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Lacan

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?

More than an object

April 1, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Lacan, Play, Possession, Transitionals, Winnicott

Winnicott tells us that the found object is part of the world of the real—and hence not merely the product of a delusion—while also belonging to the subject’s inner reality. Here, Winnicott sets up the triadic topology of external life, experience, and inner reality and locates the found (a.k.a. “transitional”) object and its corresponding phenomena in the space of an inherently illusory but no less tangible and no less crucial event of “experiencing” (”Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”, 230-31). Topology and function combine in order to charge the found object with the capacity, nay the task, to facilitate the passage from inner to outer, from oral erotism to object-relationship. The found object will henceforth bridge the otherwise insurmountable gap between omnipotence and solipsism on the one hand and encounter and interaction on the other, between limitless delusion and limited and/or limiting action. In this sense, the found object makes it possible for the subject to transition, in the words of Winnicott, “from (magical) omnipotent control to control by manipulation (involving muscle erotism and coordination pleasure)” (TOTP, 236).

In its earliest manifestation, the found object is the first other-than-me possession (a toy or a piece of fabric, for instance) the subject will incorporate (“weave”) into an already existing personal pattern (TOTP, 231). It is more than an object that the subject discovers only to observe and catalogue, and then perhaps reserve for a future time when it may prove beneficial. The found object is hardly inert; it is found at the very moment, and insofar as, it introduces itself into an already existing schema in which it participates; it is an object that unsettles, disorganizes, and reconfigures. Moreover, and insofar as it is put in the service of and, in the process, transformed by the psychodynamic needs and/or wishes of the subject that finds it, the found object is an object-in-use, which is not to say that it is an object-of-utility, i.e., a tool that has been designed for a predetermined and specific function. The found object is in fact experienced as displaying activity, production, and effect; it, at least as far as its finder is concerned, is an object that is other-than and hence more-than a mere object; it is an object that possesses a vitality or a reality of its own (TOTP, 233). The found object is hence an object that has already been, or at least partially been, subjectivised, and subjectivised by virtue of the fact that it has been found. While I will have to come back and treat this aspect in greater detail later, I would like to take a moment and stress how for Winnicott, and contra the Lacanian charge (∗), the found object is not an object that is available for consumption or assimilation and is therefore not an object that can be fully satisfying. Indeed, and no matter the erotism and pleasure it may yield, the found object is accompanied by “some abrogation of omnipotence” from the very start (TOTP, 233), an abrogation that is undoubtedly experienced as an injury and a humiliation. For Winnicott, the found object is ostensibly the ground for an experience that points to “the early stages of the use of illusion, without which there is no meaning for the human being in the idea of a relationship with an object that is perceived by others as external to that being” (TOTP, 239), an experience located at the boundary between primary creativity and objective perception, an experience that is as rife with frustration, release, and sometimes even rebuff as it is with satisfaction and creativity.

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(∗) By the early 1950’s, Lacan had dismissed Balint’s version of object-relations on the grounds of, presumably, its conceptual manoeuvre that “conjoins to a need an object which satisfies it” and its insistence that “an object is first and foremost an object of satisfaction” (Freud’s Papers on Technique, 209). Many Lacanians have hastily and, I believe, erroneously, endorsed the slide from Balint to Winnicott as target of the selfsame criticism.

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 …

Of Revisions and Caricatures

April 19, 2008
Dreams, Freud, Klein, Lacan, Laughter, MetaTherapeutics, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire

        Freud argued in Totem and Taboo that the efects of secondary revision are not exclusive to the dream-work; they are in fact evidenced in any realm of thought that requires unity and intelligibility as markers of its systematic aspirations. Freud writes:

The secondary revision of the product of the dream-work is an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one… [A] system is best characterized by the fact that at least two reasons can be discovered for each of its products: a reason based upon the premises of the system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which we must judge to be the truly operative and the real one (Freud, 1953, 95).

        Unwittingly, Freud may very well have been predicting and facilitating the course of the criticism the intellectual function of his own apparatus was soon to suffer. Indeed, his appraisal of a system’s need for unity and intelligibility applies equally to metapsychology as it does to the structures of which it speaks. The psychoanalyst’s view stands here in stark opposition to Ockham’s razor as the principle of theoretical parsimony that has dominated much of the West’s scientific inquiry and the aesthetic standards of its formulations from the early Renaissance onwards. Interestingly enough, psychoanalysis too has often found itself loath to resist such a principle. No matter its internal struggles and divisions, the discipline has invariably sought to extract from the richness of its subject matter as basic and as universal a set of dynamics and categories as it possibly could. For Freud, it was the unconscious as a process that negotiates the pleasures and pressures of the libido; for Klein, envy and gratitude provided the major keys to the psyche’s workings and possible transformations; for Lacan, registers and mathemes were the code words by which the practice of the cure may be assessed and validated; and the list goes on.

        Whether axiomatic or real, explicit or concealed, I would like to suggest that one of the main motivating factors, or “reasons” as Freud wishes them to be, behind such a pursuit of systematic unity and simplicity is the discipline’s long-standing thirst for recognition as a member in our modern day version of the Greek Pantheon: Science. The price for such recognition cannot be overestimated. Much like the dramatic storm around which it has organized its practice and much like the blind hero around whom it has mounted its own clinical and intellectual storm, psychoanalysis has remained largely blind to the material and psychological paucity of its understanding of the psyche and, by extension, of sexuality, as tragically Oedipal and nothing but.

        For the most part, the psychoanalytic profession persists in its refusal to acknowledge that for it to do justice to the panoply of human passions it must recognize itself, as both a method and a community, as subject to them. Instead, it often discourses on sexuality in the most un-seductive of styles and on desire in the most un-desirous. Humour it virtually ignores; humility it has yet to discover; auto-irony it finds intolerable. Sadly, it stands alone as did Antigone, tragic in her certitude but no less comedic in her zeal.

        This, fortunately, is not the fate to which psychoanalysis must be doomed. While the abundance of its caricatures in the popular mind is a symptom of hostility and defensiveness, it is also a sign of the discipline’s own intensely disavowed and split off comedic power. As I see it, the collective and clinical task at this point is to reintegrate that power, not as aim but as tool.

Thou Shalt not Laugh

March 8, 2008
Disjunctive Synthesis, Freud, Jean Laplanche, Klein, Lacan, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles

        In his study of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt recounts one of those anecdotes that are “true and not true, everywhere and nowhere,” in other words, one of those anecdotes that are mythic in quality and function:

The citizens of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and worship him as our patron saint’. And so they did. (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 15)

        Aside from its all-too-familiar and perhaps even universal juxtaposition of violence with reverence, what, amongst the countless of Burckhardt’s vignettes, marks this one in particular as both mythic and tragic is, ironically but not too surprisingly, the hefty quotient of laughter its recounting often evokes. At another time and in another place, Franz Kafka’s reading of his own quasi-mythic tales of humanity’s despair and absurdity elicited a similar laughter from his Prague audiences; ditto of the response of many a theatregoer to the performance of Ionesco’s despairing La cantatrice chauve. Let us not forget Emily Dickinson, that mistress of suffering, who could not but delight in the humorous nuances of certain stories of death and decapitation.

        One could easily argue, as many already have, that operative in these and most other comic responses is a concealment of and a shield against the poignancy, if not the pain, of the myth and its truth, that, in other words, the laughter is the very confirmation of what it tries to deny. With pain as the normatively posited response, no psychoanalytic clinician or theorist, to my knowledge at least, has entertained the possibility of a reverse and yet equally vital scenario whereby laughter is the target of concealment and tears are its limpid and unadorned but no less obscuring cover.

        And yet, throughout much of its history, psychoanalysis has rightly insisted on the inherently conflicted relationship a subject has with its object. Freud considered the perversions as always paired in the individual: sadism and masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism are not simply the terms we attach to the separate but presumably complementary roles we adopt in our sexual scenarios, they are co-extensive components of our identities as desiring subjects. As much can be said of femininity and masculinity for what Freud had termed primary “bisexuality” in his Three Essays of 1905 is better captured in our current lexicon as primary “bigenderism.” Klein made the case for a similar dynamic, though hers were much starker terms: sexuality and aggression, love and hate, are our inexhaustible rudiments and much of what we know of the unconscious and its positions is articulated through the ways in which the two are lived and negotiated. As for Lacan, that master of the triad wherever registers, passions, and diagnoses were concerned, he too insisted on the co-valence of the oppositional pair whenever he addressed technical questions of presence and absence, speech and silence, inside and outside,

        Puzzling then is the psychoanalytic refusal to detect anything other than the tortured and tragic in the myth of Oedipus as its founding principle. Puzzling is the discipline’s refusal to grant its hermeneutic key access to its much-treasured logic of duality and opposition, a logic that would uncover in the Oedipal script its constitutive roots in the humorous. No doubt, the clinical commitment to the alleviation of human suffering has often left little room for the consideration of anything other than the stifling and the traumatic. Indeed, there has been much seductive sense to the argument that the time for laughter and, in this case, personal freedom, is possible only after the working through of blockages and inhibitions has been accomplished. (It is worth noting here that such a working through is as much collective and cultural, considering the environment of concrete violence and destruction we inhabit, as it is individual.)

        Still, and by that very same token, the zeal and earnestness with which psychoanalysis has championed the story of the erstwhile king of Thebes as the embodiment of pathos and nothing but is itself the symptom of an inhibition that is in bad need of analysis and alleviation, an inhibition that is all the more potent precisely because of its silence and opacity, an inhibition that functions in the style of an “enigmatic signifier,” as Jean Laplanche has termed it, a constitutive communication, in this case of a clinical guideline, that remains unconscious to both sender and receiver, a communication that operates in the mode of a yet unspoken eleventh (psychoanalytic) commandment: Thou shalt not laugh.

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