Listening, Interpreting, Reconstructing.

B. What do we hear when we listen

It will not come as a  surprise to anyone if I said that we hear at least two things in what is said to us: what is explicitly meant to be relayed (verbally, gesture, etc.), and something(s) else implicit in what we get from the explicit. Both the explicit and the implicit  might rarely match but usually they diverge. This is the nature of relating and communicating in humans because we communicate “linguistically”, not instinctively. We do not always talk but convey messages with other means, i.e.., we say more than what we meant to say, or people elicit from what we say more than what we intended to convey. It will also not be  surprising to anyone who is reading this posting- if- a psychoanalyst to say that most of the time people who speak are not fully aware(unconscious) of all what they convey.

 Psychoanalysts  claim that they depend on that division to get to the unconscious, because we learn in psychoanalysis that sometimes people  ‘unconsciously’ imply, infer, give hints to some things that they themselves are no aware of. I want to bring to attention and also to opening for discussion and review, that the nature of the link the  unconscious creates with consciousness, because it is a point of fundamental importance in the work of the supervisor.

The difference between what is conscious and what is unconscious is not determined by their content but by the function they perform at a particular moment, both in regular speech and in defined psychological events. What may well be unconscious regarding an aggressive notion in a certain context could be the conscious motive that makes it a gesture of love but in a different context. In better and more psychoanalytic way: we can say that every conscious notion could and does create its unconscious parallel, and visa- versa. Better, what I will later define or refer to as the unconscious is always a  product of something conscious. Strangely, what is conscious is also product of unconscious issues. I mean by  that the common idea that we psychoanalysts have learned till the seventies and the eighties  (before Lacan and Kohut) is that there are two conditions called Cs &Ucs. But now with what we know about the basis of those two conditions we should say that consciousness creates its specific unconscious version, exactly as the unconsciousness engenders a conscious reflection of itself. We can even say that Freud’s  old  topographic metapsychology has advanced us to a point when the conscious/unconscious duality exhausted its usefulness, and the typology of the Ego/Id with its structural components threatened the integrity of the psychoanalytic theory as a whole, and we should reconsider that fixed adage and get over it .

Psychoanalysis was almost totally exhausted if it was not for Lacan who gave the unconscious its structural meaning, and Kohut moving psychoanalysis from ego psychology to the psychology of narcissism. Psychoanalysis was no longer a psychology of issues and events but a psychology of structures and processes. What I mean and hope to bring to attention is that psychoanalysis is no longer a theory ‘of things psychological that are in dynamic interaction,’ but a theory of ‘the psychological human subject’ or what is human in the psychical phenomena. The unconscious is not consciousness denied recognition; the unconscious is a structure embedded in language itself that defines the human subject. We cannot talk to each other about the ‘whole thing’; we quietly talk about other things but metaphorically and metonymically, i.e., unconsciously. Sometimes , the listener makes sense of what we said and many times we discover that the listener reacted to what is implied and not was said. At the same time when we speak it is I that talk, not Me. Me is quite and just lives the moment.

We are now at a point that tells us what we know about the unconscious could explain to us what we do not understand about consciousness. The patient who started her sessions with crying was consciously saying how in pain she was, but though she did not say how her pain suits her well because it reflects a hidden pleasure of being closer to her father, she indirectly mentioned it.

The Supervisor’s Mission:

The supervisor- as a general rule- starts by showing the candidate how he-the supervisor-listens to what the patient says  to the candidate. At the same stage the supervisor should be able to show the candidate the ‘missed obvious’ in the patient’s speech if there is some. When this process is done well the candidate will gradually, and without much input from the supervisor- appreciate listening instead being eager to interpret. The common reason is that candidates are eager to show off their knowledge of the theory. At those moments the supervisor gets a chance to show the candidate that the vocabulary he is using as “theory” is more of ‘listening to the theory’ and is distracted by that from listening to the patient. Whether the patient was defending his narcissism by identifying with the domineering mother or splitting his father’s goodness and badness no material to explain (naming a process is embalming it).

Listening  to a patient is to hear the silent psychoanalytic theory he has about himself. That theory is  unconsciously spelled out in several conscious recalls: the candidate has to develop the skill to distinguish between the patient’s theory of himself and the psychoanalytic theory itself. The same patient who was crying  at the beginning of the session was not conscious that her complaint revealed something about having her father for herself and depicting a whole family drama. Listening to the patient and uncovering the unconscious parallel to the conscious material is psychoanalysis. What is going to be interpreted for the purpose of cure is the false interpretation has given to his theory of himself.

The supervisor shows the candidate the missing parts in  the rhetoric of the patient, which finding them and putting them in the proper  context of his personal life story brings the conscious and its specific unconscious component together and the psychoanalytic rhetoric of the patient would then be reconnected. The supervisor’s job is to show the candidate that the conscious and the unconscious are like the two sides of the same coin (they are two entities  tied together and are not separated by anything that is foreign to either of them. The old notion that we analysts are dealing with disconnected issues and that we look for the unconscious to explain the conscious does not put in focus the purpose of undergoing analysis: what is curative in psychoanalyzing?!!

is is not anymore valid. The Psyche is not a disjointed entity due to resistances and defense mechanism; the psyche is the entity formed from the unity between Cs.& Ucs. That formation requires the supervisor to show the candidate  from the patient’s material the rearrangement of past and present in the patient’s speech , the links made between the Cs. and Ucs., parental misinformation and patient’s misunderstanding to one time reconstruction  will be made.

Interpretation is the act of giving the meaningless issue a meaningful place in the main story of the patient. Thus, interpretation is what the analyst grasps (candidate) using unconnected and disconnected material to explain a central ides that seems to mean something. The patient who started her sessions with crying and complaining mentioned several times her disappointment in her father’s passivity and not making the mother give her some more attention. Those complaints were not connected or systematic but just casual complaints. I noted to the patient [aF1]  that happened to mention a total family situation that if we know more about,  we  could find out why she does not make the complaining  Passing over several useful analytic interventions at that point brings us to an old false psychoanalytic meaning of interpretation: interpretation is to get to a better (more general, etc.) meaning of  the material. In fact, and in practice interpretation exposes a defense against more findings. In old psychoanalysis interpretation was getting to the repressed reason for the issue at hand.

          There is more to be said about supervision but for purpose of not exceeding the average size of a posting I would just add something that I rarely found mentioned in meetings of training analysts-even in the bi-annual  meetings of the IPA. The supervisor should know the process that led him to his advice and to explain his intervention in the context of the supervising work.  

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 [aF1]

 

A Quick Note on Interpretation and Reconstruction.

The notion of teaching a candidate how and when to formulate an interpretation that will also be part of a work of reconstruction would sound to most training analyst  blasphemous. I know why but I also know why not. Training analysts and psychoanalysts in general have been indoctrinated in the belief that psychoanalysis is an act of free association, thus, to approach it as a systematic work on patients’ verbal expressions distorts the work of the free-floating attention of both analyst and analysand. It would be  interfering with the skill if not the gift of  eliciting the unconscious from consciousness. In a different statement, analysts approach the work of psychoanalyzing as exchanges between patient and analyst that have no rules to guide them as if thinking about rules of psychoanalyzing is anti psychoanalyzing. This settled tradition misses the fact that the discoveries in the field of language about language (the structural nature of communicating verbally and symbolically) permit us to derive certain rules to get to the meaning of the signifiers (words and their equivalents), and also learn from psychoanalysis and child psychology few basics about the  nature of the signifieds (the contents of speech). We Know now how to listen to the seemingly free floating and recognize its anchors in the speakers’ intentions.

I will give an example from a case I mentioned before in one of my posts. A young female patient had a bd relation with her mother who preferred her other daughter who looked more like her and was considered the prettiest of the two. The patient used to spend the first fifteen or twenty minutes of her session reporting her on mother’s reality and lack of love. That reporting was also accompanied by weeping and sobbing. After some weeks of that routine, I said that I am unable to understand if her crying is expression of pain or of anger (first attempt at discerning the possible confusion she has about what se actually feel). The patient was offendedly angry at my remark. The following session she made a comment about the previous session and after a while she said she would like (has!?) to find out which is more important ;to be hurt or to be angry with her mother. She was conscious of her crying but not conscious of her confusion that could also confuse her mother. Not being conscious is not the same as being unconscious. My remark reveals to the patient that a symptom (crying) is a fusion of two opposing psychical entities: Pain and maybe also pleasure.

Thus, psychoanalyzing is not an act of making what is said (crying was saying something…but what?) reveal something that is not said: it is putting in front of the patient what is said and ask him to explain it so we two could understand the same thing. In other terms, psychoanalysis is not essentially the act of revealing something unconscious but revealing something that repulses or distorts something conscious therefore it does not remain withing consciousness. It is easy to talk about psychoanalyzing in terms of psychical processes instead the flawed idea of terminology, mechanisms, defences, and repressions, etc. Moreover, psychoanalyzing would introduce to the patient his time  when he was a child trying to deal with difficulties and was not very successful.

All that is capable to show the patient how his elders participated in establishing hid character or symptom. My patient remembered how her father encouraged silently the division of the family into two camps because he was also incapable of facing the mother in any way. The when to interpret, and how to interpret, and what reconstruct and to leave for the process and transference to handle needs more than posting to manage.

I do not want to leave this topic without bringing to attention that training in psychoanalysis the way they should has to be in a better and more culturally rich than institutes and training analysts who might not have given much though to what they should be doing.

 

Supervision: The Skill of Teaching and Educating:

In the previous posting- I disapproved of personal analysis as a prerequisite of training. I emphasized the importance of supervision as the main training event in the preparation of the candidates. However, I emphasized the importance and  significance of the supervisors’ knowledge of how to analyze, i.e., teach and demonstrate the skill of listening and deciphering the implicit unconscious in what the patient says in his conscious speech. Discerning the unconscious from the conscious material is an ability (we are not all of the same ability). Yet, there are things to learn about that ability which could learn to do to make the supervision  better.

There are two things the supervisor has acquire and sharpen to do that. The first thing is to know more about consciousness. Paul Davies says: “Among life’s many baffling properties, the phenomenon of consciousness leaps out as especially striking. Its origin is arguably the hardest problem facing science today and that remains almost impenetrable even after two and a half millennia of deliberation […]. Consciousness is the number-one problem of science of existence even.” Quoted in Solms’s (The Hidden Spring, 2021).

The reason I am quoting that phrase is because analysts consider their main task is to discover the unconscious, and mainly from conscious material. But how could we discover the unconscious if consciousness itself is supposed to be problematic. To make that clear I would say that consciousness is only consciousness if it is consciousness of an object or the subject himself. In a less complicated format we should ask: how could we make a candidate listen to what the patient is conscious of, but not aware that he also ‘says’ something else without being conscious of it? How to supervise a candidate without a systematic approach to listening to what was said but not verbalized? The answer is if we know the psychical process that creates the psychoanalytic term we use to understand the none verbalized. Let me try a self-evident situation like Projection. In any speech of a patient-or anyone else- that talks about another person there would be a process of projection, if not for any reason it is for delineating boundaries (he\she and me). Projection in that case is ‘to say something ‘about’ the person but in regard to the self: he is a nice person in (my opinion). This psychical process is the origin of the enfant’s budding sense of self: Mother is smiling, this is nice, I am nice I smile too. Projection is the original source of the sense of being. Infant and child psychology are essentials in doing analysis, in supervision, and making sense of psychoanalytic terminology.

Without too much elaboration we can notice that there is projection in any relationship because we gain a sense of being, or cannot gain a sense of being, without the being of another. We have to be conscious of the external as the condition of being conscious of self. This point is a source of so many features of psychological life in humans, because after a while and in different degrees of clarity and correctness we could become conscious of consciousness… of consciousness itself. Considering all those related subjects we can see how a supervisor could be good or not so good depending of his psychoanalytic knowledge, analytic gifts, but most of all is not using preformat meanings of terminology.

Most of the research done on infants’ recognition and reaction to the mother in the very early weeks and months of life. The point I am making is that within each psychoanalytic term there is a psychical process that if it is identified and studied properly teach candidates the techniques of practice,. i.e.., how to listen, what to listen to, what to derive from the patients’ speech and do proper supervision.

Psychical Processes and Analytic Terminology:

I had a professor of psychology who was not a psychoanalyst but (though very senior) a student and friend of the French psychologist Henri Wallon. One day I used the term projection in a presentation he attended. He later asked me what I meant by projection. When I used the simple meaning I got from the few psychoanalysts who were in Egypt at that time, he said: as psychologist you should know the psychological process that creates your definition of ‘unconsciously seeing in the other a characteristic of yourself’. The importance of his remark kept developing over decades of thinking to become an [aF1] eagerness to understand all the vocabulary of psychoanalysis in terms psychological processes. What is the psychological process that creates identification or narcissism, etc.?

One of the first psychoanalytic terms that I spent time researching was “Projection”, especially when I realized that Klein hyphenates it with the term “Identification”. It was thus more clear but also more complex. Projecting suggests that the person identifies both his-self and the subject he chooses to project on one of his traits. Therefore, projection is not a defense mechanism as A. Freud presumed. It is a process of making something unconscious gets a means to become -indirectly-conscious. Knowing what gets conscious and what in contrast becomes unconscious is a main issue of psychoanalysts. In other words, we can use psychoanalytic terminology to name psychical manifestations but not to understand the psychical process behind it. The psychoanalytic term makes the process just knowable but not understandable. Good psychoanalysis-and definitely good supervision- request the extra work of making the analytic term explain not just defines. The point that my professor made sheds light on an important problem in our training in psychoanalysis. We learn a psychoanalytic vocabulary, and we also know how to use it correctly (most of the time). Nevertheless, we do not know how it happens, i.e., what is projection/ that identifies.. In other words, most of us would know if the patient’s conscious associations about someone is projective or objective, we do not what happens to make that happen. What is the psychological process that creates identification or narcissism, etc.?

For now, I would say that the key to revealing the psychical processes behind the psychoanalytic terminology is in the language, the verbal expression of the term in actual explanation of it.

I finish this part of the post by underling an issue in the field of the unconscious (which relates to the vagueness of consciousness. The unconscious is a specific means of saying something in  not-conscious format: metaphorical and or metonymical.    

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 [aF1]

 

2. A Different Way of Saying the Same Thing

 

C. Training to Practice of Psychoanalysis:

 

The second arm of the formation of  psychoanalysts is ‘training to practice’. This aspect of preparing the new commers to the profession is concentrated in two activities: personal analysis (get analysed) and supervision (get the know[aF1]  how to conduct a psychoanalytic treatment of patients from three ‘training analysts’). Personal analysis is supposed to be ‘experiencing’ the process, or as Freud said it in 1910: “…. and ‘derive’ from it the essence of doing psychoanalysis”(SE, Vol XI). Sadly, this part of training lost its didactic meaning and gradually acquired a therapeutic  meaning. This is sad because we know that analysis as therapy does not work if it is not meant from the beginning to be just for therapy. Therefore, personal analysis is a distorted item in the preparation of the candidates. It is -in fact- detrimental to the process of training if it remains as a therapeutic necessity.

 This change had two very detrimental consequences: The candidate does not pay attention to the process, but very subtly creates another objective to replaces the original one(training). The training analyst takes the attitude of a therapist and the original purpose, thus, distorts the  transference and counter\transference. It is a glaring cause of the  psychodynamics of relationships in psychoanalytic societies. Moreover, personal analysis as part of training becomes another source of good patients for the training analysts; not only this does not serve its basic function, but it also distorts the purpose of becoming a training analyst. This aspect of training was the logical way to do training in the early years of psychoanalysis (Eitington modality)but now and maybe in the last seven- or eight-decades training should have taken a different direction. Personal analysis has to be redefined, or recommended as  therapeutic case by case, or be required a suitable period before engaging in a training program.

When we come to the second aspect of training, i.e., supervision, we have to consider that aspect the most basic and fundamental in the whole process of the formation of the analyst. Most the colleagues I trained with and the candidates I supervised had a strong conviction that psychoanalysis (as a process of therapy) has very limited rules, compared to the spontaneity and the analyst’s’ intuitions, and his ‘free floating attention’. I believe that conception, first of all is wrong. There are rules to listening, discerning the unconscious in the rhetoric, interpreting it, or waiting longer before doing that, etc. Because those aspect of training are important the training analyst should know how to explain them to the candidate, so he would practice something that has a theoretical base (the gap mentioned above). What is meant by that is to explain to the candidate-from the material the patient has delivered- what was unconscious in the conscious rhetoric.

Freud’s Tripartite Recommendations:

I believe and advocates the notion that Freud was intuitive about the very basic and cardinal in psychoanalysis but did not articulate his intuitions properly and many time he did exactly the opposite of his recommendation. The reason- I think- is the analyst’s intolerance of putting his identity on hold to maintain neutrality. If psychoanalysis is a unique way of psychotherapy, it is because of Freud’s tripartite recommendations for practice and the analysis of transference, or the transferiantial elements in the relationship with himself.

Freud’s paper on Wild Psychoanalysis  came two years before his three recommendations or the tripartite rules of practice [I believe that Freud’s poor clinical record is due to not adhering to  his own recommendations). His intuition about psychoanalysing made him recommend: Abstinence, Anonymity, and Neutrality. From the patient side he should create his own ideas, phantasies, collect whatever fact he could get or like to get. From the analyst side he should refrain from denying or confirming to the patient any of those notions he built. As for the analyst his unconfirmed or undenied personal qualities- given to him  by the patient- widen the field of the patient’s transference. Two decades ago, there was major attacks on this protocol, especially in Western US Psychoanalysts. The fallacy of the  reasons given shows in analysts extending those violations of the rules of psychoanalysis-unnecessarily-by sharing with patients their own personal thoughts and feelings. The issue with Freud’s recommendations is the need for good personal analysis and understanding of the process of treatment.

The basic ‘idea’ in psychoanalyzing-therapeutic or didactic- is to limit the factual and encourage the personal and transferiantial. So, the natural thing is to explain to the Candidate the logic of the tripartite recommendation and the notion of wild analysis issue. Conducting analysis that way is didactic in itself, whether in training or just ordinary practice. In training the candidate will make the distinction between therapy and learning about the way material gets it wider meaning by interpretation. A training analyst is not a better psychoanalyst but a psychoanalyst who KNOWS how to link interpretations to free association without being obvious in this didactic work. The candidate is not better than a patient in analysis. However, he has the advantage and the duty to learn how the unconscious keeps forming and changing with its interpretation. This knowledge is what to keep in mind all the time while practicing.

 

The Core Meaning of Training in Psychoanalysis:

Freud said clearly: “It is not enough, therefore, for the physician to know a few of the findings of psycho-analysis; he must also have familiarized himself with its technique if he wishes his medical procedure be guided by a psycho-analytic point of view. This technique cannot yet be learned from books, and certainly cannot be discovered independently without great sacrifices of time, about, and success.”(1910, S.D., Vol. XI, p.226). In a nutshell,  the analytic situation is a patient who knows what he suffers from but does not understand the factors that causes that condition. On the other hand, the analyst knows something about the causation of the complaint but does not know the conditions that led to that complaint. Analytic work is to make and engender knowledge to help the other person in that due understand. Therefore, training in psychoanalysis is to learn how and what is involved in this mutual effort to know what seems to one very baffling while for the other (the analyst it is a slow process building up that knowledge. Training in psychoanalysis is to learn how to mange ‘the unconscious ‘knowledge’ of the patient.

This point is related to the meaning of the unconscious knowledge and how the candidate learn to hear it within the conscious rhetoric.

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 [aF1]

 

2. A Different Way of Saying the Same Thing

B. Learning Psychoanalysis:

The literature of psychoanalysis is immense and claiming that some of it are better than others is a foremost understatement. Nevertheless, I have to say something about that: a training endeavour has to do things: make a good choice of literature that makes it logical and easy for the candidates to fill the gap between theory and practice. It does not make sense to have a syllabus that mixes literature from two clearly different authors, or that has samples of the literature of different schools of psychoanalysis. The other point is making the same deliberate choice of Freud’s works. The really significant in the Freud S.E. is how he coined his terminology and how they were pregnant with the rich meanings that they have now. THIS WHAT I MEANT BY AN ACADEMIC SCRUTINIY OF TERMINOLOGY. Our vocabulary was a marvel when it was used in the psychoanalytic theory…new, revealing, full of a variety of meanings. With time (more than a century) it no longer has those qualities and lost anything that give them that insightful  distinction.

     Learning psychoanalysis is easy to identify as sudyining some foundational theoretical texts, but the important aspect in learning the literature is how the chosen literature is studied. Because psychoanalysis is originally an original way of perceiving and understanding common issues and giving more meaning to regular vocabularies a basic part of learning it is to be exposed to those specifics of psychoanalytic way of thinking. The good example to that distinction I am making about learning analysis is the difference between a thinker like P. Ricoeur’s understanding of ‘interpretation’ and Lacan’s style of interpretation. The difference is something to learn.

Therefore, the efforts to update psychoanalysis, theory and practice requires a serious and sharp attention to the gaps between theory and practice and how the candidate will bridge that gap.

   

 

A Different Way of Saying the Same Thing

 

1.Overlooking a Basic Link in Psychoanalysis:

Saying something more than once when that thing is important and needed emphasis or was not understood well enough to leave it alone. I am repeating a previously emphasized idea that ‘psychoanalysis’ is a term that could connote a body of knowledge, and also a specific modality of psychotherapy, but not both at the same breath. The main issue in that distinction is the link between what is usually named the theory of psychoanalysis and what is considered a technique of psychotherapy. Those are two different things but linked. That link is a most elusive subject to agree on its nature. My view of that link is that if there is a link (which I believe there is) it has to come from a well-defined, verified, clearly articulated theory, so the analyst would not practice psychoanalysis arbitrarily. He has to adhere to his understanding of psychopathology and therapy, and how one determines the other. If the analyst understand psychopathology as the outcome of intrapsychic distortions that were formed during growing up his approach in therapy would be concentrating his work on transference manifestations that will give him the insight about those distortions and what to do[aF2]  the reformulate their structure. If the analyst believes that he can deal with the interpersonal mismanagement of the psychopathology, he then will not bring transference in the work and concentrate on correcting the patient’s views about relationships. Each approach has clear distinctions in terms of what to do and what not to do.

Those two different understandings of psychopathology and its link with psychotherapy goes back to something in the Freud’s dealing with discovering ‘psychoanalysis’. Freud began the notion of psychoanalyzing with-maybe-some general social ideas about sexual frustration as a possible causation of hysteria emanating from common social attitudes and some remarks from physicians who must have encountered issues related to sexuality and morality in their daily medical practices.  Hypnosis showed him that he could make his patients talk about those frustrations in less reservations. However, he was able -due to his special psychological sensitivity- to hear double meanings in what patients were consciously relating to him. Talking did not just revealed ‘the unspoken about’ but also unconscious ideas that were implicit in what is spoken. The rest is our history. Freud was endowed with certain mental gifts in addition of great and advanced psychological familiarity with the neurological foundation of most of his discoveries in in psychotherapy (see the “The Project”, and Holms extrapolations). However, Freud noticed and intuitively knew what should be done with listening to the patients’ free associations. In 1912 he made the clear recommendations of a practice of good psychoanalysis; the three or the four (1910) restriction on practice. Nonetheless, he was the biggest culprit in breaking his rules (analyzing his daughter!!). In other words, Freud discovered the core qualities of the real and true psychoanalyzing but did not follow them. He was not a good clinician, but he discovered clinical work that matches his theory[aF3] . He dropped hypnosis and started ‘psychoanalyzing’ the patients’ speech. The link between what is said and what was ‘not said’ but relayed to Freud created that gap between psychoanalysis and psychoanalyzing.  

  However, the gap is very clear in the huge difference between his building of a body of knowledge about psychopathology and psychodynamics on one side and the technique of psychoanalyzing (practice) on the other. The gap between Freud’s clinical work and his knowledge of the subject of psychoanalysis remained a trademark of psychoanalysis as a whole and its literature, since then. The scarcity of clear and committed literature to how we do psychoanalyzing-practicing it- is the background of all the unresolved issues regarding the so-called theories of psychoanalysis (the schools). It is obvious that all the well-known schools of psychoanalysis that were competing for dominating it were related to its practice and not to new knowledge; with the exception of Kohut’s self-psychology. He killed it early trying to find a new way of practicing his sudden discovery of the duality of the subject.

The link between theory and practice looks important as a major issue in the world of psychoanalysis. But it is a link in every individual practice of psychoanalysis. A psychoanalyst who has his patient on the couch or on a chair in front of him has to keep in mind that he is obligated to keep the distinction between his understanding of what the patient relays to him and his response to it, should bridge that gap properly and in the proper moment. The link between his theory of psychopathology and psychotherapy will determine his response, from silence to reconstruction. This means that the practice of psychoanalyzing should always be based on the link between the two connotations of the term psychoanalysis. In other clearer way: the link between what we know and what we do with what we know is where a clinical psychoanalyst has to keep in mind all the time and readjust his work to make that link a daily obligation.

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 [aF1]

 [aF2]

 [aF3]

 

A responsibility we are supposed to carry:

In a second reading of Solms book it became clear to me that we psychoanalysts were or are not keen to advance our science or profession. We kept recycling old ideas and trying vainly to adjust and readjust some theoretical novelties, but we could only use the terminology that those the novelties introduced. The novel approach Solms has taken to study consciousness could actually lead to solving the issue of the unconscious and makes it clear. We need that because we should work on our difficulties, not leave it to others to solve for us. Just as sample: We know that the unconscious material comes in the forms of metonymy and metaphor, and what is unconscious is not a return of the repressed but a reformulation of what is conscious which happens outside the conscious mechanisms of expression. Solms is putting conscious in the core of our sense of being, thus the unconscious is related to the subject’s sense of being. My slip of the tongue or my transference say something ABOUT ME not hiding something of me. The conscious is only conscious relative to something unconscious (out of my sense of being) . Therefore, psychoanalysis is not making the unconscious conscious but making the subject own both of them as  his subjectivity. Missing a session does not have a meaning outside the patient’s recognition of himself in that missing. Analysis is analysis of the subject and not his expressed speech.