Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the End of an Era

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{This posting will be in four parts: Introduction, The Deterioration of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, The Uncomfortable Duo of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, The Demise of the Profession of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy}.
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2.The Deterioration of Psychoanalysis:

Anna Freud and Melanie Klein

Psychoanalysis, like any other intellectual movement, had its share of internal conflicts and moment of impending danger of disintegration. However, the presence of Freud in the movement and his leadership played a big role in avoiding those threats. After his death in 1939 nothing seemed to have changed much. Psychoanalysis was expanding everywhere it had some existence, and new groups joined the IPA. Even theoretically, new elaborations and sophisticated clarifications were appearing in the more active filed of publications. It became clear that psychoanalysis was not a movement associated with the talent of one person or even the talents of more advocates who were everywhere it was established, it was not a fad but an addition to the burgeoning endeavors of the intellectual everywhere.

    

The strongest evidence that psychoanalysis was not a historical event but a serious movement in the humanities came almost a decade after Freud’s death. In the late forties the natural evolution of psychoanalysis led two of the movement’s principal psychoanalysts, who were in Great Britain due to the war circumstances, to a significant point of disagreement. The conflict between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein was significant enough to warrant creating two (later three) groups to solve the problem of coexisting, because there was no mention of those two leading figures to leave and form their societies, and they were both the initiators of solid points of view.

Similarly, the French society and institute went through a similar alarming period of conflicts around the same time. A real threat to the existence of psychoanalysis in France was not possible to ignore. Lacan and his early companions (Lagashe and other) requested changes in the modality of theoretical formations and its impact on training by questioning the merits of ego psychology and the significance of moving to structural thinking instead This time the rebels were expelled from the IPA, before they were reinstated a couple of years later (except Lacan). The two events were almost identical in timing and the main topic of discontent: the need to move from ego psychology (later called in the US drive psychology) to a psychoanalysis of psychical structures. The controversy in Britain set Anna Freud to be the guardian of ego psychology as Sacha Nacht was in France. Better to say that psychoanalysis after Freud was liberating itself from the functional psychoanalysis of the Ego (ironically called the Structural Theory) and getting well positioned to advance to exploring the intrapsychical nature of the human subject, but with substantial opposition. In the US it was the same but in a different style.

We got- in the first part of this posting- to the same distinction between two types of psychoanalysis:  the functional and the structural psychoanalyses. It is understandable that psychoanalyst who are mainly medical people would not give the idea of functional and structural psychoanalyses much attention. Most psychoanalysts did not and do not think much about the usefulness of this distinction to their practice. This distinction is what makes the difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. However, in the humanities, good functional formulations would eventually lead to the structural nature of the phenomenon. The early Freudian functional findings led to structural reformulations of the of the subject exemplified in unsuccessful attempts- at the end of his life- to revive metapsychology.

Anna Freud and Melanie Klein stood for two apposite stands from the theory of psychoanalysis [ Some attempts were made to consider the conflict a matter of personal competitions]. Anna Freud put the Ego and its affairs as the subject matter of psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein made the formation of the intrapsychic- through the relations the infant goes through with the care-givers- the core of psychoanalysis. Their disagreements were genuine points of view: is the intrapsychic a product of ego functions, thus the ego is the cause and the psyche is the effect, or the formed intrapsychic is the cause of the formation of the ego thus it is its the effect.

Psychoanalysis was divided.  Although this old dichotomy does not constitute a criterion of good/bad or right/ and wrong psychoanalyses it was understood by analysts as differentiation between old Passé psychoanalysis and new advancing one. The motto behind the new trend was an opposition between Ego psychology and relational psychology. Anyone who is aware of the works of the serious ego psychologist of the sixties till the eighties (Arlow, Brenner, Rangell,etc.,) would notice that they were dealing with the ego as a structure and not as an ontological entity.  Klein was the new and the correction of the rigidity of Ego Psychology that characterized what Freud left us with. However, misunderstanding the jest of the ‘controversies’ and the popularity Klein gained despite Anna Freud’s desperate effort to curtail it made some young analysts to think that psychoanalysis is about interrelationships and the structure of the intrapsychic is not pivotal in psychoanalysis anymore. This trend became the head of a the new trend of ‘relationality and relational psychoanalysis’.  Lacan’s trend, which was becoming the other antidote to a declining functional ego psychology had limited attractiveness outside France because of his style of presenting it. Yet (as I learned from a French Friend who was visiting South America frequently) both Klein and Lacan had strong support in Brazil and Argentina.  However, the proof that the ‘controversies’ were not simple squabble amongst some competing analysts, and it was a manifestation of a turning point in the developing course of psychoanalysis is the way Klein’s point of view surpassed being just a novelty.

Klein gave us a closer look at and into the formation of the intrapsychic through examining the relational world of the infant and the child. All along, without clear vision of what psychoanalysis was, it was the act of analyzing the intrapsychical in order to reveal the unconscious components in its structure. Therefore, we should consider the “controversies” not a historical phase in the history of psychoanalysis but a revelation of the problematic of psychoanalysis; therefore it is important to re-examine its deterioration that came after a genuine development after Freud.

The Inception of Deterioration:

Deterioration is when something good that kept improving its goodness seizes to advance in the same direction. The mere stoppage of the good indicates its deterioration. It deteriorates by just not moving forward.

Psychoanalysis started as a process of investigating the causes of psychoneuroses, and eventually developed to turn those discoveries into therapeutic works. When it reached the time of the ‘controversies’ it was at a cross roads: a very rich stash of information about childhood and its effect on adulthood, which also opened the door for widening the scope of psychotherapy beyond expectations. It was also a time when this rich endowment of knowledge about the subject was strongly suggesting intensifying, improving, refining, and expanding psychoanalysis beyond its fixed identity as psychotherapy. Psychoanalysts and the psychoanalytic organizations neither worked in that direction nor encouraged others (none analysts) to do that.

The second road was concentrating the efforts of the organization and the analysts to strengthen the organization and extend its training reach. In taking that venue, more so in North America, the success of expanding psychoanalysis clearly came on the expense of the first point: enriching the knowledge of the psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysis started to deteriorate. Worse, there was, instead, a determined effort to keep psychoanalysis in isolation from none analysts’ contributions. Another and most revealing happening took hold of the analytic community. Analysts developed a tendency to hastily give new and rigid meanings to certain events or happening in the field. The most obvious and also destructive was (and still is) considering Klein’s theory and practice “relational psychoanalysis in contrast with ego psychology” or what was dubbed drive psychology. The drive psychology ‘thing’ was the outcome of the poor system of institutes education which does not respond to theoretical fads with good scholarly response.  In 1905 Freud turned the theory ‘urges’ to the concept of Trieb; psychoanalysis lost any link with drives since.    

This trend created two camps of psychoanalysis that are based on misunderstanding, even discarding the works of their explainers. Ego or drive psychology and Kleinian psychology got meanings that are beyond their real functions, resulting in them standing for meaningless conflicts. In France those two terms stood for the conflict about the traditional viewpoint (maybe Mary Bonaparte as its symbol) and the general cultural vitality that commenced after the World War. In Britain they had more of personal meaning related to individuals and their status in the psychoanalytic community. In the USA they stood for different locations and centers of psychoanalytic organizations (East\West, regional institutes and universities, and sometimes popular training Analysts). The point is that new bestowed meanings on the two terms distanced psychoanalysts from the real concerns in the issues that were supposed to advance.

The Deterioration:

How could we reach a judgement that psychoanalysis is deteriorated or improved? The appeal or rejection of psychoanalysis is not a good criterion for the simple reason that intellectual issues are measured by their own quality not by comparing them with other intellectual endeavors. We cannot say that psychoanalysis is better or worse because it appeals to more people or less. To get directly to the point: the deterioration of psychoanalysis is evident in both the absence of an intellectual identification of its subject matter (therapy, theory, theory of practice, explanation of psychopathology, etc.) and the variations and disparities of in its practice (an  experienced and well placed analyst to judge this matter counted twelve schools of analysis in the US. I still consider three schools to be proof of the looseness of training and education in the IPA institutes). The classical modality of psychoanalysis was: knowing the structure and dynamics of the intrapsychic and its psychopathologies, psychoanalyzing how the patient ‘talks’ about his case, interpreting his speech to effect changes in his intrapsychic structures. Freud protocol of neutrality abstinence and anonymity fitted well in that modality because if any good will come from therapy it has to come from the analyst clearing the session from anything but the patient’s speech. In other words, psychoanalyzing is the process that makes the patient realizes and concentrates on his intrapsychic dynamics to initiate the desirable change in them. The analyst should demonstrate to the patient that wanting to establish a relation with the analyst beyond the therapeutic one disguises his intrapsychical difficulties that he came to find a better solution for them than acting them out in relationships with others..

The gate for deterioration opened gradually to end up in North America into a critical case of a crisis, when in Europe diverting some substantial parts of psychoanalysis to universities is proving to be protecting it from total collapse. Approaching  ‘hesitantly’ a full academic merging of psychoanalysis with academia (full merger is by stopping IPA from being involved in the Formation of Psychoanalysts) would demand a more declaration that psychoanalysis should be considered a profession, not just an appendage to other professions.  The apparent reason is that analysts do not give enough attention to how the general theory of psychoanalysis and the preferred method of practicing it as psychotherapy are linked and affect each other. For instance, if psychoanalysis (theory) is relationally oriented psychotherapy would then be directed to making relations the filed of discovering the unconscious in order to effect treatment. Psychoanalysis deteriorates if the analyst does not pay attention to what he is doing: practicing a theory or proving a theory; freeing the patients from the unconscious compulsion to act out his intrapsychic flaws in relationships or suggesting better kinds of relationships.
Is there a difference between psychoanalyzing and psychotheraputizing. 

In the next part of the posting a more elaborate distinction between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis will be tackled.  

Ann addendum:

The negative responses to my post on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis make me post this addendum.

The first part of my post was to deal with the rigid conception that the term 'psychoanalysis' means psychotherapy and possibly some other theoretical view points. My objective is to show that psychoanalysis is a theory in its own right linked to psychotherapy but still a theory created by all thinkers who think and discover the human subject. Psychoanalysis is not psychotherapy even though psychotherapies owe their existence to psychoanalysis.

A second clarification: psychoanalysis is not a profession, never was, still is not, BUT should become a profession. I practiced and made a living working in psychoanalysis but under the auspice of the licence as a psychologist. Psychoanalysis is not even a designation in the three professions that permit analysts to use their licences to practice. Anyone in those three profession could claim to be a psychoanalyst without any recourse.

I will continue with my post.

Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the End of an Era

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{This posting will be in four parts: Introduction, The Deterioration of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, The Uncomfortable Duo of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, The Demise of the Profession of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy}.

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1.    A Very Banal Introduction.

Every time the difficulties psychoanalysis is facing are raised the issue of psychotherapy- in general-comes to mind. The reason is that the birth of psychoanalysis forced sort of a symbiotic link between a theory and its application and the term ‘psychoanalysis’ signified both aspects. This linkage created and still creates may unresolved problems. However, over the years, psychotherapy reached a certain degree of independence of psychoanalysis and seemed to have chartered a course of its own, while psychoanalysis remained undecided about its place in that duo.

Psychoanalysis started as an attempt to marry the French discoveries of the split of consciousness, and of hypnotism as a means to paralyze the active one to reveal the split other. This attempt was meant- at the beginning- to explore hysteria. The attempt, with Freud’s insights and intuitions, led him to the notion that the process of exploring could be turned into a method of psychotherapy. This turning point came from realizing that the split of consciousness could be explained as repression of morbid ideas that conflicts with regular consciousness. In better terms: Freud realized that psychoneuroses could be functions of some psychical mechanism that separate (splits) the unacceptable conscious material from regular consciousness. Those discoveries resulted in creating a new vocabulary to express the findings, which were viewed more as a branch of mental health. Psychoanalysis became a new field within the mental health profession. The most important feature in this new theory was the desperate attempts by Freud and his disciples to come up with a comprehensive “functional” theory of psychoneuroses their psychotherapy (how repression causes the neurosis and removing it results in cure). They were looking for a theory of causes and effects. Discoveries were getting more comprehensive, more extensive, mistakes were corrected, new ways of looking into the nature of the ‘psychical’ were coming from gifted psychoanalysis who came from different cultural and philosophical backgrounds.

Yet, something remained illusive: what is the link within the dual nature of psychoanalysis as discoveries about the subject ant the psychotherapy of the neurotics: is it a theory of something (its subject matter!) that is applied as psychotherapy. The question had another formation: is psychotherapy (profession) that generates new discoveries that require new terminology and theoretical formulation? This question could be dismissed as superfluous if the answer is: the link between theory and practice is dialectical. However, the link between theory and practice psychotherapy did not display a dialectical quality because neither the theory of psychoanalysis got improved by accumulated experiences in practice, nor practices got any better by the “new” modifications in the theory of psychoanalysis (will come to that in part three of this posting). Dialectical links are supposed to create a more advance understandings of that link and create better links. The dilemma of theory and practice is still as complex as it was raised sometime ago and remains as it was before, and we will see later it got worse.

To avoid deviating from our objective by discussing those issues further now I will underline two pairs of concepts that affected the progress of psychoanalysis in manner that put psychotherapy-analytic and none analytic- in focus. They are reflection of a halted progress.

Functionalism and Structuralism.       

Until the thirties of last century, the only way of thinking that was considered scientific or aspiring for factual results, was ‘functional thinking’, i.e., finding the plausible ‘causes’ of phenomena ‘effects’. In the humanities, like psychoanalysis, thinkers and scientists had tremendous difficulties in getting to those functional formulation. They did not know-till Freud showed- that all human phenomena contained an unconscious aspect that interferes in the relationship between the causes and the effects. In the interpretation of the Irma dream the cause of the dream was the implicit criticism Freud read in Otto’s remarks on his patient’s suffering. Hence, he interpreted the scene (in the dream) of the confusion of the ‘great’ physicians about the patient’s diagnosis and the patient’s behaviour itself to be exonerating him from poor practice. The dream fulfilled his wish to deny that the patient’s lack of response to his treatment was because of him. But this rule ‘formula’ does not say anything about dreamers who are seldom aware of a fulfilled wish in their dreams (will get to that a little later). All the unconscious factors involved in creating a Freudian megalomaniac scene of debasing the adversaries were not considered in the interpretation of the dream. In fact, dreams-unconsciously- fulfill the antithesis wish of the ‘day residue’. The wish was to get praised for his good work, while the wish in the dream was to debase the adversaries for blaming him.

In Sociology, marriage was explained as a system to control sexual relations for the sake of normalizing the family unite. However, it was not possible to make sense of this understanding with the wide range of differences between societies in that regard. Sociology missed that whatever are the rules of marriage in the societies they all agree on one shared rule: avoid and prevent incest. Marriage- “unconsciously”- is to control incest, thus prevents interfamilial parricide. Dreams are not wish fulfillment; they are statements of wishing.    

It is very important to emphasize, even to over emphasize, that every time Freud came close to announcing his latest functional theory as the final theory of psychoanalysis, he stopped short of shutting the door behind him. He always sensed that his functional theories were inadequate. He knew what is not before knowing what is. After the theory of infantile sexuality Freud reversed the functional relation between the cause and effect between sexuality and psychoneurosis: the neurosis causes deviations in the sexual urge not that psychoneuroses are the effect of distorted sexuality. Twenty years later (Freud,1926d) reversed the cause\effect of the state of anxiety and psychoneurosis. Anxiety has become the sign for psychical processes to start to activate (unconsciously off course) instead of the old view that anxiety is the manifestation of a psychical process that went wrong.  

A different way of thinking was implicit in his major works. It seems that something similar existed in the best works of the human thinkers of the time. In the early thirties F. De-Saussure (a linguist) introduce structuralism as a distinct way of thinking in the humanities. The implicit became explicit. The jest of the structural way of thinking is to understand (interpret), then rebuild the phenomena based on what your understanding revealed of its internal structure. The ‘unconscious evolution of psychoanalysis coincided with the birth of the structural theory to give us a different psychoanalysis from the cause\effect understanding of the psyche.

The Intrapsychic and Interpersonal.

The second pair of the two concepts is the relational vs. the intrapsychic conception of the subject. As mentioned above we should keep in mind that Freud avoided several premature functional foreclosures on his theoretical endeavours. He ‘sensed’ that functional formulations are void of proper consideration of the unconscious and its participation in the final formulation. A scholarly examination of Freud’s various theoretical formulations revealed to thinkers, philosophers, and the intellectual community in general the presence of a structural component lurking in the background in all his previous functional attempts at theorizing psychoanalysis.

Freud’s finding about infantile sexuality did not stop at that, but he advanced the discovery to make sexuality a Trieb (a pressure put on the mind to work) and not Instinkt. This choice of terms did not stop him completely from trying to name other Trieb (s) but he immediately got to the process of representation (thing and word representations), which is the core structure of the Trieb activity. This means that Freud was a closet structuralist while his disciples, with very few exceptions, were functional theorists.  

Although the term ‘intrapsychic’ was not in use at that time Freud realized that the patient (subject) has his own way of responding to the pressure of the Trieb and realized that what we now call intrapsychic is the core structure of any psychical phenomena. Freud understood infantile sexuality and its relation to adult sexuality and sexual deviation as a process that starts and matures, and in its way to maturation it succumbs to modifications that changes the nature of its pressure on the mind and the response is always individual and subjective. He realized and acknowledged that sexuality is a process not an entity- thing.

 The proof that Freud’s psychoanalysis was ‘basically’ a structural theory is in its impact on the cultural and the philosophical communities. Psychoanalysis caught the attention of thinkers and philosophers quite early in its history. In 1926 Politzer (a Marxist philosopher who should have known the nature of structural thinking well) gave psychoanalysis a great amount of attention. He considered psychoanalysis a different psychology and that its understanding of the human subject (the psyche) is distinct from the other common psychologies, like Wundt’s psychology. Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1960), even suggested a psychotherapeutic approach based on his understanding of psychanalysis. He could be considered the spark that set on fire the attention of phenomenologists, existentialists, and arts and literature masters to psychoanalysis which, was isolated in its psychotherapy camp. Psychoanalysis promised the best of in those in fields an extension to their search for the nature of the subject. Psychoanalysis identified the missing item in the novel structural epistemology: the systemic and none repressed unconscious.  This early recognition of the psychoanalytic conception of the subject was a blessing and also a curse in disguise.

The blessing was extending the boundaries of psychoanalysis beyond its limited beginning as a clinical branch of psychiatry. The advancements in the discoveries about the subject, which made Freud extend psychoanalysis beyond psychopathology [his last creative work was Moses and Monotheism] was influenced by the thinkers, philosophers, and the intellectual in general. Hence psychoanalysis was a blessing in the disguise of what the concept of ‘application’ sometimes offers. None of those giants of the culture considered psychotherapy an application of psychoanalysis. It was also a curse because psychoanalysts felt threatened, surpassed in their knowledge of the subject, and became relentless in refusing none analysts to speak for psychoanalysis. They closed the field of learning, training, and practicing psychoanalysis to be their own field of being.

The serious thinkers and philosophers -mainly in Europe- continued integrating the psychoanalytic discovery of the subject’s psyche in their own philosophical works. The works of Heidegger, Habermas, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Foucault, etc. and the existential movement and many others in the associated branches of the humanities (anthropology, mythology, etc.) demonstrated a very significant fact: psychoanalysis can survive, even flourish without the practice of psychotherapy. However, psychoanalysts kept their belief that psychoanalysis is a clinical discipline. The faulty understanding of the link between theory and practice led the psychoanalysts to a basic blunder: they believed they can derive a theory of psychoanalysis from practicing it as psychotherapy and anything that does not come from the clinical filed is not psychoanalysis. The fundamental and definitive mistake in that blunder is the fact that psychotherapy is a closed field and it could only survive if there are none clinical sources that could keep it going and growing (imagine the general practitioners in medicine not accepting the discoveries in the other specialties or even in the field of medical instruments). Practicing psychoanalysts could either improve the technique or at best find in the theory of psychoanalysis, as the thinkers have advances it, some clinical aspects that could make psychotherapy more effective.

The distinction between functional psychoanalysis and structural psychoanalysis extends to distinguish between intrapsychic and relational theories of therapy, and between psychoanalysis as a different and separate psychotherapeutic work that does not share much with other psychotherapies. Psychoanalysis of causes and effects (trauma, poor mothering, unresolved Oedipus, etc.) is limited to dealing with relational issues. Relational issues, and their participation in the psychoneuroses dictate using explanations as the means to cure. Explanations do not affect the psychoneuroses that have been established in the patient before any understanding was possible, i.e., understanding them ‘now’ does not obviate the unconscious changes they already done to the intrapsychic psychodynamics when they happened. Functional psychoanalysis is psychotherapy, or we could say psychotherapy came about when psychoanalysis was still in the phase of functional thinking

The beginning of Freud’s attention to structuralism could be seen in the case of the Wolf Man and more so in his understanding of the Schreiber memoirs. In those two cases-though they were not pure clinical example- Freud talks about the person, the individual, the human subject, not about mechanisms or what confirms his theory. Structural psychoanalysis interprets what the patient says to get to its internal structure to reconstruct it with the patient and effect the desirable insights to continue self- analysis and changing the intrapsychic construct. Psychoanalysis aims at changing not improving the intrapsychic nature of the patient. WE are not healers, we are psychoanalysts.     

 Confusing a theory of psychoanalysis with presumably a theory of clinical practice had a very negative and serious result. In a very short period of time analysts started ‘improvising’ theories of practice (for reasons to be presented in part three of the posting) believing that they were advancing psychoanalysis. Some even created fictional new psychotherapeutic techniques and superimposed them on the philosophies of known philosophers of the new age of the human ‘subject’. The coexistence of functional concepts (relational, interpersonal, intersubjective….)  along side the structural understanding of psychoanalysis (identity, transference, narcissism) created two camps of practicing psychoanalysts: relational psychoanalysis and intrapsychic psychoanalysis.

This division has been by some analysts as schools of analysis. Those are not schools; they are deviations from psychoanalysis and caused it to deteriorate since the sixties of the last century.  

Is he impeachable 

I am sticking my neck out: 

Trump is unimpeachable. Impeachment has to be for intended breaching of a constitutional limitation. Trump is cognitively incapable of doing anything intentionally. An intention requires a process of thinking and the existence of issues that are separate or were separated from the person’s sense of wishing. We all know the difference between doing or saying something intentionally or impulsively or spontaneously or idiotly. 

Those two things do not have any presence in that man’s (Trump) mind. He is not able (incapable) to initiate a process of thinking about his wishes to try to fulfill them intentionally (he wished to discredit his rival, acted upon his wish without thinking of what or how he has to go about it). No intentionality -preparation- for requesting the favor from the Ukraine president. Mixed with that incapacity there is the pressure that everything he does has to be great. Thus, he considered that withholding aid from a president is only natural when he deals with others.   

How could anyone impeach a man like Trump: he is living in a world that has no exitance because his wishes and ideas is the only reality that others could and should be thinking of, or the only issue that could exist to others to think about. He does not lie; he does not change his mind. This is why nothing he mentions is like anything else (never before, worst thing ever, you have never seen something like it before, etc.).     

We do not have in psychoanalysis anything that could explain this man’s “condition”. Psychologically, Trump’s I.Q. cannot be measured because of his inability to think. However, I believe he has an I.Q.  is in the range of 90-99, but without the brains that could utilize this modest intelligence. How could you impeach a psychological –not a cognitively-idiot?   

Social Narcissism and Social Phenomena:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Addendum 

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

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

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

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

I am worried-though- about three things:

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

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

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