A. What is Therapeutic in a Psychoanalytic Interpretation?
I think the answer to this question
could lead to addressing several problems that we encounter in our practices,
and our accountability to the patients we treat. Psychoanalysts have the obligation to show that
their act of psychotherapy is based on a clear link between interpretation- as
the core of psychoanalyzing- and cure. If the analyst takes a different
approach in therapy, he still has the responsibility to explain his work. What is
professionally disturbing, and alarming is the faint notion that we initiate cure by bring the unconscious to consciousness
via the work of interpretation. Although this formula is the most acceptable
among analysts of all walks of practice, it is not the main focus of psychoanalysing-as
analysts like to claim.
The basis for saying that is the absence of agreement among analysts on
the meaning of “unconscious”. The unconscious
means- in the Freudian vocabulary- something that was once conscious and was rendered
sub-conscious, thus it gained a certain new function. After modern
thinkers, of whom some analysts were pioneers and worked on that imperfect Freudian
notion, the unconscious was regard as a structural system, or a special
form of thought that is embedded in every spoked idea (the unconscious is not
sub-conscious psychical material). Although analysts agree that the old unconscious
is not ‘the repressed’ they still have the notion that the unconscious is something
we should get rid of by exposing it within consciousness. The other challenging issues are agreeing on
the meaning of interpretation and what to interpret and from what do get the
interpretation. In less words, we have more vague and difficult issues to deal with than the expression of making the
unconscious conscious suggests.
What this post is emphasizing is that we should know consciously
what we do and call ‘interpretation’, which is supposed to be what instigate
the change the patient’s come to us to initiate.
A Moral Obligation:
As in all professions a professional is accountable to the person who requests
his service. The psychoanalyst is accountable to the patients, the colleagues,
and the field of epistemology as a whole and is not just free to practice with just the
certification of a private training institute. The analyst should know what he does to what. The early analysts were exploring a newly
discovered field and it was acceptable to give this tentative answer of making the unconscious conscious.
After Freud and his disciples gave birth to psychoanalysis as a professional
discipline, in the nineteen thirties, the few decades that followed were spent in theorising the substance of
therapy and the analytic notions about the psyche. Aa a new field of knowledge it needed two things
that were not yet achieved: validating its claims to being a successful base
for psychotherapy, and the prospects of developing it into a human science (
psychotherapy was and still is considered
an off shoot of a medical act). In spite of the absence of both those two
conditions since and till now, psychoanalysis thrived without them. There was
no proof or evidence provided to support the psychoanalysts claims regarding
their descriptions of the psychical
processes or to confirm the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as therapy.
The expanding interest in psychoanalysis required Freud and his disciples to start creating a new vocabulary for their new
findings. The vocabulary of psychoanalysis came from the common spoken
language-like repression and projection- but the words acquired additional and
more in-depth meanings. Developing the psychoanalytic vocabulary and its expansion
to cover more ordinary issues like love\and hate, sadism, and masochism, etc., made
it looked like a theory. The theory of psychoanalysis
was actually a new and in-depth vocabulary of certain psychical operations and phenomena, but it lacked a ‘subject-matter’.
We can presume that the human subject
was its subject matter, but in this case, we would be reversing the cause/effect
relation needed in theorising. A search
to understand the human subject should have created psychoanalysis and not that
discovering psychoanalysis led us to discovering the subject. This mistaken
start still delays reaching a comfortable answer to the question: what is psychoanalysis?
Because it is expected that we will get more than one answer one answer we
should just decide on some parameter for
the answers: no hypotheticals to qualify the answers.
Freud looks as if he discovered psychoanalysis
for us to find it. His text (the Standard Edition) is never old to ignore and
replace. It is not what he discovered that is
essential in the formation of the analyst; it his style of discovering it that counts. As an example of
this idea is his work on dreams. Finding out that a dream is a wish fulfilled is
not a great break-through in the field of exploring the psyche. But, interpreting
the dream- scene as fulfilling a wish, and realising that many important
unconscious wishes could be found in the patients’ dreams bring to focus the
nature of our work: interpreting in order to affect change- ‘new
knowledge is cure’? I would not be surprised if most contemporary
psychoanalysts would answer my query by saying that the dream brings the
unconscious wish to consciousness. This is not true or satisfactory. The importance
of interpreting dreams in analysis is to show the dreamer the workings of the dream-work. Interpreting the dream reverses the process of dreaming which separates the wish from the dreamwork. It
should catch our attention that a reputable physician in the eighteen centuries
started a unique career of discoveries in a nonmedical field, by finding a
respectable way of understanding dreams.
Freud’s Gradual Discovery of Psychoanalysis:[1]
To begin with, I find it
very useful to make an early distinction between ‘psychoanalytic discoveries or
finds’ like the dream as a wish fulfillment and ‘psychoanalytic thinking’ like
the ‘ego’ is negation. Soon after finding that dreams are wish fulfilment Freud demonstrated a new way of thinking without which “dream-work” would not have
become our way of listening to patients’ associations regardless of the topic.
Freud 'intuitively' realised that the unconscious dream-work (S.E., 6\277-278) has its own
structure and is not 'bad thinking'. Freud’s theory of dreams is a
discovery of the psychology of dreaming and fantasizing, but it also
detailed how a wish could be turned into a dream, a conflict, or a symptom, a childhood experience creating a character formation. Dream-
work is a product of the linguistic facilities of
metaphor and metonymy, and a dream is a
statement expressed pictorially as metaphor
and metonymy, thus the wish of the dreamer could find its way to the world of
expression, disregarding social conventions. It is not correct to
considers an insight just a moment of enlightenment, because as I will show,
Freud had an analytic mind that made insights a natural way of making
discoveries in simple and common observations.
Freud’s brief experiences
with Bernheim, Charcot, and Breuer directed him to something those three
pioneers practiced but did not notice or understand: the hysterical patients
(later all patients) ‘have two psychological lives’ separated by psychodynamic
resistances. This notion came from his observation that consciousness and
unconsciousness are only separate when to fit the situation. In
other words, the physician using hypnotism in treating a hysteric has been given a chance to look
at the two psychical lives next to each other. But as the history of the splitting
of consciousness [the French School] shows, it was a specific Freudian
insight that made the whole difference. Freud looked at the outcome of hypnosis
to realize that in terms of its content it was psychological material that the
patient is rejecting it to be his (the basis of repression). The other finding
that Freud realized was that what remains in consciousness is rational (causes
and effect) while what split from consciousness is of a different nature and has
its own system of functioning. The repressed is not another conscious content
that is objectionable; it is consciousness because of its different mental structure. To
consider the repressed different and not just objectionable-matters meant
that something else or additional was required in order to move
beyond the simple repression of the unacceptable.
Without being aware -at
the time- he started psychoanalytic thinking by saying “the hysterics suffer
from reminiscences” (1895). He discovered that the split of consciousness into
consciousness and sub-consciousness was not caused by something outside that
same split psyche. He came to a new way of thinking in regard to
psychopathology (and eventually to the human subject) by making the cause of
the neurosis part of the symptom [the patient is hysterical not because her
symptoms say so, but because her hysterical symptoms are her way of
trying to get by with her impediment!]. Thus, Freud moved to a new horizon:
understand the symptom as an unconscious message. This insight went in the
opposite direction of medical tradition. In the fields of medicine or
objective endeavours causes and effects are separated by a ‘process’ not by
differences in their nature. I am emphasizing this difference
because Freud’s gifted insight in regard to causes and effects (results) were
uncommon and were only part of the dialectics of the Hegelian thinking. This is
a point that deserve the attention because Freud's intuitions have their roots in Western
philosophy and are not merely strokes of genius luck.
There is another much more
important source of his intuition that got its definition thirty years or more
after his stating work . Psychoanalysis, as it was discovered and administered
by Freud, was fundamentally a theory of structures
and not a theory of functions. That difference was highlighted in the thirties
of last century the advancements in the field of linguistics (F.de-Saussure).
De-Saussure made a distinction between functional thinking and structural
thinking, or between explaining and interpreting (explaining pertains to
motives, while interpreting pertains to structures).The example of Freud’s distinction
between explaining and interpreting is obvious in his dream-work formulation
that interprets the dream as a wish fulfillment (a structure that is latent
in every and any dream) instead of looking for the specifics of each dream to
explain its function. and the old methods
that were meant to explain the dream.
Freud’s theory
of dreams is a discovery of the psychology of dreaming and fantasizing, but it
also detailed what turns a wish into a dream, a conflict into a symptom, and a
childhood experience into a character formation. Dream- work is a product of the linguistic facilities of metaphor and metonymy. Thus, a dream is a
statement expressed metaphorically and metonymically thus the wish of the
dreamer could find its way to the world of expression and disregarding social
conventions. It is not correct to considers an insight just a moment of
enlightenment, because Freud had an analytic mind that made insights a natural
way of making discoveries in simple and common observations.
1. The discovery of
psychoanalysis is an event created by Freud’s endeavor to follow up on his
intuitions regarding hypnotism. There are various ways to choose an approach to
that subject which would be based on the most valued findings like the
unconscious, identification, projection, etc. My approach in that regard is to
underline some of Freud’s insights about common things, which built his way of
thinking and created the ‘psychoanalytic way of explaining the new ‘findings’,
like repetition compulsion and somatization. The most remarkable thing in that
venture is Freud’s natural leaning to to simplicity instead of the appeal of complexity.
Freud’s insight
was noticing that ordinary speech is made of interwoven conscious and
unconscious meanings. This new feature in the functions of the mind opened him
to a new mode of thinking: in psychical life it is not the causes and their
effect that count but the nature of the link between them. Desiring something strongly
could become painful enough to scare the person from attaining it. He was
comfortable to live with the notion that the human mind is capable of reversing
the link between causes and their results without much consternation, because
the conscious and the unconscious coexist in the subject’s mind as a natural
feature of our specie’s verbal thinking. Freud continued from that insight to practice
thinking, instead of applying it. He accepted the existence of another
thinking process alongside regular thinking, which has different means of
expression. He also realized that with good attention to the patient’s conscious
speech the unconscious issues revealed themselves, but indirectly. I believe
that Freud was unconsciously searching for the unconscious. His
discovery of psychoanalysis- as a new and distinct field of knowledge- started
when he established the coexistence of consciousness and unconsciousness
and that there was no use for hypnotism to dealing with each separately. This point emphasizes the fact that whatever is said still requires interpretation.
If we accept
those preliminary discoveries (insights) as basics in psychoanalysis we- old
generation psychoanalysts and our candidates- should face the fact that
psychoanalysis is not going to continue being that unspecific type of work. In
more direct ways: psychoanalysis should shed off the old adage of free association,
the open ended process of sessions, the rituals that are part of the exchanges
between analyst and patient and be more focused on the two issue that bring a
patient to psychoanalyst: the impact of the intrapsychic on the interpersonal (the character
formation that was created in the early upbringing and persists in adulthood), and limiting the analytic relation with the analyst to interpretations and reconstruction.
Those three last lines-if accepted- would have a noticeable impact on the -sometimes- distorted process of psychoanalysing.
