Against Understanding, Volume 2

Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key

Bruce Fink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134663972
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Against Understanding, Volume 2, casts a spotlight on the status of case studies in psychoanalysis, which are commonly used to illustrate clinicians' expertise and mastery rather than patients' actual itineraries. When a case is presented, the complex, unwieldy, and often self-contradictory material of a therapeutic trajectory is often vastly oversimplified in view of producing a linear narrative that seems perfectly to fit the parameters of a practitioner's preferred theoretical framework.

Bruce Fink attempts to eschew the appearance of "mastery" in assembling clinical material and in discussing his approach to practice and theory in the myriad case histories and vignettes included in both Volumes 1 & 2 of Against Understanding. To counterbalance the kind of paring down of material usually carried out to make cases conform to a particular paradigm, the case write-ups presented here include much of the "raw data" so often omitted: verbatim quotes from patients about their lives, backgrounds, dreams, and fantasies; and details about the many obscure, vacillating, and unruly phases of treatment. Fink hopes thereby to allow readers to form their own opinions about the well-foundedness or unsoundness of his formulations, interpretations, and interventions.

This second part of a two-volume collection of papers, interviews, and case studies provides the reader with hundreds of illustrations of Lacanian theory in practice, and will be essential for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and counselors.

COMMENTARYOn Clinical Practice

1

ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS

According to Lacan (2006b), Pascal invented game theory with the notion that the ante staked in a game of chance must be viewed as lost from the moment one agrees to play. Whatever amount one agrees to gamble should be considered a pure loss right from the outset, hence the advice sometimes given to gamblers not to bring more money with them to the casino than they are comfortable losing, given how likely it is that they will lose all of it. This well-meaning advice is obviously quite futile in the age of ATMs and credit cards, as anyone on a losing streak can easily obtain more money to wager.

Rather than openly declare buying and selling on the stock market as tantamount to gambling—that is, as an arena in which one should not wager more money than one is comfortable losing—politicians and financial advisors have increasingly dissimulated the gambling aspect of the stock market behind the notion of “investing.” They have touted the idea that conservative investing over the long term can bring in a decent, fairly consistent percentage—not as nice as Bernie Madoff’s too-good-to-be-true, consistently positive returns,¹ naturally, but better than those achievable virtually anywhere else, whether in a savings account, a certificate of deposit, or government bonds.

As company pensions have been progressively eliminated in the United States and putting away money for retirement has increasingly become an individual endeavor even in France, the speculative nature of the stock market has been downplayed and the notion of conservative long-term investing trumpeted far and wide. Such tactics are necessary if politicians are to make people forget about soon-to-be bankrupt Social Security administrations, where their retirement income was to be doled out by the benevolent state, and rely instead on personal efforts to secure financial solvency beyond their working years. Diversification (a.k.a. asset allocation, based on “modern portfolio theory”) has been advertised as the cure-all for stock-market gyrations; and governments, in concert with financial advisers of all ilks, have attempted to convince the public that the market can be mastered through careful, conservative, diversified investments in raw materials, healthcare, technology, and yes, even banks—investments that might well be hedged to offset risk using puts, calls, straddles, strangles, three-way collars, and the like.

According to some, the boom-and-bust business cycles Marx exposed as endemic to capitalism in the nineteenth century have been tamed and contained. BusinessWeek, a well-known financial magazine in the United States, spent much of the last decade announcing the advent of what its authors referred to as the “New Economy,” by which they meant an economic system immune to serious downturns and crashes.

All of that has turned to dust in the past few years, but the Pascalian truth that one should begin one’s “investing” with the notion that whatever one stakes should be viewed as always already lost has been one-upped or raised to the second (or even higher) power by the widespread use of leverage in financial instruments. Ever more exchange-traded funds (ETFs), available like ordinary stocks on the NYSE Euronext, offer double or even triple the gains made by various asset classes or market indexes, not to mention double- or triple-sized losses. When investors purchase such funds on margin—that is, with borrowed money based on the purported value of their other paper assets, as so many have done over the past 15 years—they can very easily lose considerably more than they anted up. Those who dabble in certain kinds of futures and options should obviously be informed of the risk.

This is also true in the real estate market, where, at least in the United States, it was quite possible until recently to buy a home with no money down, only to find the value of the house decline by as much as 40 percent within a year. Mortgage holders often lost far more money in a few short months than they could have hoped to earn in a decade.

Were we to follow Pascal, we would be inclined to replace the ubiquitous formula found at the bottom of virtually every mutual-fund prospectus these days—“Past results are no guarantee of future returns,” an understatement if ever there was one—with the Pascalian warning: “Expect to lose as much as you put in. And, if you are buying on margin, expect to lose more.”

Life Is a Gamble

Pascal suggests that life itself is a game of chance, a gamble, and that those of us who are alive have always already anted up (on est déjà engagé, the game here involving God); or, as Heidegger might have put it, we are thrown, cast into the game whether we like it or not.

This is where Pascal intersects psychoanalysis, for analysts postulate that we must reckon from the outset with the existence of an inevitable, structural loss of whatever we stake in life.² We bend our bodies and minds to the language and conventions of the Other; in conforming to our parents’ and other elders’ wishes and submitting to their prohibitions, we undergo an irrevocable loss of something early on in life: loss of the primordial object, the mother, as some put it, or more generally speaking loss of jouissance—that is, satisfaction related to close contact with the primary caretaker who looks after so many of our most basic bodily functions and who in the best of cases also provides love and warmth.

Why do we conform and submit more or less willingly? In the hope of gaining something—recognition, acknowledgement, love, care—and/or of staving off something: abandonment or rejection. Most of us, even many of us who undergo an extensive psychoanalysis, keep trying our whole lives long to recover at least a little bit of what we feel we lost and were inadequately compensated for.³

We feel we made a colossal sacrifice—we gave up what was most precious to us—and got little or nothing positive in return.

One of the fundamental facets of neurosis is, I would argue, the ever-repeated attempt to get back something that is irretrievable. It is irretrievable in large part because we never really had it in the first place, at least not in the way we think we had it: we never really had an exclusive, fusional relationship with our primary caretakers, for example. Nevertheless, looking back on earlier times, we may perhaps believe we did.

The appeal of getting something for nothing—whether in a store, in a sweepstake, or through successful stock-market bets—would seem to be structurally related to the sacrifice we feel we had to make and for which the large majority of us feel we were never adequately rewarded. We believe we gave something up for nothing, that we got nothing in return. To our minds, compensation can never come too late, nor can it ever be too great, knowing no particular measure.

Being so fortunate as to achieve spectacular gains on the stock market would be no reason to exit the game. There is no clear stopping point, since there is a fundamental incommensurability between what we gain, which is calculated within a signifying system of numbers, and the enjoyment or jouissance we lost. What we lost, after all, was priceless! (For everything else, there’s you know what …) No specific number can ever correspond to the loss we incurred. No amount of money or goods can ever compensate for the sacrifice we made, for that loss is essentially incalculable and unquantifiable.

Should we have the misfortune to rack up losses instead of gains on the stock market, those losses will ineluctably aggravate the ever-present reminders of the earliest loss. This makes certain investors all the more desperate in their determination to make good their losses and encourages still more speculative behavior.

Others may become so disgusted that they “cut their losses” and invest what little they have been able to salvage in real estate. This happened in both France and the United States, for example, after the stock-market crash in 2000, especially among those who had entered the stock market for the first time in the decade leading up to the new millennium. They left the bourses, their finances in tatters, looking for something solid, bricks and mortar, so-called tangible assets. Few ever completely give up their belief that it is possible to make good the loss, if nothing else by playing the lottery.

One could, I believe, fruitfully characterize a good deal of trading behavior in terms of the psychoanalytic theory of the lost object (see Fink, 2010a). Hence, perhaps, financial institutions’ concern with taking the human element out of the equation and having computers do at least some portion of the trading. Computers presumably are not trying to get back some jouissance that was lost at the outset of their existence—jouissance is not for machines, even in their first bloom of youth when they are initially programmed. But then, they were nevertheless programmed by human beings—to do what? The same things human beings find themselves doing so “irrationally,” as people say, failing to note the logic inherent in the ever-renewed attempt to make good the losses humans feel they have incurred.

Letting Go of the Loss

One simple way of stating the goal of psychoanalysis is: to let go of the loss, to stop desperately trying to recover something that is irrecoverable. In a word, to lose a loss; or, to use a business metaphor, to stop throwing good money after bad.

Why anyone in their right mind would pay for an analysis, why anyone would pay to lose something, is a fair question, it seems to me; but I would cite Freud (1958b) when he says that “nothing in life is so expensive as illness,” neurotic illness in particular. Indeed, you can spend an awful lot more trying to get back what you think you lost than it would cost you to stop worrying about and dwelling on that loss by doing an analysis!

Now, just as few financial advisers tell prospective investors that they could easily lose everything and should even be prepared to do so—those advisers that do probably do not stay in business for very long—few psychoanalysts tell prospective analysands that they are going to have to give up what is currently the source of their greatest jouissance in life and find something else. For although they may experience their loss as anything but enjoyable, their attachment to it or fixation on it constitutes a symptom, a symptom that secretly seeks to make good that loss. All too simplistically stated, symptoms are ways of deriving satisfaction from misery related to loss, and it is this satisfaction in misery or self-pity that must be given up in the course of an analysis.

This particular form of satisfaction—this jouissance in suffering—must be relinquished, sacrificed, or “castrated,” as we analysts put it in our crude lingo. Losing a loss means giving up the misery, letting go of the jouissance-laden fixation on loss that leads us to nourish grudges and forever enumerate to ourselves and others our grievances against all those who we feel have deprived, blocked, ignored, belittled, or otherwise harmed us (including, in certain cases, the whole of creation).

Few analysts are so bold or foolhardy as to announce at the outset of the work with a potential analysand that in the course of the coming work, the analysand will undergo castration. Those who are will likely find that their waiting rooms quickly empty out. Well, they might, of course, end up exclusively with a clientele of so-called masochistic patients.

Three Clinical Vignettes

With these general notions in mind, let me now present three clinical vignettes that illustrate how symptoms are related to loss and how money affects analytic work with symptoms. The names and other identifying information about the analysands discussed here have naturally been changed, and myriad details have been left out in the interest of focusing on these specific facets of the cases.

Making the Other Pay

The first vignette concerns a young man who is paralyzed, in a sense, by his own wealth. I shall refer to him here with the pseudonym Jeffrey. Although Jeffrey had aspired for many years to be a rock musician, nothing came of his practicing and composing once his father reluctantly agreed to let him try to make it as a musician. As long as his father opposed his career path, Jeffrey pursued it ardently; as soon as his father gave in, Jeffrey lost traction. Instead, he resigned himself to working in a semi-professional capacity at a fairly low-paying job. This changed abruptly when his father died some years ago, leaving Jeffrey a couple of million dollars.

Jeffrey managed to spend some of the money almost immediately by buying an apartment, but he has felt unable to travel—something he did quite a bit before that—or use much of the money in any other way. Jeffrey refuses to spend any time learning how his money is invested, his father having set up a trust for him prior to his death, and he avoids learning anything about investing in general, feeling that the money is not really his to do with as he pleases.

At the same time, having the money in his name has made Jeffrey unable to accomplish any kind of work—whether musical or other. On the one hand, he feels he deserved to receive the money since his father, in his view, treated him badly during the father’s lifetime; on the other hand, he realizes in some way that he himself had been unkind and unjust to his father for decades.

Jeffrey’s greatest satisfaction in life came from provoking his father by doing the exact opposite of what his father wanted. His father owned a company and wanted Jeffrey to study business and work with him there, but Jeffrey selected a field that seemed to be of absolutely no interest to his father: rock music. Everything he did seemed designed to thumb his nose at his father, and to be sure that he was really and truly thumbing his nose in just the right way, he needed to ensure that his actions truly annoyed his father (not to mention other men who came to represent his father for him as time went on).

Jeffrey’s complaint upon coming to analysis was that everyone had wronged him: his father had wrongfully taken him away from his mother not long after his parents divorced, and his mother had wrongfully allowed Jeffrey to go live with his father. Jeffrey had done nothing to land himself in his current predicament, paralyzed and “depressed”—depression often resulting, in my experience, from the fact that one hates everyone, oneself included, and cannot face or come to grips with the hatred that inhabits one.

Jeffrey’s most general concern for many years could be characterized as attempting to make his parents pay for what they did to him. Indeed, this is an incredibly widespread facet of neurosis: making everyone pay for what happened to us, as well as f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Commentary
• On Clinical Practice
• On Reading Lacan
• On Translation
• Cases
• Critique
• References
• Index