Beyond Psychotherapy

On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst

Barnaby B. Barratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138362222
• eBook ISBN: 9780429778315
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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

In Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst, Barnaby B. Barratt illuminates a new perspective on what it means to open our awareness to the depths of psychic life and restores the radicality of genuinely psychoanalytic discourse as the unique science of healing.

Starting with an incisive critique of the ideological conformism of psychotherapy, Barratt defines the method of psychoanalysis against the conventional definition, which emphasizes the practice of arriving at useful interpretations about our personal existence. Instead, he shows how a negatively dialectical and deconstructive praxis successfully 'attacks' the self-enclosures of interpretation, allowing the speaking-listening subject to become existentially and spiritually open to hidden dimensions of our lived-experience. He also demonstrates how the erotic deathfulness of our being-in-the-world is the ultimate source of all the many resistances to genuinely psychoanalytic praxis, and the reason Freud's discipline has so frequently been reduced to various models of psychotherapeutic treatment. Focusing on the free-associative dimension of psychoanalysis, Barratt both explores what psychoanalytic processes can achieve that psychotherapeutic ones cannot, and considers the sociopolitical implications of the radical psychoanalytic 'take' on the human condition. The book also offers a detailed and compassionate pointer for those wanting to train as psychoanalysts, guiding them away from what Barratt calls the 'trade-school mentality' pervading most training institutes today.

Groundbreaking and inspiring, Beyond Psychotherapy will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and all other therapists seeking a radically innovative approach. It will also be a valuable text for scholars and students of psychoanalytic studies, social sciences, philosophy and the history of ideas.

1

INTRODUCING PRAXIS

Why ‘radical’ and why ‘beyond’?

What is needed, for the human community as much as for each individual, is psychoanalysis beyond psychotherapy. This book will argue the significance of this statement, especially as it pertains to humanity’s current epoch, characterized as it is by the burgeoning ideologies and globalized practices of rampant militarization, transnational corporatism, escalating fundamentalism and resurgent authoritarianism – all marked by so much violence against people and against the planet. To address the suffering of the human psyche at a basic level, what is required is not so much therapeutic palliation offered by some form of (re)interpretation of our lives, as significant as the latter may often be. Rather, the suffering of the psyche needs to be addressed by the challenging authenticity of psychoanalysis as a unique process of liberation – a radical praxis – that is both spiritual-existential and subversively political in its impact. This is not, of course, to suggest in any way that this is all that is needed, but radical psychoanalysis is, in a profound way, an exemplar of what is needed, because this is healing by a process of perpetual listening-opening-changing/learning that is in itself a liberatory movement against stultifying and compulsively repetitious modes of interpretation that imprison us. Moreover, it is the human propensity for repetition-compulsivity that sustains and recruits adherents to the ideologies of domination, fanaticism, exploitation and violence. The liberatory movement of discourse against repetition-compulsivity is the central dimension of psychoanalysis-as-praxis, which echoes Karl Marx’s 1845 aphorism, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world … the point is to change it.’ The discoveries of psychoanalysis indeed have deep and far-reaching implications for philosophy, but the discipline is not a philosophical-theoretical exercise, nor is it the enterprise of an applied science in the conventional sense. In making these assertions, I am not referring to just any ‘psychoanalysis.’ For nowadays the label is routinely appropriated for procedures that actually comprise psychotherapy practiced by someone who is nominally a ‘psychoanalyst’ or practiced as a set of techniques based on one of the models of mental functioning that have been promulgated since Sigmund Freud’s lifetime (or even those that he developed during the last twenty-five years of his life). The latter are the so-called ‘psychoanalytically-informed’ or ‘psychoanalytically-oriented’ psychotherapies. As will be discussed, for the most part ‘psychotherapy’ of any variety involves a manipulative application of techniques derived from theoretical frameworks that purport to explain human functioning. Psychoanalysis is not like that. Rather, I am pointing to a radicalized process of changing-by-listening to the inner and outer conditions of what it means to be human and what it means to suffer as a human. That is, a praxis of listening-and-opening and changing-learning and then listening-and-opening again, in perpetuum. This is not unlike the notion of a permanent revolutionary movement as necessary to effect thoroughgoing, rather than transient, change.¹ Only such a praxis decenters our discourse in a way that frees us from the compulsive repetitiousness of our lives and that thus liberates us into becoming more alive!

Prolegomenal notes

This book expresses and explains my conviction that there are pronounced divergences, and perhaps contradictions, between procedures of discourse that are merely psychotherapeutic and the unique processes of radical psychoanalysis. One implication of this is that there are profound differences both in the tenets of healing or health that are encoded in each discourse and in the manner that the patient’s lived-experience is facilitated in accordance with those tenets – herein I will use the term ‘lived-experience,’ borrowed in a modified way from Simone de Beauvoir, as elaborated by Eleanore Holveck and others, simply to emphasize the existential implications of psychoanalysis, for this discipline is, above all, about the ethical, experiential and experimental way in which we engage life. Radical psychoanalysis prioritizes a unique process of listening-and-opening inwards – the rigorous method of free-associative praxis – rather than the arrival at supposedly improved behavior, beliefs or feelings about one’s place in the world. It is this praxis that – freed from therapeutic ambition, from biological prescriptions and even from the mandates of conventional psychology – comprises the healing at the heart and soul of any genuinely psychoanalytic process, which is about becoming alive!

On what basis am I advancing these claims? I have over forty years’ experience doing psychoanalytic work. I am also qualified as a sexologist and a somatic psychologist or bodyworker (with both clinical and developmental training in psychology, as well as a rather wide-ranging education in the human sciences). Furthermore, it might be noted that I have been a consistently vigorous activist for causes of human rights, civil liberties and justice. In these decades, I have conversed with many patients – some in great depth over many years of treatment, others more briefly. Especially at the beginning of my career, many were engaged with me in the alleviative procedures of psychotherapy. As a somatic practitioner and specialist in sexuality, I have also learned much from hundreds of individuals, who did not become patients in psychotherapy, but who consulted me more briefly in relation to a wide range of painful life-issues. In the course of this vocation, my calling as a healer, gaining professional experience with patients and deepening the exploration of my own psyche, I have chosen to spend more and more of my time in the deeply illuminating processes of psychoanalysis. Such that today I no longer offer psychotherapy except as preparatory to psychoanalysis (which implies that this is a special and rather exceptional species of ‘psychotherapy’). Currently, I see ten patients a day, each for four sessions per week of fifty-minutes duration. Almost all my patients are trainees in psychoanalysis; 80% are women and the group includes not only whites (of mixed gentile European, Lithuanian Jewish and Afrikaner descent), but also Zulu, Xhosa and individuals of South Asian origin. I do still offer brief consultations on focused topics (principally within the domain of sexology and somatic psychology), but I do not do what is ordinarily called psychotherapy except in so far as psychotherapeutic procedures are often a necessary preparation for the processes of psychoanalysis and are, as it were, a sort of way-station or set of preparatory procedures within the everyday course of a radical psychoanalytic treatment.

Radical psychoanalysis draws from Freudian roots, but is thoroughly contemporary and innovative, at least in the sense that it diverges significantly from that propounded by any of the prevalent schools that nominally characterize this discipline (as well as the practices that have followed from Adlerian and Jungian theorizing). As represented today in the International Psychoanalytic Association that Freud’s colleagues founded in 1910, the three prevailing schools from which radical psychoanalysis diverges notably are: (i) the structural-functional or ego-psychological; (ii) the Kleinian or post-Kleinian and independently object-relational; (iii) the social, interpersonal-relational and self-psychological schools. More about these schools will be discussed in what follows. This list might also have included, with a rather different emphasis, the very important Lacanian and post-Lacanian schools. It is hard to imagine that the approach to radical psychoanalysis presented in this text could have been articulated without the influence of Jacques Lacan’s multifarious writings. In this sense, my approach might be categorized as post-Lacanian. Yet it is rather unlikely that any brassbound devotee of Lacan’s work would concede that there is much of any merit to what is expounded in this text (Lacanians, with whose vantage-point I shall take serious issue, tend to be deeply wedded to theoretical speculation, whereas, in addition to other profound divergences, the emphasis in this trilogy is on psychoanalysis as spiritual-existential and sociopolitical praxis). My specific focus herein will be on the way in which radical psychoanalytic praxis differentiates itself from the psychotherapeutic procedures, as propounded by three main schools – the structural-functional, the object-relational and the social/self-psychological. All this will become clear in the course of the text.

On the radicality of psychoanalysis

The calling to which I am committed is psychoanalytically radical, not only in the sense that it deviates from the hegemonic schools of this discipline, but also in that it returns to the roots of the discipline of psychoanalysis as a method or praxis that uniquely explores and heals the interiority of being human beyond what can typically be accomplished in a psychotherapeutic discourse. This is a return to, as well as a somewhat original refinding and refueling of, Freudian insights that have almost been lost. The world in which something called ‘psychoanalysis’ is clinically practiced (that is to say, now on every continent of the globe, to some degree, with the exception of Antarctica) identifies this discipline both with a model of mental functioning and with clinical procedures that exploit the transformative properties of (re)interpretation. The theoretical models, on which such interpretative enterprises depend, may emphasize, to greater or lesser degree, the ego organization, the inner theater of object-relations, or the self and its social embeddedness. But the commonality of these approaches is that these sorts of theoretical framework govern clinical techniques that manipulate the patient’s functioning to achieve an improved degree of adaptation, maturation, adjustment, integration or personal contentment (which are themselves theoretical terms that are rarely, if ever, sufficiently examined critically, or unpacked deconstructively). Against these procedures, the radicality of the mode of psychoanalysis to be discussed herein is at least threefold.

(i) It lies in its centering, not on a theoretical model that is then applied to clinical labors with the patient, but rather on method-as-praxis. As will be discussed, this is a method that is radically decentering of the subject (or more accurately that acknowledges and addresses a subject that is already decentered from itself but does not know it), and in which theorizing occurs only as the ad hoc operation of provisional or ‘auxiliary notions’ (Freud’s Hilfsvorstellungen). Psychoanalysis is scientific, but it is not a psychology in any ordinary sense of this term (and it is certainly not an adjunct to the empirical enterprises of neuroscience). Indeed, it is not scientific in the mode of an objectifying investigation. It is defined by its method and not by the grand generalities of theoretical propositions about how our human being-in-the-world supposedly functions (generalities that are often alleged to hold across historical epochs and cultural diversities). This statement requires some qualification, as will be discussed in the course of what follows, because psychoanalysis does make some generalizable discoveries about the way our being-in-the-world is constituted (by the semiotics of enigmatic messages and by the symbolic system of language itself) and about the rupturing effects of the ‘repression-barrier’ and the incest taboo within our psychic life (the repression-barrier is the intrapsychic inscription of the incest taboo, as will later be elaborated). However, radical psychoanalysis is to be understood primarily and centrally as this method of listening-and-opening to the interiority (and thence to the exteriority) of our being-in-the-world. It is an inquiry that is neither subjectivistic (like phenomenologies are typically supposed to be), nor objectivistic (like mainstream sciences are supposed to be). Unlike conventional ways of thinking about what it means to know something scientifically or to illuminate something hermeneutically, this method depends neither on the a priori theorizing of possibilities nor on a schematic conceptual system about the object under scrutiny. In short, radical psychoanalysis is not the application of a theoretical model of mental functioning, nor is it concerned with the a posteriori development of such models. Its method of listening is not engaged in order to develop a generalized understanding about how humans operate and, most significantly, it produces nothing that could be considered ‘data’ for the generation of such theory. Rather, it is engaged as the praxis of change that is both changing-by-listening and understanding-by-changing – a process which is neither subjectivistic nor objectivistic, and for which theoretical conceptualization or the collection of ‘data’ toward the construction of theoretical edifices, is irrelevant.

Thus, as mentioned, psychoanalysis is not a psychology, if we define that discipline as the enterprise that formulates models of mental functioning and human behavior on the basis of the collecting of objective data (including data consisting of subjective accounts). And very definitely this radicalized psychoanalysis has nothing to do with Kraepelinian psychiatry as horrifically exemplified by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). That is, a psychiatry that serves the status quo by categorizing individuals so that they may then be manipulated pharmacologically, genetically and behaviorally (or even, once in a while, offered some understanding form of psychotherapy) so that they may become more ‘normal’ – in this context, radical psychoanalysis is resolutely ‘anti-psychiatry.’² Obviously, there are psychological and psychodynamic models of mental life that claim – with varying degrees of plausibility – to have been derived from the theorist’s experience with some sort of psychoanalysis. In addition to Freud’s various efforts in this direction (notably between the 1914 essay on narcissism and his 1926 text, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety), several schools, each with rather different models of human functioning and indeed assumptions about what it means to be human, have already been mentioned (ego-organizational, object-relational, self-psychological). But the crucial point I want to make here is that these models are not, in any way, a necessary or primarily important feature of psychoanalysis itself. Indeed, such models are far less significant or interesting than, and indeed virtually impertinent to, a unique method that cares about the interiority of lived-experience. In short, the healing method of radical psychoanalysis is singularly scientific, but the discipline is neither a science nor a hermeneutic system in any ordinary sense.

(ii) The radicality of psychoanalysis as presented in this book is also evident in the manner by which the method somewhat engages, but then proceeds decisively beyond, the endeavors of psychotherapy. Such endeavors aim for the individual’s improved adjustment and the rationale for their engagement ceases when adjustment of some sort is achieved. The criteria for this are various, but inevitably conceived, overtly or covertly, in terms that are somewhat external to the individual’s internal journey. This is the case even when the languaging of the psychotherapeutic goal is ‘personal contentment,’ because such a seemingly monadological criterion is inevitably tied to conventions external to the individual.

I have been told that Jean Laplanche once said, ‘from the beginning, we are all muddled up with others in ways that we are never able to grasp.’ In an aphoristic sense, riffing on the adages of Donald Winnicott in 1965 (‘there is no such thing as a baby’) and of André Green in 1991 (‘there is no such thing as a mother-infant relationship’), it might be said that there is no such thing as an individual psyche. In Félix Guattari’s famous formulation, ‘we are all groupuscles’ – the individual is culturally and sociopolitically constituted via representationality that is always structured like a language. There is a serious and profound sense in which individuality is a cultural and sociopolitical construct, more than a reality of psychic life. This is because both in its particular contents and its structure (the rules and regulations of ‘making-sense’), the representational system that comprises the fabric of each of our psychic lives is not authored by us, so much as authored by the whole system within which it is acculturated (and only within this system is there latitude for what may be studied as ‘individual differences’).³ Such dicta point not only to the way in which the signifier ‘I’ and all its movements are determined by the rules and regulations of linguistically-structured representationality (by which I mean representational systems that are always structured like a language), but also to the many ways in which the entire internality of our being-in-the-world is mixed up with external forces (that bombard us as enigmatic messages coming from ‘outside’ our organismic status). The criteria of psychotherapeutic success, appraised in terms of improved adaptation, maturation, adjustment, integration or contentment, are inevitably ensconced in a web of ideas and ideological values around these tricky concepts. Any appearance of harmony, integration or wholeness within an individual’s functioning is culturally and sociopolitically contextualized. Thus, in some sense, it is external to the individual. It is also saturated in ideologies that preserve the status quo, and that assume the benefits of an apparent congruence between the particular and the system in which it operates.

We must surely ask what it really means to be adjusted, contented, or ‘maturely adapted’ when the current circumstances and the history of human existence are characterized by all sorts of venality and dehumanization, exploitation, brutality, genocide, ecocide and cyclical horror? We live in a world in which all human relations are infected with the afflictions of oppression, both internally and externally. In such a world, almost all sources of comfort – emotional and material – can only be acquired at the expense of others, as well as at the expense of truthfulness and the pursuit of freedom. Within the world we live in today, the goals of psychotherapy are inherently anodyne – emolliative, tranquilizing and analgesic.

(iii) These ideas comprise a ‘leftist’ notion of healing that is difficult for anyone, who has not stayed the radical course of psychoanalytic engagement, to grasp. Thus, the final aspect of the radicality of psychoanalysis is that its method, which deconstructs (or engages in a ‘negatively dialectical’ manner) the forces of suppression and repression that are inscribed within us, necessarily issues into a momentum that is anti-ideological. Sooner or later, the praxis of radical psychoanalysis implies a critique of the ideologies of domination and exploitation – oppression – that are everywhere around us. One cannot engage radically in psychoanalysis without becoming aware of all the various positions we adopt within systems of human relations that are endemically oppressive. Overtly or covertly, positions of domination/subordination-subjugation and exploitation are inherent in every instance of human conduct. Tragically, there are no opportunities to ‘opt out’ or ‘drop out’ of the system in which we are all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Prefatory note
• 1. Introducing praxis: why ‘radical’ and why ‘beyond’?
• 2. Free-associative praxis against interpretation
• 3. Notes on becoming a psychoanalyst
• 4. Psychoanalytic discoveries: sexuality and deathfulness
• 5. The psychoanalytic leap and the necessity of revolution
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index