Against Understanding, Volume 1

Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key

Bruce Fink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134516063
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

2014 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize winner for Best Anthology

Against Understanding, Volume 1, explores how the process of understanding (which can be seen to be part and parcel of the Lacanian dimension of the imaginary) reduces the unfamiliar to the familiar, transforms the radically other into the same, and renders practitioners deaf to what is actually being said in the analytic setting. Running counter to the received view in virtually all of contemporary psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Bruce Fink argues that the current obsession with understanding – on the patient's part as well as on the clinician's – is excessive insofar as the most essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment is change.

Using numerous case studies and clinical vignettes, Fink illustrates that the ability of clinicians to detect the unconscious through slips of the tongue, slurred speech, mixed metaphors, and other instances of "misspeaking" is compromised by an emphasis on understanding the why and wherefore of patients' symptoms and behavior patterns. He shows that the dogged search for conscious knowledge about those symptoms and patterns, by patients and practitioners alike, often thwart rather than foster change, which requires ongoing access to the unconscious and extensive work with it.

In this first part of a two-volume collection of papers, many of which have never before appeared in print, Bruce Fink provides ample evidence of the curative powers of speech that operate without the need for any sort of explicit, articulated knowledge. Against Understanding, Volume 1 brings Lacanian theory alive in a way that is unique, demonstrating the therapeutic force of a technique that relies far more on the virtues of speech in the analytic setting than on a conscious realization about anything whatsoever on patients' parts. This volume will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors.

COMMENTARY

On Clinical Practice

1

AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

Why Understanding Should Not Be Viewed as an Essential Aim of Psychoanalytic Treatment

The primary goal of psychoanalysis with neurotics is not understanding but change. Psychoanalysis with neurotics, and with many of the people classified in contemporary psychotherapeutic settings as borderline, is concerned with getting people to say things that have a major impact on their psychical economies. Should we, as clinicians, be unable to guide them to say such things on their own, psychoanalysis is about our saying things to them that have a life-changing effect on them. In the best of cases, there is considerable give and take involved: we work from each other’s cues and the analyst or the analysand ends up saying something that has a serious effect on the latter, the authorship and meaning of which are often not entirely clear.

We need not affect analysands’ understanding or self-understanding to change how they experience the world, life, relationships, and their own impulses. Our goal is not to alter the way an analysand observes and checks his own behavior or fantasy life, but rather, to give an example, to radically transform a fantasy a man has had for decades about a sexual act he finds repugnant—being forced to perform fellatio on a guy bigger and stronger than himself—such that it is no longer at the core of his thoughts during sex or masturbation, such that it no longer plagues him in everyday life, such that it disappears, never to return.

Our goal is not to try to directly change the way he thinks about this fantasy, so that he says to himself, “Oh, here comes that repulsive fantasy again—but I have to realize I have the fantasy because I'm fixated on what happened with a guy I knew in my neighborhood when I was a boy, so I must try to turn it off before it turns me on.” The goal in psychoanalytic work from a Lacanian perspective is not to cultivate an observing ego in the analysand (see, for example, Lacan, 1967–68) so that he can self-consciously catch himself in the act of having this fantasy that has bothered him for dozens of years, driving him to drug and alcohol addiction; the goal is not to lead him to contextualize it for himself, consciously downplay its importance, or talk himself out of being excited by it. The goal is to get at its root by uncovering all the early childhood material holding it in place and everything that has since been grafted onto it—which involves dredging all this material up and bringing it to speech.

Speaking this material aloud to someone else is not the same as understanding why the fantasy came into being. Understanding may at times accompany change, but it is not a necessary prerequisite to change and may in many cases constitute an obstacle to it. Bringing things to speech with another person is what is essential. As Lacan (2001b, pp. 139–40) put it,

It is false to think that an analysis comes to a successful dénouement because the analysand consciously realizes something. […] What is at stake is not, in fact, a move to consciousness but, rather, to speech […] and that speech must be heard by someone.¹

For the analysand, exploring all this material may well be slow, painful, and anxiety-provoking at times, but when it is done the fantasy itself often disappears altogether. This happened for the aforementioned analysand after about three years of analytic work; but as his forced fellatio fantasy had been plaguing him for about 25 years, almost driving him to suicide on several occasions, his relief was considerable.

We talked about countless other things during those three years, of course, but we nevertheless devoted considerable time to embarrassing, humiliating memories that the analysand was initially loath to discuss. Before coming to me, he had spent many years in psychotherapy and analysis with several different practitioners who presumably preferred to focus on the present rather than probe the past, and the fantasies that disturbed and depressed him had persisted until the day we discussed a dream he had.

In the dream, he was in a shower. When I asked him to associate to that shower, he recalled a childhood scene, one he had never mentioned to anyone before, that he had perhaps indeed repressed up until the moment we discussed it in session. As a preadolescent, he had once felt forced to perform fellatio on an older boy in the shower; this older boy had remained prominent in his fantasies for decades, and we had discussed him often, but the childhood scene had never before come to mind.

Up until that moment, the analysand had always believed that he was fundamentally perverted and flawed for having wanted to do such things at so young an age. (He felt the same way about other sexual activities from his past as well.) Suddenly remembering the childhood shower scene during the session, he recalled that he had not wanted to be there, that he had not wanted to do what he was asked to do by this older, stronger boy. Although he had initially been curious, he had ended up feeling constrained and physically compelled to do it. A week later the analysand triumphantly reported that what had happened with that boy had been “at the core of my sexual fantasies, and now it’s not.” Period.

Did the analysand realize that he had been thinking of himself as a heinous criminal for having engaged in this childhood sexual activity, and others as well, and perhaps wanted to see himself as a criminal rather than accepting the fact that it takes two to tango? Did he realize that he perhaps preferred to see himself as a criminal in this situation than in earlier Oedipal scenarios, displacing his sense of guilt from the latter to the former? To my mind, it is not terribly important whether he realized these things or not, or whether he associated our work on this particular childhood scene with our previous work on other childhood scenes. Understanding what happened, why it happened, and how it changed is all well and good, as long as it does not get in the way of the change itself. Understanding should not be taken as an end in itself since it can serve as a resistance. In the case of this analysand, what was important was that he stopped being plagued by events from his past, and felt that a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders; moreover, the energy he had been expending to carry that burden suddenly proved to be available for other life activities.

Analysands rarely arrive at such new libidinal positions without going through a good deal of discomfort and embarrassment at having to talk about sexual fantasies at great length and in excruciating detail—sometimes again and again and yet again—until interpretations (which need not in any way provide meaning, as we shall see) that are transformative are alighted upon. But there is only so much discomfort and embarrassment we can spare them while still getting them to say all the things they absolutely must say in order for movement to occur. For it is only by putting all of this into words that lasting change can be brought about. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that the analysand can make progress without ever fully exploring such formative childhood events and fantasies, for we would then be doing our analysands a fundamental disservice.

Lacanian-oriented work with neurotics—let me emphasize again that I am not talking here about work with psychotics (a different approach is, I believe, required with the latter; see Fink, 2007, Chapter 10)—is not about providing meaning but, rather, about putting the unspeakable into words. It is about saying what has always seemed unsayable (see, for example, Lacan, 1971–72), unthinkable, unacceptable, and/or unimaginable to the analysand. It is about saying what the analysand has always preferred not to admit to herself; it is about saying all those thoughts and feelings that she wishes did not even exist.

Saying all those things is not the same as understanding them, whether for the analysand or the analyst. One has to say them, first and foremost. Understanding—if it ever comes at all—can wait. Analysis need not provide meaning: for meaning is something the ego recrystallizes around, the ego using meaning to construct a story about who one is and why one does what one does. In a word, meaning serves the purpose of rationalization, which keeps the unconscious at bay. An emphasis by the analyst on meaning and understanding often leads the analysand to become very adept at finding psychological explanations of her behavior but does little or nothing to foster change in the analysand, thoroughgoing change such that she is no longer even tempted to feel or act as she has in the past.

Part of the analyst’s job is to take meaning apart, to undermine understanding by showing that far from explaining everything, it is always partial, not total, and leaves many things out. Just as the Zen master’s work is premised on the notion that enlightenment does not stem from understanding but is, rather, a state of being, the psychoanalyst realizes that the analysand’s search for understanding is part and parcel of the modern scientific subject’s misguided search for mastery of nature and of himself through knowledge (see Lacan, 1988a, Chapter 1). The analytic project, by contrast, involves reminding analysands—although not explicitly—that they are not masters in their own homes and that part of psychic health is giving up the obsession with mastery.

Our goal is to explore the unconscious, to bring as much of the unconscious to speech as possible, to get the analysand to hear himself say aloud all of the unthinkable, unacceptable things he has thought, felt, and wished for. However, this does not allow the analysand to somehow master his unconscious; to believe that it does would be to fall in with the analysand’s desire to be completely in control of everything he says and does, to never do anything he has not planned to do and never say anything he might later regret having said. Although psychoanalysis clearly aims at the establishment of a new relationship between the ego and the unconscious whereby the ego no longer rejects and represses so many things, it most certainly does not seek to make the unconscious into the slave of an egoic master!

Hence, there is no need for us to summarize the work that has been done in the course of the session at the end of each one, emphasizing the meaningful connections that we see in it. We are there to shake up meaning and to remind analysands, though not in so many words, that they do not know what they are saying because they are inhabited by different voices or discourses that are often competing and contradictory. Our work “is designed to make waves” (Lacan, 1976, p. 35), to rock the boat, and not to smooth things over.

I can, of course, think of many examples of crisis situations my neurotic analysands have experienced where I definitely did not want to make more waves than were already lapping up on the shores of their lives. I am obviously not saying that we should seek to rock the boat in every single session with every single neurotic; however, most of the time, when the work is proceeding apace, I find that there is no need to summarize or draw all the threads together. With the analysand I mentioned earlier, we spent some time discussing his associations to the dream, including his recollection of the childhood scene with the older boy in the shower, and I ended the session when he said, commenting on some stuff on the floor of the shower in the dream that he rubbed off with his foot and watched go down the drain, “It’s as if all that were going down the drain—not just gone, better than gone, sparkly clean underneath.”

I did not see any need to state the obvious, that the analysand’s wish was that such scenes had never happened in the first place, that his childhood had been innocent of all sexual exploration and knowledge. His feeling was that all of that was going down the drain, so why not just let it go down the drain? I ended the session there (practicing, as I do, the variable-length session), with no explanations of any kind, and that is precisely what happened: it all went down the drain.

In doing so—in a way fitting for one so obsessive, even if the “stuff” on the shower floor was whitish, not brown—it stirred things up and generated new material. Without our knowing that it was connected, one of the topics that the analysand broached in subsequent sessions was his staying home from school starting at some point as a boy, pretending to be ill. When I asked for more details about when he started to skip school, it turned out it was at the same time that he felt roped into sexual experiences with this older boy whom he would occasionally see at school. The analysand had been a straight-A student up until that time, but became a terrible student thereafter, eventually dropping out, getting a GED many years later, and struggling with college, which he could never finish.

The abrupt change in his relationship to school seemed to have been due, at least in part, to that childhood sexual experience; and his failure to complete his bachelor’s for decades had clearly held him back professionally. Even in his forties he would often want to play hooky from work, feigning illness, without really knowing why. His attitude toward academic work had begun to change quite recently in the analysis, but it had remained fraught with anxiety. After our discussion of the shower scene it changed more rapidly, and he stopped dreading going to work and ceased investing copious quantities of energy in thinking of ways to avoid it or be excused from it.

What I find in most such cases is that the analysand sooner or later reports having more energy or, in response to a question I ask about wor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Frontmatter Chapter1
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Commentary
• Cases
• Critique
• References
• Index