Freud’s Intuitive Discovery of Psychoanalysis and the Essential “Classical” Rules of Practice.

I expect that neurological, neuropsychological, and psychoanalytic discoveries will ultimately reveal a link between intuition and the unconscious. By knowing how to analyze such link it will be possible to answer this question: Do great thinkers uncover what they discover about the human subject and human nature by intuition or do they unconsciously sleepwalk to their great thoughts. Did Freud discover psychoanalysis intuitively or through a process of organized thinking? The differences in answering this question could help us decide if psychoanalysis is something that has to be taken the way Freud proposed it with minimum elaboration, or we could take it as a starting point in a progressive process of thinking.    

There is something about the start of psychoanalysis that forces that question on us: Why did Freud start so early in his psychoanalytic journey by thinking and working on the proper conditions of practicing it (1910,1912)?  Did he intuitively foresee that there are surprises awaiting us if we followed him in the path to therapy? Or did he anticipate that practicing psychoanalysis will lead to more than just replacing hypnotism with free association?   

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In a previous publication (‘Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis,2017) I underline the great intuition that Freud had to standardize the practice of his new discovery, ‘psychoanalysis’. In my opinion then, and now, a profession based on listening to a person speaking about himself in order to lead patients to change their intrapsychical dynamics has to be done in a consistent predictable environment, and treatment has to be decided only by achieving its success within that unchangeable protocol. This is not the familiar medical model of therapy in which the physician is the one who decides about the treatment. Standardizing the conditions of doing psychoanalysis was Freud’s ‘intuitive’ work on the patient’s disclosures. They have to be derived from within an identical process of work, with very limited external interference and variations that could affect the analyst’s unfolding of the unconscious aspect of the patient’s self, as well as affecting the analysand’s gains of insight. There was also the requirement of maintaining a necessary distance (mild in the case of the patient) between the patient and the analyst. Freud’s tripartite protocol for doing psychoanalysis and the regularity of the patient’s sessions added to restricting analysis to what the patient says about himself formed the criterium of the correctness of the analytic process.

The rules of practicing analysis, which were inherited ‘blindly’ up till now, were founded on the available knowledge of what psychoanalysis was, then. I have to add that early psychoanalysis and most of current points of view are basically of functional nature (causes like deprivations and effects like reaction formation, etc.), which limit or eliminate the uncovering of the intrapsychic psychodynamics which is the forming influence of the psychopathological condition.

There was an underlying tendency to use the new vocabulary improvised by new discoveries as theoretical background of an advancing psychoanalysis. But the main trend was to make psychoanalyzing an act of ‘making sense’ of the psychoneurotic conditions, assuming that this ‘making sense’ is the curable factor.

Things have changed overtime: in the first place we know now much more about the structures of psychical phenomena.. We also know that obvious functional understanding of psychological manifestation is more likely to be misleading and limiting of the analyst’s field of work. Moreover, we deal now with much more healthy patients- in terms of the old criteria of pathology, which makes our work in need for serious revisions of our blind rules of practice. Thirdly, we should have realized by now that the practice of psychoanalysis as therapy is related to the intrapsychical structures of the patients and not about pressures, deficiencies, lacks, deprivations that still demands satisfactions, etc. The rules of psychoanalysis that we followed till now in terms of the number of sessions per week, the length of time of a session, duration of therapy for cure (or training), couch, vacations, etc., were arbitrarily established in the past, and were chosen to fit the analysts’ professional needs (not the patient’s requirements).

In other words, the rules of practicing psychoanalysis did not come from the patients’ need or from understanding what psychoanalysis is about, because there was very little known about any of that till few decades ago. But I assume that we know now what unconsciousness versus consciousness means, how to interpret psychological material and reconstruct interrelated psychical manifestations which changes the nature of our work from receiving the remnants of transference to showing the patient the intrapsychical distortions in his transference relationship with the analyst. We are not automats who just follow a prescribed way of practice; we are supposed to know the psychodynamics of the human subject and the way to deal with them to affect the required changes.

Learning and Training in Psychoanalysis:

The history of psychoanalysis shows that it had to begin with a period of apprenticeship, which lasted much longer than the usual apprentice periods in other professions. Both the master craftsmen and student in psychoanalysis were learning a totally unexplored field of knowledge. However, in a gradual way knowledge about human psyche accumulated and most of the pioneer apprentices turned that knowledge into a theoretical body (though stubbornly most senior analysts wanted it to remain some details of a profession of psychotherapy). By the seventies of last century there was a firm body of knowledge, and interest in that knowledge in neighboring fields of academics, to turn psychoanalysis from an apprenticeship to an academic branch or program. Doing that conflicted with the personal interests of the leading psychoanalysts, or the training analysts. Although that at the present time there are great kafuffles, debates, and complaints about the Training Psychoanalyst status they is a resistance to SEE that we cannot have a training system based on apprenticeship without having master craftsman (A training senior). How could we maintain the model of apprenticeship in training candidates in an IPA and alike institutes without “training analyst”?

Back to the standard rules of practice:

·       The standers rules of practice, which we follow till now, were very useful but were arbitrarily decided then.

·       They reflected an early status of psychoanalysis based on a limited knowledge of what psychoanalysis is.

·       Knowing what we know now about psychoanalysis, as well as

psychoanalyzing (interpretation and reconstructing) demand a review of our practices.

If the notion of a need for a new psychoanalysis is accepted a revision of the practice will come as a natural outcome. If that notion is rejected there will be no need for revising those rules because they will die with the dying psychoanalysis.

Whatever the way will lead us to  the link between the psychoanalysis we adopt and the method we will apply it is not arbitrary: we practice the psychoanalysis that dictates its own method.

 

Addendum to the previous posting: The Irma dream

I received a few remarks and queries about something I said in my above published note on the unconscious. I said:” The unconscious is a state in the mind that is of a linguistic structure, or an explicit structure in the mind that could be talked about, even as an absence.

What I understood of the unconscious and put it in my own thoughts and words is that our minds have the potential to turn something conscious into something unconscious via innate linguistic adeptness. That process, transforms the intrapsychical conflicts into interpersonal relations or wishes, thus conceals its real content. The mind translates the intrapsychical entities into verbal or proverbial meanings, but seldom succeeds completely in achieving that goal. That is how Freud’s controlled rage the night before the Irma dream and projecting his anxiety (intrapsychical constructs) regarding the physicians’ opinion of him created -while asleep- the scene that when translated into words revealed a statement of contempt OR a wish to be blameless. 

This way we can put the unconscious outside cognitive function of consciousness because even if the subject’s function of consciousness is affected by something neurological or physical he still could have his psychological life intact and make things unconscious in the analytic sense. We could be neurologically brain imperfect but mind OK.  

          By detaching consciousness from its neurological basis, we get to deal with two other very central issue of psychoanalysis: interpretation and construction\reconstruction. Because the unconscious is a function of the mind and not of the brain the mind and its amenability to verbalization can only be made conscious when it is interpreted (matching verbal forms with meaningful content). Iinterpretation is the analytic act that gives the unconscious its meaning when the time comes to understanding the vagueness of some psychical material. 

The Irma Dream attests to the fact that the Unconscious is not a psychical entity (negative ideas…), content (censored intentions), a process that turns psychological entities into different entities (nonverbal or psychical). The unconscious is a state of mind that has a clear linguistic structure, or it is an explicit structure in the mind that could be talked about to make what is absence (unconscious)to presence.

A patient who lost her mother to suicide was constantly apprehensive to hearing bad news. There was nothing basically unconscious in the ‘symptom’ in light of her mother’s way of dying. But at certain times her apprehension was more active after disagreements with her stepmother. On one occasion the analyst requested her to talk more about her relationship with that woman because her anxiety about what could transpire in any of those times made the kind of apprehension itself unexplainable.  In that talk the analyst pointed out to her that her apprehensions seem to come in place of anger, which made her think for a while. Interpreting and reconstructing her apprehensions with the stepmother engendered few memories and thoughts stemming from losing her mother very young (nine years old). Working on that issue showed that anger and fear were unconsciously fused to make one bring the other forward in consciousness. Unconsciously the fusion of opposite feelings confused the patient but verbalizing them (from analytic material) turned the unconscious into consciousness and permitted some reorganizing of the intrapsychic configurations of anger \fear, and fear\anger. Still, reorganizing the intrapsychic in an effective way needed both analyst and patient to find the proper points where the disorganization happened. In this case the patient talked about memories of her mother’s suicide and how both sadness and anger at her mother for what she did scared her of herself. Anger, fear, sadness and a strange sense that she will never grow up “produced” a setup of both her intrapsychical and interpersonal worlds in which the patient had to make the unconscious conscious in order to work on reconstructing her psychical identity.  

The unconscious should not be treated as if it is the same substance of Cs.\Ucs; it could only take one of those two forms in the act of interpretation. It does not connote certain material but denotes the state of certain material. Those subtle, and sometimes not so subtle distinctions make the analyst listen to differentiate the unconscious from the conscious and preconscious. When that is done then the latent meaning in the unconscious should be verbalized (normally in stages if needed). When that is done both analyst and analysand- through free associating about the ‘content’ of the conscious and preconscious, should gradually identify the event or events where the intrapsychic has lost its integrity and work on reconstituting and reconstructing it. Psychoanalysis is the finding of disturbed intrapsychic conditions, make them conscious, then reconstructing them by the ‘working through’. However, this process needs some long time and several attempts, but it is much more effective if we listen (the basic and most difficult work) to hear first the unconscious talking.  

In this patient, her main topic was her mother’s suicide (not her mother), what that event tells about the mother (a mixture of longing and rage), exposes a sense of not getting what was her right to have…. What the mother’s suicide made her lose.    

 

The Irma Dream, the Unconscious, and a New Psychoanalysis  

 

Freud and early psychoanalysts worked on discovering the psychological nature of the human subject. Now we reached the point where we should be curious about that ‘psychological subject that was discovered’: he always says more about himself than what he intended to say. He also understands more than the speaker intended to say with no help from any speaker. Not everything about that happen consciously. We should also deepen our understanding of what could constitute an aspect in a new and contemporary psychoanalysis “the unconscious”. It is one of those aspects that still intrigue psychoanalytic thinkers.

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The unconscious is a term that is foundational and fundamental in the concept of psychoanalysis. It goes without saying that psychoanalysts are expected to know well what ‘unconscious’ means. Yet, this idea is not supported by the literature of psychoanalysis, even in the Freudian text itself. Freud specified three types of unconsciousness (topographic, dynamic and the systemic) suggesting that the term is a denotation not a connotation of a specific something. Analysts and none-analysts mean by unconscious either not conscious or something that has been conscious and got repressed, thus it is not anymore conscious. Linguistically, ‘unconscious’ is the not conscious. The prevailing sense, whether in psychanalysis or elsewhere, is that consciousness is the basic state of affairs or the natural source of phenomena in its positive or negative state. There is something to mention about that. This state of uncertainty about a basic concept in psychoanalysis requires a dedicated new study of the human subject or studying the human subject differently than the usual concept the double and adapt to the concept of duality.

A point of view:

Over years of being active and in the midst of the psychoanalytic movement I came to realize a simple and a straightforward fact; psychoanalysts do not delineate ‘well’ the difference between causes and effects in psychical life. The notion of the unconscious gave us the privilege of assuming that the existence of unconsciousness is enough to confuse the link between causes and effects. Thus, we would not find and answer to this question in our literature including Freud’s own: is the unconscious the cause of certain psychical phenomena (parapraxes for example) or does the parapraxes and similar events cause something conscious become unconscious or are they cause by something unconscious. There is nothing in language itself or in the function of speaking that could explain parapraxes in terms of causes and effects. Therefore, in order to answer the question of the unconscious without inviting many exclamations marks I am resorting to a dream (well-known one) to make the necessary distinction within the duality of Cs\Ucs, and the meaning of unconscious, analytically speaking.

The Irma Dream (the first analytically interpreted dream) was about a patient of Freud (Irma) who was not doing well in therapy. A friend of his mentioned that to him the night before the dream; something that frequently worried him early in his new career as therapist. He worried about his critics in the medical community using those chances to belittle his claims to a new discovery in the field of the neuroses. He was uncertain about his self-worth and worried about humiliation. He had a high degree of tension in that regard the night before the dream.

His dream that night was a scene of a gathering of the physicians whom he has some tension with. In the dream he depicted them the way he would have liked them to be in reality (mostly idiotic). The same with the patient whom he depicts as uncooperative and resisting his work. His interpretation of the dream was a functional interpretation (the dream was a function or the result of a wish).  He concluded (in his own words) that “the dream represented a particular state of affairs …its content was the fulfillment of a wish, and its motive was a wish” (p.118-119. His interpretation of the dream as a function or the result of a wish makes no sense that could explain of the complex process that created his complex ‘dream scene’. However, there is question about Freud’s interpretation of that dream.

The wishful content of the dream was ‘vaguely’ conscious in his mind before sleeping. Yet, the complex scene of the dream itself and all the meaningful details that could be derived from those details happened were formed only during his sleep. There is no mention of thinking consciously or preconsciously of anything similar before sleeping. This implies that the meaning of the dream happened ‘not consciously’ because the dreamer did not have the vaguest idea about his dream before dreaming it. The most remarkable and interesting is how Freud structured such a complex scene- in which he made fools of the medical gathering and accused the patient of resistance to his suggestions- and fulfilling his wishes to maintain his self-worth, all happened and was done while he was sleeping. Freud created a complicated solution to his anxiety, unconsciously, while he was sleeping, and most of all it was all in the language of consciousness. Did Freud think about his dream before dreaming it? Were there any signs of how he intended to exonerate himself from harming his patient before going to sleep?

The answer to those questions is no. The Irma Dream attests to the fact that the Unconscious is not a psychical entity (negative ideas…), content (censored intentions), a process that turns psychological entities into different entities). The unconscious is a state of mind that has a clear linguistic structure, or an explicit structure in the mind that could be talked about as an absence.

The Irma dream shows in a clear way that it is in the nature of the human subject to establish his relations with his world according to his intrapsychic structures, needs and potentials, not according to the nature of the external world itself and its demands. This point is of major importance: the human subject has a spontaneous tendency to create the world around him according to is internal psychical organizations, and in that case the external world would be of a functional usage or value and structured to serve the subject intrapsychical demands. Therefore, psychoanalysis that is built on the notions of drives, resistance to certain drives, psychodynamics of conflicts, need for ‘hiding and revealing’ the defended against internal pressures, correcting, and redressing and restoring defects ignores (avoids) the main issue of the duality of consciousness and unconsciousness that decides the reaction. In our contemporary psychoanalysis, those elements mentioned above are separated from other things by ‘defenses’ and exist in the subject as his unconscious. Despite the obvious ownership of what a mind could generate, the human subject has the audacity to still ‘negate’ that ownership.

The point to underline here is that consciousness and unconsciousness are of the same fabric (linguistically) and when the ‘unconscious’ becomes conscious we find nothing intrinsically different in it from what was split or separated from, i.e., consciousness, even in sleeping. The most interesting about the duality of Cs\Ucs. is their inseparability and the ease by which they could exchange places rhetorically. The conscious subject is only one ‘aspect’ of the subject that he truly is, because what is unconscious proves to be the other aspect which is of the same cloth. The two aspects complement each other and together make a psychical self.

This where the distinction between the intrapsychical the interpersonal happen or be examined

At this point I have to get myself in trouble in order to explain this point better. Consciousness is merely negation of unconsciousness. The intrapsychic-even in the simple meaning of the term- is unconscious or preconscious in the eyes and ears of the experienced psychoanalyst. No confirmation of a conscious issue, or just a conscious notion, can stand by itself as a separate issue: it has to implicitly negate its opposite, i.e., we consciously negate the unconscious [ I am doing good work with Irma…she is resisting me, and you could see that in her preset resistance to be examined by you]. This might sound strange to analysts who do not question the nature of the verbal human who is us, or the nature of the symbolic order we live in which necessitates the coexistence of the antithesis of the duos that constitute our lives. Yet there is and adage that I do not remember who came up with, which goes like this: The Ego is Negation.

The Psychoanalysis of the Discovered Subject:

Anything we think of or speak about has its negation present in the same sentence. This is something that permeates every aspect of our mental, cognitive, psychological and social life [when Freud depicted the gathered physicians in his dream as idiots he indirectly (unconsciously!) said ‘I am not one of them and am not an idiot like them”. There is another characteristic of human language that allows other matters to happen equally unconsciously. Human language has the grammatical and the vocabulary that could make the affirmative confirms the nature of the opposite at the same time. If I say I would never try to mislead anyone makes misleading a conscious issue, without which it was not there consciously but unconsciously. The speaker could unconsciously use the potentials of human language and say something he did not intend to say: parapraxes, negation of negation, omission, etc. The same could happen to the listener who could hear something said in the speech of another which was not intended to be heard. Human language is structured that way: Animals’ quasi languages affirms but have no place for the negation of the affirmed.  

My point is that Freud revealed an aspect of the human subject that characterizes his most intimate and personal nature… his intrapsychical makeup and formations. He also revealed the existence of unconscious psychical entities that reside only in a linguistic structure in the mind. Those two discoveries explain how a psychical issue is expressed outside the verbal limitation of consciousness (intrapsychic sense of inferiority!). Awell verbalized conscious interpersonal issue could be totally irrelevant conscious issue. The intrapsychic structures are more likely to be unconscious and their interpersonal equivalent be the material for consciousness.

  If this distinction makes sense to analysts the next step is to rethink practice and training. Resistance to rethinking our psychoanalysis is not pervasive.   

 I have areason to publish this very long post as one unit instead of dividing it into two or three parts. 

Time For a New Psychoanalysis

 

 

A Puzzling Question

          Is ‘our’ psychoanalysis replaceable with a more advanced version, or that would only be one of the many resistances it had been exposed to over the years? Is psychoanalysis a “text’ that has to be kept as it was originally delivered? Or is it just a psychoanalytic text?

Psychoanalysis is a more than a century old discovery. Hundreds if not thousands of capable analysts and thinkers expanded and explained it. Those contributions changed it in different ways and degrees. Yet, it maintained its original status as the most comprehensive understanding of the human being. However, lately it looked as if it needs to be retired as a theory of the subject. It lost its chine, has nothing new to add, and as it was previously considered a profession of sorts, it no longer appeals to many. Resuscitating it is like resuscitating a well-preserved Mummy.

          I am taking the position that psychoanalysis is an essential constituent of any cultured society. Therefore, a new psychoanalysis has to be discovered, created, allowed to evolve, and take its place in the social fabric of society (not only the medical professions). This call could be considered blasphemous by present day psychoanalysts because they think of psychoanalysis as the Freudian thing, and that makes it unreplaceable.

I think psychoanalysis is a theory of the human subject, and the human subject of Freud’s psychoanalysis is a duality of intrapsychical structures that create and shape his interpersonal relationships. Thus, the work on those two aspects of psychological life and the kind of links between them will always be needed. A new psychoanalysis should maintain that fundamental conception of the human subject, but it should consider that the human subject’s interpersonal relations change with social evolution and his intrapsychical structure get affected differently with experience.

 

          A Debatable Answer:

          Most psychoanalysts -with the exception of in some parts of the world- accept and agree that psychoanalysis was and still is more than a finding in the area of interpersonal relations or is merely a psychotherapy procedure. As such, analysts are supposed to be the leading authority for the inevitable change and evolution of psychoanalysis, i.e., psychoanalysis is their domain of expertise, and they know- better than any others- what requires change and how. Regrettably, in those same parts of the world, psychoanalysts were the main resistant power to putting it in the stream of change and advancement toward wider and better horizons.

The birth and death of ‘the schools’ revealed- without doubt- that analysts directed their whole attention to the issue of its practice as therapy. They did not appreciate that the crisis is in psychoanalysis not in its practice. They strived to introduce quite controversial modifications to the basics of its traditional method of practice. The three recommended principles of practice (anonymity, neutrality, abstinence) are founded on the principle of analysis of transference precedes analysis of content, and this is basic in ‘psychoanalyzing’ no matter of theoretical choice or preference of the school. Instead of looking into the substance of the crisis, which was the deterioration of training and trainees they looked at practice, blaming it for the crises.

Within that inverted attitude there was an insidious threat to psychoanalysis as a whole: theory and practice. Analysts turned analysis- as it was practiced in the early eighties of last century- into final and absolute (obsolete) statements that are not supposed to be interpreted, developed, or of course challenged. Freudian psychoanalysis lost its value as human thought and acquired a revered quality that turned it into a subject to accept or reject, but not to understand and develop.

          The insidious destructive issue in this attitude is that on one hand considers psychoanalysis a sacred doctrine, at the same time subject to any frivolous modifications to understanding its fundamental premise.

Through the first hundred years of its life, psychoanalysis went through several changes and corrective internal processes but remained unquestionably ‘Freudian’, even after his death. However, in the seventies of last century, psychoanalysis faced several calls and trends of radical changes to its practice (the schools). The main and common feature in those changes was abandoning the intrapsychical core of psychoanalysis, which was the real Freudian discovery- and adopting theoretical stances of interrelationships. Thus, the work of interpretation and reconstruction disappeared and was replace with nothing tangible to relate practice to a theory.

There is something at this point that requires special attention from all of us, regardless of our differences. Freud’s thinking was influenced by German idealistic philosophy, which could have begun by Kant’s distinction between the innate (a priory) and the acquired (a posterior). Freud’s claim to fame is considering a distinction between the intrapsychical (the basics of the subject) and the interpersonal phenomena (his experiences) and the unconscious disconnection between causes and their repressed origin. His work on what is latent, and what comes out in a disguised and the unconscious way became the core of the psychoanalysis. The whole world of the psychological world got a jolt that never recovered from till now. We-whoever the we is- are not the same as the generation before that Freudian discovery. Freud alone changed the basic conception of the human subject as an object of observation and proved that the human subject is not only what we observe of him but a significant part of him is subject to a different way of observing and discovering.  

The ‘schools’ minimized the notion of the veiled part of the subject. Psychoanalysis, since it was characterized as an object oriented, or psychodynamically oriented branch of knowledge, has seized to be Freudian. Yet, the psychoanalytical organizations hanged on to the term psychoanalysis irrationally and for lack of own characterization of what they offered to replace it.

Despite the absence of the significant idea of the intrapsychic from contemporary psychoanalysis (and as a result the significance of the Unconscious) psychoanalysis is still an entity of sorts. In other terms, it is psychoanalytic blasphemy to call for a new or a different psychoanalysis. The reason is that analysts made themselves believe the different psychoanalyses they advocated are one and the same! and that they are all Freudian psychoanalysis. However, I strongly believe that there is only one psychoanalysis (Freud’s), but only if it is based on a clear distinction and understanding of the intrapsychic and the interpersonal nature of psychical phenomena, and that they are the constituents of whatever is psychological about the subject. Discovering the link and the separation between those two poles is the core, and only core, of psychoanalysis. Therefore, a plea to work on a new psychoanalysis is not blasphemous, or a call for abandoning ‘our psychoanalysis’.  It is a call to save psychoanalysis from abandoning its original function: discovering the human subject in the way his intrapsychical shapes his interpersonal life.

Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis:

Freud was an unhappy neurologist but was also not a fully inclined physician. His short experiences in medically related work led him to the new (then) field of hypnosis. His search and contact with Bernheim, Charcot, and Breuer directed him to something those three pioneers did not notice or understand: hysterical patients (later all patients) ‘have two psychological lives’ separated by psychical dynamics. One is what the patient is aware of and report to physician, and another he is not conscious of but it shows its existence under hypnosis. The way Freud looked at the outcome of hypnosis revealed the special quality of his special analytic mind.  The split of the psychical life of the patient is product of what caused the split not caused by something else outside the same the split psyche. Without being aware of what he has started by saying “the hysterics suffer from reminiscences” (1895), he created a new way of thinking about the human subject: he moved the cause of the neurosis from outside the symptoms to consider it the structure of the symptom and, the nature of the symptom: she is hysterical not because she is sick but because her symptoms are her way of trying to get cured!!. 

I am emphasizing this difference, and Freud’s gifted conception of the psyche, for another reason than the common adulation of Freud. The birth of psychoanalysis came out of a man’s mind who understood psychic phenomena differently from the ordinary physicians. The ordinary physician -even up till now- would like to find a cause for the symptom. The discovery of psychoanalysis came as a natural outcome of a proper and intuitive mind that changed the process of thinking from functionality to structuralism. Freud moved the accent from the cause and put it on the nature (structure) of the pathological phenomenon.

Could that happen again? Could Freud’s genius be repeated in a different time and circumstance? Yes, but only if the thinker (s) identify what the old discovery has been about, and what our current difficulties are about. Our psychoanalytic experience made clear that early childhood and parental dealings with infantile and childhood psychological life creates a psychical entity that is what we later call the subject, healthy or sick. What brings someone to an analyst’s office is unconscious ‘intrapsychical’ formation that is affecting his interpersonal relationships. In other terms, if contemporary analysts listen and work with the unconscious elements that Freud’s psychoanalysis bring to focus new discoveries and understanding will rejuvenate a dying psychoanalysis.

New Psychoanalysis: Need and Possibilities.

The need for a new psychoanalysis comes from two sources; ‘our’ psychoanalysis of today is stagnant and is not offering anything substantially important (or even interesting) that would justify-anymore- its presence in our culture. This-in itself- is not a good reason to dismiss it before making some effort to revive it or renew it. But because psychoanalysis is a theory of the human-subject and its discoveries have changed us everywhere in the world [the Oedipus complex is a term that is as common in society as Starbucks]- it should continue changing and be updated. Moreover, psychoanalysis is not anymore a theory limited to psychotherapy or a specialty in other branches of science. Psychoanalysis is now like medicine, law, ethics, and many other necessities of our social life. Therefore, psychoanalysis as it is still promoted by the psychoanalytic associations -local or international- is useless and edging toward being redundancy.

The need for a new psychoanalysis comes from the necessity of having a theory of the human subject that replaces the old one. A theory of the subject could also have useful side-applications like psychotherapy without which there will be fables about the main concerns of humans. A main issue in that regard is the way psychoanalysts could replace the old theory with a new one without causing psychoanalysis to be lost in the process!

The first thirty years of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was influenced more by the clinical material and patients’ psychoneurotic conflicts. Both he and his disciples and coworkers were able to gradually step out of the clinic and put together a theory of the healthy subject, and to derive from their clinical practice general statements about the subject and place psychopathology in the context of a theory of the ‘normal’ subject. In other words, psychoanalysis was born in psychopathology, but it eventually found its subject matter: the subject whatever his condition is. Old psychoanalysis, having been originally derived from psychopathology, started, and remained attached to the notions of drives, resistance to certain drives, psychodynamics of conflicts, need for ‘revealing’ the defended against, correcting, and redressing and restoring defects. Thus, discovering a new psychoanalysis does not have to take the same course. We can go directly to its subject- matter, which is the coexistence of a duality of consciousness and unconsciousness. There are several possible venues to take in that regard, all emanate from the puzzle of the dual identity of the subject: being the knowing subject I, and the object of that knowledge Me. A new psychoanalysis will be regarding the coexistence of the duo of subject-object I, Me, and the duo the intrapsychic-interpersonal) and conscious-unconscious (interpersonal-intrapsychic).  

Conclusion:

Hundreds if not thousands of analysts have done analysis with patients for decades. They wrote about their findings and their personal views about those findings. They improvised special terminologies to convey their finding to their colleagues. In few years that terminology, that was meant to define psychical discoveries became discoveries in in its own right. Psychoanalysis expanded (gained more vocabulary) but did not progress (got more knowledge about those terms). For psychoanalysis to progress it has to do what Freud did: separate the intrapsychic from the interpersonal and study each independently. At the same time study their connections separately, to first consider what they reveal about the subject, second develop a theoretical conclusion about this link, third how they differentiate into conscious and conscious conditions. There will be a difference between todays psychoanalyst and Freud; we might rediscover what he has already discovered but understand them better.

Intuitively but also with his analytic mind he realized very early in his work that the relationships the child develops with his caretakers shape his biological and social and then his psychological identity [the innate Vs. the acquires again]. The formation of that identity happens before language registers them in consciousness and make them acquire a personal quality. The formation of the psychical identity of the subject happens outside the enfant’s (toddler’s, child) verbal ability to find its meaning. Moreover, most of time the caregiver, him or herself, does not have a clear (conscious)link between what they say and what they mean. This common state of affair confuses the child’s identity and the patient’s complaint and makes transference the central issue in analytic psychotherapy.

The main and most rich source of new starts for a more advanced psychoanalysis than the one Freudian Analysis has provided till now is the concept of the unconscious. Even though we all claim that we know what the unconscious is we cannot deny that that knowledge is influenced- in many ways- by the one psychoanalysis started with…. the repressed. However, the French school and some other European analytic centers (Dutch and Portuguese) were more inclined to approach the unconscious from the angle of language: language is the human facility that has the means to let meaning be present in what is stated without physically being there. The most particular about the unconscious is its link with the nature of language: we are a creature that could say two contradictory things at the same without even intending to do that. This is a complex subject and quite involved but to just to make it brief, I like to say that a new psychoanalysis has to deal with the complexity of consciousness\unconsciousness. After I was able to understand what I was hearing from my patients I was fascinated and puzzled by the nature of the vocabulary used: it normally conveys meaning but in patients (in normals too) the vocabulary carries another implicit meaning that is disguised in the firm of metaphor or metonymy, which is neither created intentionally or absent mindedly. The patients’ speech says things unconsciously in those two linguistic formations.

The dualities of conscious\unconscious, I\me, meaning\metaphor and metonymy, are very much related to another neurological duality of Broca/Wernicke areas in the brain. I am mentioning those dualities as an example of the issue in this posting: psychoanalysis as the exploration of the nature of the human subject has reached a point that it has to be renewed. Renewing psychoanalysis will come from psychoanalyst who through experience noticed characteristics of the subject that need exploring and making it leads us to a better and more advance understanding of ourselves.  

 

A Small Addition to the Previous Posting

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.

 

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).