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Reflexivity

The Irrelevance of Psychoanalysis (?!)

April 27, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Play, Reflexivity, Transitionals, Winnicott

I want to turn to the possibility that psychoanalysis may acquire the status of a found object and hence, and for all parties concerned, be no more and no less than an animated, resilient, and, eventually (gasp!), irrelevant object.

The most obvious and frequent strategy for addressing this question has been to elaborate on the clinical and psychodynamic factors that allow for the analysand’s associations to take on the quality of a found object, for the expression of dreams, memories, demands, and affects to occupy the intermediate space between hallucination and reality, for, in turn, the analyst’s intervention to meet this expression on its own terrain instead of functioning as a correction according to a scientific fact (“this is what actually happened”) or an injunction in the name of a psycho-mythology (“this is what should happen”), for, in other words, the analyst’s intervention to take on the quality of a found object as well. Contra the classic strategy advocated by Freud and Klein according to which every clinical phenomenon ought to be identified, understood, and interpreted as the enactment of some pre-existing unconscious pattern, Winnicott’s elaborations have prompted many clinicians to focus and promote the analysand’s use of his or her words, wishes, and predicaments, of the person, presence, and utterances of the analyst, of the frame, the couch, and the money that exchanges hands at the end of a calendar period, of, in sum, the whole range of factors that constitute and shape the analytic situation as a found object. Transference, aggression, and defence, for instance, are no longer the unconscious puppet masters that need to be exposed and neutralised; they are to be understood and responded to as the effects of the analysand’s attempts at utilising the analytic situation and all that runs through it as a found object.

What become crucial in such a context are the analyst’s own responsibility in the face of such use, the interpretive, counter-transferential, and extra-transferential factors that correspond to and further that use. Such a responsibility entails the analyst’s recognition that every single aspect of the analytic situation must not only be animated and resilient, but that it must eventually cede its place to something other than and greater than itself, that, in other words, it must become irrelevant. Much like the found object that is a toy will sooner or later lose its meaning in favour of a broader field of cultural expression, the found object that is a dream, an intervention, a transference, an analysis, an analyst even (or perhaps especially) will not so much come to pale in comparison to a deeper or richer other of its own kind, it must eventually open onto an altogether greater experience, non-clinical and extra-analytic. To put it roughly, for a psychoanalysis to qualify as a found object not only can it not be its own end, it must also foster its own ultimate dissipation.

While setting its author apart from those orientations that construe the culmination of the analytic process as the analysand’s identification with or internalisation of the analyst, it seems as if there is nothing uniquely Winnicottian about this call for the dissipation of analysis. Classical Freudians have proposed that the “resolution of the transference” be the measure of clinical success and Lacanians have defined the cure in terms of the dissolution of the analytic “subject supposed to know.” What does set Winnicott apart is the fact that while the clinician in him equips us with the category of the found object as yet another instrument that serves our psychoanalytic objectives, the philosopher in him opens up for us the possibility of transforming that object into a meta-clinical frame by which we may understand and assess the practice and its objectives not only from within the analytic situation, and hence according to the needs or expectations of those that participate in it, but also, and, I believe, much more interestingly, from without.

Winnicott gives us not just a tool of analytic inquiry that may eventually be displaced by other more accurate or more efficient, but no less analytic, tools but also a standard grounded in analytic theory and practice by which both the theory and the practice (rather than any particular analytic moment or process) can be assessed. Psychoanalysis, Winnicott tells us, does not stand outside of the history of that quintessentially human phenomenon, play; it is only its “most recent form” (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 41); and though he speaks of it as a “highly specialised” type of play, nowhere does he indicate that psychoanalysis is that history’s culmination; in fact, there is good reason to believe that Winnicott would have to agree with the idea that, much like the found object in the life of the individual, psychoanalysis is but a found object in the life of the species, an object that will neither die nor be repressed but will simply lose its meaning in favour of more subtle, more collective, or maybe even more enduring forms of “play.”

As a discipline, psychoanalysis seems to have entirely sidestepped the challenge at the heart of Winnicott’s notion of the found object. Freud could not have conceived of civilisation without analysis since civilisation is, as it were, the Petri dish of humanity’s psychological ailments which only analysis is qualified to handle. As for Klein and Lacan, and though they disagreed on just about everything analytic, they would have been in complete accord over the impossibility of even imagining humanity’s growth without a psychoanalysis that would temper culture’s otherwise devastatingly aggressive and distorting effects on the individual psyche. I doubt that, by definition, Winnicottians are more amenable to the idea of a “life without analysis” than their Freudian, Kleinian, or Lacanian counterparts. (A Winnicottian colleague I respect asked if I was contemplating leaving the profession; when I answered in the negative she jokingly requested that I hold off on expressing these thoughts till after she retires!)

Reading

March 6, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Machines, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        From Plato and through to Hegel, the distinction that has governed the analysis of desire is that of production versus acquisition, with desire invariably subsumed under the heading of the latter. At those rare moments when it did depart from this schema, psychoanalysis could conceive of desire as productive only in terms of an internal or “psychic” reality, of a fantasy and a mimic, of a representation of the real, desired, and hence lacked object.

        Deleuze and Guattari offer us the linchpin of a critique of the notion of desire as lack and, by extension, of the subject as lacking, as well as the elements of a desire whose three constitutive moments (production, recording, and consumption) are both transitive and reflexive. Paradoxically, the anti-oedipal level of abstraction here opens up the possibility for desire as a machine whose satisfaction is not equivalent to having (consumption) or to being (performance); it is rather a matter of doing, which may include having and being but is limited to neither.

        This, I believe, is most evident in the context of the reader’s relationship to the text: does Anti-Oedipus carry with it a measure of either the descriptive or the prescriptive? The former requires an appeal to neutrality that the text has doggedly resisted: indeed, and rather than on entities, its focus has been on events and relations, and, most importantly, on its and its reader’s inevitable implications in them. In the process, the text thwarts that reader’s demand for an ethical or clinical guideline since such a demand can be satisfied only in a context whereby the agency that makes it and the agency that fulfills it are identifiable and discrete.

        If anything, the Deleuzo-Guattarian schema reverses the responsibility for satisfaction; the question that is most pressing now is the one that regards not the text’s meaning and application but the reader’s experiences and/of use. Dismantle, rearrange, and reassemble; the status of the anti-oedipal schema is that of a machine that is distinguishable from the wanderings of its meta-psychological counterparts; it is not so much that we have an account of psyche, text, and institution that can better fulfill our analytic, epistemic, or political demands; rather, we are offered and drawn into an understanding that obeys the laws of its own inquiry. If the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject is conjunctive, provisional, and indeed situational then, as a textual, theoretical, and methodological subject, so are Anti-Oedipus and its readers.

Anti- … … …

March 3, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Condensation, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Disjunctive Synthesis, Displacement, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        One of the most striking qualities of the Deleuze-Guattarian schema is its trinitarian structure: production, recording, and consumption; machine, body without organs, and subject; paranoid, miraculating, and celibate; connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; and, finally, delirium, hallucination, and experience.

        The question that presents itself at this point is whether such a schema is but the latest in a series of vignettes that articulate the fundamental processes of thought (primary and secondary) Freud and Lacan had already attempted. Are we, in other words, witnessing a departure or simply a reiteration, no matter how varied, of what has been said and done, analytically and otherwise, on numerous occasions already?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s response is that the triangulations of social delirium, be they Oedipal or symbolic, are inherently static and stultifying; their forceful insistence on immutability and universality has now become drone-like and quasi-hypnotic. The schema that Deleuze and Guattari offer instead is grounded in a logic of counter-stability; its structure may be tripartite but, and forever, its modalities are infinite, its meanings multiple, and its subjects aleatory.

        I want to backtrack a bit here: what Freud had posited as his most cruicial contribution to the study of the psyche was not the fact of the unconscious. Freud had posited the fact of a dynamic unconscious as a form of thought and a process, as in primary process, as the basis for his newly elaborated project. I think that as much as Anti-Oedipus marks itself as profoundly anti-psychoanalytic, it remains most faithful to Freud’s core insights. In the name of flows and machines, the text rejects the Freudian unconscious in favour of an unconscious governed by three productive syntheses: connection, disjunction, and conjunction. However, with structural linguistics and its Lacanian appropriations for background, Deleuze and Guattari have essentially recast the Freudian mechanisms of displacement, condensation, and secondary revision in terms that, though unsettling, are no less psychoanalytic:

  • displacement, circulation along the axis of contiguity-metonymy, is now the connective synthesis (and… and…);
  • condensation, circulation along the axis of selection-metaphor, is now the disjunctive synthesis (either… or… or…)
  • secondary revision, the arrangement of disparate fragments into commonsensical and identitarian narratives, is now the conjunctive synthesis (so that’s what it is…).

        Deleuze and Guattari identify a psychoanalytic implementation that can only tolerate a “this and that” (mummy and daddy), a “this or that” (masculine or feminine), and a permanent “it’s me” ego. Deleuze and Guattari advance a schizoanalytic implementation where the connections and the disjunctions operate ad-infinitum and the subjectivities to which conjunctions give rise are partial and transitory.

        The anti-Oedipal criticism can be reformulated in the following terms: psychoanalysis has erected unnecessary and institutionally self-serving limits; it has betrayed its own first principle of a dynamic unconscious. It has not gone as far as it can actually go. Guattari stated as much in his notes while preparing the text. In the recently published Ecrits pour l’Anti-Oedipe, he repeatedly admonished Freud and Lacan for reintroducing the subject into the very realm from which they had previously evicted it, for subordinating the unconscious to the logic of unity and coherence, if not in fact then in therapeutic ideal. For Guattari, psychoanalysis has proven itself incapable of tolerating its own discovery of the unconscious as a primary process; it has become little more than an ossified and ossifying secondary revision.

        I want to suggest that, in adopting the notions of slip and dynamic primary process, Anti-Oedipus belongs at the heart of the psychoanalytic tradition. That it rejects the Oedipal schema in which Freud encapsulated his findings makes it less Freudian but not any the less psychoanalytic. Before and since Deleuze and Guattari, many in the Kleinian and relational camps have rejected the Oedipal drama as a major hermeneutic key. This did not make them any the less psychoanalytic; it confirmed their commitment to the study of the psyche and to the intervention in its workings. Deleuze and Guattari’s failure to separate the discipline from some of its practitioners may be due to the fact that, sadly, the discipline itself has been governed by doctrinaire allegiances to those prominent amongst the practitioners. One often hears certain Freudians, Kleinians, or Lacanians declaring only members of their schools as the “true” bearers of the psychoanalytic torch; outsiders are dismissed as lost souls or impostors.

PS: see also Anti.

Subjects-Laws

January 26, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Subjects

        Let me draw a parallel, temporarily at least, between Lacan’s three registers (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) and the tripartite structure Deleuze and Guattari identify as the basis for the emergence and understanding of a subject: hallucination, delirium, and intensity.

        The correspondences imaginary/hallucination, symbolic/delirium, and real/intensity identify the last of the couplets as the logical priority without which the other two would be impossible. Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari would agree on this point. They would, however, part company on the status of thought and the logic it betrays.

        The symbolic for Lacan is immutable. One is born into certain linguistic structures over which one has very little if any control. Rather than the resolution, taming, or expansion of unconscious thought processes, the analytic task for Lacan consists in giving such processes expression, in articulating their truth and making them subject in and of such structures.

        In foregoing the structural distinction between conscious and unconscious—“it,” after all, is at work everywhere—Deleuze and Guattari disentangle amongst the various expressions of delirium, of the “I think,” and hence of the symbolic, the schizophrenic from the social. Whereas the Lacanian symbolic, its quality, and the fact of its presence or absence, is beyond modification, Deleuzo-Guattarian delirium is indeed subject to transformation-fetishisation: reversal, exclusivity, and ossification.

        It is worth noting here that schizophrenic delirium is not simply the counter-part or specular image of social delirium since its productive quality lies not so much in a Law that will install and ground an identity, but in a process that will lead to (se rabattre sur) and produce a subject and a meaning that are residual, aleatory.

        One of the many implications to this distinction reflects on the practice of a symbolic community. In the one case, it is a given; in the other it is produced. In the one case, it is the limit that safeguards its members from the threat of psychosis; in the other, it is the porous boundary through which much is trafficked and produced.

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.

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