This is a book that reveals psychoanalysis as a profession, its history and theories with broad but lively strokes, and the lives of its practitioners through vivid and personal details. The book compiles interviews of Aaron Green (anonym) and a few more psychoanalysts in New York, interpolated with stories of the founders and pioneers of psychoanalysis and excerpts drawn from their works and communication.
What is psychoanalysis, and why? As a native Taiwanese who once aspired to become a creative engineer and has never heard of this term until half a year ago, I get asked this question a lot. The shortest answer I can offer is probably: psychoanalysis is a way of living. But my answer is probably inconsequential here, so let us see what Freud said about this vast world he discovered.
It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those “impossible” professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government. – Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937)
In fact, the way this explanation goes touches my encounter with and understanding of psychoanalysis. I grew up in a difficult family, and through auditing the bitter and violent quarrels I realized early on that language and meaning does not connect with each other transparently or statically. We complain about the ridiculousness of other people’s words when we can not make sense of them – when we can not fit them into our inner symbolic structure frictionlessly. The beauty of Freud’s words above is that psychoanalysis, a rather unfamiliar term to most, is now as a signifier connected with other preexisting signifiers in the reader’s minds, and therefore understanding, or relatedness, is achieved.
Hence, by saying I understand something, what we really mean is the situation where the something is placed frictionlessly inside our humongously complex inner symbolic network. What we are able to do then is to explain and relate to the something we learn with something else we already learned, by traversing the signifying chains that are associated with the something. Hence this understanding that we usually achieve is through the natural attitude coined by Husserl, since most signifying chains activated in our daily thinking, learning and living are taken for granted and seldom given second thoughts.
In fact, one famous contribution of Lacan is to suggest that unconscious is symbolic. Since the pre-oedipal period when the child is nourished by the mother’s love and wanting to become the object of focus and desire of the mother, and then the oedipal period when the child enters the world of symbols and symbolic orders, the child gains linguistic capability and gradually the fluency in relational interaction, but at the same time the child realizes the impossibility to materialize the dream of becoming the mother’s object of desire in light of the father’s presence. And hence the name of the father (or the law of the father) represents metaphorically the introduction of symbols and orders into the child’s inner world, and the introduction of an eternal sense of alienation and sense of lack since language is not created for the child and therefore by operating in language internally or externally, consciously or unconsciously, the child repetitively experiences desire that will never be fulfilled.
The sense of lack and the inevitable frustration of desire permeates one’s life, and in cases where one can not make sense of the surrounding world full of other people – many of whom are walking wounds themselves, as Winnicott told us – or the inner disturbed world featuring undercurrents of insatiable and un-speakable desires, one feels pain and seeks therapy. This brings us to psychotherapy.
Equating psychoanalysis with a subset of psychotherapy is understandable but misleading, for therapy seeks therapeutic cure, but for psychoanalysts the definition of cure can be undetermined, intangible, or at best varying across different therapists and the psychoanalytic schools or philosophical thinking they subscribe to. To talk about therapeutic cure, let us briefly return to Freud’s adventure.
Freud started his career as a neurologist, treating patients by means of electrotherapy plus baths, massage, and something called the Weir Mitchell rest cure, but with a growing sense of futility. (p.14) He then incorporated hypnosis into his private practice, which led to dissatisfaction due to the lengthy and fallible process of induction. Despite its difficulty, Freud practiced it and together with Breuer they arrived at the same conclusion, that:
Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. (p.16)
After the attempt to induce hypnosis-like state of mind by forehead pressing, Freud invented free association to replace hypnosis. And with free association, Freud craved for digging out secrets in his patients, like an psycho-archaeologist, with the half-empirical half-speculative belief that by remembering and reliving past traumatic experience, one can be cured of his or her neurotic symptom. Freud then observed that patients invariably talked about their dreams. Shall we recall a scene in Westworld when the Professor divulged his deepest calling to his inventor:
Professor Abernathy: “When we are born… we cry that we are come to this great stage of f… f… fools.”
Dr. Ford: “What is your itinerary?”
Professor Abernathy: “To meet my maker.”
Dr. Ford: “Well you’re in luck. And what do you want to say to your maker?”
Professor Abernathy: “My most mechanical and dirty hand. I shall have such revenges on you both, the things I will do, what they are yet I know not, but they will be the terrors of the earth. You don’t know where you are, do you? You are in the prison of your own sins.”
Bernard: “He is the fragments of prior builds … the reverie must be allowing him to access them.”
(Westworld S1E1)
Dreaming and daydreaming/reverie – to access prior builds, or the traumatic memories lodged deep within – and the deciphering of the dream narratives and symbols led Freud to his proudest work: The Interpretation of Dreams. Then Freud moved on to discover another entry into the unconscious – parapraxes – and then the eroticism in the dreams of the neurotics, which led to the theorizing of resistance, infantile sexuality, Oedipus complex, the structure of the psyche and so on.
In that period, the feverish rush of discoveries that Freud had made in the eighteen-nineties – about dreams, the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, free association, transference – was settling into a design of orderly beauty. All the pieces fit, and the whole thing shone. (p.10)
Shine as the whole theory did, the definition of cure and the timing of termination has troubled analyst even today. Object relations therapists would, for instance, believe that they are introjected by the patients, becoming the significant goodness within. This internalization and idealization would only make termination more difficult. Freud said rather blandly that the sign of a successful analysis is to be able to love and work, to achieve a certain degree of happiness, a joie de vivre (joy of living), a certain well-being, good enough relations with oneself and others. (Maria Pierrakos, “Transcribing Lacan’s Seminars”, 2006). And in Lacanian analysis what indicates a termination of treatment is that the patient ends the identification with the analyst – the analyst becomes dispensable – and instead identifies with sinthome. (http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/on-the-aim-and-end-of-analysis-in-the-lacanian-school/) In this book, the protagonistic analyst said:
The purpose of the analysis isn’t to instruct the patient on the nature of reality but to acquaint him with himself, with the child within him, in all his infantility and its impossible and unrepudiated and unrepudiatable longings and wishes. (p.76-77)
How impossible would this be! If the obscure depth of the unconscious is beyond measure, how can one know for sure he or she has reached the bottom, the very core within cores, the real child within? Fortunately, this uncertainty would not be put to test frequently because the majority of analytic cases because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached. (p.151-152)
And when these forced terminations occur, the patients have to leave their good objects, which invariably hurt. Paradoxically, the analyst is said to never have experienced such pain, because if psychoanalytic maturation embodies a final stoical acceptance of the uncertainties of adulthood and the inevitability of death, then analysts never grow up and never have to die. The people who instruct others on serious and final things themselves remain Peter Pans indefinitely staying off adulthood and extinction in the Never-Never Land of analytic practice and institutional politics. (p.155)
And so we have an entourage of respectful, saint-like analysts extolling the theories they subscribe to or institutions they attached themselves to and declaring their life’s work is to evangelize analysis as going after the big win, while having themselves stuck in the politics, the power struggle, their unresolved neurosis, and the petal-picking dilemma of interpret-or-interpret-not. There is even more dilemma in the therapy room i.e. the apology situation: should the analyst apologize for bring late for a session? No, said the classical Freudian Aaron Green:
… a rather vicious analyst joke came to mind, which goes like this: A new woman patient comes to a male analyst’s office, and he says, “take off your clothes and get on the couch.” The woman gets undressed and lies down on the couch, and the analyst gets on top of her. Then he says, “you can get dressed now and sit in that chair.” She does so, and the analyst says, “O.K. We’ve taken care of my problem. What’s yours?” … I felt guilty about my lateness, and by apologizing I was seeking forgiveness from the patient. I was saying to him, “Let’s take care of my problem – never mind about yours.” (p.78)
Nevertheless, analysts still favor their profession. One reason can be the rich pool of dramas they constantly have access to, which can be sources of reflection:
… patients – their stories are full of just such arrestingly rich detail, as if a gifted writer had composed them. When you do analysis and get people’s particular stories, they stop being cases of this fixation and of that developmental arrest; they become real people. What first attracted me to psychoanalysis was the power and elegance and, yes, even the reductionism of the theory. But the longer I do analysis the less I can generalize and the more I become impressed with the idiosyncrasy of human experience – even of my own! (p.148)
This can explain exactly how I was drawn to psychoanalysis in the first place. I grew up absorbing theories and methodologies in math and physics and fantasizing about the power of a unified theory that can explain all. I grew up amidst bitter family fights and have countless inner debates on what constitute a good object relation and the short-term/long-term effectiveness of help. And throughout my engagement with the so-called non-elites – in restaurant kitchen, in shore side hostel, in the army – I gave up reductionism and found life stories rich in idiosyncrasies in their own struggle with the hardship of life, in their infinite strength and creativity to survive and live in their definition of meaning of life. Virtually all my experiences and narratives can find their positions under the rubric of psychoanalysis, hence my affinity with it. Recalling the dream I had after reading Alice Miller’s book and the inward spiral of self-exploration and the cognitive restructuring it triggered ad infinitum, I sense a smell of awakening, like the dawn of artificial consciousness in Westworld and the awakening of Dolores after her father whispered: these violent delights have violent ends.
When I hear that trumpet sound
I’m gonna rise right out of the ground
Ain’t no grave
Can hold my body down
(“Ain’t No Grave” by Johnny Cash; ending of Westworld S1E1)
Psychoanalysis, for me, is a way of living.
Inbetweenness 