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Monthly Archives: August 2007

Parental Fallacies

August 24, 2007
Lacan, MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Repetition

        Be it the austere father with whom and against whom the oedipal drama is to be completed or the empathic mother remedying infancy and early childhood deficits of nurture, the parental fallacy continues to be one of the most persistent and striking elements in psychoanalytic practice; persistent in its quasi-universality and striking in the uncritical support it has managed to accrue.

        Indeed, and with the notable exception of some of those working in the Lacanian and relational fields, the endorsement of the parental model as a marker of sound clinical practice has substituted the dynamic unconscious and its primary process as the principle through which the analytic profession has come to identify and unify itself. In spite of their differences with the ego-psychological paradigm upon which that arbiter of professional standards was founded, revisionists and so-called dissidents have been able to hold on to their presence within the International Psychoanalytical Association not so much by an allegiance to first principles regarding the psyche but by their endorsement of a mechanism whereby the parental stance is grafted onto both the institutional and the clinical.

        Institutionally, this grafting has had the double effect of A) producing a hierarchy—the IPA—that is now fully grown into its status as hermaphroditic parent: father defending and policing the genealogical lines of access and exclusion, and mother providing for the offspring’s political and clinical sustenance; and B) the growth of societies and institutes outside the fold that, not coincidentally, have often operated with a number of tropes and models other than the parental.

        Clinically, the insistence on a parental schema, as well as its attendant hierarchies of knowledge and experience, has served to reinforce a divide between doctor and patient in matters of diagnosis, treatment, and health, a divide that, sadly, much of psychoanalysis continues to carry over from its nineteenth century roots.

        In a parallel mode, this insistence has helped consolidate an understanding of psychopathology as a stagnation or a regression in the individual’s temporal journey from primary, childish, or primitive defenses and coping strategies to more mature modes of organisation of self and/or relations to others. For many, this has become axiomatic. Under the banner of genital love, ego autonomy, the depressive position, or an integrated self, health is posited as a culminating synthesis and with it are articulated not only the aims but also the modes and stages of analytic inquiry.

        Whether it is framed in terms of conflict or deficit, or a combination thereof, the cause of the stagnation is located in a disruption in the individual’s earliest relations with his or her primary caregivers. In this context, analysis has to submit to the model of a process by which a repetition of the original development is pursued, though with a healthier resolution. As the stage upon which such a repetition unfolds, the transference is expected to absorb as many features of the pathology as it can bear and, in so doing, to allow for that pathology’s re-emergence and possible treatment in an environment that is both safe and robust!

Leopard Dreams

August 19, 2007
Dreams, Freud, Schizoanalysis

        In his essay on Plato from The Logic of Sense (253-66), Deleuze invites us to think identity and sameness not as the logical ground from which difference ensues but as “the manifest content” of “a condensation of coexistences and a simultaneity of events” (262).

        Deleuze’s Freudian dream terminology here need neither confuse nor mislead us. As manifest content, identity is not the mere distortion of a latent and disconcerting but ostensibly much truer or more primal difference. In the context of this Deleuzian sameness and identity, the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, and the determination of hierarchy are all rendered impossible. Though the products of a deep disparity, identity and sameness speak of neither normative copies, nor melancholic and hence failed duplicates.

        The psychoanalytic echo here is not that of the Freud of 1899 whose schema in The Interpretation of Dreams designates the latent thought as primary at the expense of all the other components of a dream. In the first degree, it is to the Freud of 1925 who, in a footnote to his most favoured text, identified productive work (condensation, displacement, symbolization, and revision) as the essence of dreaming and the explanation of its differentiating and individualizing nature (The Interpretation of Dreams, 649-50 n2). In the second degree, it is to Eric Erikson who later insisted on the unique constellation of the three indispensable elements of the dream: latent thought, manifest content, and dream work.

        I read Deleuze as pursuing for the couplet identity/difference what Erikson before him had done to dream analysis. Deleuze however went one step further: his identity is highlighted not only as a produced, aleatory, and hence potentially dispensable effect instead of a fixed category, but also as a product that may or may not be re-inscribed in a circuit of differences leading to future products and effects.

        I would like to carry the trope yet another step further and invoke the challenge of Adam Phillips. Philips recounts Kafka’s parable of the leopards whose regular storming of the temple is subsequently interpreted by the believers as a necessary part of their religious ceremony (Terrors and Experts, 67-71). Phillips argues for at least the possibility of a parallel scenario whereby dreams, whose initial appearance into the analytic setting may have been coincidental, have since overtaken the entire process as its foundation and primary mode of operation.

        Likewise, couplets such as identity/difference, or theory/practice and subject/object for that matter, and in whatever combination or order of relevance—Freudian, Deleuzian, or otherwise—may very well turn out to be the leopards that have infiltrated our own conceptual and clinical ceremonies. Some may choose to continue in the rituals as they stand, leopards et al; others are more than justified in at least contemplating the possibility of rituals sans leopards, the possibility of thinking, as Teresa de Lauretis once put it, “elsewhere and otherwise.”

__________
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and ed. Constantine Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interprestation of Dreams. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Phillips, Adam. Terrors and Experts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

Integrity (with Janus)

August 16, 2007
Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire

        The gates to his temple are open only at times of war, where beginning and end collide, when the split between past and future is no longer manageable. With Janus, simultaneity becomes a crisis that the logic of the border cannot settle. It is no longer a question of being neither “here” nor “there” or of being on the way from “here” to “there.” Rather, it is a question of being both here and there, of inhabiting different spaces, languages, and identities simultaneously. As in the time of war, there is much room for terror and madness here. The linearity of the hierarchy between who one is and what one chooses to be (conveniently, strategically, or defensively), the linearity and comfort of passing are unsettled when Janus has both his faces turned in the same direction, when, in seeing the double, he sees the depth.

        Nabokov, Hoffman, Cixous, Beckett, Said, Kristeva, and Wolfson, among many, many, others, have had to grapple with the seemingly intractable Janusian split they inhabit. Each, in her or his own way, has managed to counter what would have otherwise been a devastating silence: Beckett, by insisting on translating his own texts from one language to the other, has had to rewrite them anew; Kristeva, whilst falling into the abjection of exile, has also written it; Wolfson, in writing what he speaks rather than what he feels, has succeeded in unfolding his highly combative games of phonetic translation. Each, in her or his own way, has resisted the current vulgate in its conflation of integrity with integration. Each has recognized that integrity lies precisely in that ability to live the truth of fragmentation even, or especially, at its most disruptive and hence also most creative moments.

        In the process, each has made one language render its other as an irreducible parallel through which and with which it will have to pass. In the process, these authors have also highlighted, though sometimes unwittingly, their readers’ own unstable linguistic polyvalence. For, indeed, it is not only the exiled or polyglot author that is refracted through the text. Even the so-called “monolingual” reader is unsettled by way of her or his unavoidable and fragmenting migrations through the dialects and codes of the familial, sexual, and economic worlds they inhabit and/or pursue.

Singular . Dual . Plural

August 14, 2007
Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire

        Much of psychoanalysis has been fuelled by the dilemma of opposites—practice/theory, primary/secondary, self/other—a dilemma that has plagued linguists, ethicists, and political theorists as much as it has psychoanalysts. Themes such as privilege, responsibility, property, and meaning have been subsumed under modernity’s logic of opposition between individual and group, private and public, body and mind.

        However, the advent of modernity is no more distinguished by its championing of certain ideological categories, such as the autonomous subject, than by its reordering of key structures of language. A grammatical convention has dominated virtually every language in the modern west, the one that allows only the singular and the plural as specific essences and modalities. And yet,, many non-modern languages, such as Old English, Church Slavonic, and Classical Arabic, have imbedded in them three separate declensions of the noun: the singular, the dual, and the plural. Modernity’s impact has been the quasi eradication of the linguistic dual as a connection—“this and that”—in favour of the dual as a mutually exclusive disjunction—“either this or that.”

        The disappearance of the connective dual has gone hand in hand with the rise of what have become the dominant ideological disjunctions either subject or object, either self or other, either individual or group. But the dropping of a declension is the dropping of a word, an object, an idea, a relation, an action, and of all that they may entail. This is no simple linguistic manoeuvre but, much more radically, a transformation in being.

        At its most potent, modernity’s grammar of opposites reinforces the notion that desire is a desire by the subject for an object. Presumably, the subject desires what it does not have; it is a subject in lack; it stands in opposition to the object as an object of consumption. As acquisition, desire secures the opposition between production and consumption, property and lack; in the process, it reconfirms the occlusion of a space that is declared vacant and irrelevant. I am referring here to that space occupied by the verb in its unfolding, by the verb as a gerund, by the verb without which the very idea of subject and object would be impossible.

        In response to the theorists and practitioners who have pinned desire to lack, I would like to redirect their attention to the times when they have argued the intricacies of theory, danced, fucked, cooked a feast, or listened to a story, to the tremors particular to arguing, dancing, fucking, cooking, or listening, to the tremors that have little to do with lack and much to do with doing.

        Modernity’s grammatical emphasis on the subject and object in their separateness and opposition has resulted in the psychoanalytic focus on relations of conflict (between self and other) and/or deficit (suffered by the self on the hands of the other). While much is gained by such maneuvers, what remains overlooked is a most significant set of relations that have little to do with either conflict or deficit, relations that are localized, partial, and productive, relations that underscore the verb of desire as an act rather than a mark of separation.

Fragment

August 13, 2007
Associations

        Somewhere, Hakim Bey once suggested that it is only a fragmented theory that can do justice to a fragmented reality.

        Among other things, a fragment is a residue not entirely covered over by time. Its presence is unsettling. It invites us to excavate for another to which it may retell its story. Its misshapen contour triggers in us a sense of ambiguity, of dislocation, of something that does not belong to the here and now. A fragment is a knot and a complication. Abstraction hopes to conceal its pressure but, inevitably, the crack is laid bare. The complication becomes a pointer to a parallel yet unspoken, perhaps even unspeakable.

        Memory is often called upon to reconstitute the fragment in such a way that it is no longer jarring. Recollection hints of a loss not only of what was but also of what might have been or has yet to be. In the meantime, the fragment remains crucial; it is an anchor much as the mark of a question that requires the stability of the solitary dot beneath the curve. Ironically though, the fragment is stressed by the typographical gesture. It is brought to the fore with the convenient separation between riddle and solution, mostly as a pretext for further riddling.

        The fragment is now a link in the chain it previously interrupted. Rather than merely assimilated, it is charged with the task of securing a malleable continuity, of assuming a function, utilitarian perhaps, or maybe even anaclitic. The sequence and hierarchy associated with such an arrangement are much less static than generally granted.

        The fragment for its part remains neither formal enough to satisfy the requirements of academic discourse, nor immediate and conclusive enough to be of any particular use to those so-called frontline activists in search of strategies or solutions. Perhaps this renders it duplicitous in its inactivity or thoughtlessness, depending on the side of the purity divide from which one wishes to approach it. This, perhaps, lends it the possibility of engaging, once again, in new forms of thought or action, arrogant at times, and yet fully aware of their aleatory micro-political and/or micro-theoretical relevance and limitations.

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