B. Revisiting the Call for Psychoanalysis in Academia.

B. Academic Psychoanalysis VS.  Professional Psychotherapy:

I come now to the main point in my attempt at revitalize the need for taking psychoanalysis few steps ahead of its present decaying state and renewing its long-lost vitality. The idea of modernizing psychoanalysis-the dearest to us all- never got unhinged from the old modality of the tripart system of training. We spent few decades just improving what we already had, and still have, with some different additions to the old thing we inherited. But we did not even question the tripartite system of the IPA Training Centers. We did not question the apprenticeship model of learning or make the simple distinction between the vocabulary of psychoanalysis and its theory (ies) In a nutshell, instead of looking at a scientific mirror to know how we look we are holding our grand-fathers’ pictures  and thinking that we are their living reflections.

In many previous postings I was calling for moving psychoanalysis to academia. The reactions I got was negative but polite (except three). However, I did not notice or came across any..any sensible defense of the ongoing tripartite institutes of training. My point of view is that the psychoanalytic community could not envisage the idea that we should lose our revered psychoanalysis and replace it with something else that has emerged from our increasing experience over the years. The proof to that is the fantasy that old psychoanalysis is a school of psychotherapy and could or should be replaced with other schools, even if the ongoing training has actually proven ‘to be detrimental to our discipline’( no known criteria of efficacy). Moreover, training analysis created the function of the training analyst, which has proven to be a very problematic issue.

Training under the auspices of the IPA system created levels of in competencies that cannot be ignored but could not point out openly because they were in quasi  private learning facility. In other words, we are stuck with a psychoanalysis that we need to keep patching up, but never thought of replacing it with something manageable. I would not get into that issue and distract the attention from the core notion of academic psychoanalysis, but I will go directly to the problem of having the difficulty in psychoanalysis that could make it an educational topic.

Academic Psychoanalysis:

The psychoanalysis we learned had two features that would not have made it change into an academic topic: it did not have a defined subject-matter and did not have definable links with other branches of knowledge. What was psychoanalysis about, and was it a human science or a medical specialty? The seriousness of Freud and his followers were clearly supported by great minds and respectable professionals to dismiss it as not worthy of acknowledgment. Moreover, the pioneers, who were of varied professional inclinations, seemed to be honing on something that pulled the attention by Mesmer and the French school, which what is there behind consciousness and hypnotism. Psychanalysis did not have the seed of qualification for an academic subject but was right on the intriguing topic of the unconscious.

As it happened, only professional practitioners and no academics continued the walk toward the significant discoveries of psychoanalysis. It was unfortunate because the birth of the psychoanalytic language looked as if there is a theory behind the language and turning it into a profession pushed aside the need to bring it into an academic form. It should have made every practitioner of psychoanalysis look at the way of turning it into acknowledge that deserves an academic affiliation. I think that Laplanche is the first serious analyst who recognized its availability to academic status, but it will be a big disappointment if I was right and just him and few more in France who were that.

Now we should make an independent assessment of the nature of psychoanalysis to proceed with finding it a place in Academia: where does it belong? If is not by exclusion it is by inclusion part of the humanity. Although aspects of it pertain to psychosomatic functions, and basic neurological roots, they are amenable to study within the subject’s other aspects of psychological life. They are separate complete entities in their own right: conscious/unconscious, metal\affective. Moreover, when  we come to the basics and detailed program of studies, we will find out that the humanities have more to offer than medicine or other branches of knowledge. Thus psychoanalysis fits more in the humanities than in any other Academic field.    

But which area of the humanities; psychology, sociology, social work, linguistics, philosophy, or what?

This question requires answers from analysts of all those backgrounds.

Psychology and Psychoanalysis:

As a psychologist I believe that psychology could offer psychoanalysis a great deal of insight in the areas of development of mental functions, emotional maturity, and integration of the link(s) between verbal acquisition and meaning formation (essential in studying the unconscious). There are the potentials of making good research in the filed of object relations, evolution of identity, the formation of the intrapsychical and narcissistic qualities, etc.

It is possible to think about psychoanalysis in academia through two venues: adapting and adopting the coherent and systematic aspects of its basic findings and offering it as a program in departments of the humanities (with the hope for improving and expanding it), or creating something similar to the The International University of Psychoanalysis (Berlin) with the clear idea that psychotherapy is not psychoanalysis but psychoanalysis is psychotherapy.

Anyway we go-that is if we will go- end the training system of the IPA

 

ONE: Revisiting the Call for Psychoanalysis in Academia.

A.            The need for evaluating the Present System of Training:

After more than a century- since establishing the first training institute in Berlin- it is normal to ask if the Institute System of Training is worthwhile maintaining or we should think of -at least- evaluate it systematically. Personally, I did not come across any methodical assessment of the tripartite system of Seminars (theory and literature), Personal Analysis ( therapy and personal experience), and Supervision ( learning in vivo). It has to be underlined that this system was an ingenious one when it started a century ago.

However, it may have become now less effectiveness if not even counterproductive. Personal analysis has created factions of candidates and training analyst that are not always !!!!!.The literature to study is also badly influenced by the same psychodynamics with the added factor of creating ‘schools’ of thought that are-sometimes- ‘falsely’ considered advancement of the main doctrine. Fewer papers are still adding to the body of knowledge because we do not have yet a defined understanding of psychoanalysis itself to make an objective assessment. Supervision is poorly monitored-in the diverse branches of the institutes- and candidates are not in the position to differentiate between good analysis and bad (is intersubjective psychoanalysis good or bad psychoanalysis?!).

Although those flaws are the natural products of years and miles of independent training centers, insistence on keeping training the responsibility of the IPA is the malignancy.

The IPA is supposed to be a membership association of people who are trained as psychoanalysts. It defies logic that the IPA is also the only source of training that it will accept or its graduates as members. A membership association has the right to recognize the institutions that meet the criteria of training, which it accepts  its membership. But it should not be running the training institution that it will qualify for its membership. This is said again, the IPA could set up the criterion of training that qualifies for its membership OR offer the training and let the boards of professional standards accept or reject their teaching but doing away with both.

Ignoring this very simple fact created the impression that getting the    of the IPA gives the member a professional status, which it does not. The court case of 1989 was considered a psychoanalytic advancement. Yet now, with an unbiased understanding of the situation in the USA , the judgment in that case was harmful to psychoanalysis because it did not make psychoanalysis a specialty but only a membership of sorts. So, it gave the IPA an implicit acceptance of its contradictory functions.

Before I get to that, to my knowledge nonmedical professionals in Europe were well accepted in the local psychoanalytic association without court cases. The reason is that psychoanalysis in Europe  was always the arena of thinkers and not of different fields of practice like psychiatry and clinical psychology. Although psychoanalysts practice psychoanalysis under the name of their basic professional license (because psychoanalysis is not a profession) we gave ourselves a special status. This is dangerous,  because the IPA is a society of peers and not a professional society.

The Necessary Change in the Content of Learning\Training Psychoanalysis:

The tripartite training system we all go through to specify our distinction from other colleagues of our specialty is not  defined strictly distinguish  to make that distinction. Each specialty in mental health professions could train its members in psychoanalysis and initiates its own membership organization. Then, an international psychoanalytic association be formed of members of different backgrounds in psychoanalysis. Membership  in an IPA takes place later and independently. It goes without saying or with saying very little that moving psychoanalysis to Academia will force(one day) that solution because psychoanalysis will become the main concern not the membership in its association that is what is sought after.

It remains to ask what would be the content of such body of association?

My answer now is that I know what should not be, but not -yet- what it should be. People of the caliber of Laplanche in France, and few I know about but miss their names in other European centers are qualified to answer this question. It is not only their personal potentials that qualify them but also the general scientific atmosphere of culture fill in many gaps.

 

 

Revisiting the Call for Psychoanalysis in Academia.

The call for moving psychoanalysis to Academia  was a major basic divergence from the proper well-established tradition of the psychoanalytic movement, and its IPA system of ‘training institutes’. The call to end the system of apprenticeship in training, as I called iy in  June 2020 was met with a great deal of rejection and belittling, although I justified and supported it with logical discussions that were not responded to.

In the latest part of nineteenth century psychoanalysis was new a point of view regarding the human subject -therefore it was natural that it would be stated through a system of apprenticeship. Apprenticeship was the way to train young people in trades in the Middle Ages. The creation of ‘institutes’ to be the place where transmitting knowledge and experience of the forefathers of psychotherapy to a new generation, was the logical thing to do with psychoanalysis, only at the beginning. But when we come to the twenty first century we should know better: there is a great volume of knowledge and modifications, which transmitting it from generation to generation necessitated changing the system of qualifying the professional practitioners. The IPA did not pay attention to a subtle point. Psychoanalysis was not going to stop at improving itself as psychotherapy; it was destined to become more than psychotherapy. Yet, the issue at hand in that regard was not whether psychoanalysis is psychotherapy or much more. Whatever psychoanalysis was it was also a knowledge that has to be ‘acquired’ from experienced professors who are knowledgeable in the field and are also knowledgeable in related fields. All the attacks on the notions of adding to or replacing the traditional system of the institutes came from training well-established analysts who did not want to lose their distinctions to none analyst or none training analysts. Denying the impact of such change on the community of psychoanalysis had a direct impact on assessing the sustainability of the suggestion to remove training out of the apprentice model and moving it to the system of academic education.

My point of view:

My suggestion was to move training in psychoanalysis to academia for two reasons: academic thinking would introduce to psychoanalysis different and new aspects that would change it from merely a transmittable knowledge from generation to generation to become a knowledge that exits independently of a certain generation and remain available independently of some aspiring psychotherapists. Psychoanalysis should not remain an ownership of individuals but should be component of knowledge, i.e. a heritage. The second reason is keeping psychoanalysis as merely a transmittable experience would- sooner or later- lead to its deterioration (which is proven to be a correct prediction by what happened to it in its IPA isolation). Few supporters of the change in the USA were becoming cognizant of the serious efforts in Western Europe to add psychoanalysis to its curricula as  an academic item. This made them  more agreeable to consider the matter. The issue at this juncture is the relationship between the IPA with its training program and institutes and the different universities that offer training in psychoanalysis. Failing in writing something reasonable about that subject convinced me to ignore its complexities and just give my opinion without background support.

I think we are at a point now that is ‘at least’ suggesting making training and education in psychoanalysis an academic task. Thus, the IPA institutes should be phased out gradually, and the academic facilities to take over the job of maintaining and developing psychoanalysis. We are few decades behind in doing that but the resistance of the training analyst is waiting time.

However,

It was natural that introducing psychoanalysis to academia started in a shy mode. As much as my capability allowed me to know, this change in attitude had some basic flaws. In Western Europe the sensitivities regarding competing with the function of the IPA institutes was noticeable. The academic psychoanalysts  avoided making an academic degree equivalent to becoming a certifiable psychoanalyst. Those attempts proclaimed that the objective of academic psychoanalysis was to learn it but practicing it is the domain to the IPA system. The same was the case in the USA universities. After few decades of resistance there seem to  be a trend to create academic psychoanalysis that matches the IPA model. This is almost as giving IPA psychoanalysis a university address. However, in very hesitant and cautious  ways the universities acknowledged the existence of psychoanalysis as knowledge and not just a practice without the backing of psychoanalytic knowledge. Despite all that we still face a reluctance to ‘fully’ accepting psychoanalysis in academia.

The IPA is not an educational body. It was at the beginning when it was only an association of fellows of similar interests. Its institutes were an additional service to its members. That service, with time and domination of the training members, became Something Else.

Psychoanalysts, or the psychoanalyst who manage the old link between training in psychoanalysis and getting officially recognized as a psychoanalyst are losing the old powerful right acquired from the authority and status of the IPA. In simple and hesitant way, it could be said the IPA will soon be merely an association of differently and poorly trained psychoanalyst.  Few years ago there was a quasi-silent complaining of the status of  the “Training Analyst”. That complaining was  leading to nothing because the cause of creating that fictitious was the apprentice mode of training.  The problem and the cause  was not the status of training analyst but is apprenticeship as training: if knowledge is only available for ‘transmission’, then the training analyst is the ‘transmitter’. But if knowledge is to be ‘acquired’ then professors should be the source and the teachers. In the academic world there are Levels of Competence based on excellence and competence not on age and connections.

Psychoanalysts should not remain isolated in an antiquated system of learning, training, affiliations and ‘the mystique’ of psychoanalysis. If the IPA is so dear to us we dn not have to reinvented, just make it a professional association.

 

Inductive Thinking and Interpretation

The notion of considering the kind of thinking we use in our regular life is not-in any way- a common one. Still, it is very informative in some fields of epistemology like psychoanalysis. The reason is not obvious but important. The interpreting of dreams-like the  Irma dream- demonstrated that there is an unconscious process parallel to every conscious process. Since this is the case in all the work the analyst does, he has to think about the ‘implicit’ in every ‘explicit’ the patient delivers in his sessions (verbal and none verbal). Knowing about the process of thinking is imperative and not just gratuitous. Even so, that knowledge is vital in just knowing what to do with what we are dealing with: am I to wait for more to deduce from, or this is enough induce its meaning give an interpretation or even progress to make a reconstruction. What I am emphasizing here is that the analyst should know what is involved in his work to avoid the slackness that creeps in the analysis because of its repetitiveness and length.

In the Irma dream, Freud induced from the dream scene that in order to make the accusation of failure belong to all of ‘them’ he created the scene of the dream where his most likely critiques were doing ridiculous things. Interpreting a dream, a slip of the tongue or a symptom, and now we could add character formation, etc., needs deductive thinking to elicit from the details the main theme. However, if a patient is always few minutes late for his session we try to deduce (elicit) a meaning from that general or common behavior, i.e., find out what does this repetitive behavior is saying. In more related meaning to those two types of thinking we could say that we deduce from the details the general meaning, and from the general we induce the details of the general issue. Better, in analysis we are constantly using inductive and deductive thinking almost spontaneously, but we would do a better job if we knew if we have only enough to interpret or enough  to reconstruct. However, it could also be said: isn’t that what most people do normally in their daily life and without even being aware of thinking? Yes, people think and use induction and deduction without doing that consciously. But how much do we misunderstand, wrongly  understand, respond with the wrong adjective or adverb, and we get thing even worse by trying to correct ourselves without thinking of thinking.

We cannot or should not put ourselves- as psychoanalysts- in such a position of not knowing if deduction is required or there is a meaning that we should induce to give an interpretation? Our problem as analysts is that we have one tool to do our work: thinking and choosing the proper words to help the patients. Moreover, when we engage  ourselves in a general matter, we are still expected to be more thoughtful and accurate.

Our work as analysts, therapists or not, is to ‘interpret’. We are expected to understand matter of human nature more deeply. By definition a psychoanalyst interprets not explain, which means to derive from the given what is latent. I have to interrupt this line of thinking at this point to introduce a different but related issue. An interpretation has to be done within a context because-strange enough-it is the context that would make the interpretation meaningful. The Irma Dream, like all dreams, had a context that could be derived from the day residues. The context was talking-the day before the dream- about the unsuccessful work Freud with doing with Irma. Without the context of the psychic material the interpretation could be deductive or inductive and as a fact unrelated to what is analyzed. The strength of an analytic interpretation the kind of thinking that linked it to the context. Psychoanalysis is unique in understanding the human phenomena because any attempt at understanding is dependent onto how the context of the issue becomes the interpretation of the interpretation. I will go the example of the patient who comes late to her session. The context was creating a time gap between the patient before her-who was also a female- and herself, which eventually revealed a competitiveness of transference nature.

We need to keep in mind- all or most of the time- that interpretation is the dealing with the material that is delivered as free association. Construction is a different ‘ball game’. Construction is the kind of psychoanalytic work that is derived from transference. Transference is the psychic material that goes back actual interpersonal relationships in the history of the patient. Therefore, inductive and deductive thinking in dealing with transference take a slightly different place in the psychoanalytic work.

This would be a separate topic that when is done properly (I hope) it will get us to the doorstep of training.

 A Need for a Theory of Practice and a System of Training

In a recent posting of the IPA, a colleague (sorry to have lost his name) underlined a ‘serious’ problem that pertains to both practice and the theory of practice. He underlined the absence of interest in childhood in the contemporary theory of psychoanalysis. He also related that disappearance to the disappearance of the issue of the intrapsychic in the field of its practice. The two issues are fundamentally and inherently connected. If we haven’t forgotten, we psychoanalysts who were the first to refer psychopathology to fixations on unresolved conflicts in childhood. We were also the ones who stipulated that correcting those fixations comes through analyzing their transference to the analytic process. Add to that that as this is the case, and was always so, training in psychoanalysis was more than just learning: it was forming a psychoanalytic mind in the candidate.

My colleague hit the nail on the head, but the nail needs more hitting…. because analysts-hopefully-still want the do the good and real work of psychoanalysis. But there is a problem with that. Until the late sixties of the last century learning and training were possible because the field was expanding in terms literature and fields of practice (psychosomatics, borderline cases, etc.). But thinkers from outside the field, and thinkers from inside the field, in addition to the change in the kind of cases that sought treatment, the development in psychology and linguistics, all those dug deeper and more complex strata of the human subject. Instead of getting more ‘psychoanalytic’ we neglected the two pillars of our discipline: childhood and its fixations, and transference and the intrapsychic.

What happened, eventually, is that the practicing psychoanalysts closed the door behind themselves and kept regurgitating their knowledge, leaving the thinkers advance psychoanalysis toward wider horizons while their world remained limited if not even shrunk. This subject is of more complexity and further horizon than what I am equipped to dela with. But I can and wish to go back to two or three topics that I raised before that are related to the issue our colleague has raised: The difference between having a vocabulary of psychoanalysis without having its language, and the difference between a psychoanalysis founded on deductive thinking and another that is inductive in nature.

Practicing analysts and even training analysts might think that this topic is too far from their own realm of practice and work. It is not. If they are doing good work, they would be actually using the right approach without being aware of it. The old vocabulary we still use and teach candidates will gain more meaning than when we were taught it. The fact that we know more now about what we did 'unconsciously' for a long time obliges us to learn how to convey that elaboration of psychoanalysis to the new generation AND keep ourselves aware of what we should be doing in our practice.

I hope to write two posts, one Transference and Interpretation and one on Inductive Thinking and Interpretation. 

 Inductive Thinking in Psychoanalysis.

There is no obvious reason for psychoanalysts to reject or at least to dismiss non-clinical thought as irrelevant to psychoanalytic clinical work. Most, if not almost all my posts, that do ne relate directly to clinical practice or the application of psychoanalysis are frowned at. This is a prescription for unmanageable deterioration of our specialty. The reason is that Psychoanalysis itself was and still is not clinical discipline. It was originally a discovery that needed a theory to take its place epistemology. By mistake the theory needed did not come from thinkers but from practitioners. Yet, Freud and a few of his followers had the insight that Psychoanalysis is more than just a psychotherapy and tried their hands in trying to give it a theoretical foundation. The continued domination of the clinical picture of psychoanalysis delayed and distorted the efforts to give it its ‘theoretical’ structure.  Just to avoid a common misunderstanding: a theory of psychoanalysis does not interfere with whatever the clinician thinks of his work.

Psychoanalysis, like all other similar mental accomplishments, is either the product of inductive or deductive process of thinking. We can say- with reasonable agreement- that psychoanalysis was initiated by noticing two things. The first is the coexistence of two streams of thought of which one is not fully in the sphere of awareness or consciousness (Anna O). The second is the interpretation of dreams (the Irma dream). In both those initiating events Freud induced from what he observed the existence of a split in the familiar process of consciousness, and a dream is a scene that says something about the dreamer, which neither the patient nor the analyst could deduce from manifest dream but could educe a latent meaning from the patient’s associations about the dream. The Irma dream said many things about the day residues, but the interested dream said (unconsciously) a great deal about the dreamer-Sigmund Freud his anxieties, his thoughts about his colleagues, his sense of importance and being hungry for more: his Narcissism.

The difference between deductive thinking and inductive thing is the difference between psychoanalysis without a theory and with a theory, even psychoanalysis and the mere psychotherapeutic work. I will mention a case I used a couple of years ago in one of my previous postings on my personal blog.

The patient was the older of two sisters. She looked more like her father while the younger and prettier sister took after their very pretty mother. The analysis was going nowhere - for a lengthy period of time- as the patient was just reporting on the divided family structure and her mother’s bad treatment of her. I could say that I was also compliant to that type of resistance and was bust deducing some feature of masochistic pleasure in the patient’s complaining. In a moment of ‘inductive’ thinking I realized some sadistic sense of joy that her sister is deprived of the father’s love and attention. This was a deduction from the material but an inductive thought that was in the fabric of the family structure.

There was a pleasure in releasing myself from my deductive work and moving to the inductive analysis of my patient’s psychological stagnation in complaining. Again: deduction is finding the thread to trace to the main issue- induction is to discover what is missing to make sense of what is obvious, operational, but seems to be void of justification. This point is more important than just doing better psychoanalysis. The therapeutic objective of psychoanalytic therapy is to change the intrapsychic structure of the patient Not to improve his interpersonal way of relating to others. We cannot do that without inducing from the obvious what is missing in it. In this patient it was inducing her narcissistic relationship with the father and depriving her sister from that closeness to the father. I believe-as I found out- that changing that intrapsychic structure was therapeutic enough.    

Thus, true analytic work comes from the analyst’s ability to induce a meaning in his hourly deductive work. Just keep in mind the difference between interpretation and reconstruction. 

 Deduction and Induction in Psychoanalytic Thinking.

I was reading a book on the struggles of Einstein and free thinkers in his time in Europe with great details of the links he had with the physicists of his time. The book showed well the effect of his 'sudden unexpected genius' of the notion of relativity on the field of electromagnetism. Most of that part of the book was high above my mental capacity, but one trivial remark by the author Matthew Stanly about Einstein's way of thinking gripped more than my attention. He said that Einstein's intuition came from Inductive thinking and not from Deductive thinking. There is so much to say about the distinctiveness of each of these bipolarities, but the striking thing is that deductive thinking adds to a postulate what clarifies it while inductive thinking deduces from the postulate what explains it. 

This simple and clear distinction between the two poles of thinking shed a beam of light on psychoanalysis. Generally, we agree that the basic discovery of psychoanalysis came to Freud from interpreting dreams and discovering (uncovering)the primary and secondary processes. He inductively distinguished the difference between Instinct and Trieb, the duality of the subject in narcissism, even the Beyond the pleasure Principle, and most of his major and not so major discoveries came from inductive thinking.

I went back to the Standard Edition to remind myself of what was deductive and what was inductive in his work, and it was a totally new journey to psychoanalysis. This issue brought to my mind the points of disagreement I always had with analysis based on deductive work; especially with the birth of schools (even Lacanism). It also reminded me of some difficult supervisions of some candidates who insisted that discovering the unconscious is a deduction and they could not comprehend the notion that it should come from inducing it from the material. I must admit that I did not have that distinction clear in my mind as it is now after reading Stanly's book. 

I wish some young analysts would include the distinction between deductive analysis and inductive analysis and training faculties in the institutes give that distinction some serious attention