Lacanian Psychoanalysis between the Child and the Other

Exploring the Cultures of Childhood

Liora Stavchansky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429814976
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Lacanian Psychoanalysis between the Child and the Other explores what topology can contribute to clinical work with children, emphasizing that psychoanalytic listening goes beyond the individuals who attend a session. This kind of listening does not seek for what is hidden inside; rather it seeks to create a continuous topological transformation, with topology regarded as the most sophisticated way in which structure, structuring and playing can be thought.

Using Lacan's theoretical framework, the book provides a new perspective on working with children, re-examining fundamental Lacanian concepts such as structure, subject, lack, Other, clinic and, of course, child itself. It charts how time and space are knitted together for children in psychoanalysis, and how a Lacanian approach can enable clinical practitioners and researchers to venture into cultures of childhood, helping them conceptualize and intervene in the process of knitting and unknotting.

The book will be of interest to psychoanalytic child clinicians in practice and training, as well as researchers in the field of child psychoanalysis.

Chapter 1

About psychoanalysis and other stories

History is inscribed in the body … in the words of a non-existing reality and in the silence of an inhabited time.

Scraps of theory from child psychoanalysis

Once upon a time there was a boy who feared horses, his name was Little Hans. A phobia, a psychoanalyst would say. This boy’s father took him with a man who indirectly crafted a land of fantasies, myths, legends, stories … and a little bit of adventure. This childhood land might be the place where our hero and some opaque shape of this boy would meet and the debate will start.

The discussion about the clinical practice that takes children as analysands has filled bookshelves for a long time. Even from 1937 in Moses and Monotheism, Freud would say that psychoanalysis produces a ‘historical truth’, and he also would insist on restoring the plots and illusions of which the child has always been part. Ever since that time, Freud pointed out that the fundamental psychical operation located in a weave of past relations is where the child becomes a subject. This movement allows the child to get involved in desire by inhabiting and being inhabited by it, hence taking a place; a historical one.

By historical, we shall not understand a relativism of the social outcome (social constructions or conditions) or a factual history of social happenings. When Freud speaks of historical truth, what he means is what Lacan would formalize in terms of structure. Structure is diagonal to the individual and the social, as well as to the objective and the subjective. The historical truth is a question regarding the complicated place that the child occupies within a genealogical fabric that has a structural nature. If historical truth is a question concerning a place within structure, then its time is logic, not chronologic; it responds to anticipation and retroactivity within a structure. Following Freud, it is under this structure and temporality that the historical truth and its possible interventions emerge.

Freud saw Hans only once, so it was literally the father who conducted the treatment. Hans’s father had sent Freud notes about his first observations, making a contribution to the theories of infantile sexuality. He also confessed to Freud his difficulty in facing the enigmas that his son presented.

According to Freud, psychoanalysts are faced with impossibility when applying the psychoanalytical method to children due to the fact that a child is not yet accountable for what he or she does (his or her acts) or what the child says (enounces) in the psychoanalytical device. Most often, the parents are the ones who want their child to begin therapy since they are concerned with the behavior of the child, but not precisely about the child himself or herself. This is why the child cannot quite face his own history in the same way an adult would, even though his history is not without difficulty or shifts. It gets clearer if we consider that to Freud transference was essential to conduct a psychoanalytical treatment; however, this concept became more complex with the introduction of positive and negative transference. Negative transference is considered to be resistance, while positive transference moves the treatment forward. In this respect, Lacan did not agree with the notion of transference in terms of negative or positive.

Until then, the problem with Freudian psychoanalysis laid with the place that the psychoanalyst held in the complicated transference of the child, because it was the parents, and not the child, who requested treatment. If we look for responsibility within psychoanalysis and we ask the child, “what brings you here?”, the answer we get is: “My parents”.¹

Initially, Freud considered that the only possible way to direct the treatment with children was if the father and the psychoanalyst became the same person. Years after the case of Little Hans was published in 1908, Freud would change this assertion. Later on Melanie Klein, without publicly admitting it, would include among her first cases the analysis of her own three children. She was granted a degree as a psychoanalyst after presenting her third case. Beyond these anecdotes, the complexity lies in listening to the subject, who is also a child, and whose history, of many ruptures during his first year of life, is coming from the Other. The psychoanalyst becomes a reader of what the subject says in a hesitant discourse that finds an ally in the child’s play.

What follows will lead us to Lacan’s early teachings, or more precisely, to his return to Freud. Lacan takes a road that does not follow subsequent stages. Understanding the subject as a concept is as complex as the clinical practice that lies in the emergence of the unconscious. The history of psychoanalysis with children follows along these lines.

Psychoanalytical listening aims at the subject and his subjective time, not at the person or at an age. To better understand Lacan, we will go over the works of the most relevant psychoanalysts in the field of child psychoanalysis.

Anna Freud

What matters the most to Anna Freud is the internal world and its influence on the external world. She takes what happens on the outside as a force that moves the inside. In this way, she finds a clear difference between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ which directly influenced her clinical perspective: “[…] the child patient may see ‘getting well’ in the unpleasurable terms of having to adapt to an unpalatable reality and to give up immediate wish fulfillments… . The child’s unfinished personality is in a fluid state” (Freud, 1989, p. 106).

To Anna Freud children cannot choose whether or not to start psychoanalysis. Her writings reflect an interesting understanding of ‘immaturity’ and the absence of choice in that stage of life. It is then expected that complete maturity will be achieved at some point in time, and then the person ‘will fall’ from the tree. She also refers to a possible paradox in the treatment of children when compared to that of adults. An adult can remember his or her first object relations, while the child does not have the will to leave such relations in an attempt to embrace reality. It is frustrating to the little one not to have anything to remember because of being a child.

In addition, Anna Freud went over the developmental stages that her father proposed (oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital stages) to indicate the stage of the child, clearly showing a sort of order that evidenced the developmental status of the child and the reason why he or she should go through some of the twists and turns of life before reaching a self-sufficient phase; that is, adolescence. This perspective also implies the possibility of making a prognosis (diagnosis) of the child. She writes: “There are many other examples of developmental lines, such as the two given below, where every step is known to the analyst and that can be traced without difficulty, either through working backward by reconstruction from the adult’s picture, or through working forward by means of longitudinal analytic exploration and observation of the child” (Freud, 1989, p. 69).

When reading this reference, one can clearly find a clinical proposal that follows certain parameters, either forward or backward, and that uses interpretation as its tool. Anna Freud presents a diagnostic route (dia comes from the Greek “through”) to point the path by following bidirectional roads. These roads reflect what is expected in each stage of development. In her book, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, it is possible to find a table titled “Draft of Diagnostic Profile” in which Anna Freud lists the areas that a clinical history must include to assess a child’s development; as a result, one can read: “Child analysis is able to prevent this and, by mitigating the conflicts, to act not only as a therapeutic but as a preventive measure in the truest sense” (Freud, 1989, p. 248).

The preventive character of Anna Freud’s child psychoanalysis becomes clear when it involves a possibly perverse or psychotic subject whose psyche could be directed since childhood to avoid any future anomalies. It shows a preventive psychoanalytical approach that aims for normality in adulthood. The treatment is equally important for both parents and child. From this point of view, parents can libidinize the developmental lines where the child has been stranded in order to unblock the libido. What stands out in this sequenced approach to child development is that nowhere do we find Freud’s pivotal discoveries, i.e. retroactivity (nachträglich) and psychical reality.

Clearly, there are plenty of other thoughts proposed by Anna Freud. Nevertheless, I only mention a few, since it is not the objective of this chapter to thoroughly explore them. My purpose is to locate the place of the child. From Anna Freud’s perspective, the infant can be seen as an element that avoids further pathology by means of preventive psychoanalysis. Her psychoanalytical approach leads us to work with a chart of equivalences that refer to what is and what is not normal at a certain age. One can find where the libido has been stranded and the ways to unblock it.

To what extent does the proposal of a developmental line and the means to redirect that stranded libido through psychoanalytical therapy halt the possibility of starting a course of treatment that takes the subject’s desire as its core, regardless of age? If it were possible to take psychoanalysis as a preventive measure, wouldn’t that make it part of a pedagogy? Does providing the ego of the child with elements that aid in coping with the environment not make a child become obedient? I know that with every question raised here, there are many others that open new ones; however, for the purpose of this work, we will not follow these to the end. The interest is to articulate such questions within the same weave, and to show how Lacan would rethink this theory.

The fact, not less relevant, that mostly women work with children implies that this might be a more suitable task for this gender. Freud predicted that child psychoanalysis would be a field exclusively for women. Only a few male psychoanalysts have adventured their work with children. Among these, we find Donald Winnicott, whose thought has largely contributed to a better understanding of child development, mainly in terms of emotions and culture.

Donald Winnicott

Winnicott makes a unique proposal that joins concepts such as ‘holding’ and ‘handling’, ‘good-enough mother’, ‘the false self’, ‘fear of breakdown’, the ‘use’ of the psychoanalyst, hate in countertransference, a play theory, and probably his most known concepts, ‘the transitional object’ and ‘transitional space’. Lacan would take the all these concepts and theorize the objet petit a, which was influenced by Winnicott but is not linked conceptually to the transitional object.

Since play involves anxiety and attempts to elaborate traumatic situations, Winnicott correlates the importance of play with that of free association in the adult analysand. It is Winnicott who while distancing from his teacher, Melanie Klein, and the IPA’s principles, created another methodology with children, one that considers treatment even a few months after birth. Both his clinical practice and theory about transitional space came from this conceptual movement, which paradoxically, does not aim to be solved. Transitional play has an effect on the unconscious dynamic. The child builds a transitional space from a non-topological one.

Is it important to mention the characteristics of Winnicott’s transitional space; in other words, the paradoxical place where the child locates the transitional objects used in the game that allows a bridge to be built between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’. For Winnicott:

• The child assumes rights over the object.
• The object is affectionately cuddled, as well as excitedly loved and mutilated.
• It must never change.
• It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating, and if it be a feature, pure aggressiveness.
• It must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show vitality or reality of its own.
• It comes from without (according to the adult’s point of view), but not so from the point of view of the baby. Neither does it come from within, it is not a hallucination.
• Its fate is to be gradually decathected, so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. By this I mean that in health the transitional object does not ‘go inside’ nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression […]. It loses meaning. (Winnicott, 1971, p. 4)

This reference is important because the transitional space concept opens the possibility of a clinical dimension with children from a structural perspective. This perspective differs from Anna Freud’s ‘insight’ (showing the child what is unknown about his or her own unconscious), and from her approach to the external-internal dualism which conveys ‘impasses’.

Winnicott’s research does not focus on the object as such, but on the first possession, as well as on the intermediate zone between subjectivity and what the child perceives objectively. Winnicott named this first possession “not-me”. This is the first reference to differentiation and separation from the primordial object. The teddy-bear does not represent the object-mother, rather the object substitutes the mother’s absence while the child is being constituted as a separate entity from the object-mother. He separates by means of an object in his possession that is not a part of himself but that belongs to him.

He also pays special attention to the concept of ‘normality’, more evident in Anna Freud, which tends to educate the subject. When following Winnicott one cannot think of normality without subjectivity, and so it complicates any attempt to universalize subjective positions and it separates corporal measures from the symbolic building, which results in the symbolic exclusion from corporality. I will even venture to say that the first is cut across by the second, by the symbolic order. Lacan will radically develop his theory from this position.

Returning to Winnicott’s thought about ‘suspended normality’, he says:

Although from the purely physical standpoint any deviation from health may be taken to be abnormal, it does not follow that physical lowering of health due to emotional strain and stress is necessarily abnormal. This rather startling point of view requires elucidation… . A doctor who does not understand the process underlying such unwellness will think out a diagnosis and treat the illness as determined by physical causes.

(Winnicott, 2001, p. 309)

Including the subject’s history impacts the way we “read” a clinical session with a child or even with an adult. Winnicott takes Freud’s conception of psychic reality, which holds sufficient weight, so that we should reconsider the problem apart from closed discussions that focus on correct development and normality from a biological model.

It is also interesting to think about the tie that exists in children, according to Winnicott, between fantasy and anxiety. The importance of fantasies cannot be underestimated since they hold some sort of truth in themselves. Moving ahead onto a topic I will discuss in more detail, I can now state that fantasies are the material from which symptoms are made. This is why Freud initially got positive therapeutic results, since his patients would tell what they remembered that had happened.

We must not only read childhood experiences literally, because repression and forgotten fragments mix with fantasies in the retelling of a past story. In other words, fantasies cut through the past. So, fantasies are not stories without consequences; rather, they are the discourse that labels the way in which the subject reveals himself and the way his story relates to others and to his own history.

Winnicott uses ‘trauma’ and its relation with anxiety to exemplify the importance of fantasies.² Consequently, a life experience cannot produce significant effects if a subject has not (unconsciously) fantasized about that event, or if there has not been a traumatic experience linked to a representation, or if a meaningful representation from experience has not been built. Such thinking confirms that it is impossible to explain a child’s behavior without taking into account his fantasies. In his 1926 work Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud, 1925/2016), Freud would point out that in order for the outside world experiences to resonate within the child they must be tied to the ego through a prior to interiorization.

In relation to the notion of a prior mental structure that (Winnicott, 2001) developed in 1936 in “Appetite and Emotional Disorder”, he states that children, including newborn babies, possess a complex mental structure. From this point ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: perspective: the unfolding of a clinic
• 1 About psychoanalysis and other stories
• 2 The infantile and the child in Freudian theory
• 3 The Lacanian subject: notes for considering the place and function of the child in psychoanalysis
• 4 Language in analytical listening with children
• 5 Toward a topological articulation with the clinical praxis
• 6 What is a child-specter in psychoanalytical clinic?