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Psychoanalysis/Trauma

September 6, 2011
Ego Psychology, History, Klein, Lacan, MetaTherapeutics, Trauma

A possibly significant but obviously significantly under-developed hypothesis, a hypothesis that has less to do with causes and more with surrounds, impressions, and movements:

Moment 1 The sturm und drang ethos of the nineteenth century that fed the psychoanalytic (un)conscious, the ethos that stripped ancient Athens of humour and irony and rewrote its own history and tradition, which is also to say much of its future, as a melodrama and in the process repackaged aggression as a manufactured aberration, this ethos suddenly became the very real trauma, a.k.a. the First World War, psychoanalysis has had to suffer as opposed to, say, theorize or analyze.

Moment 2 The popularity of a cemented and cementing meta-psychology (seen most evidently in Ego Psychology’s over-investment in an agenda of development, resolution, and normalcy) in the 1920s and 1930s is a phenomenally defensive response to the first instance of the trauma (the chaos and devastation of the “war to end all wars”).

Moment 3 The rise in the tragic character of the psychoanalytic environment in the 1950s and 60s (as per the Lacanian conviction in a profoundly wounded relation between the human and the world as well as the Kleinian insistence on an intractably paranoid-schizoid strain contaminating every aspect of the lived experience) is both a direct effect of the second instance of the trauma (the Second World War) and a reaction against the reaction to the first instance of the trauma (as per Moment 2 above);

Moment 4 The subsequent appeal of a psychoanalysis of nurture (exemplified by the self-psychological and inter-subjective re-reading of Winnicott as a “love heals all” approach) reflects an attempt to obfuscate, yet again, the tenacity of aggression and its underlying roots.

In sum Certain twentieth century defining moments of psychoanalysis, as both a practice and a theory, correspond to the familiar three-step response of the traumatized: rigidity-fragmentation-denial, a response that is hardly sequential and hence all the more traumatizing.

Might there not be a moment at which psychoanalysis can not so much step outside of the last two centuries as instead move along with them, into a new century and a new millennium that are not only riddled with their own pressing conflicts and strategies, but also open to their more current, and hence more specific, resources and dynamics?

Work – 2

April 29, 2008
Freud, History, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Re-Parenting, Winnicott, Work


        The following is partly in response to Ktismatics’ comments on a recent post.

        The method of free association was Freud’s response to one of the most challenging tasks with which psychoanalysis has had to grapple over its history: the elaboration of a system of contact, traversal, and translation between the primary and secondary processes as two ways of thinking, and hence as two ways of being, that are radically alien to one another.

        In their elaborations of the unconscious, Lacanism and Ego Psychology seem to stand on the opposite ends of a conceptual scale that pits the ineluctable foreignness of the symbolic against the domesticity of development. One recognizes the effects of such theorizing in the tone of the texts as well: from the turgidly undecipherable to the rigidly banal. What a shame it is to have reduced the workings of the unconscious to the structures of language or the chronologies of development, and to have colonized the former with the disciplines and strategies of either of the latter.

        While relying heavily on Klein’s notion of unconscious “phantasy,” Winnicott articulates the fact of an in-between that facilitates and organizes the passages between subjective and objective, self and other. Neither a hallucination nor a concretization, the “transitional” object is the site of infantile illusion and, by extension, adult creativity. It is neither simply given nor autocratically created; it is a found object in the sense that, while belonging to an external reality, it is invested with the qualities that suit the momentary psychodynamic purposes of the individual that “finds” it. It becomes “transitional” at the very moment of its finding.

        Of all the principal figures in the psychoanalytic pantheon, and in spite of the ideological restrictions of his parental metaphors, Winnicott is perhaps one of the most faithful of Freudians. Rather than upon the uncovering of history, the enunciation of truth, the resolution of conflict, or the mastery over anxiety, it is upon the capacity to “find” and re-deploy creatively one’s own objects, in other words to play, that Winnicott bases his principal mark of health. Instead of merely a tool for analytic inquiry, the capacity to associate freely has now been clearly identified as the goal of that inquiry and, ultimately, as a necessary strategy for “healthy” living. (I think there is a bridge here between Winnicottian play and Deleuzo-Guattarian bricolage.)

        This makes a lot of sense to me. And yet, rare indeed are those that undertake an analysis because they want to “play.”

        More …

Work

April 26, 2008
Dreams, Freud, History, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Repetition, Schizoanalysis, Work

        Freud grounded psychoanalysis in terms of a collaborative uncovering of the unconscious as dynamic and over-determined. That such uncovering occurs in a fraction of the time “psychoanalysis” occupies or that it necessitates much preparation does not deny it its status as the core and defining element of the practice; if anything, it reinforces it as the however infinitesimally small but not any the less defining marker of a practice that is singular and specific, a practice that is irreducible to this or that of the modes of relating with which we are already familiar.

        That such uncovering leaves open the questions of “efficacy” and so-called “therapeutic value,” that, in other words, the uncovering does not necessarily make people “feel better,” assuming we already know and agree on what the expression actually means, the way doctors and parents are presumably supposed to make patients and children “feel better,” may be a concern for those attempting to justify the practice in the eyes of a culture grounded in the principles of expediency and comfort. But it is precisely the work of such a culture that psychoanalysis has been designed to counter. This is no less true nowadays than it was in the time of Freud. Sadly, the practice has become increasingly consolidated around the safety and satisfaction certain objects may bring to the process of reproduction and less around the complexity and unpredictability of our desires.

        It is for this reason that, I believe, the parental metaphor has continued to hold great sway over the profession. Unlike all the other models that have enjoyed varying degrees of success (I am thinking of friendship, education, witnessing, or even healing) parenting comes closest to elevating repetition from a basic physiological need and/or a pathological compulsion to the status of a stable and overarching principle of psychic life.

        However, and by the standards of not only this or that of the various leading orientations in psychoanalytic theory or practice but by those standards that the discipline itself has held as its foundational and distinguishing mark, repetition could not be any further from the either the truth of the unconscious or, for that matter, the history of its science. As regards the former, and even at those times when the unconscious is trapped in the most monotonous and debilitating of cyclical scenarios, it is still, and however minimally, an unconscious that dreams, phantasises, mourns, defers, displaces, remembers, thinks, and compromises; it is still an unconscious that works. It is a machine that affords a rest only once in its lifetime, in that very same ground where it finds its final resting place. Otherwise, it is in constant movement. As for the science of the unconscious, it has managed to thrive precisely because many of its practitioners, famous or otherwise, have resisted the institutional demands and methodological requirements for repetition and homogeneity.

Why no longer?

April 3, 2008
Deleuze, Guattari, History, Mourning, Repetition

(This review is forthcoming in the fall issue of Symposium)

        In his most recent book, Jay Lampert leads us back to one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most complex philosophical expositions of time and repetition without fuss or fanfare. He weaves for us an account of history that is both rich and concise. In a wonderfully honest and generous paragraph near the end of the penultimate chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Lampert asks: “How is someone trained in philosophy supposed to know how to name even one genuine event of ‘today,’ let alone analyse one convincingly as part of his book? What qualifies someone like me to diagnose it in an interesting way, so as to avoid making amateurish or pop-postmodern pronouncements? … Does any case study, short of one that inaugurates an entirely new world-historical Regime of Signs, show what a historical event is qua event, or show in general how the now captures the ‘why?,’ or how the ‘why?’ captures the now?” (154). Lampert’s poetic modesty does not preclude scholarly rigour; it reinforces it. Witness not only his illuminating digressions on Hume, Hegel, Bergson, and Derrida but, and much more encouragingly, his sense of responsibility to detail: 4 arguments for intratemporality, 13 for the pure past, and 2 for the dark precursors of the future; 4 major genealogies of the syntheses of time, 4 similarities and 6 differences with Derrida on dates, and 7 confrontations with Hegel on that selfsame topic; 13 layers to Alice’s obsession with size, 12 features to discuss in relation to the question of why an event occurs when it does, 5 senses of “falling back into history,” and 4 elements to the theory of consistency.

        Lampert unpacks a most subtle and challenging set of questions that have preoccupied, if not defined, the long tradition of western philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, the rehabilitation of multiplicity, of difference, and indeed of chaos under the rubric of the One has had to confront the question of repetition and time, time after time, only to relegate it quite often to the status of a seduction. Contra those who have understood repetition as the reproduction in time of an origin or a preceding state of affairs, Deleuze elaborates a repetition “for its own sake” (« une répétition pour elle-même »), a repetition that accounts for that which does not return, for that which is a becoming without origin or destiny. This is a repetition that does not operate in time; it produces time. This is the repetition Lampert deploys to elucidate not one grand “Philosophy of History” but—count them—nine forms of past, of present, and of future, nine forms of succession and simultaneity, and, finally, nine “movements of the name of history.” Lampert braids his concepts, crosses them, stacks them, aligns them, serially, co-extensively, but always deftly and rigorously, in order to argue that “the succession of befores and afters is a triple by-product of there being three simultaneous simultaneities. What takes the place of the classical concept of history is nothing other than these multiple forms of co-existence with their multiple subordinate forms of serial distribution. Once it is proved that an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous, it will follow that the succession-effects of the names of history run simultaneously, and that the past is a real place on the body” (9).

        Here, the typical questions of a philosophy of history, of a universal history, (“How come?” “Why now? “What next?”) are all questions of contingency. I believe that these questions very quickly extend into the broader concerns around memory, desire, and life. Indeed, repetition does not belong exclusively on the stage of world historical events with their progressions, interruptions, and recapitulations; repetition also pertains to the passage from one affect to the next, from one performance to the next, and from one observation to the next. A philosophy of history that takes the syntheses of time for a point of departure, a philosophy of history as thought by Deleuze and Guattari and subsequently pursued and elaborated by Lampert is hence a philosophy of psychology, of art, and of science as well. This is why Lampert’s text is neither an introduction to one aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought nor is it an exhaustive account of that aspect. It is rather a plateau, as Deleuze and Guattari deployed the practice in the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a plateau that revisits and repeats, which is to say rearticulates, the as of yet unarticulated—or perhaps that which is beyond articulation—becoming.

        I would like to take a moment and consider not Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History but Lampert’s History of Philosophy. I am convinced that Lampert is qualified to “diagnose” (and this is his term), and has indeed diagnosed, the genuine philosophical event “Deleuze-Guattari.” This is why I would like to invite him to deploy his philosophy of history as a measure and an understanding of his history of the philosophy of history, of his history of philosophy tout court, with all of its attendant simultaneities and serialities. If the past never actually dies, if, as Lampert affirms, “an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous … [and] the past is a real place on the body” (9), what then is the status of Deleuze and Guattari’s own past on their philosophical body? What, for instance, is the status of their long standing investments in psychoanalysis, intellectually, as with Deleuze from his Presentation of Sacher Masoch to Difference and Repetition, to both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and clinically, as with Guattari the Lacanian-trained psychoanalyst, member of the Ecole freudienne, and institutional psychotherapist at the La Borde clinic? I pose this question of the so-called “past” because I am not sure how to reinterpret Lampert’s deployment of the double dating of any event—that the first time it appears is when it appears for the second time—without Freud’s nachträglichkeit or Lacan’s après coups. I am also not sure how to re-assess the discussion in Difference and Repetition without Deleuze’s treatment of Freud’s elaborations on the pleasure principle and its beyond as a founding mechanism of repetition. I am even less sure how to understand the syntheses of desiring production in Anti-Oedipus as the “motor of history” without reference to the laws of the dynamic unconscious (condensation and displacement) and their structuralist renderings (metaphor and metonymy)?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s psychoanalytic past is nowhere to be seen in Lampert’s account. It has become “imperceptible.” Is it excess baggage or last year’s fashion? Is it a passing phase which, once “diagnosed,” is easily overcome? Has it been castrated and/or repressed? Has it been excised, sublated, or deteritorialised beyond recognition? Is it no longer? Lampert, via Deleuze and Guattari, and as far as I can observe, never poses the question of endings, of how the “why?” not only captures the “now” but can perhaps sometimes suffocate it and render it “no longer.”

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