General Assembly 2016-17: For A New Economy of Analysis
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 2016
Starting September 17th 2016 the General Assembly of PLACE will meet exceptionally once per month throughout 2016-17 in order to address questions of economy and to respond with a coherent framework specific to analysis. The first meeting is open to anyone who has participated, or will participate, as a Guest, Adherent, or Auditor in the year 2016-17. The subsequent meetings of the General Assembly for the year 2016-17 will be open to only Adherents. The first meeting will take place at Euclid at 11:00am the 17th and go until 2:00pm.
1. For A New Economy of Analysis: (First draft/8-21-2016)
From the 1950’s until his death in 1981 J. Lacan defined two didactic procedures whose aim was to establish an effective teaching of psychoanalysis. The two major procedures, the Pass and the Cartel, continue to be used today by many Lacanian analytic associations. Yet, what has become evident over the years is that these procedures tend to be trivialized by the very institutional formations, both academic and professional, that they were designed to avoid. Without going into the details of the procedures here, it has become evident that just as the Pass can be easily turned into the defense of a thesis in front of a jury in an academic setting, it can also be turned into an evaluation of the competency or incompetency of someone whose goal is to become an expert within a professional association. In either case, the structure and efficiency of the Pass is bypassed and trivialized in the appeal to an authority and system of power having no inherent analytic foundation. A similar problem exists with the Cartel. Whether in France or the United States, cartels, if they operative at all, are often reduced to tutorials or classrooms with educators. No doubt, such pedagogical structures would work fine if the context were that of a university or research center and not a place for the practice of analysis. Some do not seem to be worried by these assimilations, while declaring both the Pass and the Cartel were unsuccessful efforts of Lacan that were eventually disavowed in his dissolution of his school. Thus, in France, they today offer university degrees, jury defenses of theses, and an education in a psychoanalytic theory influenced by Lacan (this is the case of the L’École de la Cause Freudienne at Paris VIII and other departments of analysis implanted at Paris VI). Other associations, usually smaller in their scope and ambitions, have attempted to thwart the devolution inherent in such an assimilation by refining the didactic procedures each to fit their own particular contexts and style (this is the case of L’école Lacanienne, Dimensions Freudienne, Association Freudienne, for example).
The antagonistic proliferation of Lacanian schools and associations in France and abroad, each claiming to have their own particular claim to the truth of a practice-theory, can be recognized as an avoidance, or more precisely, a symptom of a more fundamental cause. The didactic procedures of Lacan were never extended to the economic field. In failing to do so, each association, regardless of a claim to the truth of a theory, is faced with the dilemma of having to either assimilate its practice to the dominant forces of the market place and state institutions, trivialize its function into artificial groups bordering on religious sects, or isolate itself. I will interrogate briefly these assimilations here, while proposing a means of dis-assimilating the economy of analysis at PLACE in the General Assemblies of 2016-17.
1.1 What is wrong with the current economy of analysis?
The various post-neo-Lacanian traditions and schools, whether in France or abroad, have always experienced difficulties in the implementation of an effective organization – or topos/place. Despite the variations and approaches, whether rejecting a purely analytic topos or attempting to reform it within the existing institutional structures, the results have met with predictable problems that can be summarized in one statement: the economic conditions for the functioning of the analytic association are not being address as inherent to the very functioning of its didactic dimensions. Instead, each analysand or analyst is left to fend for themselves in attempting to integrate, or not, an analytic practice into the dominant consumerist society. For the average analyst/analysand bound with the exigencies of everyday life, this usually means trivializing their practice-theory to some mode of authority, whether professional or academic, which they suppose will give them the means to establish the conditions for an economy. Many in the United States, for example, go through 4 years of education in psychology or social work, then another two to three years in licensing and training, in the hope that they could stabilize a career as an analyst. Usually this means that they hold their day job in something similar to a human resource director, therapeutic coach, guidance counselor, social worker, or educator, while in the evenings or weekends they meet with others – clients or colleagues – in order to ventilate their aspirations. Of course, none of this can guarantee a work of analysis, but it may assure a professional career that is only analytic nominally. Others not concerned with developing an actual practice merely get degrees in the humanities and speculate on things behind the walls of the ivory tower of the university. Or in California, a licensed position has been created under the name of ‘research analyst’ that allows the holder to practice analytic therapy without a psychology or medical degree, but under the supervision of someone who has obtained such degrees. In each case, the practice of psychoanalysis is secondary, under-supervision, deferred, while being trivialized to psychotherapy and the dominant modes of exchange of a liberal economy.
Whether in a professional or academic setting, whether as improvised therapist or professor, it soon becomes clear, at least to the most honest among us, that what is being proposed as Lacanian analysis in the market place today is often nothing more than institutionalized forms of therapy revealing a ready-made delirium. By delirium, I mean an effective reading (lire) has been replaced with its rejection (de-lire). For instance, instead of actually reading and writing his/her own symptom, the Lacanian therapist speculates on the symptoms of others in a coded language of signifiers, barred subjects, unconscious desire, and jouissance, etc. that is only understandable within the same school. That is to say, the effectivity of such a jargon is only grounded on the conventions they maintain to a social group and not on any intrinsic necessity of the formalism and terminology itself. In fact, such Lacanian jargon is similar to the codes of the Diagnostic Statistics Manual of the psychiatrists and cognitive-behavioral scientists whose methods they claim to critique. Yet, what I admire about the Lacanian therapists, and psychoanalytic therapists in general, is the incomprehensible nature of their language makes it absolutely useless in public health programs and generalized applications to society. Though some have tried, you would be hard put to draw up a serious and coherent instruction manual for the use of a Lacanian terminology. This is not to say that such therapeutic non-sense would not be without benefits at the level of the individual: the old French saying, “The only way to cure a crazy person is to have them speak to another crazy person”, finds its resonance here. Without denying such therapeutic deliriums or the possible curative effects they may have, the door to analysis has a more necessary opening. Thus, just as not everyone is hypnotizable or susceptible to a delirious use of language, not everyone can follow or benefit from a therapeutic trivialization of analysis. If analysis is not a mere possibility but has a necessity to its practice-theory, then it should focus on this necessity in a way that is not reducible to establishing mere conditions of possibility. There are people, for instance, for whom such a practice-theory is impossible and who have resigned themselves to finding no help whatsoever in a therapy. Instead of practicing the ready-made professional and academic deliriums, either as expert or client, they suffer them and fall sick. The question remains as to how a symptom can be used as an effective compass to a necessary practice-theory of analysis and the establishment of its economy.
1.2. What economy is it a question of? From the Possible towards the Necessary
The most misleading door to analysis, whether that of potential analyst or analysand, is to consider it a problem of the intellect: as a question of acquiring an intellectual competency for the analyst or a better understanding of yourself for the analysand. In each case, reading the symptom, or reading and writing in general, has been reduced to cognitive categories and a set of codes, thereby bypassing a reading of the body and pulsion. This common but false entry to an analysis by the intellect, school, and expertise, reflects the anxiety of not only not being able to decipher the symptom, but not understanding the complexity of the field – except once it is trivialized into a set of codes, common language, and institutionalized forms. What is required is a reading that would be necessary, a reading and writing that would go beyond possible interpretations and codes, where psychoanalysis can be freed not only from the naive opposition between the normal and pathological, but where the school and economy can find its own intrinsic laws of formation.
Lacan claimed that the psychoanalytic symptom has a political order and its first reading is found in neither Hippocrates nor Galien, but Marx. For instance, if the protests against the capitalist in modern times can be read as a symptom of the suffering of the working class, Marx recognized its cause could not be treated by addressing the wickedness of their employers or the terrible work conditions (lack of tools, insufficient wages, unhealthy environment, etc.), but has a structural condition requiring a political solution – not a mere mere psychological or technological reform. Yet, Marx does not merely try to understand the symptom or empathize with the workers, but reads the symptom in a construction, or more, specially, an economics. That is to say, he recognizes the political solution requires not merely an assembly into protests and a critical interpretation, but an economic construction and calculation without which the symptom would not be isolatable. It is this emphasis on constructing the real of a symptom that is left unaffected by mere critique and rallies that is crucial. It is not sure that the Marxist today has the same concern for Marx’s mathematical oeuvre, preferring instead to put the stress on the latter.
Be that as it may, a homologous situation is present in current day Lacanian analysis: preferring to only pay lip service to Lacan’s topological and mathematical-logic, the fashion is to focus its practice on a critique of society and to only offer a possible therapeutic response or philo-literary adventure. Yet, in a genuine analytic formation, the constructive and necessary achievement of its practice-theory can not be denied, far from it, what is in question are the possible therapies that gum up its place.
1.3 From Marxist Revolution to Freudian Involution
Nowhere is this avoidance more evident than at the socio-economic level where the construction of a properly analytic economy goes unheard of and is trivialized into the model of goods and services. The exchange of money that takes place in analysis, the payment of an analytic session or the contribution to the formation of its school-clinic, is economic not because it is the re-compensation for a service, but because the division of labor of analysis is based on the transfer – a passion or pulsion. It is not a priori certain that such exchanges function like those being described in the current economic theories of our liberal economies. It would be unfortunate, for example, to confuse the inability to practice analytic therapies or to manipulate others by anthems for economic gain as a mere psychological symptom of shame since the truth such symptoms implies indicate, with a second and more refined look, a necessary entry to an ethical economy. What I will call here, the ideology of psychoanalysis, is precisely this: the confusion of the place of analysis in an economy of truth and desire with an economy of goods and services. Once this ideological position is assumed, whether implicitly or explicitly, the transmission of psychoanalysis is reducible to aberrational forms of therapy. It follows that more than any other field, including literature or critical philosophy, economics is a powerful instrument in unmasking the ideological assimilations of a discourse as well as a determining factor in their occurrence. When a scandal breaks out today in society, we often hear: “Follow the money!”; when Hilary Clinton claims to be for the man in the street and economic reform, but gives private dinner engagements to powerful Wall-Street brokers, a suspicion is cast on her sincerity and ethics. One may well ask the same of any Lacanian therapist who, while being employed in a psychological clinic or state institution to pay for their necessities, only hands out possible interpretations (deliriums) when they empathize and try to do good for their clients.
The ideological epitaph, Lacanian therapy, is only one among many of the number of possible psy-therapies growing exponentially by the year. Beyond the bewildering multiplication of contents, from spiritual coaching to chess therapy, they all have this in common: the exchange of money is formulated as a payment for a service and treated like any other exchange of goods from that of a garage mechanic to an accountant. Of course, those more sensitive to the shift necessitated by an analytic economy may try to improvise something like a 'gift-economy' at the level of the private session, but the actual economy of the analytic association is left untouched in practice and theory. This is because analysis requires an involution of the dominant consumerist economy in which the client-patient consumes the cure while the therapist is paid to work. Such consumerist arrangements may suffice with goods and services, but they bypass what is crucial in the founding of an analysis: it is the analysand who does the work and pays to establish this work. Unlike Marx, who called for a political and economic revolution to address the discontents of modernity, Freud opened up an ethical and economic involution requiring a construction specific to analysis. Lacan claimed if Marx isolated the symptom, his formulation of the cure went too far: it was never a question of exiting people from capitalism in mass, but providing a door to another economy that could be achieved one by one.
Those who avoid asking these economic questions, or who would reproach me for drawing out their logical conclusions – or perhaps for being a North American focussing too much on the pragmatic and money aspect of things – are merely stating the anxiety of having their own economic assimilations exposed. To be fair, if in the foundation of an analysis there is a moment of acquiescence to the economic demands of daily life, the question is how to acquiesce in a more neutral and intrinsic manner. What are those conditions that makes an analytic work necessary? It is to this question we aim to respond.
Through this initial probe, we can already begin to recognize a response to the question of the last section of this article: What is wrong with the current economy of analysis? There is a failure to articulate a more generalized economy of desire – a libidinal economy – inherent to the functioning of an analytic organization, or more generally, its topos. Lacan sought to introduce a new and more necessary means for the dissemination of an analytic teaching with the procedures of the Cartel and Pass by formalizing them in a topology. Although there are quite a few articles addressing analysis and the economy, to date nobody in France or elsewhere, at least too my knowledge, has tried to generalize these procedures to the economy of analysis or viewed the lack of such procedures as a cause for the dissolution of Lacan’s school and the ideological positions that formed afterward and remain today. My aim is to extend the procedures of the Cartel and Pass to the economy of analysis and thereby make room for a new coherence and more necessary transmission.
The details of this response will be put forward at the 2016-17 General Assembly of PLACE.
Robert Groome
Summer 2016
Santa Monica, CA