The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis

Jamieson Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921308
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From its peculiar birth in Freud's self-analysis to its current state of deep crisis, psychoanalysis has always been a practice that questions its own existence. Like the patients that risk themselves in this act - it is somehow upon this threatened ground that the very life of psychoanalysis depends. Perhaps psychoanalysis must always remain in a precarious, indeed ghostly, position at the limit of life and death?

Chapter One
Fatigue and haste

I am tired. Psychoanalysis makes me incredibly tired. I have spent a greater part of my time hating psychoanalysis. I can’t read another paper. I want the whole thing to collapse. I see it teetering on the edge of its abyss, and think I’m done, it is done. And yet somehow I know that it could do nothing else—it is precarious, it has been from the beginning. What have I been hoping for? What did I expect? Apparently a whole lot. It is an understatement to say that I am betrayed both by disappointment and this constancy of hope. I have never allowed this the label of pathology. Better yet, I will never allow this. Label implies stasis. So does my never.

I hear the voice of Rapaport (1967), a member of Lacan’s enemy camp, cautioning the psychoanalysts that structure is that only amenable to a very slow rate of change. Never get ahead of yourself. Know your limits as a psychoanalyst. I want to tell him psychoanalysis is in too much jeopardy for this slow rate of change. Never say never then also. Nothing is without its pathos. But I am myself too slow for this structural pathos that catches up on you faster than you can imagine. Hope what you will. Psychoanalysis will remain precarious.

We seem to be doing our best to back away from what has always been this precarious place of psychoanalytic truth. Science isn’t going to seal up that hole and remove the abyss. Neither will any recourse to folk psychology or Lacanian mathematical formulas. I’m sure my theories won’t seal off this hole either, which is what I am beginning to suspect that I have expected as well. Pathos is quick, like fantasy arising in the place of any disjunction.

So we should not be so hasty. Psychoanalysis from day one circled around this question of pathos and structure. What emerges instead of declared ends or hasty beginnings seems to be a question about what it really means to begin or end. “Now we have finally begun,” the analyst thinks, not necessarily at the first session, but maybe three months down the line or even longer as the case may be. Before that moment, the work has not constituted this kind of opening, and, as is the case with psychoanalysts, we must wait. We do not know when this time will arrive. In fact, most often we only know it after it has passed, as in the now we have which marks the point in passing.

In light of this, let me tell you about a dream I had. I was reaching up into an attic and I found a vase. Inside the vase, in its empty cavity, was a letter sealed into its edge, the internal periphery. The letter turned out to be from my maternal grandmother, sometime in the 1970s from the Philippines seemingly addressed to no-one in particular. This is also to say also that it was written specifically for me. In the letter she states that she has read a book, Laplanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970/1976), and that it has not yet been translated but that it would come to be a very important text. This is the scene, now what was the wish?

This undistributed letter granted me the authority as analyst that I am constantly looking for. Here, in the form of a wished for matrilineal inheritance. That was it. There was no ambiguity. It was written in the stars. You were born to do this kind of thing, I remembered being told when I was young. I could be done with myself and with my nagging questions about psychoanalysis. Both are transparent. All was revealed in the secrets of my history. It would come to be very important, as my grandmother said. That was a fact. It would come.

When I am working, trudging along in an analysis, I often wish it would work this way. The curtain goes up, the act is performed, we applaud, and in no short time, the curtain comes down again. We both leave the theater. I think Freud also wanted the work to conclude in such a way. As we said before, his desire to be the ultimate transgressor, to lift the veil, to reveal all, was a point of fantastic closure. In any case, if it did work in such a fashion, I don’t think I would be where I am—dreaming of empty cavities, full of imagined histories, and in the end very, very tired.

There is an old psychoanalytic joke about what a woman means when she says she can’t cook. It is her reproach against her mother for leaving her with a question concerning her feminine sexuality—for having failed to teach her. As jokes go, it’s really not that funny, but it is there in the dream. Hysteria takes the form of a vase and a wished for matrilineal inheritance. One might begin to see that the question of the desire to be an analyst and the desire of the analyst are already at play, in minimal form as something you would like to find inscribed like a letter on your body, something that is painfully connected to questions of femininity.

Psychoanalysis, I might say, rests on a precarious ethics that demands one steer clear of any fantasy of closure. That one can imagine psychoanalytic work as precisely this kind of closure is why we are required to go into it. This difficulty, the tenuousness of any opening, is easily papered over—with meaning first off. Certainly if there is a desire to be an analyst, the consequences of that wish can open out in a psychoanalysis; but this would only be possible if the listening analyst does not feel he or she can provide an answer to this impossible desire. Psychoanalysis from the very beginning cannot but pose a question of what its own teaching or transmission consists of.

I remember my first confrontation with a woman analyst. I was a little older than twenty. I sheepishly told her I wanted to be a psychoanalyst and she replied that I had to understand my desire to be an analyst before anything else and casually ate a banana. I ran away after that meeting. I was only able to approach her again a decade or so later. At first I thought there must be something terrifying about this desire she intuited that I didn’t understand or seem to know anything about. A little bit later I think the command to understand, more than anything else, was what terrified me. To our desire, we can accommodate ourselves. To others, knowledge, that takes a little more work. I was newly in analysis. I was also new to Lacan.

The dream of the vase was a dream close to the end of my analysis. If what we can locate in psychoanalysis is unconscious desire such that it can be taken up as the desire of the analyst, then it would follow that such commandments (in particular to understand, as if that had anything to do with desire) should finally have less effect on me—that I couldn’t be put on the run. It is for this reason that Lacan (1986/1992) takes up the question of desire in the guise of the courage of Antigone in the face of Creon. His laws were bound to a form of closure and authority. She was, in her way, true to a desire beyond his Law.

In this same seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, Lacan also speaks about a vase. He plays with Heidegger’s (Heidegger, 1971) notion of the vase as the Thing, or das Ding, particularly as it relates to human creation. Creation is like the event-character of Being, Heidegger contends. It is something whose proximity and nearness is veiled, situated between earth and sky, between the terrestrial and celestial, between gods and mortals—what Heidegger calls “the fourfold” (Heidegger, 1993). The vase offers us up to the Heavens at the same time that it is grounded in the earth from which it fashions itself.

This is close to how Lacan defines the signifier in its purest dimension—the emergence of a signifier as signifier, without any proper ground or signified upon which to rest. Human creation for Lacan cannot be understood without reference to the importance of language and symbolism, and furthermore, there is always a dimension of the signifier that signifies something of the act of signification itself. Contained in the signifier is this movement of reaching suspension, from nothing toward something, that is at the essence of the signifier exemplified in the vase:

If it is really a signifier, and the first of such signifiers fashioned by human hand, it is in its signifying essence a signifier of nothing other than of signifying as such or, in other words, of no particular signified …. Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by its self knows not of them …. And it is exactly in the same sense that speech may be full or empty …. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole (Lacan, 1986/1992, pp. 120–122).

This vase is the human object of creation par excellence. Wherever we find them, they mark the presence of the human. The human gift of creation is one that brings emptiness into existence, and by virtue of this, the dream of filling it once and for all. Before it, as he says, the world knows not of it. Psychoanalysis gives particular meaning to this Thing or nihil upon which the world is fashioned through desire. The vase establishes a trajectory. The thing, impossible, is both the origin and the aim.

The letter, my letter, comes with this introduction of emptiness—it rests upon it, indeed in the literal image of the dream. This nothing or nihil creates the dream of a wished for authority precisely at the point where the question of being a woman and being a psychoanalyst irrevocably cross. The letter remains closed and unopened—unsent. The letter as such seems to try to close in space, asking for something to exist beyond signification, perhaps beyond even address.

There was something about the feeling of reaching; reaching into an attic, only then to have to reach further, into a vase, into the letter. The point of satisfaction was with the letter. It’s imagined history acted as a stopping point. Thinking of this, I was reminded that in the houses in which I lived as a child we couldn’t build basements. The water table is too high. The idea that the earth wasn’t solid, that water was not just all around but below as well seemed to imply that the only direction to reach was upward. That the Philippines consist of thousands upon thousands of islands is another aspect of the felt absurdity in this dream. How did this text get there? How would it have gotten off?

The Philippines, in my memory, was always a terrifying place either without identity or with too much of it—the effects of having had one colonizer after another. Paris in the 1970s, on the other hand, is, for me, the heights of an intellectual movement I have devoted much of my time to. Something here is certainly at play—identity and the ravaging of it, civilized life and something more primal, land and water, reaching upward and the fear of sinking below. Points of identification seem to multiply and unravel in these shifting associations.

Perhaps in light of this we should place in opposition the heights of attics with the basements or earth where these artifacts are usually found. I am reminded of Freud’s cautionary note to Binswanger (1957), quoted in the latter’s memoir of their friendship:

I have always confined myself to the ground floor and basement of the edifice—You maintain that by changing one’s point of view, one can also see an upper story in which dwell such distinguished guests as religion, art, etc. You are not the only one to say this; most cultured specimens of homo natura think the same thing. In this you are conservative, and I revolutionary (pp. 96–97).

Binswanger reaches for sublimation too quickly. Any inheritance, taken as a direct line, will always be conservative. What Freud does in isolating himself on the ground floor is to attempt something more radical than this.

Psychoanalytic work, as it is elaborated in this dream, is fatiguing—confined to the basement we cannot reach too quickly for the light. We must work there where the line between dream and reality, between the human world and the inhuman, even between good and evil, is one that comes seriously under question. Weariness, fatigue, cannot be done away with—something solid ground or exalted heights would seem to offer. One must find a way to be permitted to be weary—to let oneself be submerged.

My maternal grandmother, the same one who wrote the letter, used to say to me “Jack of all trades, master of none” because, as the story goes, I would never finish projects before I was on to the next. Maybe I was lucky despite my grandmother’s consternation. What frustrates me is a question concerning education, pedagogy—that assumptions must be made that one knows, has something to give, has been given something, performs the outcome of this exchange, and so has made certain progress. This is where the discipline of psychoanalysis generally suffers. Standards of training are always the crisis.

When is one ready to be a psychoanalyst? Who has the authority to decide such a thing? Who declares the analyst done, fit, competent, learned, master? For my part, this process cannot be controlled, however much the ambiguity might seem to force us in this direction toward imagined histories that legitimate. So I feel like I could say to you the main thesis of this work, just as my grandmother said it to me, but I will reverse the negation into an affirmation—Jack of all trades, master of none. And I’m done. I was always hasty. But, if it were simply a matter of stating it, a matter of commandment, positive or negative, then there wouldn’t be a need for psychoanalysis.

Freud understood this. He also shares an unfortunate sense of haste. One can marvel at his radical impatience with himself and with Fliess in his letters at the time of his self-analysis: “the time for hypnosis is up … In all haste, your Dr. Freud” (Freud, 1985, p. 22). His irritation and confusion, particularly when he feels “incapable of mastering it all,” loom large in these early letter. He tells Fliess he feels “beaten and disenchanted,” “fatigued”—all these wonderful vicissitudes of haste. He concludes this last letter, “I now feel a void.”

If Freud’s letter expresses his desire to “catch a Pater as the originator of neurosis” thereby putting an end to his “ever recurring doubts,” it is not the fulfillment of this wish that in fact makes Freud work, or indeed makes his work any good, but a putting to use of the wish. He recognizes something of its impossibility (Freud, 1985, pp. 150–151). This, I would speculate, begins in a working through of his transference relationship to Fliess—his love, his most cordial friend, his tyrant, as he called him. In this, Freud will not back away from a discovery that feels transgressive, as he had done earlier, to his great pain, with the cocaine experiment.

If we are to understand the beginning of psychoanalysis, the faltering way it comes into being through the interpretation of Freud’s dreams, we must return to Freud’s feeling of failure with respect to Fliess. For a time, he was always ashamed and incommensurate, crystallizing this internal obstacle in the figure of his analyst. Freud’s questioning and search for his own authority can be seen in almost every dream—his nightmare of his work as a mausoleum of shit, and the wish for the better cure, Irma’s injection. The question of authority paralyzes him.

Through Freud’s developing transference to Fliess we can see the elaboration of this paralysis into a terrifying desire to push further. Rome, travel, discovery, and dreams. In the beginning, perhaps you only need one person who listens, or even that you imagine listens, to elaborate on an unknown terror, and, to encounter the field that emanates the orders of inhibition. This situation—imagined protector, imagined persecutor—is ripe. There is one there who seems to be the cause. In the end, that Freud would be able to write on his own, without Fliess, is what we analysts call, with too much triviality, the working through of the castration complex.

Beyond whatever fantasy, it is also Fliess’ support of Freud’s transference, hinged on very little, that offered to Freud the possibility of taking up his desire. Despite the bad reputation that haunts Fliess, I think you can see in these letters that, more or less, he lets Freud be. This enables Freud to exchange his transference for a flurry of creativity, his depression transforming into enduring enthusiasm. In this way, dreams and reverence are indispensable to this beginning act in order that it may act as a real beginning.

The presence of the letter in the vase holds this very susceptibility to reverence. The command for mastery can be just as much a demand for love. Identification forms a closed circle—from myself to my grandmother and back around again. This circle, in essence, must break. We must find a way for our desire not to be swallowed by our own families. The wished for inheritance is one among many covers for an incestuous tie gratifying for the child who wishes only to be the apple of their mother’s eye. The Oedipal prohibition descends with all its ambivalence and unfolding strife. So you would like to leave the Philippines behind? What use do the French have for a girl like you?

This particular Oedipal brand of narcissism, the dilemma between narcissism and desire, acts like a wall Freud keeps accidentally banging his head against; the problem simply won’t go away. Indeed, its vicissitudes become for Freud exactly that which we inherit in our advanced state of civilization: discontent or Unbehagen. The internalization of the authority of parental figures exists at the far end of this trajectory of identification. Between the ego-ideal and the superego wishes multiply and conflict in the range established by this process. We move from the desire for absolute correspondence to the aggressivity of a conclusive eclipse. I am, after all, the one who is writing the book, Life and Death.

Lacan (1970/2006) begins his discourse from this point with his conception of the mirror stage. Narcissism, the dialectic between body and reflexive self-image in the development of the structure of the ego, is something like a necessary failure. For Lacan it is important to understand how easily difference, what is beyond the ego, collapses into a desire for sameness and mastery—at root in any narcissistic structure. To see one’s self in the other, like with like, cannot but arouse one’s aggression. This aspect of the ego is formed like the suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE Fatigue and haste
• CHAPTER TWO Angels of disenchantment
• CHAPTER THREE Instructions on how to fell a tree
• CHAPTER FOUR Last remarks
• REFERENCES
• INDEX