The Unconscious’s Search for Consciousness

The two concepts of consciousness and unconsciousness are the most principal concepts in psychoanalysis. Consciousness is easy to define and deal with because it relates to awareness and is the condition of regular mentation. However, the concept of unconsciousness is most puzzling. The prefix ‘un’ when added to consciousness, it opens the door for multiplicity of meanings ranging from ‘not’ conscious to the reverse of consciousness, which is not within the field of psychoanalysis. Freud and analysts after him used the term unconscious in a variety of capacities, which is not unusual in human sciences. But, the absence of a recognized meaning of unconsciousness in keeps psychoanalysis deteriorating because it allows false psychoanalyses to compare with what is supposed to be the right one.

This post is an attempt to address the puzzling question of psychoanalysis: what is unconsciousness? Is it something we assume its existence; thus, we keep searching for it-in psychoanalysis- almost in a sleep walking fashion? Or is it something we feel its presence in us but do not know how it existed in us in the first place! We should remind ourselves that the unconscious (adjective) existed in our life form the beginning of the distinctiveness of homosapien from the rest of the primates. It started to raise eyebrows only when Freud brought it to our attention. He began talking about  the unconscious as noun (something specific) but gradually realised that ‘unconsciousness’ is an adjective of different and varied psychical process. He was even more ardent in giving it a primacy in psychical life, considering it an integral part of anything conscious issue.

A question arises in that context:  How could someone who is fundamentally conscious learn of the existence of unconsciousness, i.e., become conscious of unconsciousness?

Background:

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was a long trip. He recognised that part of consciousness could be forced out of consciousness in some circumstances creating what he called repressed unconscious. Then he realised that consciousness is not the natural state of affaires because it is selective and the rest the mental activity gets systemically removed from consciousness and become an unconscious system. Later, he realised that the systemic unconscious leaves disguised marks in in consciousness. Those marks, he called none repressed unconscious. In real terms, the none repressed unconscious (conscious but disguised) means that both consciousness and unconsciousness coexist in the same psychical act. They are not qualitatively distinguishable or different, yet one gets a place in attention while the other has to be deduced.

Having that in mind and also being curious to know how could we extricate the unconscious from consciousness since they coexist, made me wonder about myths as a possible model of the hidden unconscious in consciousness. In a late posting I wondered about Jocasta’s part in the Oedipus Myth, or her disguised role in making the myth be about to be about the taboo of the incest. I got into an interesting but short exchange of views with a senior and very experienced analyst regarding psychoanalysis and mythology. The main point in the exchange was whether psychoanalysts could say something about myths, or do myths say something to psychoanalysts. In the first case myth would be treated as historical events (conscious material) thus its characters could be treated as personifation[aF1]  of regular human attributes. In the second case a myth would be an implicit (unconscious!) statement about a human condition disguised in a situation (not an event). We are still creating myths; the Pope is still creating saints, and none religious people create mythical heroes from politicians, artists, and others. Americans’ adoration, if not idolization, of their ‘forefathers’ is modern myth-creation and its unconscious message is not very unconscious. Therefore, the effort to look at myth as a way to understand unconsciousness seemed reasonable. The distinction between a myth and a historical event is in the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in both. In the myth, the unconscious is hidden within the seemingly quasi conscious events. This is what gives the myth its unconscious messaging quality. The Oedipus myth is not about some characters manipulated by ‘destiny’ to set up a human drama; it is a human drama, created unconsciously by conscious minds to say something unconscious about family intra-dynamics. The Oedipus myth is -unconsciously-about the taboo of incest in family structure (The taboo of incest is the most important achievement of homosapiens in regard to separating themselves from the rest of the high primates). A historical event – on the hand- is empty of any unconsciousness even if it implies that it will unconsciously cause future changes.   

Few days after that exchange with my  colleague I remembered a discussion-of few years earlier among some friends about Greek Tragedies and the birth of Theatre (one of the people present corrected the notion that ‘theatre’ is a Greek invention stating the discovery of a hieroglyphic text of a play in one of the historical digs that went back to the second pharaonic dynasty (of the fourth century BC). Remembering that meeting reminded me of a very interesting and extremely important question that the archeologist in the group raised: Why did we (whoever the we were) created Theatre? A little later it came to my mind that theatre, whether Greek or Egyptian, began in parallel to the early creation of myths: theatre was devoted -then- to performing the popular myths of the age. The enactment of myth was also part of celebrating religious occasions. Theatre was the spoken text of mythology ‘par excellence’.

 As psychoanalysts, we learn that dreams are wish fulfillment. A dream is a scene in which the wish is already performed and fulfilled (the Irma Dream). Therefore, it is safe- at least- to say that acting a myth on theatre makes it come across as a real event or as an actuality. It also becomes a scene of fulfillment and frustration of conflicting wishes. The theatre goer watches a fictional scene as a reality for the duration of the acting, at least, without noticing or being aware (unconscious) of his state of mind that did not make the distinction between reality and fiction. This is exactly what the dreamer does by not waking up whatever the dream is saying. It is also safe to say that the great evolution in theatrical creations worldwide, including movies and other contemporary means of expressing ideas is still functioning as enactment of something dormant and silent within the subject, i.e., unconscious. Watching an enactment paralyzes or abolishes the critical functions of consciousness for a while. Just as examples: in “Gone with the Wind” Gable and Lee acted a dramatic story that could have actually happened during the Civil War in America. However, people watched the movie as a story but in the back of their minds it was also the story of the North (Gable) and the South (Lee), and the tragedy that at the end finally made Gable (the North) “walk out of his marriage without giving a damn”.  Myths are made of the fabric of dreams, as theatre is made of the fabric of dreaming.  

I reached a comfortable position in regard to the possible relation between consciousness and unconsciousness from comparing myth to history. Put a little better, a myth is unconsciousness disguised in what looks like conscious, while history is consciousness disguising as unconsciousness intention.

The puzzle got a little clearer but the problem remained unsolved clinically. Where is the conscious and the unconscious in the work of psychoanalysing?

A Surprize in a Gift:

A few weeks ago, a friend gave me a book as gift, entitled “Hermopolis” (Author: Mervat Nasser). Hermopolis is the name of an old city that existed in Pharaonic Egypt (there is still a city near its original place). The book deals with an ancient book of wisdom entitled Hermetica. Hermetica is initially a text that combined the wisdom and philosophy of the Pharaonic God Thoth or Tehuti, and Hermes the Greek God. It originated in the old Egyptian city of Hermopolis, then moved to Alexandria to get assimilated in the Greek text, and was known since as The Hermetica.  Tehuti, the Egyptian God was ‘lord of the divine words who invented the hieroglyphs. He also put thoughts and speech into form [thus] encapsulating the ‘information’ of the world into the words (logos)” (Nasser, p.16.).

This piece of information about Tehuti surprized me, if not shocked me. Egyptians, created their spoken language and realized the core of its nature but did not consciously own their discovery. The detail of Tehuti putting thoughts and speech together into form [thus]encapsulating the ‘information’ of the world in words (logos) is evidence that the Egyptians were conscious of the intricacies their language, but just retroactively (knowledge that came back to them from the God they themselves created).  They spoke and exchanged ideas, feelings, and many other psychical issues correctly, and did that without any conscious effort. Yet, they had to created a God whom they considered the initiator of that magical world of speech and meaning to explain the marvel of language. They also invented a way to write that speech so people could know about things beyond the time of speaking but ascribed that too to Tehuti. What surprised me was the process of unconsciously creating language and also creating the God who made what is done unconsciously become conscious. This could well mean that consciousness is an after-effect, a re-cognition, or a reaction to unconsciousness (I published in 2014 a book suggesting that we should call the psychoanalytic unconscious ‘a-conscious’, to bypass the notion of the primacy of consciousness). The evolution of human mind allowed humans to gradually  reclaimed most of what was previously attributed to the God(s).  We could assume that basically myths are product of something similar to the creation of the Gods, i.e., they represent affairs and concerns that preoccupied humans at the dawn of civilization, but unconsciously.  

The Primacy of the Unconscious:

 The combination of the book of Tehuti and the myth of the God Hermes in early Greek thought created the book of Hermetica (the first-second centuries AD). Hermetica became a main basis to build upon future thought, knowledge, and culture. Better, the principles of learning about things stayed in the roots of Hermetica. The authors of the book about Hermetica tackled this fact almost unconsciously. In 1460 the manuscripts of the book were translated by Cosimo De’Medichi and given to the Platonic University of Florence. Mervat Nasser, the  author of the book I got as gift, is an Egyptian psychiatrist (British educated and trained) gave a brief but elegant journey from the date of the translation of the Hermetica to modernity, revealing the direct and indirect impact of the Hermetica on the evolving European thought from its origins to William James and Carl Yung. She did move from the old to the recent, showing in a very palpable way how the book Hermetica continued to influence human thought-indirectly- till now. The way the whole matter of the Gods who knew the what and the how, and the continuation of unfolding knowledge to actualize more revelations over the years, forced on me the idea that knowledge is discovering the unconscious unconsciously. What I mean is that moving from the belief that Tehuti created language to De Saussure structuralism, in the early thirties, is a continuous unconscious process of searching for consciousness and turning it into knowledge. I would say that ‘knowledge’ is a human product that starts and grows unconsciously, and gets more sophisticated but remains disguised so the subjective achievement remains unclaimed until it acquires the quality of consciousness. Similarly, Feud’s concept of the none repressed unconscious is the final upshot of the concept of the unconscious as repressed consciousness. Lacan’s reference of the unconscious as “the other” (the not me) is consciousness of the unconscious. Moreover, when we go back the split of ‘unconsciousness’ of consciousness we could trace back to Descartes’s Cogito. 

The Clinical Dealing With Unconsciousness.

The pharaonic Egyptians first created Tehuti out of the fabric of unconscious imagination, then let him bring to their domain of consciousness what they have already unconsciously knew. This process kept going, as Nasser condensed well, until it reached Freud who gave us the conscious knowledge of the unconscious.  A young bright candidate was ‘keen’ to know how the analyst reaches the unsaid in what is said. During that particular part of her analysis she mentioned the movie of the Wizard of OZ frequently, and she pondered the symbolic meaning of the Wizard’s deeds in the movie. From the way she talked about the Wizard I likened him to her as the analyst. The wizard realized the unobvious that remained unconscious to the three disgruntled characters.  He gave each the equivalent of what they unconsciously wanted: courage, mind, and compassion represented in something obvious that is equivalent to tuning the unconscious into consciousness. Although my intervention did not seem to engender the desired insight about the unconscious transferiantial nature of the character of the wizard the analysand made major and foundational progress after that intervention.

The issue is how could we notice and interpret the unconscious in the conscious material he conveys to us. We all ask the patient to ‘free associate’ and tell us what comes to his mind without censorship. Free association- as a way of talking- is not possible, because of the transcendence of consciousness over that lower level of consciousness. A Lacanian supervised brought to my attention what I should convey to the patient about the process of analysis: talk freely in order to know, not about what you already know. The patients who are capable of doing that, or whenever they are capable of doing it show something particular about their analyses. They talk, know, then become conscious of what they have said. They invariably realise that they said something they dis not notice till the analyst showed them. A better way to say it: the patient talks to find out-sometimes- by the help of the analyst that they unexpectedly understand something that was implicit in what they said. A patient commented on the analyst’s silence and limited participation in process by saying ‘like my father who was a man of little words’. He continued to say that he became worse after my mother’s death and his condition worsened. I heard him ‘not saying that his father’s depression got worse’.  As I made that unconscious notion come to focus the patient came up with a rich description of his family history and his father’s depression and passivity. A great deal of reconstruction was thus possible. The patient’s new understanding is new consciousness. The unconscious turns into consciousness only if it becomes knowledge. Consciousness emanating from knowledge is the material for a better awareness of the identity.

Back to our Main Question:

Like the Egyptians who sought after something to display their knowledge of their language by creating the God Tehuti, the patients display their knowledge of heir unconscious wishes in symptoms and several other features psychological life that are in the fall in sphere of consciousness. The idea that the unconscious is separate from consciousness and has to be retrieved from other location in the psychical structure is the error that analyst easily do, and that needs arguing. What we suggest to the patient to do is to free associate and tell us anything that come to his mind. If the patient does that (thanks to its difficulty if not impossibility he does not do it) the analyst would not have material to work with; only quasi psychotic gibberish. A Lacanian supervisor’s gesture clarified to me three core ideas about psychoanalysing:

A.      Whatever the patient says carries a corresponding unconscious meaning within it. Extracting the unconscious from the related conscious material is the work of psychoanalysis, and what distinguishes a good psychoanalyst from a not so good one. 

B.      The way the analyst reaches and underline the unconscious to the patient requires from him to be carful in his choice of words. The same material will come back in a different context and should have the chance to be reinterpreted, and get an interpretation that is similar or complimentary to the previous one.

C.      Handling the elicited unconscious requires from the analyst to make it come from the conscious material that it came in its context. Otherwise the interpretation would more of information than the conscious equivalent of the unconscious revealed. The patient has to notice the existence of something unconscious in what he imparted for the unconscious turns into consciousness.

Conclusion:

The unconscious is disavowed consciousness. It is conscious material which the subject does not acknowledge owning at a previous time. Disavowal is not denial or negation of a link with the conscious material, it is total absence of recognition of the material. Thus, the patient I mentioned above did not at any previous point in his relationship with his father realised that his father was depressed; he was just a man of few words. Literally speaking he was unconscious of depression until depression hit him as an undeniable description of his father condition, which worsened with the depression for loosing his wife.

Unconsciousness is disavowal of consciousness.  

---

 [aF1]

Is There a Theory of psychoanalysis:

There is an Arabic saying that goes: There is no good in you if you do not say it (the truth), and there is no good in us if we do not listen.

This post is about truth that I am sure of its validity, as I am also very sure of its failure to interest- if not even be disregarded- by most analysts (listeners). The reason is that it is not limited to one definite aspect of psychoanalysis that psychoanalyst could differ about in degrees; it is regarding the very essence of what we all make out of psychoanalysis and the nature of our profession. To make it more concise I will put the issue of this posting in the form of a question: is what we have now in our literature and call the theory (ies) of psychoanalysis- whatever we agree or disagree with it- has to do with the subject matter of analysis(the human subject), or is it about the different and varied stances we take from  psychoanalysing the subject? The prototype answer is that we have ‘knowledge’ about the subject, and we also learn the techniques of applying it in his treatment, and those two aspects combined become psychoanalysis, whatever the knowledge or the training are. We should not ignore or deny that we chose our answer to this particular question depending on the overt or covert intention of the person asking: is he critical or supportive of contemporary psychoanalysis. I am aware of most the variations of answers to this question because we actually do not have a definite or a quasi-definite distinction between what we call theory and practice.

The question still remains unanswered: which is psychoanalysis and which is just the application of psychoanalysis. We used to have a simple formula for practicing psychoanalysis: free association, transference interpretation, reconstruction. But since Empathy was introduced as a factor in therapy, and the distinction between intrapsychical versus interpersonal distinguished three types of psychoanalysis we have become the proud owners of a muddled field of psychoanalysis. This muddled situation is rooted in the origin of psychoanalysis. Freud’s valiant endeavour to pursue the French finding of the splitting or the duality of consciousness he created through practicing hypnosis a unique situation which still effects psychoanalysis.  He was making his own discoveries that were very original, and there were no words to describe or define. He had to improvise a new vocabulary for his findings using everyday language. He was not yet aware or concerned about the distinction between theory and practice, so his vocabulary derived from daily speech, was supposed to signify his conception of what he was noticing clinically. For instance, terms like repressed or conversion bordered the line between the common and the technical. Thus, the vocabulary used in building our literature makes the distinction between the knowledge of the subject matter of analysis and the expertise about practicing this knowledge in psychotherapy very difficult attain (Latin solved the problem for medicine).

Freud opened the ‘Pandora’s box’ and realised that every discovery leads to another or to a more sophisticated meaning of the term. He was not really equipped to improvise a vocabulary (and a semi-language) because of his fast understanding of his findings (the repressed is not repressed but disguised within consciousness). Projection is a phenomenon (mechanism) of identifying someone by certain qualities which analytic work reveals their unconscious pressure on the subject’s own identity. In other words, the most of what we call ‘theory’ is merely common expression of the psychoanalytic findings. Thus, the unexperienced analyst would keep revealing to the patient his projective identification to no avail. Even if the patient finally could notice the analyst’s finding no analysis, still no analysis has been done unless the formation of projection is revealed is revealed to the patient, and mostly through its working within the transference. The reason for that distinction is that applying a descriptive concept as an explanatory term would not dislodge the symptom from repetition compulsion. This process is neither a theory nor a technique: it is the outcome of work of interpreting the patient’s speech to reveal to the patient his objection to the presence of those projected qualities in himself.

In the period after 1915 Freud started to revise his findings (concepts) shedding off old fixed links between signifiers and signified in the vocabulary he improvised. Just as an example: the wrongly named “papers on metapsychology” revised the concept of repression completely (primary and proper), He also eliminated totally any gesture that we deal with drives (instincts) and made Trieb a flexible base of psychical endeavours. He introduced the real meaning of ‘unconscious’ by distinguishing the systemic unconscious as the real unconscious, This dissection made possible for him to talk latter about the non repressed unconscious.

Our question now has to be: what is the nature of the psychoanalytic vocabulary? Is it descriptive or explanatory? Freud’s earlier works were justifiably descriptive. His insights, intuitions, and his genius made him turn the descriptive terms into an explanatory legacy of the human subject. His explanatory concept and remarks were getting more and more about the subject as individual and person, and also in his other capacities. There was no theory of practice because the subject matter of practice is specific to the subject (each patient). In other words: if we know the nature of the human subject (the way he unconsciously creates his identity) and we also know how the conscious material he delivers is weaved with that unconscious that creates his identity we could then make the act of interpreting a practice of psychotherapy.

 we should not rush to consider the explanatory terms, like identification or negation, terms of theoretical importance. A psychoanalytic theory has to be in regard to the subject matter, which is the subject (the patient). The rest of the psychoanalytic terminology looks to most analysts as a theory of practice when it is merely issues, we encounter when we do proper analysis of the subject. Every psychoanalytic session is a repetition of the discovery of psychoanalysis itself.  We start with a subject alienated in his false unconscious identity (the pre-psychoanalysis dogma about the human subject), and we gradually do what Freud did; listen, interpret and gradually reconstruct the patient story (give the details a comprehensive framework (a theory). We learn more about the subject from our experiences with the subjects we treat.

Freud modifications of his views regarding early findings indicated a fundamental shift in psychoanalysis, not just the significations of the vocabulary. The best example is his papers on technique: which came a couple of years before the metapsychology papers. The most intriguing about those recommendations is that they related to what makes analysis possible to do and avoid mishandling transference resistance.  Basically, Freud recommendations are about avoiding sliding into the futility of a real relationship with the patient. The fact that Freud was the worst violators of his recommendations suggests (to me) that he realised what makes psychoanalysis fail and recommended avoiding them.

Thus, answering the question of what is the nature of the psychoanalytic vocabulary is extremely important because as I mentioned in a previous posting, some analysts use the conceptual framework of their literature of choice as the theory of doing the analytic work. The psychoanalytic vocabulary, or the literature of psychoanalysis that is available to us is a mixture of descriptive terms that we usually differ (conflict) in giving it one meaning like projective identification, and of terms that explain findings like after- effect which to understand it we need to keep in mind both the concepts of transference and the none existence of a sense of time in the systemic unconscious. Therefore, analysts should not mislead themselves by believing that the literature is, or comprises, the theory of their discipline. There are very few works that could be considered theories of the subject (Erickson, Kohut, Anna Freud, Lacan, Klein!, Matte-Blanco, …). However, there is no theory of practice; only recommendations that should apply the same way in practicing any of those theoretical modalities.      

In two weeks, my last book will be available in book stores and book depots. The book is entitled:

Psychoanalysis: A Theory of the Subject.

Overview:

The current literature of psychoanalysis- English and some French- suggests that psychoanalysts are satisfied with what they have already achieved, and are not expecting or aspiring for any considerable changes in the present situation.   There are some  ‘novelties’ in contemporary psychoanalyses that are mainly  related to issues of practice, presumably considered, by some, theoretical advancements too. Some of those novelties are reactions to some legitimate criticisms that psychoanalysts should have look at carefully, but did not. Notwithstanding, the natural advancement of any knowledge has to come from learning from its history and maintaining its established course of advancement. We-psychoanalysts- should identify what constituted the point of birth of psychoanalysis, understand the nature of that birth, look for other similar points of advancement in its history, and know what could be a false advancement in its evolution to avoid misleading ourselves. That is if the future of psychoanalysis is a concern.

Psychoanalysis started with Freud’s attempt to understand three ordinary features in the life of the subject: dreaming, making unintentional mistakes in speech and other ordinary activities (Parapraxis), and joking. From examining those three-none clinical- features Freud revealed the workings of a process that deceives the subject and misleads him away from his real intentions. Those three features in the life of the ordinary subject where the point of birth of psychoanalysis. The interest in knowing more about the subject increased the interest in the subject himself. More observations and discoveries turned into the new movement of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis started as interest in the subject and should remain a theory of the subject, not his psychotherapy or any other appropriate speculation. Freud and his contemporaries continued adding to our knowledge of the subject by examining and interpreting more of the subject’s attributes, including psychopathology. Freud’s rich literature attest to that fact. His work varied from the clinical to the historical and from the banal to the most specific. However, gradually the literature-including his own- dropped in quality and variation.  A new interest in the nature of the subject had to emerge for psychoanalysis to maintain its importance.  Although their were attempts at making changes in the foundation of the Freudian doctrine (Rank, Ferenczi, Steckel, etc …) they were not of much significance and had no lasting impact. They were calls for changes in technique and practice, not additions to the theory of the subject.

The semblance of a new phase in defining the ‘subject’ came with Klein’s views in regard to early infancy and the structuring of inner reality (the intrapsychical). Yet, Ego Psychology was considered by most analysts the natural extension of Freudianism. Klein’s pioneering intuitions and endeavours were not properly appreciated at the beginning but R. Winnicott came up with a most simple and common observation that turned the psychology of the subject upside down. I would like to remind ourselves of Winnicott’s paper on the ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’.

Winnicott brought t focus a very simple observation about an infant’s innate oral response. From the first hours of his life the infant makes his hand or fingers objects and source of satisfaction and pleasure. Winnicott considered this most known observation an expression of the existence two separate realities that constitute a basic psychoanalytic duality: subject\object. The hand is an external reality that deals with an internal reality regarding oral demands. That distinction gave Klein’s intrapsychic psychodynamics an access to psychoanalytic meanings and interpretations. The recognition of the subject’s intrapsychic life released psychoanalysis from the inherent limitations of Ego Psychology, which was a functional theory of causes (drives) and effects (explanations).

Winnicott’s observation established the duality of subject\object, thus, psychoanalysis reoriented itself and got on a remarkable course of evolution. His observation is a landmark in understanding how psychoanalysis had advanced in the fifties beyond any Freudian expectations. One of the major outcomes of the notion of an intrapsychic life was the creation of psychosexual model development of the subject. In that model the subject  goes through and predetermined stages of development from one the autoerotic zones in the body to the next (this concept and its model of development is a vanished landmark in the journey of discovering the nature of the subject).  However, familiarity breeds boredom.  A slow down and even some distortion of the core meaning of the duality of the subject\object started a process of deterioration of psychoanalysis. The time was ripe for a new leap in understanding the subject.

Jacque Lacan in France put psychoanalysis right in the midst of the structural movement and made several ‘brilliant’ remarks about the subject and his unconsciousness (maybe up to his tenth Seminar). Lacan’s remarks -complicated as they are rightly considered- were the smartest regarding a perspective of the subject and his attributes.  The result of Lacanianism was controversial: most analysts did not appreciate his structural thinking and remained hopeful for a comprehensive functional theory of the subject, while some realized the limitations of functionalism in psychoanalysis. Others, especially in Europe adopted his views and produced a lively version of structural psychoanalysis (French Psychoanalytic Association).The irony is that most the analysts who rejected functional psychology (drives theory) replaced the theory with a poorer form of functionalism (the schools of psychoanalysis, starting from Kohut).

We ended up with different points of view that are allowed and semi-condoned by the IPA in the eighties. The glaring cause of that twist in the history of psychoanalysis is the absence of any subject-matter of the discipline, while complete shift to the profession and the therapeutic modalities became the main concern of most of the struggling societies. We are now psychoanalysts without a subject-matter but with various psychotherapies for the lost subject (literally and figuratively speaking).

What is needed now is variations on the theme of Winnicott’s observation, and his way of unfolding its core. We need to make more observations about the subject and formulate psychoanalytic understating of those attributes. We need new discoveries of the subject’s attributes, and eventually a theory that interconnect those attributes in one theoretical ‘interpretation’. In other words: we need to work toward a theory of the subject based on simple and complex observations of his nature, instead of improvising therapeutic modalities for none existing theory or patients.

This argument brings me to another point that is related to the issue of the vanishing theory of the subject.

The most difficult task I dealt with in my experience -as teacher and supervising analyst -was to make the candidates and young analysts recognize the difference  between using the lexicon of psychoanalysis (or a preferred school of psychoanalysis) as interpretation or part of an interpretation, and Interpretation as a separate act in the practice of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic terminology is limited to giving us a vocabulary to talk to each other, nothing more. Thus, we should consider psychoanalysis a language that pertains to the issue of the subject. It is a description that leads to, but does not explains the process. There is no better example to that distinction than Winnicott’s concept of the transitional phenomena. After separating reality into inner and outer he says: “. . .  it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world which can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war. This helps, but is it enough?”.

Explaining processes in the physical world is good enough to be called a theory. But in the psychological world we need to interpret the process not just identify and explain it. We interpret a subject’s attributes by deriving their meaning from the lived experience of the subject and from his own words (not a theoretical vocabulary). Interpretation transforms a psychological process into something lived. An example is the term projection. We can talk about it n two metapsychological terms, but still we have to answer this question: what is ‘projecting”. There are two reasons to bring this point to attention because using a psychoanalytic term in an interpretation means the analyst is neither showing the patient has unconsciously revealed something when he was talking, nor showed him how he- the analyst- got to the interpretation of projecting. A patient says: my father had bad temper tantrums that scared me all my life and made me very mad at him. I hated him and wanted to scream back but I was always scared. This could be understood within the conscious connotation of the words the patient used. He would get nothing from an interpretation that his rage at the father made him ‘similar’ to that hated father. But if he is shown that his speech indicated that his fear of the father made him unconsciously become like the feared father, he would understand the notion of identification without using the psychoanalytic terminology. Making that distinction obvious stops turning psychoanalysis into mere communication between two people: one sane and one less sane.  

The evolution of psychoanalysis and the changes that it has to be introduced to it is not matter of having better lexicon, newer terminology, more sophisticated concepts; it is to learn more about the subject himself. Learning more about the subject makes us listen to the patient more than looking for the right mechanism that describes the content of the associations.  A patient reports (complains) that she has, and always had, bad relations with people whom she loved most. She came to realize that she did and still does say the wrong thing to the, even though the right thing would be clear in her mind. It was pointed out to her that she says that she is of two, and the wrong one responds first before she stops it. This remark led to exploring the issue of her duality, narcissism, and problems in separation and individuation. Thus, what the patient said was used to show her that she also says other things without noticing and they would be the right things to say. This remark got her into a process of exploring her unconscious intentions. However, the analyst had to know more about the nature of psychical dualities and the structural core of narcissism to extricate what to interpret. Talking to the patient about the meaning of her symptom instead of improvising dubious ‘motives’ behind her social reactions can only be done when the analyst knows more about the nature of the subject..

Turning psychoanalysis into an act of interpretation for the patient, and an act of explaining among the psychoanalysts requires developing a theory of the subject. We need to know more about the Subject and about the subject we work with. We work to make the patient learn about himself as being that particular subject and not an abstract person who ‘identifies with others, project his undesirable intentions on them, and introject the analyst’s character in order to get cure.

I promoted the idea of a need for a theory of subject to get psychoanalysis out of its rut for sometime. I reached now the point where I am able to put my ideas in a book:  Psychoanalysis: A Theory of the Subject.

If the theory I am proposing is not good, not convincing, or would not mount to anything of value, the book still could achieved its purpose. Write a better theory. There is for sure better theories of the subject than this one; just let us have a theory of the subject.

                                   _____________________

I am attaching the Preface of the book and its Table of Content.

                                   _________________________

Preface

 Early analysts and several weighty thinkers, with penchant toward psychoanalytic thinking, recognized and documented a great deal of facts about the nature of the human subject. Learning about the subject – as such – was triggered by psychoanalysis in the first place and it remained its core endeavor for several decades. However, it gradually seized to be the only source of that knowledge because of the psychoanalysts’ insistence on limiting psychoanalysis to the profession of psychotherapy, meanwhile the theory of the subject was getting expanded and enriched by contributions of other human sciences. A worrying gap opened, and is getting wider, between psychoanalysis and the facts about the subject that other equally capable authorities are gathering. A genuine interest in this issue would reveal a major problem that is rarely addressed. Although psychoanalysts claim to be the legitimate heritor of psychoanalysis, by virtue of being its only practitioners, they did not and still do not have a defined theory of their practice. There are few recommendations about practice in the theory, and the analyst has to rely on his experience in didactic personal analysis and rare remarks usually exchanged in the rest of the training activity.

However, the rest of the theory of psychoanalysis has all the elements of a theory of practice, but only if analysts notice and accept that psychoanalysis is not a theory of psychopathology but a theory of the subject as an epistemological entity. In better terms, psychoanalysis is a theory of the subject that could succumb to psychoneurotic conditions in the course of his life. When that happens, and the subject seeks psychotherapy, the therapist has to know first what the healthy condition of the subject is. Physicians have to learn the anatomy and physiology of the healthy person before they advance to the stage of medical practice. Without a theory of the subject – as a healthy being and a subject matter in his own right – psychoanalysis is a useless base for any practice of psychotherapy.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Introduction: A Point of View 

Chapter One:  Functionalism and Structuralism in Psychoanalysis

               Learning or Training?

Chapter Two: Psychoanalysis: The Issue of Its Subject Matter

               A Brief Account of Misguided Efforts

               The Gradual Birth of the Subject

                The Subject in Philosophy

               The Need for a Theory of the Subject

               The Intrapsychic and the Subject

Chapter Three: The Roots of Psychoanalysis in Philosophy

               The Search for an Origin for Psychoanalysis

               A Brief Account of the Western Philosophical Movement

               The Cogito and the Subjects

               The Forerunners of Psychoanalysis

               Conclusion

Chapter Four: The Subject’s Basic Duality and Narcissism

               I and Me

               The Place of Psychoanalysis in Epistemology

       I, Me, and the Other

       The Counterpart and the Particularity of the Psychoanalytic Theory

      The Counterpart and the Intrapsychic

Chapter Five: The Psychology of the Wish

      The Wish as the Prototype of the Psyche

       Thinking in Functional and Structural Theories

      Dreams and Wish Fulfillment

      The Interpretation of Wish       

      The Wish and Its Antithesis

Chapter Six:  Sexuality and the Trieb (Instinct)

      Sex as Trieb

      The Libido Theory: Problem or Solution

      Sexuality and the Wish

Chapter Seven: The Duality of Life and Death

      A Basis for Narcissism

      Life and Death of Trieben and Narcissism

       A Brief Account of the Myth

      Back to Psychoanalysis

       Addendum

Chapter Eight: The Subject and the Unconscious

      The Aconscious

      The Puzzling Unconscious

      The Solution of the Puzzle

Chapter Nine: Reconstituting the Subject

      The Subject Matter of Psychoanalysis

      The Subject in a Structural Theory

      Three Basic Dualities

      I and Me Duality

      The Manifest and the Latent Duality

      The Conscious-Unconscious Duality

Chapter Ten:   Psychoanalysis: A Science of the Subject

       The New Subject of Psychoanalysis

       Psychoanalysis: Skill (Practice) or Science (Education)?

      The New Subject of Psychoanalysis

       Psychoanalysis as a Human Science

       Psychoanalysis and Research

 Chapter Eleven: Psychoanalyzing and Psychotherapy

      The Essentials of Psychoanalyzing

       Interpretation and Reconstruction

       The Freudian Clinical Protocol in Perspective

       The Conditions of Psychoanalyzing

       Freud’s Insight and the Issue of Training

 Epilogue:

 Modern Psychoanalysis and the Issue of Training

 Psychoanalysis and Academia

 Index

References

                                           

3. 

The Individual Unconscious and the Social Unconscious:

The parallelism between social and psychological change is significant in a special way: in psychoanalysis we listen for the details of the past life of the patient to gradually reach the core unconscious thread in those details, so we could then initiate change. The historian does something similar with civilizations. He tries to interpret (analyse) social and political events to uncover the equivalent of the unconscious in social change. This fact raises the question: What is the equivalent of the unconscious in the individual in history or historical movements?

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious started with the intuition (inductive thinking) that there are old psychological events that act upon the present psychological life of the patient and causes his psychological disturbance. This intuition led to the notion of repression (the patient does not mention them spontaneously or even recognize them as the cause of his sufferings). We know the rest of the story of moving from repression to the primary process, leading to the concept of the none-repressed unconscious. Is there something similar to the unconscious in social life, which could shed light on the force of social change and resisting it at the same time?

There is an equivalent:  Karl Marks (F. Engels!) had the intuition that the economy is the main social agent of change in the society, and the change it initiates is salient but silent. Moving from agricultural to industrial modes of production changes the social structure of the society from family-oriented to union-centered society. Thus, all aspect of social systems like marriage and the family starts to change too. Traditions, ethics, values, laws, art, etc., also change as a response to the social change dictated by the new and different economical structures . Resistance to those changes lead to episodes of chaos and temporary break down of order in a society. In some cases boils up to become revolutions, . The unconscious workings of the primary process in the individual are parallel to the birth of new values in the society that serve the new social order; gallantry   social changes the economy initiates in the society. History of social change is the history of cultural evolution.

What brings patients to psychoanalysis is the psychological chaos the past creates in the present and not knowing what is happening.  Resistance to psychoanalysis is always-as we all discover is part of that past, i.e., in the past of the neurotic there is aspect in his past that created a narcissistic self mage that was protective of itself. Hence, there is no psychoanalysis done without encountering a narcissistic resistance against such dissolving that image. Just think of a masochistic patients who resists the analyst who is interpreting his masochistic inclinations.

On the Borders of Personal and Political Narcissism

A. The Core of the subject’s Sense of Being.

Listening to Trump-the other day- delivering the State of the Union (The annual report regarding the current and the proposed plans of the government for the future) brought to my memory Nasser’s speeches to the Egyptian people. In the fifties and the sixties of last century (Nasser was an army colonel who led a military coup, in 1952, to end monarchy in Egypt. He evolved to become a political idol for the Egyptians and the Arabs in the middle East from 1956-1970. He was also considered in the Western Hemisphere the main political villain). Nasser's speeches were always a puzzle to me: what makes millions of  Egyptians, and tens of millions of Arabs in other countries, of all walks of life, adore and idealize that man!! (It also puzzles me that millions of Americans tolerate Trump's shenanigans and still give him some notice, and elect him as president).

The answer came to me listening to Trump the other day: create an imaginary adversary, say that his attempts to misguide have failed, and that he has been defeated or in the way to defeat. Any lies, misrepresentations, claims of victories even if defeated, and demeaning the adversary whatever the situation is will be accepted by the masses. From previous experiences, the masses do not deny facts but negate them: “it is true that we lost but it was because of the referee". Trump’s State of the Union Speech was exemplary of that mass deception. He set up several imaginary enemies of the US and bragged about his administration dealings with them, claiming his success in defeating them all. The ridiculous popularity of that man does not come from fooling people, but from making them fool themselves. However, Americans were waiting for sometime for someone to make them fool themselves and there comes Trump!!!!!!!

(Matter of fact, Nasser never lied to people but by making that imaginary adversaries the focus of their attention people did not pay attention to the narcissistic trap set up for them to fool themselves. This is the invisible barrier built by leaders between the masses and reality.

Reaching this point in my thinking led me to formulate a question that was always central in my efforts to understand Narcissism: Why do we need some one or something to Hate (liberals, socialists,  Nato members, Mexicans, etc.) in order to be able to Love ourselves (the strongest, the most democratic, etc.). Sometimes even out of the same narcissistic demand we create an ideal image of the adversary to debase ourselves (China is outsmarting us, the Mexicans are abusing our laws, etc ). I just want to underline the point that the existence of individuals, families, nations, sport fans, etc., is always based on an I and an adversary, opponent, enemy, or just a reactive "not me". The core of our sense of being is a duality or the duality of me and the not me. I does not exist on its own. Put it in another way: any sense of identity requires finding or creating an anti- me or anti-us.

The duality of the subject and his anti is normal and the natural way of acquiring an identity. But most of the times it goes astray resulting in problems. Trump, with his personal difficulties, creates that confusion in his base. He tells them that they are idiots and the laugh of the world, but that they are also the greatest and the envy of everyone else. He does not do that intentionally or by design; he is not that smart or a thinking person to have defined intentions. He does that as a reflection of his own image as an envied idiot.

Explaining the duality of the subject’s identity is the most central issue in our work that we pay less attention to it that it demands.

The Duality of the Subject’s Identity:

The duality of the subject is part of acquiring an identity. In a better wat to put it we should realize that our identity is a dual entity. The subject cannot get a sense of identity unless he also senses that he is not someone else. The subject is identified-in part- by the other, but that should not preclude- in the heathy person- the presence of a core of subjectivity that responds to the demands of the other without loosing its uniqueness.  This nature of the subject’s identity is not due to the coexistence of the conscious and the unconscious systems; it is due consciousness of consciousness. The stability of that consciousness of consciousness affects the kind and degree of psychopathology.

The duality of the subject’s sense of being is there from birth. At birth, the infant has no sense of being (existence) but he senses the being of the care-giver. So, the first consciousness is consciousness of the other; not about the self. The other’s reactions to the infant builds- in a slow and sometimes confusing way- the infant’s sense being, or his consciousness of his being. The initial step in developing an identity or a sense of being becomes the work of the care-giver (s) and his or her’s psychodynamics. The psychodynamics of that process and its results is and still is “our” field of interest and expertise. We all know the possibilities and different opportunities in what the infant will end up acquiring as an identity: is it his free choice or what he was told to be, and with what kinds and degrees of distortions.

The innate gap in the duality of the infant’s identity “demands” an anti-me for the sense of I-ness gets established. Thus, it is obvious that being told who he is (good\bad, stubborn\obedient, etc.) will ultimately clash with his own sense of himself. Even if the child accepts what he was given as an identity it will always be an image of himself, and not he himself. Thus, duality is the nature of the human subject: he is the I that he senses and a me that was given to him. In better words: to own an I that speaks for the subject a none I has to subside and not annul completely the I (Trump’s base is people who are unable to shed off the me he has given them to know their other and get in touch with their true selves).

Psychoanalysis looks as if it is the birthplace of these findings. It is not. Duality was born with the homosapiens’ consciousness of consciousness, which was first a duality of I and religious feelings (animism, spirituality, deities, organised religions, etc.). Philosophers -particularly the Greeks- tried to understand what is the subject that is defined by the ‘other’, but were not very successful. Then came Descartes in the seventeen century to reveal that duality is within the subject and not between the subject and something else that defines him: The Cogito is the declaration of the inherent gap in existence: I the thinker affirm the presence the I that exists (both are the subject). The rest of the matter is what led French psychiatry to notice the division of consciousness and for Freud to discover the nature of that separation.

What we deal with in psychoanalysis relates to the nature of the duality of the subject and what happens within that gap.  The most central is the relationship between I-Me and the kind of the link between them.  

Politicians of the kind of Trump and Nasser play with that natural duality. First, they chose a false “other’ who defines a false I for the mass. Once this is achieved, they make the false I defines itself the way the politician wants it to be. The whole political scene looks as if the masses are in possession of their will and they support leader because of his ideology. The fact of the matter is that leader shifted their narcissism from the real Me to a false I.