The Trainings of the Psychoanalyst

Annie Tardits, Marc Du Ry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367328986
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429922480
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

If psychoanalysis, for freud, was an impossible profession, what consequences would this have for psychoanalytic training? and if one's own personal analysis lay at the heart of psychoanalytic training, how could what one had learnt from this be transmitted, let alone taught? In this groundbreaking book, annie Tardits explores the many attempts that analysts have made to think through the problems of psychoanalytic training. Moving from freud and his first students through to Lacan and his invention of the "pass", Tardits charts the changing conceptions of psychoanalytic training. With clarity and elegance, she shows how different ideas of what psychoanalysis is will have effects on how training is understood. If psychoanalysis involves each person's unique unravelling of the unconscious and of sexuality, what kind of training would be appropriate, or even possible?

Chapter One

The First Analysts

A testimony

During the Weimar congress of the Internationale Psycho-analytische Vereinigung (IPV), a woman told Freud of her desire to learn psychoanalysis. Freud laughed a lot at the ardour of Lou Andreas-Salomé. A year later, in 1912, after six months of “self-taught preparatory studies”, he allowed her to take part in the Wednesday evening meetings. He wrote to her in October 1912: “we shall all endeavour to make available to you the little there is in psychoanalysis that can be demonstrated and shared” (Andreas-Salomé, 1965, p. 31). During the winter semesters she followed Freud’s lectures and Tausk’s courses, whom she found too servile in his Freudianism, and she took part in the Wednesday discussions of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The Wednesday evening walks and the long Sunday visits at Freud’s home wove a web of friendship, affection, and intellectual collaboration lasting twenty-five years. Their correspondence was pursued in “complete and unreserved frankness”. From 1913, she participated in the publication of Imago; in 1917, she asked for guidance in the analysis of a little girl, in which she felt a bit lost. In 1922, in Gottingen, and in Koenigsberg in 1923–1924, she conducted a few training analyses of doctors. It is only in 1922 that, thanks to a lacuna in the statutes, she became a full member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, where she always felt most fully at home. Anna Freud, the “girl-Anna”, delivered the joint paper for their formal admission.

Lou Andreas-Salomé would never forget the “serious”, even lugubrious, tone with which Freud warned his listeners of the difficulties of psychoanalysis, pointing to the resistance an alert and conscious person would, almost of necessity, bring to it because this resistance belonged normally and not pathologically to the psyche. She saw in this “a deliberate attempt to scare us away” (Andreas-Salomé, 1965, p. 32). How could one not, in fact, be afraid of a discovery that could only have been made in the pathological domain, “there where inner life renounces something of itself through its failings” (ibid., p. 17)? She remembered, when she heard Freud for the first time, that this was the thought that took hold of her as she encountered “the Freudian thing” for the very first time while reading Swoboda. An interest she characterized as “neutral and objective” (ibid., p. 18) had been awakened by “the lure of a path opening new sources” (ibid., p. 19).

This was the first reason she gave when Freud spoke to her of the way she came into analysis, giving herself over to it so deeply. From what she related of the talk, it is not clear how the major encounters of her past could have formed this interest in a knowledge which had its source in the experience of certain personal difficulties. It is clear that her meetings with Paul Rée, Nietschze, and Rilke, as well as her intimate attraction to Spinoza, her interest in theology, philology, and poetry, predisposed her to receive psychoanalysis as a “gift”. Freud is amused by this third reason: “I really think you look on analysis as a sort of Christmas present” (ibid., p. 90); even though it is but the consequence, however decisive, of the encounter with a “science in progress” which “always allows a return to beginnings” (ibid., p. 90). It is this beginning which is at the start of analysing (Psychanalysieren): in Freud’s own analysis, there was accomplished “in the very act of the mind” what appears to us afterwards as a human condition for becoming “ourselves” in the simplest sense (Pfeiffer, 1966, pp. 56–57). This encounter affected her: analysis became not only a choice of profession to her but “that by which my life always guides itself”.

Both her diary, “In Freud’s school” (Andreas-Salomé, 1965), and her correspondence testify to the way she fulfilled her desire to devote herself to analysis; they testify to the way her encounter with Freud and his companions made her initial desire an informed desire; they show what an analytic training could be before it became institutionalized.

At her first Wednesday evening meeting, Lou Andreas-Salomé could not but notice the gap between what Freud wrote and what he had just said. His answer to her explains his position: “my last formulation”. She thus discovered that his “theory was never rigidly fixed but was based on his changing experience”. This model of a researcher steadfastly advancing, without respite, constituted Freud’s greatness for her and gave a particular meaning to the dogmatism imputed to him: it was simply a way of putting milestones on the paths of this research which advanced to new frontiers, reserved the right to impose concepts born from difficulties (like the “drive”) and “turned problems of psychic life into steps forward for science”.

It is to this position of researcher, and not to some paternal complex, that she attributed the complexity of some of Freud’s traits: a nostalgic desire for the solitude of the time before the analytic school and the public he nonetheless wanted; an egoism which poorly tolerated an independent and aggressive mind at its side while wishing for a freedom without dogmatic restraints for his disciples. This complexity was sorely tried during the times of the splits in the analytic movement. In 1912, it was already ten years since Freud had began to work with a few others, on the development of analysis, its transmission, treatments, and training the first analysts. The price paid for these new steps was the loss of Wilhelm Fliess’s friendship. By making analysis exist, by making it “ex-sist” to him and to Fliess, who shared his discovery, he lost the friendship of the man who was an active witness of the formation of his own desire as analyst. Fliess was his first audience and addressee of a supposed knowledge. 1912 was the year of the first separations, which were to have a definite influence on the training of Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Despite the definitive break between Freud and Alfred Adler, Andreas-Salomé met with the latter and participated in some of his evening seminars, while respecting the split Freud asked her to maintain. She had bitter disputes with the man who, for her, remained but a psychology pupil of Marx and initiated her own split with him. Her bent for synthesis, no doubt strengthened by her previous training, philosophical above all, could have led her to system builders like Jung and Adler. Freud often emphasized her way of thinking, so different from his own, and from which he did not fail to draw benefit by letting her commentaries work on him, her way of “adjusting and completing fragments until a construction is produced”, where he would stick with the fragmentary and with discontinuity. He clearly identified how he won her confidence:

by the way of the ego-libido you have observed how I work, step by step, without the inner need for completion, continually under the pressure of the problem immediately on hand and taking infi nite pains not to be diverted from the path.

[ibid., p. 61]

As both a witness to and as agent of the concept of narcissistic libido, Lou Andreas-Salomé could assess the theoretical and practical, as well as personal, issues at stake in these splits, which Freud abhorred but was resigned to. When he asked her to take on the role of “third party” to judge his “On the history of the psychoanalytic movement” (Freud, 1914d), she tried to explain the process that turns a misunderstanding into a split. For purely personal reasons, a new point of departure is substituted for the theoretical core. Yet she believed this to be a necessary displacement: “All true revolutions are subject to abuse, but from its very nature Freudian psychoanalysis calls forth this abuse in a completely new fashion” (Andreas-Salomé, 1965, p. 17). In a decisive way, in fact; in analysis “we only know what we experience” and resistance is, for all of us, at the heart of our experience. Analysis progresses with this resistance, and the resistance to doctrine is just one form this can take. “Accusing, denouncing and unmasking” (ibid., p. 19) were the tasks repugnant to Freud, yet necessary to analysis.

She used the imagery of core and periphery, of tree, graft, and reject to articulate and guide herself in her disagreement with Freud on certain points. Each person’s small kernel of subjectivity can profit from the margins around Freud’s work, margins he himself would not refuse to question, but “what belongs to analysis must remain intact”. Her constant worry not to misinterpret what belongs to the core of analysis earned her a friendly compliment from Freud: “you were born to understand” (eine Versteherin par excellence), to which he added that his way of darkening things on purpose to concentrate on an obscure point did not render him so mole-like as not to rejoice in the feedback she sent back to him. One could speculate that he was not immune to the objections she would formulate in 1931 concerning religion and artistic creation. Did they touch the kernel or the periphery?

If the specific scientific project of analysis is to let theory be shaped by experience, because, more than in other sciences of the mind, here we only know what we experience, its conflicts will be more difficult to appease and its struggles more bitter than anywhere else. This is because the misunderstandings at work in splits are an almost inevitable effect of the intertwining of theory and subjectivity, experience and knowledge. The “Wednesday round table”, the “kind of fraternity” to which analysis had introduced her were, for Lou Andreas-Salomé, the very example of an “honest community” (ehrlichen Gemeinschaft) in which the probity of each in relation to himself guaranteed loyalty between “brothers” in battle. But was the transformation of a theoretical kernel into “absolute dogma” enough to substitute for the presence of Freud, who guaranteed both cohesion and the space needed for battle?

Lou Andreas-Salomé believed in the necessity of turning this theoretical kernel into “absolute dogma” so that it could attract a wider range of followers. She was very happy, in 1917, that the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1915–1917) gave a shape to the very personal construction of Freud, so that its meaning and value could be appreciated by outsiders, “lay” people like herself.

Better than anyone, even Freud––to whom she addressed the truth of her complaint in the form of a productivity which was too intermittent, uncertain, and subject to mood and health––she articulated the way the object of analysis only allowed itself to be approached in these discontinuous ways. “For however scientific the method of investigation is, the Unconscious will always tend to elude it, as dreams elude us on waking. It will always require an almost unnatural exertion to dedicate oneself to this subject” (Andreas-Salomé, 1965, p. 52). She added, perhaps following Freud’s advice, that this effort might only be possible “by keeping up the habit of self-analysis and especially the analysis of one’s patients” (ibid.). In the very intermittence of theoretical production, the object of analysis gives the “seal of its authenticity”.

Now that the masses besiege the edifice and seek to obtain authorization to enter, what form of “honest community” can house such a strange rapport with knowledge and with the very foundations of analysis, as well as the equally necessary attempt to transmit this particular knotting of knowledge and experience? Lou Andreas-Salomé does not tell us. This woman, to whom Freud addressed himself as impartial judge and who, like a child whose dream is fulfilled by a present, signed the letter of acceptance into the Vienna Society with pride and humour as “member-Lou”, kept a very singular position with respect to this cause-thing (Sache) to which she devoted a third of her life. She did not participate in the “business” in the same way as the “six elder brothers”, according to the repeated error of Freud. He was not worried in Lou’s case that, as he put it in a letter to Ernest Jones dated 18 November 1920, “business is devouring science” (Paskaukas, 1993). This risk that business would absorb the time and leisure needed for scientific work was one he took with his brothers, those brothers who were just a little too much like sons for him to include himself in the count, if that was the wish indicated by his error. (The number of brothers wrongly assigned to Lou [six instead of five] represents, in fact, the number of members belonging to the Secret Committee at that time, including Freud.) Yet, he offered her a ring, as he had to those in the Secret Committee, and, in his funerary tribute, he counted her as one of the “battle companions”. Something of Freud’s division in his struggle to carry the destiny of his invention can be felt here; analysis today inherits this division, and it is situated in an elective way in the question of the training of analysts.

Freud’s way

The psychoanalytic institution was still in its infancy when Freud had to deal with the “pathology of associations”, of which Ferenczi had warned analysts the moment they were about to organize themselves into the IPV. To the classical pathologies (narcissism, struggles for primacy, filial conflicts with authority) was now added the difficulty Freud’s disciples had in sustaining the core notions of the unconscious, repression, and libido. With these concepts, Freud had responded to the facts he encountered (gaps in memory, resistance, and transference) once he had given up on hypnotic suggestion and invented a method of directed speech governed by the rule of free association. This rule, which became fundamental, was precisely the means by which resistance, transference, and the psychic formations related to the unconscious could manifest themselves. The split with Steckel involved subjective givens more than theoretical conflicts; Freud considered that Steckel remained faithful to analysis despite having wronged him. The dissidences of Adler and Jung revealed a resistance to the core notions and a refusal to acknowledge the facts they answered to. It was, for Freud, the moment to specify what should be called analysis and what had better be called by another name. For these facts and these theories, scandalous to thought, constitute the “agreed ground of the premises of analysis”, terrain which one could not abandon without leaving analysis. The positions of Adler and Jung illustrate how resistance and transference are at work in relation to the doctrine that seeks to account for them. How can one, from then on, take on board the fact that neurotic investment in theory can be at the root of false paths as well as discoveries? How should one prepare analysts to recognize these facts and sustain theories that generate such an aversion?

Confronted with those he had henceforth to consider as adversaries of analysis, Freud continued to think, in 1914, that one’s position in relation to dreams and their interpretation was paramount. In conformity with what his own experience had taught him, he thought, during those years, that the dream, being an analogon of the symptom, “as far as a good dreamer and an individual not too far removed from the norm was concerned”, the kind of analysis which was his own might suffice. No doubt he did not fully appreciate the fact that the terrifying, anguishing, unnameable image would wake up a normal dreamer while he, Freud, by dint of his “defiant courage in the search for truth” (Letter to Andreas-Salomé, dated 28 July 1929, in Pfeiffer, 1966, p. 182), would pursue the search for truth up to the moment of recognition of what Lacan would call the “acephalic nature of the subject”. Yet, Freud knew, since the dream of Irma’s injection, that that is where the key to the dream, to neurosis and to the treatment was to be found. The question was how to transmit it. Could one teach it?

In the text of 1904, in which he described his method objectively in the third person, Freud presented the interpretation of dreams as an initiation to the technique which allows one to extract “the pure metal of the repressed thoughts from the ore of the unintentional ideas” (Freud, 1904a, p. 252). Ferenczi confirmed how each new reading of this text (which were numerous by 1908) gave him new knowledge and fresh insights (Falzeder & Brabant, 1996, 66 Fer¹). Then Freud specified in 1912 that handling the interpretation of dreams was not an art in itself: “it has to answer to the totality of the treatment”. Between these two dates, his own experience and those of the first analysts had permitted the drawing of the outlines as well as the pitfalls, both unexpected and foreseen, inherent to this method. In his letters, as well as during their meetings, Freud often and gladly offered as a gift to his companions this “hardest of conquests”––technique––but to respond as “an old hand” to the requests for advice from Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi and Ernest Jones was not enough, and neither was his lecture at the College of Physicians in 1904. He became aware of the gap between his way of practising the “rules” taught him by his practice “at his own expense by using other methods”, and the attitude of his pupils. He had never felt fear at remaining at a loss with a patient, as Abraham had, too anxious to triumph rapidly over the symptom; his indifference towards his patients never led him to “be inclined to consider their affairs as his own”, as happened to Ferenczi. His exchanges of 1908 that dealt with the major technical questions of handling time, transference, and what he would call, a year later, countertransference, led him to plan to write “ a general method of analysis”. Ferenczi was unabashedly delighted, without a hint of the rivalry which marked Abraham. He gauged the extent to which “there must, however, be something painful in simply yielding this knowledge, with such difficulty and so many sacrifices, to us youngsters.” (Falzeder & Brabant, 1996, Fer 23). But doubtless Freud could only spare his followers from “part of the grind and—part of the cost” (Falzeder, 2002, p. 25).

Freud never published this methodology, giving up on it in 1910, just as he gave up on metapsychology; instead, he opted for the piecemeal, publishing six decisive articles, on the technique of the treatment between 1912 and 1915. First published in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse and then in the Zeitschrifft für Psychoanalyse, they were ultimately published together in 1918 in the collectionj of writings on the theory of neuroses (Freud, 1911e, 1912b, 1912e, 1913c, 1914g, 1915a). In 1912, Freud announced that, besides articles bringing new developments in psychoanalysis, the Zentralblatt proposed to present work of “didactic nature and technical content”, setting out clearly what was already acquired for whoever is learning and aiming to give to the beginner appropriate indications which might save him time and effort. In 1914 he wrote about his restraint and his choice:

I myself did not venture to put forward a still unfinished technique and a theory still in the making with an authority which would probably have enabled the others to avoid some wrong turnings and ultimate disasters.

[Freud, 1914d, p. 26]

He claimed to have preferred the autonomy of intellectual workers, with their swift independence from a master. He recognized it was a difficult, even risky, choice if not supported by “long and secure discipline”.

This discipline, which goes against the master–pupil relationship of a training, was that of analysis and its fundamental rule. Already, at the Nuremberg Congress of 1910, Freud posited its necessity: “… No analyst goes further than his own complexes and internal r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE The First Analysts
• CHAPTER TWO The Berlin Model
• CHAPTER THREE The Introduction of Training: Crises and Debates
• CHAPTER FOUR From one Training to Another
• CHAPTER FIVE The Training of the School
• CHAPTER SIX The Apparatuses of the School
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX