Radical Psychoanalysis

An essay on free-associative praxis

Barnaby B. Barratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138954847
• eBook ISBN: 9781317355960
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

2020 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) book award winner!

Only by the method of free-association could Sigmund Freud have demonstrated how human consciousness is formed by the repression of thoughts and feelings that we consider dangerous. Yet today most therapists ignore this truth about our psychic life. This book offers a critique of the many brands of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that have forgotten Freud's revolutionary discovery.

Barnaby B. Barratt offers a fresh and compelling vision of the structure and function of the human psyche, building on the pioneering work of theorists such as André Green and Jean Laplanche, as well as contemporary deconstruction, feminism, and liberation philosophy. He explores how 'drive' or desire operates dynamically between our biological body and our mental representations of ourselves, of others, and of the world we inhabit. This dynamic vision not only demonstrates how the only authentic freedom from our internal imprisonments comes through free-associative praxis, it also shows the extent to which other models of psychoanalysis (such as ego-psychology, object-relations, self-psychology and interpersonal-relations) tend to stray disastrously from Freud's original and revolutionary insights. This is a vision that understands the central issues that imprison our psychic lives - the way in which the reflections of consciousness are based on the repression of our innermost desires, the way in which our erotic vitality is so often repudiated, and the way in which our socialization oppressively stifles our human spirit.

Radical Psychoanalysis restores to the discipline of psychoanalysis the revolutionary impetus that has so often been lost. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, mental health practitioners and students and academics with an interest in the history of psychoanalysis.

1
INTRODUCTORY NOTE

 

 

 

 

 

Das Jungsche Argument ‘ad captandam benevolentiam’ ruht auf der allzu optimistischen Voraussetzung, als hätte sich der Fortschritt der Menschheit, der Kultur, des Wissens, stets in ungebrochener Linie vollzogen. Als hätte es niemals Epigonen gegeben, Reaktionen und Restaurationen nach jeder Revolution, Geschlechter, die durch einen Rückschritt auf den Erwerb einer früheren Generation verzichtet hätten.

The Jungian argument, which he makes ‘in order to gain goodwill,’ rests on the overly optimistic assumption that human progress in culture and in knowledge follows an unbroken line; yet after every revolution come the epigones—those who react against its advances, refusing its achievements and attempting to restore previous conditions.

Sigmund Freud, 1914

The sentiments expressed in the above quotation set the mandate for this book. Writing a “history of the psychoanalytic movement” (when his discipline was barely two decades old), Sigmund Freud’s 1914 commentary is directed against Carl Jung’s claim to have “corrected” Freud’s innovations and thus, by abandoning “unwelcome discoveries,” to render the discipline more appealing to the “masses.” He could equally have directed his remarks to Alfred Adler’s revisionism. And, were he alive today, might he not offer similar injunctions against so many of the “corrected” versions of psychoanalysis contemporarily available? Evidently, Freud was acutely aware that, in certain respects, human “progress” can go backward, and specifically that his troubling revelations about the human condition might well be discarded or repudiated by those who might claim to be his successors. Today, the history of the psychoanalytic movement spans well over a century and touches, to greater or lesser degree, every continent north of Antarctica. The movement is now conspicuously heterogenous, boasting all sorts of “progressive developments,” many of which are notably in conflict with each other (clinical and theoretical disagreements that are rarely articulated clearly or cleanly debated), and many of which treat Freud’s innovations merely for their iconic value. In this context, does it not make sense to return to an assessment of Freud’s most “unwelcome discoveries”?

There can surely be no question what Freud’s most troubling revelation is— namely, that the “I” of self-consciousness is not the center of our psychic life, never the master of its own endeavors. Rather, the operation of self-consciousness is perennially self-deluding. The “I” that reflects on itself actively eliminates, evicts or excludes, meanings which are abhorrent to itself, yet which impact upon its own functioning. In a specific sense, we are condemned to live in a dream (often, a nightmare of a dream). Freud discovered this—and I believe he could only have discovered this—by diligent immersion in the method of free-association. It is this method that uniquely discloses, and to a certain extent undoes, the repressiveness of human self-consciousness.

This book is a cri de coeur—a plea for a return to Freud’s originality, in the interests of a wisdom that has been, over the course of the past century, obfuscated and all but lost. There have been previous appeals for a return to these disciplinary origins, perhaps the most flamboyant of which is inscribed in the theorizing of Jacques Lacan and the Lacanians. As is now well known, the Lacanian enterprise systematically critiques the versions of “psychoanalysis” propounded by the ego psychologists, the Kleinians, the object relations and attachment theorists, the interpersonal and relational psychologists, and so on. But this book is not a Lacanian thesis, although I believe it owes much—in spirit, even if not to the letter— to the writings of distinguished “post-Lacanians” such as André Green, Jean Laplanche, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray.

The Lacanian plea for a return to Freud constituted a grand exercise in theory-building. The structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the phonetic and morphological investigations of Roman Jakobson, the anthropological study of communication and exchange systems promulgated by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others, as well as a significant exposure to the surrealist movement, were all brought to bear on an effort to reread and thus elucidate the contemporary significance of Freudian theories. It would be absurd to hold opinions wholly for or wholly against this endeavor. As much as I have learnt from the Lacanian enterprise, I have also offered some criticisms of the Lacanian oeuvre. But in this book, I am not interested in the construction of grand theoretical edifices. Indeed, I shall argue that there are ways in which Freud himself, especially after 1914, somewhat betrayed the essence of his own most unwelcome discoveries by focusing on the elaboration of various objectivistic theories of the functioning of the “mental apparatus.” The topographic depiction of mental spaces (which was formulated well before 1914), the elaboration of object-relations theories after 1914, the speculations of 1920, and the subsequent structural-functional conceptualizations (of ego, id and superego), all variously present Freud’s discipline more as a series of objectivistic theoretical endeavors, and less as a radical innovation of method. In addition to Freud’s major efforts—from 1914 to the end of the 1920s—to formulate an objectivistic model of the human psyche, we have to contend with the theoretical splintering of the psychoanalytic movement that began in the 1930s. Whether one considers this diversification in terms of the conflicts between the Vienna group (Anna Freud and what later became ego psychology), the London group (Melanie Klein and the movement that followed her), or the Budapest group (from Sándor Ferenczi, Sándor Radó, and many others, to Michael Balint and the eventual coherence of an “independent” group of object-relations theorists), or in terms of the conflicts between structural-functional or ego psychology, Kleinianism along with other object-relational formulations, and the social or interpersonal movement (which began in the United States), the debates are, at least initially, over models of the “mental apparatus” and not clinical practices.

What if we focus on method? This is a focus that permits us to sidestep many of the issues of grand theorizing, since the method was decisively practiced prior to 1914 (let alone the 1930s). Such a focus must comprise an exploration of the method of inquiry by which the “I” of self-consciousness comes to know, or at least to have some sort of intimation of meanings that are impacting it, yet are or have been in some way eliminated, evicted, or excluded from its purview—that is, we must ask how self-consciousness can possibly come to be aware of its own repressiveness. Thus, it is precisely the purpose of this book to explore the significance of the method of free-association as the uniquely derepressive process that thereby demonstrates the conditions of repression.¹

The free-associative method that teaches us about the repressiveness of our self-consciousness is—as Freud stated unequivocally in 1914—“the cornerstone” on which rests the entire adventure of psychoanalytic inquiry. As Freud knew well, what this method teaches us concerns the unconsciousness of a psyche radically different from the ideas about an “unconscious” that had preoccupied philosophical speculation for many decades prior to his discoveries. Freud also knew (although more ambiguously or ambivalently) that a mode of inquiry in which self-consciousness divulges its own repressiveness makes “unwelcome discoveries” that are never going to be equivalent to all the findings that empirical experimentation in the behavioral and neurosciences might make about psychological and neurological mechanisms that are nonconscious. In short, the free-associative method is unique in its power to reveal the “repressed unconscious” (that is, the repressiveness of self-consciousness). That neither logical argumentation nor empirical research can address this “unconscious” should not bother the psycho analytic practitioner one iota. This is the thesis to be argued herein.

Of course, this raises the central question as to what is this “unconscious,” if indeed it is a living reality of our being-in-the-world and not a figment of the patient’s imagination (that is to say, not an artifact of the method facilitated for the patient by the psychoanalyst). In this context, I will argue that free-associative method is not merely an epistemological procedure, designed to arrive at what Wilfred Bion might have called a knowing about the unconscious. Rather, it is an ontological and ethical process by which self-consciousness opens itself experientially—erotically and existentially—to meanings that are other and also that are otherwise than those it owns, or could own, upon reflection.

As I intend to demonstrate, the notions of the other and the otherwise are essential to an understanding of the power of the free-associative method. As the process of free-associative discourse deconstructs the law and order of representationality (within which the reflectivity of self-consciousness is constituted), meanings that are other than those that self-consciousness represented to itself become available. These meanings that were previously repressed (or arguably, deeply suppressed) can be translated into the representational languages (thoughts and imagery) familiar to self-consciousness. In this respect, they are meanings of an other text. However, free-associative discourse is far more powerful than can be explained in terms of the operations of translatability (from repressed or suppressed ideas or wishes into those that can be self-consciously articulated). For the method also opens self-consciousness to impulses or pulsations from within us that are untranslatable in terms of the languages of representationality. Free-association opens self-consciousness to be able to listen to enigmatic messages, from within the depths and the ground of our being-in-the-world. This is a meaningfulness that is otherwise than that which can be represented—otherwise than textuality. Such messages are of our embodied experience—our libidinality, by another name—and this is why the unwelcome discoveries of free-associative discourse led Freud immediately to the troubling revelation the significance of our erotic embodiment in all of the everyday operations of our psychic life.

Because these early insights—adumbrated approximately between the mid-1890s and the advent of the First World War—have so regularly been “corrected,” obfuscated or relinquished, in the subsequent history of the psychoanalytic movement, it is precisely the mandate of this book to focus on the free-associative method, and the erotically and existentially embodied discourse that comprise the liberatory potential of psychoanalytic inquiry.

2
WHAT IS RADICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS?

… eine entscheidende Neuorientierung in Welt und Wissenschaft angebahnt ist
…
… a critical new direction in the world and in science is open to us …

Sigmund Freud, 1915/1916–1917

This book explores and advocates psychoanalytic praxis as the healing science of human self-consciousness and our lived experience.² By a close examination of the method of free-associative thinking and speaking, I will explain why such praxis indeed comprises “a critical new direction in the world and in science.” It will be argued that psychoanalysis, if championed as free-associative praxis, is more wild, more critical, more erotically corporeal, more mystical yet existentially pertinent, and more powerful as a critique of contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic arrangements, than has hitherto been fully realized.

Each of these salient terms (praxis, healing, science, self-consciousness, lived experience, the ideological constitution of a “world,” and indeed “psychoanalysis”) will require critical discussion in order for us to understand the uniquely radical features of psychoanalytic discourse in relation to psyche, the human bodymind (the “soul” of our aliveness). Indeed, at the heart of this book is an effort to show how psychoanalysis, in its radicality as free-associative praxis, challenges our conventional ideas about what it means to be human. Such is the purpose herein. In a sense, this chapter merely explicates what any lived experience of psychoanalytic discourse tells us—or should tell us, if the process is conducted authentically—about the human condition. Yet, it also argues for the prerogatives of psychoanalytic method or praxis, as contrasted with much of what today passes as “psychoanalysis” in the guise of “psychoanalytically informed” or “psychoanalytically oriented” theory and therapeutic practice. In the latter sense, this chapter is a manifesto for radical psychoanalysis or, at least, for a reradicalized approach to the discipline.

It might seem perplexing that a field of endeavor that has been in existence since some time in the 1890s should require a manifesto thirteen decades later. After all, the genre of a manifesto denotes a declarative argument that is to be made— a polemic, the issuance of which typically indicates a hope for some future eventuation, rather than an agonizing reappraisal of the significance of discoveries made over a century ago. Yet in a special sense, this manifesto is both revival and proclamation. In order to reactivate the revolutionary dimension of Freud’s vision, it invokes Freud’s seminal disclosure of an approach to the interiority of each human being that is praxis—as a method for understanding-by-changing the order of our lived experience. Thus, what is advocated here is radical psychoanalysis as a discipline significantly different from, and in some ways profoundly contrary to, from much of what is currently presented under the rubric of “psychoanalysis.”

In this chapter, the notion of radicality has a threefold implication. Etymologically, it can simply mean to go to the roots of something, to address the heart and soul of the matter—and this is indeed what is intended here. However, in this sense, many fundamentalist religious movements would be classified as radical; whereas many supposedly leftist political initiatives (notably, the liberalism of social democratic organizations) would probably not. In the context of psychoanalysis, the radical rekindling of the discipline that is advanced in this book is grounded on the recognition that the free-associative method has a powerful potential for the critique of all modalities of fundamentalism, fascism, and fanaticism (indeed, all the ideologies and hegemonies of domination that infuse our intrapsychic, interpersonal, cultural, and socioeconomic lives). Moreover, this radicality involves an appreciation of the human condition that exceeds the palliative or reformist possibilities of liberalism, and that contests the seemingly limitless scansion of utopian imagination. The heart and soul of psychoanalysis is not only radical, but revolutionary. Thus, radicality here implies: (1) a return to the roots, which are those of method or praxis; (2) a leftist vision of change, which emerges from the discipline’s contributions to the critique of ideology; and (3) the awareness of an anti-ideological momentum that is revolutionary.

What is revolutionary about psychoanalysis is to be discovered and rediscovered in every moment of the passage of free-associative thinking and speaking—namely, that the self-consciousness of our being-in-the-world is never identical with what it thinks and takes itself to be. Psychoanalytic experience, as the praxis of free-associative method, demonstrates that the living and lived experience of the human condition is dynamically nonidentical or interminably contradictorious. As Freud himself suggested several times (but nevertheless perhaps did not fully appreciate, as will be discussed subsequently), this discovery implies a revolution, a great blow to human narcissism, in a way analogous to that delivered by Nicolaus Copernicus. The Copernican revolution decentered our planet. After the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium in 1543, there could be no restoration of a comfortingly geocentric universe, or indeed of the conviction that the universe has any center anywhere (excepting perhaps as the alpha and omega, the absolute totality that we choose to ascribe to G, who actually now appears to be playing dice). The Freudian revolution decenters by unveiling the perpetually deferred and displaced condition of our psyche. The “I” of self-consciousness, our bodymind and our being-in-the-world is not, cannot become, identical with itself. After Freud’s publication of Die Traumdeutung in the final days of 1899, or perhaps after the slew of papers that preceded it from 1896 onwards, there is actually no genuine return from this revolution. Thus, it should be of no surprise that Freud, toward the end of his life, judged the methods presented in The Interpretation of Dreams “the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make.”³ With the awareness of free-associative praxis, there is no possible restoration of a center to our lived experience, for the human condition is shown to be inherently ruptured and contradictorious. Without such awareness, one lives in the illusions and delusions of centeredness.

Indeed, there is a fashionable history of theorizing that reverts to the illusions and delusions of mastery, by imagining or positing philosophically a temporal point, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introductory note
• 2 What is radical psychoanalysis?
• 3 Freudian roots I
• 4 Freudian roots II
• 5 Sampling free-associative discourse
• 6 Textual analysis and the dogma of interpretation
• 7 The lessons of the method: Psychic energy
• 8 The lessons of the method: Theorizing praxis
• 9 The lessons of the method: Triebe and psychic reality
• 10 On the paramount significance of our psychosexualities
• 11 The necessity of the psychoanalyst
• 12 Resisting praxis: Notes on clinical and theoretical retreats
• 13 What is freeing about free-associative praxis?
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• About the author
• Index