What Is Psychoanalysis? – An Alternative View

What is psychoanalysis and what makes it different? Psychoanalysis is a response to human suffering. It is a form of psychotherapy, but it’s very different from other kinds of psychotherapy. In this video we look at how it’s different, how it works, and a little about what the experience of a psychoanalysis is like.

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Works referenced in this video:

– Jacques Lacan, Écrits

– Lacan, Seminar IV

– Lacan, Seminar VI

– Lacan, Seminar XI

– Lacan, Seminar XVI

– Freud, Studies in Hysteria

– Bernard Burgoyne, ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis’, in Jitendra: Lost Connections

– Lawrence Friedman, Freud’s Papers on Technique and Contemporary Clinical Practice

– Jean Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual

– Jacques-Alain Miller, Le Divan, interview in Liberation, 3rd July 1999

– Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Contraindications to Psychoanalytic Treatment’

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Transcript

This video is about what makes psychoanalysis different. It’s not just an alternative view of psychoanalysis, it’s about the ways in which psychoanalysis is itself an alternative view.

Let’s start with a simple definition: psychoanalysis is a response to human suffering. It’s a way of intervening on that suffering that works solely through speaking freely and listening in a particular way. The dynamic effect of this is to bring about change in a person’s life, in their relation to their suffering, and to open up new pathways, new options, new possibilities through which they can act. Psychoanalysis is a form of psychotherapy. But it is very different from other kinds of psychotherapy. We’ll look at how it’s different, how it works, and a little about what the experience of a psychoanalysis is like.

Speaking, Space, Listening

A psychoanalysis involves speaking freely. Speaking in a way that doesn’t hush the thoughts that go through your head, as we do in everyday life. In this sense, psychoanalysis is the purest practice of free speech.

All psychoanalysis has to provide is a space. Someone can come to that space, at a certain time, and know that during that time they can speak freely, be themselves, be the things they might not be able to be outside. Everyone deserves to be heard. This is a place where what seeks to be heard is offered a voice. Psychoanalysis gives someone the space to have a thought that they haven’t had before. A space where possibilities, and surprises, can emerge from things that seem difficult, perhaps even impossible – to talk about or to think about. “It is a place which welcomes contingency, where necessity loosens its grip… this is the site of the possible.”

A psychoanalyst listens in a certain mode. We listen, and intervene here and there, in a way that allows the other person to hear themselves differently. A psychoanalysis is a product of a dialogue between two people. But it is not like the kind of conversation you would have in a bar, or at the dinner table. We could say that it is a dialogue which aims to circumvent egos, by listening more attentively to the way someone speaks and especially, how they speak about themselves, and how they have taken up the words of others.

“Psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience.” That is, there are two and only two people in this space. Through two positions that are different, and by virtue of the place that one inhabits for the other, something new can emerge. “Psychoanalysis… is a way of intervening in the pain of human relationships.” It does this through the creation of a different kind of relationship, between the psychoanalyst and the psychoanalysand. As Lawrence Friedman said, this is a unique kind of relationship in that it’s the only kind of relationship where you will find somebody intensely interested in you without wanting anything from you. “You will find in the psychoanalytic relationship the only situation where somebody is intensely interested in you without wanting anything from you.”

How is this different from other ways of responding to human suffering?

Brain, box, digit

The field of human psychology is full of many very clever ways to not have to listen to what someone is saying. Instead, we are often encouraged to look at someone’s body language, their responses to a questionnaire, or perhaps a scan of their brain. But how much does that really tell us about what it’s like to be that person? How they experience themselves, the world, their sense of life? Rather than actually listening to someone, today human subjectivity tends increasingly to be reduced to the level of brain, box, and digit.

1. Brain – through an appeal to the brain all emotions, meanings, ideas get systematically associated or linked to a cerebral quantity. Neurochemicals, neurotransmitters, electrical signals. We are told that we are just meat and electricity. But what space for personal meaning or narrative, creation, or invention?

2. Box – the box, as exemplified by the questionnaire, supposes that anything can be understood by being quantified, say by presenting someone with a scale from 1-10, and just asking them to tick the box. Complex and compound emotions like love, loneliness, distress can then supposedly be measured unproblematically, mathematised, relieving us of the burden to actually ask someone what it’s like for them to be lonely, in love, or in distress.

3. Digit – And today, ‘to be’ is ‘to be measurable’, digitalised. To be represented by the digit. With the assumption that we can know someone by what they show of themselves on social media, through their clicks, views, scrolls, or opt-ins. In short, by looking at the ways they are encoded in a digital economy.
Rather than trying to sanitise a human encounter by reducing people to units in order to make them neat and comprehensible, the psychoanalytic approach suggests that we have to listen carefully to what someone tells us: we have to respect what they say about themselves, their experiences, their history, and the meanings that they give things. Psychoanalysis exists between the pen and the pill. It offers a respect for human subjectivity: that it matters how you experience yourself and the world.

This means that in psychoanalysis we seek to understand what reality is for someone, rather than trying to impose a reality onto them. After all, there is no such thing as a shared reality. How you experience the world, how you make sense of it, how you carry yourself through it, is absolutely singular, absolutely idiosyncratic.

Here psychoanalysis stands in contrast to certain other approaches to psychotherapy which seek to impress on someone that they have certain patterns of thinking or ideas which need to be ‘corrected’, made more realistic, better adapted to reality. In psychoanalysis, the question is a deeper one: why do you have those ideas to begin with? Where would they have come from, what function might they serve, for whom, and to what end?

What happens in a psychoanalysis?

So what happens in a psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis is a one-by-one practice. This means that every case is different, so it’s hard to generalise. Often however, someone coming to a psychoanalyst will start by trying to present some kind of story about their life. In most cases, it quickly becomes apparent to the person themselves that something doesn’t quite make sense. There might be certain moments of contradiction or inconsistency, parts of the story that they have told themselves about themselves that don’t really fit together. These tend to be the starting points for exploration. Perhaps there are things that someone has never really questioned about their life – decisions they have taken, problems they seem to repeatedly encounter, patterns that persist, questions that were never answered. In speaking about them they may ask themselves these questions. What they say about themselves might, all of a sudden – from within their own words – be heard in a different way. Another meaning may form and surprise them.

This kind of work cannot be done alone. Part of the psychoanalyst’s job lies in getting someone interested in themselves in a way they have not been before. In this respect, the skill of the psychoanalyst lies not so much in what they say as in how they are able to draw someone’s attention to something that they have said about themselves. There might be certain points or certain patterns around which we would encourage them to elaborate. And we may intervene by: cutting, linking, echoing, punctuating, in order to allow this. It’s not about providing ready-made interpretations, like simply telling someone why they do something and what they should do instead. Psychoanalysis involves something more like a pointing – like a big, fat finger pointing – not at meaning necessarily – but at significance. A personal significance or a personal truth. For instance, if someone uses the same term to describe their relationship with a family member and their relation to a substance they say they are dependent on, we might indicate – in some way – that this is significant, and want to draw their attention to that particular term they have used, to open up the question of dependency, what it means to be dependent on someone or something.

In this, the psychoanalyst could be different things for different people, or a different thing for the same person at different times. Addressee, administrator, object. Jacques-Alain Miller describes it well. “Here, he loosens the ideal identifications the exigencies of which besiege the subject. And here, where the ego is weak, he extracts from the statements [dits] of the subject the material with which to consolidate a viable organisation. If the sense is blocked up, he articulates it, liquefies it, dialecticises it. If the sense flows non-stop without stopping upon any substantial signification, he introduces stopping points, quilting points, as we sometimes say, which give the subject a supporting armature.”

Meaning, Marking, Narrative

Someone’s reasons for wanting to talk to a psychoanalyst are also very individual, and clarifying this is where things begin. Very often, someone feels the need to know themselves better, “to seek their own meaning” as Lacan said. But in fact, most people go to great lengths to not know something about themselves. And psychoanalysis involves an often difficult confrontation with a lack of knowledge. We could say that in the place where someone searches for knowledge they might, instead, find truth. That is, not something that a psychoanalyst will inform them of, but what is most specific and singular in what they say about themselves.

Lacan said that psychoanalysis was “This assumption by the subject of his history, insofar as it is constituted by speech addressed to another.” This history will be structured and determined by the ways we have navigated certain failures or disappointments in love relations, and how we have fought against challenges to these relations, beginning with those to our earliest caregivers. Parts of this history may never be known. There will be gaps of course, but there will also be fantasies we put in those gaps, that is, certain core ideas we have patched or bound together for ourselves. In many cases, psychoanalysis is what Jean Laplanche called a “work of unbinding” that brings new material to the fore, allowing a renewed narration. In this sense, psychoanalysis lays bare the questions that are concealed by the answers. While some approaches to psychotherapy might aim to reframe, rephrase or restructure someone’s history or complaints, the effect of that may only be to recycle material that is second-hand to begin with. It’s like trying to translate a text starting from a translation rather than from the original. The problem is that unconscious foundations persist unaltered. Symptoms get substituted but the basic terms of the problem remain the same.

In many cases, psychoanalysis is actually about marking rather than making meaning. That is, it’s the ways in which things are marked or inscribed – as different from one another, as separate from one other – that’s important. Less about meaning and narrative as about the points where meaning ends, breaks down, or is allowed to fail. Rather than focus on meaning and narrative then, what is often important in a psychoanalysis are the points in our life that seem to resist our ability to make meaning out of them. Elements that are isolated, that cannot be connected in a representational sequence, points of impossibility. As Lacan put it, “It’s not a matter of localisations, but rather of relationships between loci, interposition, for example, or succession, sequence.” Think about grief and bereavement, for instance. We know nothing about loss, Lacan once said. “We simply plot points.”

Equally, someone might turn to a psychoanalyst because the form of their suffering – their symptom, their ‘idiom of distress’ – has become too much for them to bear. Here, rather than simply trying to remove the symptom of this suffering, we start by asking: why is it there? Rather than simply eliminating a problem, in a psychoanalysis the problem is taken seriously and respected. Because perhaps through that problem something is being addressed, worked on, worked out. A symptom, then, isn’t judged by a measure or a scale, but by how someone experiences it – what place it has in their life, the meaning they give it. So we ask, firstly, what might be the consequences of just getting rid of it? Is it for instance, a defence or a protection against something that would be too much? For this reason, most standard ways of measuring clinical outcomes like randomised control trials aren’t really applicable to psychoanalysis for the simple reason that there is no control group: psychoanalysis is absolutely a one-by-one practice. Even if you seem to have the same surface symptom or problem as someone else, how it operates for you will be different. Again, psychoanalysis is about what is most particular, singular about a person. It follows then that the psychoanalyst might be more interested in the points in someone’s life where knowledge breaks down, or where there are gaps in knowledge that can’t easily be filled – and what has been, or could be, put in their place.

Today we are constantly encouraged to survey ourselves. To ceaselessly ask ourselves ‘Am I happy?’, ‘Am I enjoying life?’, ‘Am I productive?’ Psychoanalysis involves moving beyond these simple categories of happiness, pleasure, and productivity. Refining these questions. Perhaps, initially, to relieve you of this burden, this (super-egoic) imperative to demand accountability of yourself to yourself through an endless monitoring of your ‘moods’, your ‘behaviour’, your ‘wellness.’ Psychoanalysis demands very little in comparison. In the end, as Freud once said, we might succeed merely in turning neurotic misery into what he called ‘common unhappiness.’ But that is a great deal. After all, suffering is a measure of what matters, of what we are invested in, of what it means to be human.

Living Contradiction

We don’t resolve our contradictions, we live them. One of the most difficult things for someone to confront as part of the work of psychoanalysis is living contradiction. Psychoanalysis, we could say, is a radical acceptance of contradictions. It does not promise to resolve them, but to progressively elaborate on them, as if, in the work, we are tightening around them, sculpting them, until their malevolent effects soften. Perhaps things that appear contradictory are, in fact, just… different. There is a difference, for instance, between what you want and what you enjoy. Just because I enjoyed Titanic doesn’t mean I want to sink a ship. Human beings are inherently contradictory, and psychoanalysis is a space in which you are allowed your contradictions. It is possible to think two things at once about something, to both love and hate the same person at the same time, just as it is to love and hate oneself. Ambivalence is in the nature of human relationships. This is a very difficult idea for people to accept, because we like to believe we are transparent to ourselves. But doing so allows us to move beyond the often simple binaries through which we’ve come to understand ourselves, and make another perspective possible.

When in psychoanalysis we talk about the unconscious, this is in essence what we are describing. The unconscious is not a hidden meaning or hidden wish that the psychoanalyst teases out. And nor is it a long drawn-out confession. If psychoanalysis is supposed to make what is unconscious conscious, it does so by making possible the articulation of formulas that express contradiction. The unconscious is a process which connects two different sets of impossibilities in a ciphered way. Two different things that are too much to bear, or which can’t be thought of by themselves, but which can be put into relation. Psychoanalysis mobilises unconscious effects which operate on this relation. The analyst’s cutting, linking, punctuating, affirming, ignoring – through speech alone – allows a different kind of relation here, makes new things possible, even while there will be some things that are never fully figured out. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, this is essentially what has the dynamic effect.

Movement, Ethics, and “Absolute Difference”

Psychoanalysis is a theory of movement. Lacan calls it “a treatment that modifies structures.” There will always be things you can’t change about the past, things you can’t explain or will never know about. But you can change the expression of them in the structure.

The way in which this happens for someone is absolutely individual. Which means that psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not a treatment that can be standardised. “[For] psychoanalysis is [also] a practice subordinated by its purpose to what is most particular about the subject.” (Ecrits, 296 Eng).

This is the ethics of psychoanalysis. ‘Ethics’ here is not a set of rules that governs how psychoanalysis is conducted. It’s something that’s generated as a result of the analysis. An approach to life, the opening of a possibility, that someone is able to reach through psychoanalytic work. It is about what makes someone singular, unique, and irreducible. Often, the truth of your subjectivity emerges when, through analysis, the coordinates of your identity start to fail; when something of your truth contradicts the social discourse, the cultural mandate, or the family determinants under which you have lived. It’s an ethics that creates a space for someone, some distance from the ‘other,’ by bringing them to the point where their relation to themselves and to their place in the world is one that Lacan summed up beautifully as: “absolute difference.”

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com