be exactly what it is now: just a practice without a theory of psychopathology. What it is, is much more important than something else (psychotherapy for instance). Understanding the psyche led to the birth of psychoanalysis because the psyche puts in focus the notion of interpretation and the duality of the interpreted and the interpreter.

I though of adding this paragraph to this post to allow me to move better to the next (just started to write).

Psychoanalysts and Philosophy:

This is an important topic because examining it closely reveals several important points that are usually ignored, because the important topic itself is rarely addressed. Psychoanalysts were mostly from the medical professions and the rest of them liked to be considered part of the majority. Mentioning philosophy in the psychoanalytic milieu was frowned at, specifically in the Anglo societies and institutes. Basically, because philosophy was not, and still is not, a popular subject in the regular Anglo school curricula (Canada, USA, and some other nationalities). Yet it is basic in Latin and other peoples’ schools. Thus, philosophy was a term that is badly misconceived. To the uninitiated it’s speculative thinking and arguable ‘useless’ topics of no consequence in a profession of particular aims of achieving tangible results, not just enjoyment of the abstract. Philosophy to the uninitiated is a pleasant way of thinking and talking for better thinking.  I hardly know any psychoanalytic center that brought out the most important characteristic of psychoanalysis which is the profession of dealing with the human subject (not his neuroses) and learning about human heritage. As a profession it is a unique method of exploring and discovering the obvious and the unobvious about the human subject. As human heritage it is the tail end of a long human chain of inclination to learn about ourselves: psychoanalysis is the latest connect in the chain of discovering the subject. That is why whether we are human scientists or physician we are all philosophers/psychoanalysts. I should think or be interested in the place the cogito in our theory of the unconscious.

A modest request in any training center is to spend a trimester studying what happened when thinkers like Kant showed us much to learned amount our minds (and our patients indirectly) thinking about ideas (idealism) instead of the objects of those ideas [when Freud thought about the dream instead of dreaming]. There is no medical thinking about guilt feelings but there is a lot of thinking about guilt as a human phenomenon. A better example is Kohut’s institution about ‘mirroring’, which was a breakthrough to the totally ignored duality of the subject in Ego Psychology. For lack of philosophical background, he used mirroring to explain banal issue in transference and identifications. Philosophy trains the analyst what and how to think about his discoveries about his patient while working with him about the repressed. Moreover, philosophical thinking is of unusual significance how the analyst Formulate and structures his interpretations and make sensible reconstruction of the material gathered over many sessions. Philosophy, as it was for the great thinkers, is the better and higher form of looking at and in the mundane. This is the difference philosophy makes in psychoanalysis.

 

Dear Friend (Name not mentioned for privacy)

It is good to hear from you. I ment to the members part of the list. There were very few comments. I was  unable to get to any of your published comments on the list or any other place. In fact I haven't come across any of your published opinions. I wonder if there is another list that I am not a member of. No Lance, I meant it. The human subject had changed like everything else in life and it was changed to a great extent by the influence of the psychoanalytic culture itself.

  

I noticed two comments that were negative (childish: like being accused of being a secret communist agent who is to destroy USA psychoanalysis). I decided to go back to my blog where I get feedback from several countries... not all positive but all from psychoanalysts who link to what I publish, not take them as pro or against the APaA or the IPA. 

 

I knew that using 'useless 'will not sit well with people who are making a living of practicing that same psychoanalysis. It is impossible that analysts in the USA- who are less than 4 thousands- are not aware that all the efforts made to at least keep psychoanalysis viable did not bring any results to show that they have found the right way to revive it (??? you are the most dedicated and honest person who is concerned about that situation). I am convinced (I have the right to have convictions) that  the old 'justified' narcissism analysts enjoyed for decades is still controlling our self-perception.  But now we have nothing to nourish our narcissism to being psychoanalysts. There are reasons but no justification to not like our true image. Just compare how we handled our disagreement in the last four decades and the splits in England and France. 

 

I will take your objection to something I said as a step toward explaining my changed position from the list and my blog. You quote me saying: "Parents are more informed about childhood and its psychological conflicts'', I have no doubt the Oedipus Complex is not a common term anywhere in the world. The parents of any education and cultural background are now aware that their relationships with children in childhood have consequences (I come from Egypt that is  backward because of the educational system and the prevalence of Islamic thinking in it. I saw mothers who can hardly read and write making remarkable observations about bringing up kids intelligently, which my mother and aunts  had no clue about .

My position lately is that we have a poor version of the old classical psychoanalysis because of the haphazard additions and discarding of main ideas about the human subject left us with a seriously disfigured psychoanalysis. Society and the human subjects have changed in a drastic ways lately, with the availability of the internet worldwide.. All we psychoanalysts are concerned about is training and  the number of candidates and patients seeking psychoanalysis. Those concerns are 'results' of poor psychoanalysis and dealing with them is cosmetic. .

The birth of psychoanalysis came with the birth of new and modern subjects (males and females) who invited exploring their unspoken psychological conflicts. In other and better ways: psychoanalysis was the response to a change in the human subject that needed a new approach to continue the March Of The Race. Change is inevitable and after over a hundred years we would be just protecting our narcissism to think that the psychoanalysis of a hundred or forty years ago is still valid till now.

 

From the reactions I got from the membership I easily could say: not only patients have changed as a natural result of time, but analysts are still maintaining  an old narcissistic self concept. The old psychoanalysis WAS excellent but a new one has to be discovere to deal with new kinds of psychopathology. Calling for a new psychoanalysis does not consider the old one as useless, Just that it lived its life  we should move on to know who we are now: Oedipus or Narcissus (Thank you Jane).

 

 

In response to an analyst who believes that the problem is not in psychoanalysis but in what the Ego does !! (the ego is the personal pronoun I in Greek). he could not disagree with my opinion more. Here is my opinion.   

For sure our old psychoanalysis is useless now and more so in the future. It was based on conflicts between good and bad in some interpersonal relationships (sexuality, aggression, parental dictates, poor or wrong psychodynamics, etc.). The new subject (patient) has nothing of that: sexuality is no longer a field of prohibitions and conflict. Aggression has been streamed away from shouting and mussels to more group activity not individual quality. Parents are more informed about childhood and its psychological conflicts and more from society, media, and schools in bringing up their children.

We have to consider two things: a new psychoanalysis geared to understanding the human subject of now (which will not come from A Freud or many of him), and the cooperation of of other humans sciences' specialists in exploring the nature of the human subject. Those two things require contemporary psychoanalysts to prepare themselves for  be just part of big circle of knowledgeable professionals
We, old analysts should hand out psychoanalysis to a new generation of human scientists, thinkers, psychotherapist, educators.  Our bags have nothing to offer anymore.

 

 

The Future of Psychoanalysis and Future Psychoanalysis

The Difference Between Evolution and Change

2.The Discovery of the Subject and the Psyche

 

This post is likely be considered boring. Not even few analysts would consider it related to what they are presently doing. However, I will continue writing and publishing it because I am convinced that the recent efforts to resuscitate psychoanalysis-especially in North America- have already failed. Psychoanalysts in the whole world are 12,000. The figure tells it all. Even if the 12000 are in one country they validate and attest to that it is a profession close to its last downfall. To cut it short: this could be for one (and only one) of two reasons: either psychoanalysis has outlived its usefulness, or there is something missing in our perception and conception of what happened to it. Personally, I am convinced that old psychoanalysis that we learned until the late Seventies-early Eighties has outlived its usefulness. What we face now is a new human object who has no concerns about sexuality, gender, parental relationships, aggression whether public or private. We need a new psychoanalysis that is different in its topics and who is the subject we will be dealing with in our future psychotherapy.   

                 I am making the first section of the post a problematic because our old psychoanalysis had and has a history that explains whey it emerged in the end in the nineteen century. If we will have a new psychoanalysis it has to have a similar background history too.

 

The Future of Psychoanalysis and Future Psychoanalysis

The Difference Between Evolution and Change

1.The Discovery of the Mind 

Dealing with this topic again could easily cause a feeling of boredom and considered useless if not even harmful. Psychoanalysts- at the present time and maybe more acutely in North America than in other parts of the world-are dealing with serious issues about the curricula of learning psychoanalysis and modernizing its training. They also face as partitioners issues pertaining to restructuring the organizations they belong to. Psychoanalysts, after three or four decades of worrying about the declining interest in psychoanalysis, are awaking to the fact that cosmetic rearrangements of issues will not bring any improvement to the dire condition of psychoanalysis, whatever the term psychoanalysis means to the discussant. However, there is no doubt that now psychoanalysts acknowledge their uncertainty about a solution or the right way to pose the main questions regarding psychoanalysis as a field of interrelated issues, not just a a problem with apprenticeship. A preliminary aspect of that question is: should we confront the topic of the future of psychoanalysis instead of ‘negating' the issue by just thinking that we are making the necessary adjustment in its course of evolution? Is psychoanalysis changing or just evolving?

Psychoanalysts might claim to differ theoretically about psychoanalysis, but most of them if not all, never differ in considering it –basically-a profession of psychotherapy. This attitude creates two unfavorable attitude that were behind every crisis psychoanalysis has gone through. A. Although we are not an independent filed of practice (certifiable like medicine or law), and we are also not a well identified field of knowledge (economics, history), we consider ourselves distinct from our original academic foundation or any other academic entity. B. The second attitude is that psychoanalysis could evolve and change but not as result of external factors or new knowledge, or a need for revising one of its old points of view.  In other words, psychoanalysis to the psychoanalysts is a closed system of knowledge and an exclusive filed of practice. After my colleagues reject to this assessment of our silent nature, I should ask them: what is your counter argument to that characterization of our field. As the saying says: it takes a thief to catch a thief. I am a psychoanalyst, and I was of that same nature for many years if not most of my years in practice and in the organization. It is the failure of the organization since 1995, and the haphazard and even bizarre suggestions made by some colleagues that claimed to have come up with 'a natural evolution of the theory of practice’ pushed me to revisit the topic of this posting several times before. This time I am not suggesting solutions but revealing the risk of dealing with psychoanalysis as an issue that has no link to its history or limit its history to the history of psychotherapy.

Whether we like it or not psychoanalysis is not a spontaneous independent discovery or creation. Our pride in Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis has to be put in its historical context, because without that context it looks like just a silly act of a great mind that was searching for a specialty in medicine that he could not find. Psychoanalysis is a product of and a contributor to the ongoing thinking endeavors of its culture. Therefore, when we say that the history of psychoanalysis goes back to the birth of German Idealism it means that without looking at what we practice as part of something bigger we will end up with a self-perpetuating narrow-minded view of ourselves. That self-perpetuating idea is that we are psychotherapists. This fixed idea is the reason we remained captive of the primitive model of apprenticeship that controlled our training and caused its deterioration. We do psychoanalysis within a wider scope of knowledge that gave birth-for the first time-to the notion of psychotherapy, to replace prayers, holy waters, apothecary, and even physical punishment in forcing corrections of pathological behaviors.

In the Middle Ages thinkers engaged in a litany of explorations, investigations, discussions, analyses of the main problematics that occupied the human mind for centuries without any conclusion.  Thinkers gradually became aware and systematic in studying the works of the mind. Religious issues and the religious texts were not only included in that undertaking, but they were also the main and best issues in the field for such an exercise. Priests who were dealing with that material were the best educated in that time and place. The human mind was examined through its responses to what was previously Givens which did not raise any questions. Scholastic philosophy discovered that “man has a mind”. Translating this axiom into spoken languages it meant that the human being is not an object like everything else the world, but a subject that is distinct in his being. This might sound facetious now but then it was a foundational shift in our psychological life. Man was defined by his manifestations: Christian serf in lord W’s estate. So, a human could redefine himself to others as others define themselves to him. But, at that moment came Descartes to as the Question of all questions: I prove myself to others but how could I prove myself to myself.  If it were not for Descartes’s Cogito it would have been impossible for the practice of hypnotism to result in discovering the unconscious, or for psychoanalysis to have been born. Psychoanalysis could not have been discovered before the Cartesian cogito, and the nature of the issue in ‘I think therefore I am’ is that the human subject needs himself to both define him to himself ad to conceive of that defining of the self. The cartesian Cogito reveal the true nature of the subject that is no more an object of nature: he is a duality: thinker and thought of. As analyst we can see the significance of stating the duality of the subject: the birth of the objective and the subjective pronouns needed for the subject to exist I have to notice that the thinking is me.

Reaching this point in the argument takes me to a common question that is always asked by practicing psychoanalysts: do analysts need to know those things, and maybe other things of the same nature? Yes, a psychoanalyst who does not know what psychoanalysis comes from will think, believe, and limit his idea of psychoanalysis to being merely a discovery achieved by a genius [called Freud] who if not created it, it was his brilliant mind that figured it out. A short support to this direct answer to the question is: could any analyst specify one or few works by Freud that are enough to learn from them Freudian psychoanalysis? No. Freud’s text or the Standard Edition is one essential journey in the mind of that man, and one-way continuous step by step unmasking of unconsciousness. Similarly, the history of German Idealism is one journey that led to psychoanalysis. Analyst do not need to read Hegel, Kant, or Nietzsche but should know what those thinkers were dealing with in the nature of the human subject. Analyst should know that when Freud worked on Anna O, he did not work as a physician but as a thinker who learned from Bernheim about the dual consciousness of the subject and from Hegel the dialectics of opposites.  

In the next part of this posting, I will try -as an amateur- to show how after the scholastic philosophers explored the existence of a mind in the human subject Western thinkers carried the ball further to show how that mind works. I will try to reach the point when it was time to reveal the presence of ‘unconscious’ aspect to all their revelations.     

 

 

Mistake:

I hope you will forgive me in making the mistake I am trying to correct now. It could be referred to something unconsciously playing with my understanding of the unconscious, or it might be just “a return of the repressed”.

In the past posting I used a clinical experience to show the manner the practicing psychoanalyst usually deals with the unconscious aspects in a patient’s associations. Instead of showing what may be a better way to giving the unconscious the chance to unfold in a gradual way I went directly to its content.  

                                       >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Here is the corrected mistake:

While in training my patient mentioned with some annoyance that sometimes he feels that his deceased mother is behind him watching what and how he does things. My supervisor (very Kleinian) asked me to ask the patient where exactly his mother stands behind him when he feels her presence. Although I very seldom ask my patients questions, I asked the patient, the first time he mentioned his difficulty with his mother’s presence. He replied: ‘She stood a couple of feet behind him to just feel her presence but not see her’. I mentioned to him that she stands in the same space I occupy with him laying on the couch i.e., he could be speaking about me too in his complaint. My remarks were meant to show the patient that his speech could unconsciously reveal things that he is talking about without being aware.

This remark came from realising that the patient-in an unconscious way- created a metaphor that (also unconsciously) depicted the psychoanalytic situation as the situation and relationship he lived with his mother growing up. The metaphor was quite revealing of this patient’s tendency to construct other situations in the same manner. In other terms, the patient’s unconscious identification of me with his mother reveals several possible unconscious leanings in his psychological relations with people: need for approval, narcissistic sensitivities, repressed anger, potential to regression to dependency demands. The point to underline here is that every patient has his own metaphor of his analysis as every analyst has his own unconscious metaphor of his practice. This notion is important in termed of ‘counter transference’ because analysts have to minimize, as much as it is possible for them, the works of the metaphor they live in being psychoanalysts.

The point I wanted to underline with this correction I am trying to make is that the analyst has to uncover the unconscious in the relationship with him before just going around our rich vocabulary to find the best term to use to form his interpretation. The analyst has to uncover the unconscious interplay in each analysis separately from a general conception of “THE UNCONCSIOUS”.

This remark was instrumental in analyzing the relationship the patient had with his mother through his transference relationship with me. In other terms, the unconscious is not something conscious that became unconscious, or something happened before the emergence of consciousness during psychoanalysis, so it was never conscious in the first case. The unconscious is a psychical process that is active all the time, shaping the present by something of the past family psychodynamics. The unconscious creates -by participation of consciousness- the psychical life of the subject as a natural part or aspect of the living present. The unconscious in this case is not a psychical entity, it is the psychical process that made the patient’s phantasy of his mother watching him, and analyst listening to him, overlap in one mentioned event. His upset about his mother’s interference meant something else too.

What I would like to strongly emphasises is that we should discover WHAT is unconscious in the analytic situation and gradually use it to rebuild the evolution of the original events that furnishes the unconscious in the patient’s life in general. The most unnoticed thing (which is the most important) is hurrying up to find a term, a verb, a concept a word in our repertoire of vocabulary that could explain what we are doing, when we should avoid the closure on the process of analysing for no gain from making the best choice.  

 

Training in the Age of Learning Psychoanalysis

I will start with an issue that was the fabric of my postings in- at least- the last two years. When the term ‘psychoanalysis’ is mentioned in a conversation with ordinary people they assume that we are talking about psychotherapy. Analysts are slightly different. They think of the profession of psychotherapy. Those two assumptions are partially right, but incomplete. Psychoanalysis is the body of knowledge of which an aspect of it could be a profession of psychotherapy. But there is more to it than that. Psychoanalysis is discoveries in the nature of our psychical quality of lif. This quality created the duality of the subjective I and the objective me, and the potential and the need for language to facilitate a link between those two aspects of within the human being, and the emerging phenomenon of communication between humans. The emergence of language uncovered the subject’s sense of being, which is the uniqueness of homosapiens among other creatures. We also do not just see; we like or dislike what we see, i.e.., we have a psychical life that parallels our physical sense of being or self. Freud found out that the psychical nature of our existence could be analyzed to reveal immense unobvious features that go beyond the obvious and the conscious. A substantial part of our consciousness of consciousness is unobvious. Psychoanalysis, thus, is not psychotherapy; it is the knowledge we already learned and should continue to learn about the psyche and was also able to explain aspects of the subject’s psychical psychopathology. Better, psychoanalysis is the “knowledge” that we could acquire from analyzing what is pathological in terms of the natural, and from analyzing the natural in terms of the pathological.  

Basic Psychoanalysis:

At the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, in the late nineteen century, there was nothing of psychoanalysis to be taught. The first papers on technique came out twelve years after the Interpretation of Dreams. Maybe after 1912 some material on the technique of psychoanalytic therapy were derived from the shared and combined observations of other clinicians. The notion of a theory of psychoanalysis took a central place in the history of the movement around the time of founding the IPA’ (1910). Psychoanalysis’s first shot on theory was the libido theory, which became the basis of Ego Psychology few years later. Ego psychology freed psychoanalysis from the captivity of psychopathology but led it to the field of psychical mechanisms. Without the concept of the libido, which was used as the initiator of psychical life, the problem of the force behind the psychical mechanisms had to be resolved. Psychoanalysis became a theory of psychodynamics in which the libidinal energy and the mechanisms combine to create the psychical phenomena. Obsessive compulsive phenomena were created by anxiety regarding rage that had to be dynamically turned into symptoms.  Psychoanalysis did not offer any serious material to learn but became rich in vocabulary with some grammar (common terminology like the blockage of the libido, reinverting the libido in the self, etc., and few elaborations of old insights. It created a limited field of communication between analyst but without a language that none analysts too could learn and speak. (A. Freud’s ego psychology and Klein’s object relations were accents not languages for psychoanalysis). Other analysts tried to construct their own language of psychoanalysis like Lacan, but it was impossible to do that without sharing an explanation of psychoanalysis. If we talk without the listeners agreeing on what we are speaking-because of the absence of a common language there will be no chance to translate to each other what we are saying.

What is psychoanalysis??!!

It will take a lot of time and space to answer this question. I also cannot say that what I endeavored to do to answer this question for myself would be satisfactory to others. However, if I mention the names of analysts who did magnificent work in the domain of explaining psychoanalysis you will know what I mean: Matte-Blanco, Laplanche, Ricoeur, Bouvet, Erickson, Bion. They worked on the vocabulary of psychoanalysis and used it as the framework or background of their psychoanalytic meanings. For example, Erikson put psychoanalysis in the framework of building the intrapsychic in the early years of life, while Ricoeur put it in the framework of understanding the significance of interpretation in psychical life. Thus, an Ericksonian could talk to a Bouvetian about trust and mistrust in the context of Orality and they could understand each other. Psychoanalysis must be understood as one of the human endeavors, not a simple system of reaching the unconscious that parallels an associated consciousness.

 

Mistake:

I hope you will forgive me in making the mistake the mistake I am trying to correct now. It could be referred to something unconsciously playing with my understanding of the unconscious, or it might be just “a return of the repressed”.

In the past posting I used a clinical experience to show the manner the practicing psychoanalyst usually deals with the unconscious aspects in a patient’s associations. Instead of showing what may be a better way to give the unconscious the chance to unfold in a gradual way I went directly to its content.  

                                       >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

While in training my patient mentioned with some annoyance that sometimes he feels that his deceased mother is behind him watching what and how he does things. My supervisor (very Kleinian) asked me to ask the patient where exactly his mother stands behind him when he feels her presence. Although I very seldom ask my patients questions, I asked the patient, the first time he mentioned his difficulty with his mother’s presence. ‘She stood a couple of feet behind him to just feel her presence but not see her’. I mentioned to him that she stands in the same space I occupy with him laying on the couch i.e., he could be speaking about me too in his complaint. My remarks were meant to show the patient that his speech could unconsciously reveal things that he is talking about two subjects and could speak about them together or separately, if in a different context.

This remark came from realising that the patient-in an unconscious way- created a metaphor that (also unconsciously) depicted the psychoanalytic situation as the situation and relationship he lived with his mother growing up. The metaphor was quite revealing of this patient’s tendency to construct other situations in the same manner. In other terms, the patient’s unconscious identification of me with the mother reveals several possible unconscious leanings in his psychological relations with people: need for approval, narcissistic sensitivities, repressed anger, potential to regression to dependency demands.

The point I wanted to underline with this correction I am trying to make is that the analyst has to uncover the unconscious in the relationship with him before just going around our rich vocabulary to find the best term to use to form his interpretation.

This remark was instrumental in analyzing his relationship with his mother through his transference relationship with me. In other terms, the unconscious is not something conscious that became unconscious, or something happened before the emergence of consciousness during psychoanalysis, so it was never conscious in the first case. The unconscious is a psychical process that is active all the time, shaping the present by something of the past. The unconscious creates -by participation of consciousness- the psychical life of the subject as a natural part or aspect of the living present. The unconscious in this case is not a psychical entity, it is the psychical process that made the patient’s phantasy of his mother watching him, and analyst listening to him, overlap one mentioned event. His upset about his mother’s interference meant something else too.

What I would like to strongly emphasises is that we should discover WHAT is unconscious in the analytic situation and gradually use it to rebuild the evolution of the original events that furnishes the unconscious in the patient’s life in general. The most unnoticed thing (which is the most important) is hurrying up to find a term, a verb, a concept a word in our repertoire of vocabulary that could explain what we are doing when we should avoid the closure on the process of analyzing for no gain from making the best choice.  

A clinical example could be useful. While in training my patient mentioned with some annoyance that sometimes he feels that his deceased mother is behind him watching what and how he does things. My supervisor (very Kleinian) asked me to ask the patient where exactly his mother stands behind him when he feels her presence. Although I very seldom ask my patients questions, I asked the patient the first time he mentioned his difficulty with his mothers presence. ‘She stood a couple of feet behind him to just feel her presence but not see her. I mentioned to him that she stands in the same space I occupy with him laying on the couch i.e., he could be speaking about me too in his complaint. My remarks were meant to show the patient that his speech could unconsciously reveal things that he could speak about if in a different context. This remark was instrumental in analyzing his relationship with his mother through his transference relationship with me. In other terms, the unconscious is not something conscious that became unconscious, or something happened before the emergence of consciousness, so it was never conscious in the first case. The unconscious is a psychical process that is active all the time, shaping the present by something of the past. The unconscious creates -by participation- the psychical life of the subject as a natural part or aspect of the living present. The unconscious in this case is not a psychical entity, it is the psychical process that made the patient’s phantasy of his mother watching him, and analyst listening to him, overlap one mentioned event. His upset about his mother’s interference meant something else too.

What we call unconscious is the process that makes an event a psychical event, i.e., a meaningful event. Without a contribution from an unconscious process to our regular present events they will all be void of meaning. Waiting for the bus to arrive means waiting because it unconsciously relates that to somethings related to time. The unconscious is the process that manages our psychical life; therefore, it is not an entity but the process that creates entities of the present events. The unconscious, in that sense, is something to study because as a process we will always have to elicit it from consciousness, which requires a good grasp of its formation and functioning.

Studying the Unconscious:

          After more than a century of making the unconscious explain things to us-psychoanalysts- it is time to study the unconscious itself. The reason is that we -psychoanalysts- mean several and differing things when we use the term unconscious? The most serious about that is not the absence of agreement on its meaning but the absence of clear disagreements on its connotation. We keep hedging about that for reasons: we consider it a psychical entity, the reversal of consciousness, the outcome of a process of repression that we assume its presence, or at least we consider it a thing. Therefore, there is no ‘ one understanding’ of the basic essential of our practice.

My suggestion comes from the fact that Freud did not explain his multiple definitions or identifications of the term unconscious. He started with the unconscious as the content of what is consciously rejectionable. He then moved from its status as an object (content) to a more subjective connotation of the individual’s own psychodynamics and subjective dealings with his own self creating his own preference to the unconscious. It changed from being an entity of rejected instinctual urges to become the processes that manage altering the personal rejection of a certain content. Thus, the uncosncious could get some conscious recognition from the subject. Freud’s tendency to find an acceptable meaning for unconsciousness made him think of it differently based on the context its mentioned. He specified three domains for the unconscious to be activated: topographic, dynamic, and systemic (1915). This classification was not recognized as of significance by the psychoanalysts, but it showed that unconsciousness exists in every aspect of psychical life. We can talk about the degrees of unconsciousness (Cs, Pcs, Usc)., or topographically as in (Ego-Id-Super-Ego), and dynamically as (repressed, transformed, sublimated, etc.).

Learning the unconscious has to start with Freud’s first distinction between the primary processes the and the secondary processes as in primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. He also distinguished between the primal of an issue and the issue itself (primal repression and repression proper). The ‘primary’ is the earliest while its evolution(s) generate its secondary and more elaborate forms. The primary processes are expressed in our language in the double format of metaphors and metonymies, in speech or messaging. Consciously we use, and literature the primary process is a style of speech, but psychologically it is the earliest way of using language (It takes long months for a child to recognize that mother person who has a special function).  The primary process in psychoanalysis is the means by which the unconscious would use the formats of metonymy and metaphor in moving from the cognitive to the thoughtful and from specific to general. In the Irma dream the gathering of the physicians was metonymy of the medical profession while the patient’s reluctance to open her mouth to be examine was a metaphor of her resistance to cooperate. The unconscious is an amalgam of primary and secondary process, and primal states of psychical entities. Being such a complex psychical function, it is ‘a must’ study subject in psychoanalysis because without knowing how the unconscious penetrate all our conscious life will make consciousness most difficult to comprehend. We do not only need to know it well, but we also have to know how to respond to it, which is another issue.

Learning and Training in Psychoanalysis:

As a psychoanalyst myself who got his formation as analyst in the old days (early1960), a formation that is still ongoing system of training I know well that what I have presented till now and what I am proposing is quite foreign to the minds of the contemporary analysts. In spite of all that it is a duty to use experience to improve psychoanalysis. There is a great deal of new and better understandings of the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, but unexpectedly are done by none-analysts. I mean by the vocabulary of psychoanalysis is the establish ideas, conceptions, practices and modalities of training. It was acceptable- till maybe the mid-seventies- to use the old IPA model of forming the new psychoanalysts via its training modality of the tripartite, but now, with all what we knew and know, and the changes in the sphere of the formation of analysts that happened, that model is not quite enough. we should consider learning psychoanalysis has to replace training in psychoanalysis. The difference is make studying psychoanalysis and teaching it under a strict system of academic education the way to go and look into the aspect of psychotherapy separately. If there is going to be transmission of knowledge from senior teachers to junior candidate it should be done via extensive supervision and not personal analysis. Supervision could be wider in scopes and more enriching to groups of candidates, and maybe some of the personal blindness to the unconscious be better discussed that a personal analysis. However, students of psychoanalysis who want o work in the field of therapy might consider a period of personal analysis as part of training.

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Psychoanalysis was training in doing psychotherapy based on whatever was learned about it, which was much less that what should have been. Whatever was learned in psychotherapy was confined to limited knowledge about psychical mechanisms, dynamics, processes, wrapped in few terminologies that sounded as carrying meanings beyond their ordinary meanings. There was also a lot of reliance on the basic clinical education of the candidate. Despite the gradual deterioration of that narrow scope of background, it seemed that the notion of reviewing the whole scope of psychoanalysis did not get enough attention to seek its revision.  It is our duty as psychoanalyst to encourage and work on moving the learning of psychoanalysis to academic institutions. We should let the specialists in philosophy, linguistics, child development, cognitive psychology, history of civilization, psychiatric issues, and several other issues pertaining to the human subject be the basis of a new psychoanalysis.