Download What fuels analytical work ?, p. Guy Le Gaufey What fuels analytical

GUY LE GAUFEY
WHAT FUELS ANALYTICAL WORK?
The detractors of psychoanalysis are used to making fun of the long-drawn-out treatment it can
be. The feigned surprise of these skeptical detractors is very often dictated by an anticipated scorn,
but a reliable answer to their suspicious disparagement is nevertheless not so easy to provide.
When Freud pretends to face the same interrogation – one he puts in fact in the mouth of a
supposed patient: “How long will the treatment take? How much time will you need to relieve me of my
trouble?”, he begins with alluding to one of Aesop’s fables. A traveller to Athena asks to a shepherd
how far the city is. And the shepherd replies: “Go. I will walk your own pace, and when we arrive at
Athena, I will know the exact value of your pace. Then, I could tell you how far we were when you
asked that to me.” But Freud immediately adds that the comparison is not a good one because “the
neurotic can alter his pace all the time”. Did he mean, then, that the analyst is not a shepherd?
Let’s rather suppose that the word “transference” is the first term to be taken into account in this
matter of duration, but at least with one caveat: without reducing it to the feeling of love or hatred
addressed to the analyst. The first meaning Freud gave to this word referred to the link established
between two ideas through any kind of connection, including what he named very early “simultaneous
cathexis”. This last conception is to be found in the first part of the Project [1897], when Freud tries to
explain this “simultaneous cathexis” he presents as “the foundation of all the connections between the
neurons ”. Let’s try and figure out how this type of connection works.
We learn that in chapter 11: “The quantitative cathexis is transmitted from a neuron  to a
neuron when  and 
 or anywhere
else.” This is a clinical supposition made for explaining how it is possible for the psychic apparatus to
avoid as far as possible the experience of pain that always comes from an excess of quantity. Such an
excess is conceived by Freud thanks to another supposition about some “secreting neurons” that,
once excited, can belch out new quantities, provoking pain (he explains this way why simply recalling
a bad memory can be so painful, without any new quantities emerging through perception). It is then
possible to send a quantity to a neuron other than the foreseen one on the way to the secreting
neuron (which is still dormant) so that, thanks to the wonderful property of “simultaneous cathexis”, the
current will be rerouted. The ego – then introduced in chapter 14 as a “wholesaler” of quantities – has
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therefore the capacity to launch such lateral cathexis in order to shunt a quantity running in the bad
way. Freud calls this process “Inhibition”, and this is a founding property of the entire psychic
apparatus to the extent that it permits to differentiate between perception and memory.
That’s all fine and good! But this wonderful inventiveness suffers a setback when it comes to
mourning. Let’s imagine that a severe loss and its associated pain are centered on a group of ideas
such that the least cathexis of any of them can trigger off grief and distress. The usual
recommendation in that situation is to get distracted, to think to something/someone else: but if the
group of ideas that bring about my inner turmoil keeps being constantly cathected (normal case in
mourning), then any other distracting idea newly cathected by the ego will be linked on the spot with
these permanently harrowing ideas and will immediately appear for what it is worth: nothing but a poor
substitute, a sheer distraction from… what I cannot help thinking about all the time. Inhibition appears
as a successful process if and only if the pathogenic nucleus is not previously too much and too
constantly cathected.
Partly because of this reasoning, when transference emerged for the first time on the analytical
stage as feelings addressed to the analyst, Freud considered that on the pattern of inhibition: sheer
resistance to the disclosure of repressed ideas by means of a new cathexis towards the analyst to
reroute the exploration of unconscious ideas. I think we must stick to this angle if we want to treat
correctly our matter of duration of the treatment because this love, this hatred, this affected
indifference, this constant moaning, etc., are just the visible part of an iceberg that will not melt into
clear and harmless water thanks to some interpretation. Why?
Because if interpretation (whatsoever it can be) is capable of dismantling a symptom, it is utterly
ineffective in front of what Freud called, in the first chapter of Inhibition Symptom and Anxiety, “reine
Hemmung”, that is: pure inhibition. And we already know why: if we give any new meaning to some
inhibition, we will just link together two ideas, creating then a new connection that will reinforce the net
around the point of inhibition. Unlike the symptom, there is no possible surprise with pure inhibition as
far as the danger (i.e. the perspective of pain) is too clear and too well located, which is patent with
phobia. In 1919, in his paper Lines of Advance in Psycho-analytic Therapy, Freud wrote:
The phobias have already made it necessary for us to go beyond our former limits.
One can hardly master a phobia if one waits till the patient lets the analysis
influence him to give it up. He will never in that case bring into the analysis the
material indispensable for a convincing resolution of the phobia. One must proceed
differently. Take the example of agoraphobia; there are two classes of it, one mild,
the other severe. Patients belonging to the first class suffer from anxiety when they
go into the street by themselves, but they have not yet given up going out alone on
that account; the others protect themselves from the anxiety by altogether ceasing
to go about alone. With these last, one succeeds only when one can induce them
by the influence of the analysis to behave like phobic patients of the first class that is, to go into the street and to struggle with their anxiety while they make the
attempt.
Still, Freud is not to be considered as a champion of active therapy, or a precursor of cognitive
therapies. He just respects his conception of what inhibition is: when the pathogenic nucleus keeps
being constantly invested up to run all the analytical process through the “pure” inhibition it
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commands, there is none hope for resolution. Unlike the symptom, resolution of a “pure inhibition” will
happen only if the excluded act takes place before any interpretation presumed to be resolutive. All
that seems absurd and absolutely counter-analytic, but Freud is clear enough: first, the patient acts
the phobia out, and then the phobia can be resolved. The analytic logic is here put upside down.
And so, transference is interpretable insofar as it is a matter for symptom, that is: a transfigured
repetition of a repressed idea, for instance the completely forbidden love for the father, consciously
masked by a harsh and constant criticism. In this way, transference is actually the powerful lever it is
supposed to be for giving way to the infantile neurosis without which the entire treatment is making no
headway. But there is also the dark side of it: the part of transference that falls within the competence
of pure inhibition. To understand that, we just need now to come up to the tie between inhibition and
repetition.
Inhibition is clinically understood as an impossibility to carry out an act, grammatically: “I cannot
do this”. But the “this” in question can be very often a semantic negation following a syntactic one, as
in the formula “I can’t help doing…”, which is an expression of inhibition in due form. Not being
capable of doing or of undoing is equal. The incapacity to refrain has to be considered as an inhibition
in spite of the fact that an action has apparently been accomplished and is to be repeated ad libidum.
And the negation can be second too, as in the so famous Bartleby’s phrase: “I prefer no to…”. When
you understand that the “preference” here at stake is in fact a deadly determination, then you know
that all that is about inhibition. So, the grammatical expression of inhibition can be syntactic or
semantic or both, but the decisive accent revolves around a repetition grounded in the conviction that
the claimed impossibility ist but unconquerable – and you are invited to nod assent in front of such a
pressure.
Therefore, we must differentiate the inhibition linked to a repressed idea (as it occurs in the
symptom) and this pure inhibition that is a turning away from nothing repressed, but from something
considered as a danger by the subject — not exactly a danger for his life, but for his capacity to be
represented by a signifier for another signifier, a danger for his “ex-sistence”.
What all that has to do with the duration of the treatment? Here we encounter another
dimension that comes into play in connection with the question of aim in the treatment itself. The
fundamental rule enacted by Freud – still valuable for analysts of very different trends – asks the
patient to abandon any “purpose idea” and to follow what comes into the mind, as such, without any
“re-thinking” of it. An immediate consequence ensue from such a rule: the work to come is, according
to Freud’s words, “zielloss”: aimless. That is the strongest difference with any psychotherapy, either
“psychoanalytical” or not. “Searching the trauma”, “being or feeling better”, “get married or get
divorced”, “stop grinding one(s) teeth at night”, “no longer laughing all the time stupidly”, all these
targets are perfectly allowable, but they are not aims the practitioner can trust as final points with
which the treatment could be concluded, not only because they could be deceptive but because
accepting any of them as an aim would reduce the fundamental rule to a sort of technical trick one
could drop at any time.
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Nevertheless, according to Freud, two purpose ideas stay at stake: the first one, about what
“the patient has no idea”, is the one of “meiner Person” (Freud’s words), that is: transference.
Concerning the second one, Freud “hypothesizes” (his word) that the patient will not forget that,
whatsoever is to occur between the two of them, it shall be considered as part of a treatment. Try this
in front of an hysteric patient proclaiming her/his love for you, and you will understand what adding fuel
to the fire means. Besides, the same Freud said elsewhere that if love transference is to a great extent
a neurotic repetition (interpretable), it has to be recognized too as an “echte Liebe”, a genuine love
(uninterpretable). So that invoking secretly the treatment as something you can brandish in front of a
patient in trouble with transference, is but a sort of anticipated worry, a reinsurance with a distant
danger in mind, in short: a counter-phobic idea. The fact that the analyst does not secure any aim is
indeed the only way to explore the net of signifiers in its natural complexity, and the best proof of it is
the analysis of one single dream: when free associations are not present to dismantle the manifest
level, the analysis of it will stay only an occasion to spin a yarn (which is not that bad, either).
But I want now to focus on a side effect of such an analyst’s stance, in direct relation with the
fact that the patient consequently does not actually know what the analyst aims at and wants. How this
analyst could be at the same time aimless and so demanding (sessions, time, money, speech)?
Would s/he be whimsical or fickle?
All that gives to the analyst’s desire an unknown value – something never really stressed by
Freud even though it is paramount to Lacan – and that is what I would like to consider as that that
“fuels” analysis, that permits its duration far beyond the reasonable, at least according to the usual
standards about health treatments of any kind.
Che vuoi? That is the question Lacan puts consequently as central in the making of the subject,
but we have now to understand that this question is not that addressed to the subject but, all the way
around, addressed from him to the powerful Other, first maternal.
In the center of the mystery consisting of this unknown value at the core of the Other, Lacan
puts into play, in his seminar Desire and its interpretation, what he calls the “common tragedy”, tying
the emerging subject and the Other in a new and decisive way. Let’s suppose first, as it has been
already put in The Signification of the Phallus, that the explicit demand of the child has been fulfilled,
his/her need appeased, and that this satisfaction has taken the value of a sign of love. Lacan then
states that desire is to be understood as a split between appetite for satisfaction and demand for love,
that is something rather difficult to understand correctly, but in the seminar he adds something else
very precious to get at it. He adds that the child wants, at one moment or another, to secure this sign
of love, that he wants in return a sign that will confirm this love as actually addressed to him/to her.
And that is precisely, according to Lacan, what the Other is strictly incapable of. Any sign produced as
a reply to such a wish of certainty coming from the child or the patient will be as equivocal as any sign
can be. There will be no proof that the will of the other is unequivocal, straight and simple, just
because the symbolic means do not make it possible. And that is the “common tragedy”.
If patient and analyst do not share any common aim (let’s keep on believing it), they do share
this “common tragedy”. My only hypothesis is to conceive this tragedy as a point of inhibition, for both
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of them, in the meaning we approached previously. Any idea that would be on the brink of touching
this “tragedy” bounces and is rerouted towards another direction by means of a new cathexis of any
another idea. Keep on talking, and the incompleteness of symbolic order will be put off, over and over
again. In fact, the treatment comes to an end when patients as the ones of the second class
(according to Freud’s words about phobic patients) climb to the first one: the moment when
transference is no longer the shelter it was, even if outside is rather chilly and the streets inhospitable.
The usual faith is gone further to a sudden and sheer distraction – what Lacan pointed to, in his own
vocabulary, as “the fall of the subject-supposed-to-know”. Is that so, the actual and final target of any
treatment? No, it is not. This is just an accident. A welcome accident, maybe, sometimes, but an
accident.
That is: something you can’t anticipate, even if you know it is on the verge to happen any time.
To follow the French philosopher Antoine-Augustin Cournot who, in the mid-nineteen century, gave a
definition of hazard as a crossing of two causal series – we must think over an accident as an event
without a cause of itself, considered as such only because there is an unexpected subject to be
snared by this fortuitous encountering. If a giant asteroid crashes on earth one day, it would be
nothing but the result of gravitational laws, but for mankind, it would be a dreadful accident. Any
accident therefore depends on a “subject-effect”, which means that what is to occur is considered as
something that could not to occur, implying thus a movement of thought that opens a space to:
contingency.
If I give to the end of an analysis the value of an accident, it is precisely because, according to
the applied method, it could never happen. There is not any inner necessity to be done with such a
process, only an open possibility to conclude the analytic relationship one must grasp without being
forced to – and that is so scandalous that generally we do not dare to say that to our skeptical
detractors of the beginning. But this very fact can also be a frame for a subject to confront the mystery
of castration, in its own contingency, as Lacan made it understood, in a rather enigmatic formula,
around the end of the seminar From an Other to the other (4th of June 1969): “The proper of castration
is that nothing can, properly speaking, express it, because its cause is missing.” (“Le propre de la
castration, c’est que rien ne peut à proprement parler l’énoncer, parce que sa cause est absente”).