Can analysts be interested in what is real in the clinical interchange, or is meaning only to be found in the text?

Ordinary clinical enquiry vs discursive oratorial practices


by Jorge L. Ahumada

Contribution to an IJPA email discussion of his paper,
"Rebirth of the idols: The Freudian unconscious and the Nietzschean unconscious"; IJPA Vol 82 pp 219-235 April 2001. (Full paper available at http://www.ijpa.org)

The following commentary is by the author of a paper currently under discussion by members of an ongoing email discussion held by the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJPA). We are indebted to the Editor of the International Journal, Professor David Tuckett, and to Jorge Ahumada, for allowing us to reproduce his comments here. Some of them will be difficult to follow without the wider context of the discussion points of his fellow discussants, but the central thrust of his arguments are clear, and may be of interest to readers of this website because they bear on at least two issues of some controversy in the world of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Britain and the USA in 2001. One is the tension between those who embrace a textually based, 'post-modernist' approach, tending towards the de-emphasis of the role of clinical evidence, and those who place evidence from the transference-countertransference relationship at the heart of their studies. The other, related, issue is the self-authorisation of psychoanalysts, which perhaps may be seen to be associated with antagonism towards authority structures in teaching institutions. This in turn may relate to the basic attitude held by self-authorising practitioners (a phenomenon burgeoning in both the USA and, more recently, in the UK, where 60 UKCP Psychotherapists have announced themselves as Psychoanalysts without reference to authorising bodies over which they have no influence) in regard to the nature of evidence, and hence to the first set of issues mentioned above. The editors welcome your comments. Please send to discourse@psychoanalysis.org.uk

 

Professor Ahumada's commentary on the initial discussion of his paper:

Firstly, my thanks to Kay Torney Souter for being so explicit about her own experiences on the two quite different Freuds she met in psychoanalytic clinical training, on the one hand, and on her teaching in a postmodernist liberal Arts environment, on the other hand. This supports quite precisely what I mean as the "Freudian unconscious", and the "Nietzschean unconscious". I coincide on how polarized these positions have become: clinical enquiry and discursive oratorial practices are guided by quite distinct if not opposite rules. This issue is to my mind crucial for the future of psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline. The teaching at University schools of psychology often functions on the basis of oratorial discursiveness, students being amply fed, as concerns psychoanalysis,
various admixtures of, say, Lacan, Foucault, and such literary latecomers as Derrida and Forrester. Some of these students will go on to become text-begotten pseudoanalysts, authorized just by themselves. Some, perhaps only a few, will seek admittance as candidates to proper psychoanalytic training, but then their training analyses will meet quite a fight to traverse their ideologized layers of epistemic narcissism - to use Ron
Britton apt term. The end result may well be varying degrees of clinical sterility, analyses going on in lighter and lighter, ultimately self-defeating versions. The paucity of detailed, in depth clinical papers on the side of the younger members in many societies may be taken a mark of what goes on.

I must also thank Ruth Stein, whose work on Laplanchian lines was part of what was being discussed in my paper, for her openness, courage, and generosity in confronting the issues and engaging in the controversy. It is a pity that only a few points can fit within the limits of a discussion. I appreciate her stressing that one of the strong points of my paper is that
the Cartesian quest for certainty and the Nietzschean death of evidences converge on the point of the dismissal of reference, evidence and truth.

Evidence she considers a controversial term, with which I would certainly agree: it is at once indispensable and elusive, that is why we need to adhere to the method in order that evidences can unfold, most often in complex and contradictory fashions, until in the course of further unfoldings things begin (hopefully) to clear up. Evidences, then, are unavoidably part of a process and subject to further correction, which does not in any way mean that they are undecidable. Evidences are not dead, as
Nietzsche would sustain; they are just hard to reach. Then, oftentimes evidences become alive to the point of being undeniable, but to decide on that is mostly the patient's task rather than ours. I would also agree on that neutrality is impossible in its totalizing version: only, the idea itself of a totalizing analytic neutrality is part of the Cartesian epistemic trap whereby concepts are absolutised. Also, I fully share Ruth
Stein's concerns on the anarchic, potentially fascistic faces of
postmodernism.

Some of further thoughts on the sacrality of the sexual, leaving Bataille aside. Clinically, one can observe in today's sexuality the presence of at least two different gods. This may be illustrated by the case of a female patient, already well in her thirties, whose conceptual approach to a rather
fluid sexuality can be summarized as "why not?". In the course of her analysis, after one of her "why not" flings, she came to session in a quite paranoid state of mind, believing at a quasi delusional level that I would cruelly criticize her for her fling; analysis opened the way to an understanding of how, from adolescence on, her sexuality had been put at the service of the mocking defying, mostly of her father but also of her mother.

The mocking, exulting, Dionysian orgasm at the service of the reversal of the received and the given -or of the parental couple, if one wants to say it so. Sometime after, when she became able to start a valued relationship which eventually brought her to her marriage, sexuality turned into an intimate affair and, unsurprisingly, some inhibitions came to the fore.

Far from being phallocentric and defensive, I think that Freud's comment, after Ferenczi, that the penis is a guarantee to its owner that he can be once again united to his mother in the act of copulation can apply to both sexes and describes the more intimate type of sexuality where emotional dependency on the partner comes be acknowledged.

A last comment on the place of the poetic as part of the analyst's role. As recently and astutely noted by Glen Gabbard, few great analysts have been good writers - let alone poets. In this terrain I would tend to rely on the patient's poetic creativity, if any, and wouldn't attempt to add in my own.
At the most, I would say that oftentimes a countertransference occurrence on the humorous side can help lessen the pain. Some time ago, a patient finishing her treatment recalled with some gratefulness that once, when she came in into pieces as she often did at the start of the analysis and she said "I feel I have been run over by garbage truck". I responded, "Why
couldn't it be some other sort of truck?". Which she felt as a way both tactful and precise of pointing at her cruel self-demeanings. But I would call that humour, or tact, rather than poetry. Poets, as Einstein used to say of good ideas, are rare.

As usual, Robert Caper's perceptiveness hits right on the nail: "The Rebirth of the Idols" is part of a larger project, the first part of a book, with the same title, to which the finishing touches will be put after this discussion closes (by the way, whoever can, in these postmodern times, suggest a willing prospective publisher for such non-postmodern piece will
be appreciated). I couldn't agree more on the need for epistemic humility, for the giving up of omnipotence of thought on the part of the analyst. I would also wholeheartedly agree that the evidence-free and method-free, declamatory performing art that I am calling the Nietzschean unconscious
amounts, in Caper's own happy terms, to a fetishization of psychoanalytic theory.





Jorge L. Ahumada, Psychoanalyst
Buenos Aires


A review will appear here in due course. (Ed.)

 

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