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Insight

Finding, reflexively

November 15, 2011
Finding, Insight, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Winnicott

“Finding” is almost always reciprocal, doubled, as the subject is incorporated into the structures that belong to the object it has found and is made to fit that object’s requirements and/or concerns. One is said to be gripped by an idea, defined—for better and for worse—by his or her membership in a family, a group, a profession, an institution, or a nation, and transformed through care and responsibility for or outright servitude to another subject or object.

That the subject finds itself being “found” by the other is no mere intellectual manoeuvre. The reciprocity here undermines the otherwise convenient notion of active autonomy implicit in the very sense that the subject tends to have of itself. In the best of all possible scenarios, such reciprocity opens up for the subject the prospect of finding itself and becoming its own found object, of experiencing itself as neither a self-fashioned hallucination nor a cog in the vast machinery that is external reality, but as a subject that is animated and resilient, even, and perhaps most especially, when confronted with the prospect of its own inevitable diffusion.

It is this reflexivity that distinguishes genuine understanding from simple explanation—in other words, introspection, psychoanalytic and otherwise, from what is merely inwardly directed truth, regardless of whether such truth is grounded in a self-serving delusion or in the presumably most authoritative and verifiable of meta-psychological principles. It is this reflexivity that invests introspection with the quality of an integral, dynamic, and mutative knowledge.

Situational Subjects

January 23, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Fetish, Guattari, Insight, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Subjects, Termination

        Ultimately, the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject (be it an individual, a text, a practice, or an institution) is produced as the offshoot of a particular constellation of forces of attraction and repulsion, which is to say of a surround and a situation. It is hence aleatory since the constellation itself is an effect of the ongoing process of production and its three syntheses. This subject is producible—differently, persistently; it is mutable, agile; its history knows little of linearity or development, of stages or resolutions, and often only accidentally so. This subject is situational.

        Contra the fetish that ossifies it by subsuming its relations and experiences under the heading of this or that topology or purpose, Deleuze and Guattari offer a more modest and hence potentially more flexible and productive strategy for being, for reading, for intervening. Julia Kristeva’s insistence that individuality requires that in every analysand be discovered a distinctly new classification (New Maladies of the Soul, 9) and Wilfred Bion’s recommendation to enter each session with “neither memory nor desire” in order to be best prepared for that session’s specific productions—its newness—strike a similar cord.

        In this context, the clinical concern is much less with the correction of a pathological present (as the reiteration of disruptive early childhood patterns) in favour of a pre-established adult (read: integrated) identity, and more with what that present is being made to produce or not produce; with the malleable relations and experiences it makes possible.

        The present is about much less a state of being than a deployment of being, for it too is a machine. This is not to suggest that the subject does not admit of a history; its past is a machine that is often called upon in hindsight in order to justify or make necessary, and sometimes even more tolerable, a present as an investment or a relation. Nor is this subject lacking in a capacity to observe and hence modify itself; it is not without will, though its will, and by extension its want, revolve around a simultaneously more visceral and more subtle concern than for simple advancement or acquisition.

Subjects-Insights

January 20, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Associations, Conjunctive Synthesis, Deleuze, Guattari, Insight, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        One of the main controversies in the history of the psychoanalytic movement has coalesced around the meaning and relevance of insight as a clinical category. A divide has often separated a more classic epistemic orientation from a concern for the analysand’s affective well being which, supposedly, may or may not have much to do with the making conscious of conflicts and/or deficits. Through the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari are effectively redefining insight and in the process rearranging the terms if not the relevance of the debate here. The conjunctive synthesis is ostensibly a “so that’s what it is!” moment of insight and a clarity identified by its effect to reorganize radically not only delirium (thought) but hallucination (perception) and intensity (experience) as well. The “so that’s what it is!” is not so much a revelation or an uncovering of the subject to itself but the making of a subject. Instead of simply eliciting in the analysand a greater sense of subjective responsibility, or a greater capacity to tolerate anxiety and its ambivalence, or even a broader affective vocabulary or repertoire, the conjunctive synthesis is quasi traumatic in its quality for it is the signpost of a radical shift in the subject’s thought, perception, and experience, which is to say in the subject’s way of deploying itself for itself and for others. Insight is that rare moment of tremor in the clinical situation that marks for both analyst and analysand a transformation, not only in understanding but also in being and in relating. However, and whereas the trauma (of war or abuse for instance) dissociates the subject from its experiences, thoughts, and perceptions, and in so doing robs it of its agility and ossifies it, insight, analytic or otherwise, multiplies the connections between the components; it produces new recordings, experiences, subjectivities; it makes such multiplications and productions tolerable.

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