The Ends of Analysis, Oct.

2010

The Voice that came in from the Cold

In recent years, its often been said that psychoanalysis is dead. New advances in the brain sciences have finally put it where it belongs, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers in the lumberroom of pre-scientific obscurantist searches for hidden meaning. This quote from iek1 is obviously tongue in cheek, but one that may be worth exploring as many people do believe that psychoanalysis is outmoded and that we need to move on Or maybe its more than that, maybe psychoanalysis must by its very essence, and maybe it wants to, repeatedly come in from the cold? From the outset the theory has not been easily accepted. Let us think about it, how could a theory which promises no immediate fix, which tells us we are unconsciously driven, that its all down to infantile sexuality, and that basically we are not masters in our own house,2 compete with todays psychopharmacology, which provides a pill that solves every problem without the need to work on our own psyche? However psychoanalysis, like the proverbial bad penny, continually returns. It must have something which captures the desire in people. As an aside, talking about pills, SmithKline Beecham has produced a pill to melt away shyness, it was written up in the Independent newspaper in Ireland in January of this year! 3 Psychoanalytic theory operates at two completely different levels in society. Firstly it operates at the level of the clinic; working with the individual in analysis who is unearthing their own truths in the hope of alleviating or at least understanding a symptom, spying on themselves; and secondly at the academic level where it influences other disciplines. At the academic level analysts have continuously studied other subjects; logic, language, topography etc. to expand and clarify the meta-theories which underlie psychoanalysis. Learning in the forms of discussion, reading and writing was always the way of both Freud and Lacan and something they both demanded from their pupils. Now we have multiple examples of psychoanalysis as an academic discourse with iek himself providing a prime example, publishing, as he does extensively on politics, philosophy, and cultural theory all underwritten with psychoanalytic understandings. There are clear benefits in this academic discourse: its ability to shed light on the nature and significance of individual psychological effects; its capacity to explain interventions in such effects in a beneficial and ethically defensible manner; and through its heterogeneous teachings and writings about literature, art, politics, sciences, these are the obvious ones but in fact psychoanalytic theory ends up being discussed in nearly all aspects of life. There are articles on cyberspace, nanobots, sculpture, fashion, racism... I dont need to go on. However, engagement at an academic level about the structures and doxa of psychoanalysis runs the risk of being almost certainty stated in a masters voice, taught by one who knows, and as such,

1 iek, Freud Lives!, London review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 10, 25 May 2006, www.lrb.co.uk/v28/nl accessed Sept. 2010 2 Freud. S.E.,XVI: 286; XVII: 136, 139-43;XIX:221 3 SmithKline Beecham claims its anti-depression drug Seroxat, launched in the UK in 1992, has been shown in tests to cure 'social phobia'. www.independent.ie/national-news/pill-to-melt-shyness-427378.html

The Ends of Analysis, Oct. 2010 diluted as a theory, misunderstood, and reduced to sound bites which come back to haunt us, placing us repeatedly out in the cold. But non-engagement could mean an end of psychoanalytic praxis; we would become introverted, unrecognized and stagnant, and thus be a voice permanently dismissed, or dismissive. This would lead to the theory being unavailable at an academic level; the danger of this is that psychoanalysis would not be known about, as a clinical option. Speaking here is difficult as I am speaking to the converted; - a forum of people who know what psychoanalysis has to offer. There is however a challenge, one which I have just alluded to, that of avoiding being reduced to a theory, assimilated into other academic discourses, of losing what both Freud and Lacan were articulating that is: the individual unconscious, its moments of appearance producing truths, the primacy of the signifier and the links back to knowledge and desire. So this is more specifically about the university discourse as distinct from Lacans other three, as this, I feel, is the crux of the matter. The university discourse cannot tolerate enquiries based on a singular subjective stance, especially an unconscious one, while clinical psychoanalysis cannot be assumed into a university or master discourse and still remain potent. However even though psychoanalytic theories originate from the understanding and unravelling of the symptoms of individual hysterical patients, they have already woven themselves into the very fabric of university discourse. For example; dream theory in neuroscience, the Oedipus complex and the pale criminal in law, the uncanny in film and sculpture4... Likewise the theory Influences many of the professions, let us show this with two examples: the Law and the sciences: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE LAW Psychoanalysis was not traditionally considered an integral part of the discipline of legal theory, yet there are over one million hits on Google which refer specifically to psychoanalysis and law. It influences basic jurisprudence, criminal justice and criminal intent, and its many insights into the origin and the structure of law, and response to the basic question of what law is permits an exploration which allows a dialectal movement between the universal and particular in a manner not available from other points of view. Freud teaches that law is an institution that emerges from and reverts to our most quotidian and intimate experiences love and aggression. Add onto this the psychoanalytical take on such concepts as repression, signifiers, perversion, wit, desire, sexuality and gender, anxiety and mourning and we can see the set of interpretive terms and techniques which allow us grasp these

Antony Gormley, Uncanny Sculpture, The figuration of the human body in sculpture has always held within it something of the uncanny. From ancient Greece to the present, the sculptural figure, whether considered as magical talisman to ward off danger or propitiate the gods, or more recently as the disturbing double or imago, has been seen either as a defence against, or an uninvited guest of, unseen forces. Romantic philosophers identified the presence of the uncanny in early Greek sculpture: Schelling writing of the sculptures from the Temple of Aphiai at Aegina, saw in their attempt to configure a representation of the gods in human form, something extra-human or non-human something strange, that he qualified as a certain uncanny character www.whitecube.com/artists/gormley/texts/162/

The Ends of Analysis, Oct. 2010 apparently opposed disciplines in a unitary manner. He tells us that our civilisation is built up on the suppression of instincts 5 and we know that civilisation is based on laws. Though Freud initially planned to study law6 he enrolled in medicine and while he never wrote a full paper on the integration of psychoanalytic theory into law he does refer to it from time to time. For example in his 1924 paper Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings7, he explores the untrustworthiness of statements made by witnesses, and how reactions to stimulus words could not be chance but must be determined by an ideational content or complex present in the mind of the reacting subject. He ends his paper with a plea not to abandon these ideas and the possible measurement of them though investigating stimulus words and their associated complexes by saying ... it might be made your duty to undertake such examinations over a number of years in every actual instance of a criminal prosecution... After years of collecting and comparing the results ... all doubts about the serviceability of this psychological method of investigation would surely be resolved.8 In fact last year in a paper called Defense Mechanisms: Neuroscience Meets Psychoanalysis9 a very similar concept was explored by Heather Berlin and Christof Koch. They asked the question how much of what you consciously experience in your daily life is influenced by hidden unconscious processes? They report on an experiment from St Andrews University in Scotland which explored the brain basis of memory suppression. Twenty four volunteers had to memorize 48 word pairs (for example; ordeal-roach or steamtrain). While lying in a scanner, subjects were shown the first cue word and had to either recall the second associated word (called the respond condition) or prevent it from entering consciousness (suppress condition). Actively suppressing the matched word while lying in the scanner had the effect of reducing recall of the word afterward as compared with the respond condition, or actively remembering this result is not just a simple forgetting that occurs with the passage of time. The Scottish team collected imaging data which showed that the volunteers suppressed the words by recruiting parts of the brain involved in executive control areas in the prefrontal cortex. This was in order to disengage processing in sectors of the brain important for memory function and retrieval, in particular the hippocampus. This is important because earlier experiments showed that the amplitude of activity in the hippocampus is proportional to memory recall the stronger the activity, the higher the likelihood of remembering. A second observation is that the brain is more active when avoiding recalling a memory than during recall itself. So people suppress unwanted memories by exerting wilful effort that can be tracked in the nervous system in ways postulated by Freud but empirically impossible for him to show.

5 6

Freud Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness, 1924, SE,9, Pg.186 Gay, 1989, xxxii 1873, Freud enrols in the medical faculty at Vienna University after changing his choice of career from law. 7 SE,9, pg. 99 8 SE,9,pg. 114 9 Berlin & Koch, Defense Mechanisms: Neuroscience Meets Psychoanalysis, April 2009, Scientific American Mind

The Ends of Analysis, Oct. 2010 Nevertheless psychoanalysis focuses on the individual subject so while experiments like this may confirm Freuds views that repressed thoughts affect statements made by criminals or supposed criminals the law refers to the collection of guidelines for the behaviour of a society. On the face of it these are two separate discussions. What the neurosciences show is that word association and repression exist in individuals, but what they cannot generalise is the form of the individuals psyche structure the signifiers which will be repressed or linked in free association in each individual. So while the individual makes up the basis of society and thus its values and while there are many a criminal whose sentence has been reduced from murder to manslaughter by the understanding that criminal intent was unconscious, psychoanalysis as a practice and a theory is still necessary to understand each separate psyche. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE SCIENCES If we look at the sciences, for now the clinical sciences, we can identify three models of thought three paradigms.... and according to Paul Verhaeghe each one initially seeming quite different from the others: the medical-biological one, the psychological one, and the psychoanalytic one. The last is considered corny and outdated.10 Here, rather than the integration as seen with law, psychoanalysis is defending its position vis a vis what are believed to be the harder disciplines of medicine, neurosciences and psychology. Yet all three in this regard are part of the university discourse, and here they institute the same social bond and the same level of impotence. We know that the analytic way of exploring the self/ psyche produces clinical results. So can we defend psychoanalytic theory against the sciences within a university discourse? Or is psychoanalysis with its understanding of mans individuality an outdated voice in a modern society which favours high performance using and gaining technology as its product, alongside this, of course, there is chemical regulation for the suffering of the soul. This future vision of the individual through ideologies such as transhumanism has as its goal the elimination of congenital mental and physical barriers. Of course, within these fields, psychoanalytical theory can be defended. Mans psyche cannot be simply reduced to the functioning of his neurons, what about the production of truth? So if the structures such as those of the DMS and the neurosciences are adhered to, the point of analysis will be missed. This would be to miss the distinction between knowledge and truth, dismiss the work of the unconscious and would ultimately result in the desexualisation of the sexed being. It is an endless criticism of psychoanalysis that its theories are not based on quantitative and experimental research and that it relies on clinical case studies. This is especially true in relation to behaviour therapy and CBT. Instead psychoanalysis relies on the ideas of transference and the unconscious which has to be guessed at. Yet the unconscious is now the trendiest of topics for psychology and the neurosciences. Even strict behaviourists acknowledge that a vast amount of classical conditioning is unconscious and that this has a profound effect on our emotional life. Research into these areas by neurosciences has resulted in a one sided argument that provides a biological basis for unconscious emotional processing in line with psychoanalytical theory. There seem to be no papers- at least recently that challenge psychoanalytical theory. The danger here is that psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and of transference gets subsumed into
10

Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders, 2004, Pg. 77

The Ends of Analysis, Oct. 2010 neuropsychoanalysis and disappears into the master discourse. The subject becomes an object and disappears as a speaking sexual being. Let me give you a clinical example written up by Darian Leader in the English newspaper the Guardian.11 It shows the missed opportunity of unveiling a truth about a symptom by a clinician A woman convinced that she emits an unpleasant smell is persuaded to travel around on public transport with a portion of fish and chips to monitor how people react to her. This will allow her to assess the "evidence": she will realise that there is a difference between times when she is the bearer of a strong smell and when she is not, and this will help her to "correct" her beliefs... After her strange sojourn on the tube, the woman with the fish and chips would meet her therapist and discuss the events of the day. If she realised that people in fact reacted to her less when she didn't have the malodorous meal, then she might be able to change her thought pattern, to see her life in a more positive way. She would learn that her symptom was an incorrect interpretation of reality and hopefully come to see the world as everyone else does.12 Psychoanalysis would question the function of the symptom for the individual why did she suffer in the first place, what role did it play for her and what would be the consequences of removing it? It would be about hearing what was being voiced by the symptom -by her as an individual. Neither is psychoanalysis about the plasticity of the brain or about the plasticity of the psyche where unwanted inner truths are to be excised, removed, but about an individuals own truth, their knowledge, the jouissance they receive from their symptom. Neither of these examples implies that psychoanalysis is outdated, legal systems can benefit from its theories and unless the individual in society is a thing of the past psychoanalysis is a voice which defends the person as an entity. So maybe psychoanalysis wants and needs to be a partial outsider, something to be called in when needed. Freud tells us that the doctors position in psychoanalytic treatment recalls in many ways that of the obstetrician, who also has to conduct himself as passively as possible, to content himself with the post of onlooker at a natural proceeding, but, who must be at hand in the critical moment with the forceps in order to complete the act of parturition that is not progressing spontaneously13. Maybe psychoanalysis has to stay out in the cold until as a last resort its voice is demanded? A discipline which is not easily accepted but occasionally attends the party?

11 12

Darian Leader The Guardian, Tuesday 9 September 2008 Ibid. 13 Freud, 1919, 182-83

The Ends of Analysis, Oct. 2010

To comprehend the repetition of psychoanalysis exclusion and return to favour we could look at Lacans account of the four fundamental structures of discourse: Neither clinical nor academic psychoanalysts can or wants to operate at the level of the master discourse, here the modern master is in the position of the agent (S1), and knowledge (S2) is in the position of the slave or the other, this equates to bureaucracy14. And psychoanalysis is about the production of truth. Nor can psychoanalysis operate at the level of the hysterical discourse, here the already divided subject is in the position of the agent, demanding of the Other mastery or knowledge, an endless scenario, the product is knowledge but assimilating this knowledge that is allowing it to produce a truth - is impossible. This knowledge is dangerous as it is transformative it threatens the imagined unity of the self. This calls into question what sort of disaster does analytic knowledge produce?15 Lacan tell us that It is around the word knowledge that there exists the ambiguous point. Knowledge is the enjoyment of the Other16, and he goes on to say that repetition has a certain relationship with the limit of this subject and this knowledge, which is called enjoyment17. So at what level can psychoanalysis speak clearly, making the signifier and the signified agree stopping the sliding and thus the production of the unconscious? Jacque-Alain Miller tells us that it is through the placement of the master signifier that Lacan defined analytic discourse, inasmuch as this discourse has the function of ordering the speech of the analysand, and the purpose of this discourse is to produce its own master S1.18 This is well and good at an individual level, but what about the desire of one to learn or discuss the theory, to acquire knowledge? In the university discourse knowledge takes the position of agent in Lacans discourse theory, and in the place of the Other is jouissance, so the Other is reduced to being the object a cause of desire. A social bond results from the desire to reach this object through knowledge. But underlying the agent is the voice of the master. Every field of knowledge needs this underlying master, a theory in science, religion, Lacan! At the position of the other is the lost object cause of desire, the relationship between this object and the signifying chain is impossible as the object is beyond the signifier as a result the product of this discourse is an ever increasing divided subject. The more knowledge one uses to reach for the object, the more one becomes divided between signifiers, and the further one gets from the truth the actual cause of desire. This implies that the objectivity on which this discourse is based is an illusion. The many applications of psychoanalytic theory are the reason why it is capable of having many ends, in many subjects, across many disciplines and its understanding of non-sense the unconscious, is why it needs to keep its voice coming in from the cold to where it is banished on a

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Psychoanalysis Upside Down, seminar XVII, translated by Cormac Gallagher, online. Lacan, Seminar XVIII, trans. Cormac Gallagher, pg. 27 16 Ibid, Pg 32 17 Ibid, Pg 33 18 Miller, Jacques-Alain, Religion, Psychoanalysis, Lacanian ink 23, Trans. Barbra P. Fulks, online www.lacan.com/frameXXIII2.htn

The Ends of Analysis, Oct. 2010 repetitive basis; or maybe psychoanalysis cannot ever find a home in the university and I am being delusional as Wittgenstein says Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

The Ends of Analysis, Oct. 2010

(The alienated position that psychoanalysis, possibly?, finds itself in has two sides for Douglas Watt in his paper The dialogue between Psychoanalysis and it, for example, had abandoned the constructive intent in Freuds project, while the neurosciences contributed to the failure by dismissing and caricaturing the insights contained in key psychoanalytical concepts such as transference and repetition compulsion.19 Lacan is famous for saying Modern science can be regarded as an expression of paranoia20. But Verhaeghe21 in On Being Normal tells us that this statement has to be read in a wider context. )

19

Watt, Douglas F. Ph.D. The Dialogue between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: Alienation and Reparation, 2000, Neuro-psychoanalysis, 2:1 Pg 183-192, PEP Web 20 Lacan 1992[1959-1960] pp 129-132 21 Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders, 2004, Pg. 88