Crucial Questions

18 Crucial Questions (clicking on the question below will take you the response)

1. What is contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis? The problem of suffering
2. What is a psychoanalyst today?
3. How do I find a psychoanalyst?
4. What is an analytic practice?
5. What is it to achieve an analysis?
6. Where is the analytic cure?
7. What is the analytic cure?
8. What is the minor clinic of analysis? A history of silence
9. What is the difference between the talking and writing cure of psychoanalysis?
10. What is the difference between the major and minor clinic? Modalities
11. Where is the clinic of psychoanalysis with regard to psychosis and neurosis-perversion today?
12. What is the non-analyst?
13. What is analysis in intension and extension?
14. Has psychoanalysis been discredited today? (UNDERCONSTRUCTION)
15. What is the relation between psychoanalysis and science today?
16. What is the relation between psychoanalysis and formalization?
17. Can analysis be used to address the contemporary issues of gender and sex?
18.  How does psychoanalysis address the modern family? Does analysis still refer to the Oedipus Complex as a model of family relations?
19. How does analysis today address the rising occurrence of autism? What is the analytic clinic of autism today?
20. What is the stance of contemporary Lacanian analysis towards madness and psychosis?
21. What is the argument of Lacanian analysis towards the 21st century ‘post-truth’ landscape?

1-What is contemporary Lacanian analysis? The problem of suffering

2- What is a psychoanalyst today?

• Where is the pianist in the music? An analyst is not defined primarily by a title, a credential, or a professional identity, but by the effect of an object – the letter – in the production of a method. In this sense, the analyst is an effect, much as the pianist is an effect of the playing of music on an instrument, or the microbiologist is an effect of the object examined through the microscope. Without the specific connection between act, instrument (method), and object, there is no reliable way to distinguish the analyst from the therapist-counselor. Nor is there any way to determine whether the claims made in the name of analytic practice are true.
• As obvious as this may seem, the criteria by which a psychoanalyst is recognized today have largely been inverted and absorbed into the mass marketing of psychotherapy. Instead of locating the analyst’s position as the effect of an object — and of the conditions that allow this object to be constructed — the analyst is increasingly defined through a professional identity: a private training analysis, school formation, institutional recognition, or clinical license. Once this identity is secured, its effects are then operationalized as techniques for monitoring the psyche and managing interpersonal relations. In which case, desire becomes a matter of personal goals; the unconscious becomes an excuse for ‘gaslighting’; dreams become messages to decode; symptoms become expressions of the mysteriously unspeakable. In this reduction, what is specific to the analyst’s position disappears. The letter of the analyst still lies elsewhere — in abeyance.

3- How do I find a psychoanalyst?

• It may come as news to some, but searching for a psychoanalyst is a way to avoid doing an analysis. This is because psychoanalysis does not entail a dual relation between doctor-patient or therapist-client, but requires an association to be achieved. What is surprising is that older models of an analytic association – or institute – only open their schools or educational programs to those who supposedly hold the keys (students), while those ‘others’ attempting to address their suffering are redirected towards the clinic and private sessions. Further still it is not recognized that it is the analysand that institutes the demand for analysis, and therefore should have a say in instituting the association itself. This dated organizational structure not only requires a social reform, but also explains the predictable difficulties anyone attempting to achieve an analysis faces. Fortunately, today there is a more contemporary approach that neither segregates people into students/patients, nor confuses the search for analysis with the search for an analyst in the marketplace.

4- What is an analytic practice?

• An analytic practice begins when at least two people meet in a setting that provides adequate conditions for an analysis. As mentioned in (3) above, these conditions are provided by an analytic association, but it is the analysand that institutes the demand and, therefore, sets up the institution in the sense that the association is not just run from the top down by analysts, but analysands. Therefore, it is up to each practitioner, not simply the analyst, to assume responsibility for its method and object. The fossil of someone lying on a couch, simply emoting and consuming, while the analyst does the work and provides a service, has long passed. Today, both the analysand (formerly called a patient) and the analyst have become responsible for the practice and theory they are engaged in.
• As a consequence, the analytic clinic begins not with an index – when a patient complains of a symptom or points to a pain – but when the patient’s language and speech begin to be listened to as providing a reason for the symptom, as ‘off’ as such reasoning may first seem. At which point, one may begin to recognize the transformation from the medical clinic and the patient to the analytic clinic and the analysand. Or extend an analysis out into a cartel (work-group), course, seminar, or the procedure of the pass.
• Yet, even when considered at the furthest remove from the therapeutic platitudes – as a safe space where you can explore desire, feel connected, and free up your unconscious – the possibility of doing an analysis has always been taken for granted. Setting the conditions such that the analysand institutes the analysis, while including the didactic dimension in the session, may make analysis less possible and touristic, but as a result, it has become more necessary and achievable.

5- What is it to achieve an analysis?

• Anyone can begin an analysis with just about anyone, by rumor or referral, though it is much more difficult to achieve an analysis. What is meant by ‘achieving an analysis’ is to become the analyst of one’s own speech and writing. In this respect, “There is no other reason to do an analysis than to become an analyst” (J.Lacan), which makes the difference between a therapeutic or training analysis moot, since any achievable analysis is itself didactic. In spite of the doctors, educators, legislators, scientists, business and religious leaders, and before saying one is trying to help or being helped by others, it is the difficulty of making this self-reflexive moment effective in the city that becomes necessary in the achievement of an analysis.

6- Where is the analytic cure?

• Habitually, the analytic ‘cure’ today is reduced to therapeutic modes of managing others’ symptoms in the clinic and private sessions (through empathy, listening intently, a ‘talking cure’, etc.), while any attempt to develop the truth or knowledge such symptoms present is set aside in favor of the doctor’s theory and school. The bias of this approach is not surprising, since its lineage goes all the way back to Freud himself who took the position of the master, although his psychoanalytic method was only achieved through his own self-analysis. The numerous histories of Freud’s psychoanalytic case studies reveal there is no clear conclusion as to whether his method was successful when applied to others, but what most would probably agree upon, if there was a cure, it was on the side of Freud himself rather than his patients. It is for this reason that if anyone can be credited with achieving the first analysis, it is not to be found in the inertia of Freud’s case studies (the celebrated Dora, the Wolfman, Little Hans, etc.), but in Freud’s own self-analysis. The consequences of this change in focus are far-reaching enough to situate the remake of the analytic clinic underway today. The opposition between the well-known minor clinic of patients and doctors in the talking cure, and the lesser-known major clinic of Freud’s own analysis and the writing cure, introduces this extension in questions 8,9,10 below.

7- What is the analytic cure?

• Freud mentions (x) that the cure (Heilung) is a bonus: that psychoanalysis does not attempt to cure people, but that a cure, if there were one, would count as something extra. Instead, Freud first proposes that psychoanalytic practice is conducted so that someone becomes better through a kind of emancipation (Befreiung). Lacan adds that this position is insufficient: rather, someone who is going to remember is involved in curing themselves. Yet, what kind of memory is this? And what is meant by ‘curing themselves’?
• First, the memory in question is not the typical Hollywood portrayal of analysis, where someone is emancipated by remembering their past, where the psychoanalyst acts as a monitor – a superego – to help someone become conscious by remembering what they did not know. It is not a question of reminiscence or a descriptive memory, but of repetition: a symbolic memory, where memory is not the condition of the cure, but if there is a cure, there is memory. Said otherwise, it is not because someone can remember that they are cured, it is because if someone is cured, or more precisely, has a practice of a cure, they can remember. But what is this symbolic memory if not something from the past?
• An example: ask someone to tell you some important dates and times for an upcoming event. If they can tell you the precise time, then a symbolic memory has been developed, even though the event has not yet happened. But if they cannot, then there is a symptom of something else going on that may be just as, if not more, important. It is not a question of trying to cure a bad memory, but of practicing this forgetting, a symptom, as a practice of the cure. In this sense, symptoms are not something to be excluded, but to be practiced. To learn to reread and rewrite a symptom, and thanks to this construct a memory is, in the words of Freud (x), a kind of emancipation (Befreiung). What is being emancipated from?
• In this case, the more one accounts for the ciphering of specific dates and times, and the more a symbolic memory develops, the more one becomes the analyst of one’s own proper analysis without a super-ego or memory police. Or, inversely, the more an analyst takes themself as their proper patient the more they are emancipated from the postures of a therapist or supervisor of desire. (see Kohut: How Does Analysis Cure?)

8 –What is the minor clinic of analysis? A history of silence …

• It is well known that the phrase “talking cure” was coined by Anna O. to describe Breuer’s therapeutic procedure, not Freud’s psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalysis depends on speech, its common identification as a talking cure belongs largely to what may be called Freud’s minor clinic: Dora, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and other case histories organized under neurosis and perversion. This clinic is called ‘minor’ because its status remains uncertain. Freud’s psychoanalysis may have cured some neurotic or perverse patients; he may also have failed to do so. In Lacanian terms, it is therefore a possible treatment: one that may or may not work.
• What is striking, however, is that Freud repeatedly leads his treatment of others to a point of impossibility — a rupture, impasse, or end of the cure, which appears in his work under the name of a negative therapeutic reaction. Examining the current psychoanalytic literature, the question remains as to whether Freud ever arrives at anything more than possible/impossible treatments. Various developments in the contemporary scene and the long history of analysis reveal this is the case: Deutsch’s 1957 follow-up interview of Dora, Freud’s first case history, concludes that even after Freud’s ‘treatment’ she was plagued by her neurosis for the rest of her life; or read Erikson’s pathfinding address to the American Psychoanalytic Association and his critique of Freud’s method, in Reality and Actuality, in 1961. It was not simply Lacan in France who was critiquing ‘business as usual’: read Jung, Tausk, Rank, Klein, and Horney, all of whom were cited as outcasts by orthodox Freudians. What Lacan effectively did, however, was not to take sides but situate the symptoms of psychoanalysis itself in the minor clinic, then show a new way to write their silence in the major clinic.

9- What is the difference between the talking and writing cure of psychoanalysis? Introducing the major clinic

• One response to the symptoms of the minor clinic is to recognize that Freud’s psychoanalytic method is not merely — or even primarily — spoken, it is written and read. When an analysand says, “They love me,” Freud writes: erotomania. Across the twenty-four volumes of his written work, what was said in the session appears only as reported speech; what remains directly available is Freud’s writing. This distinction is decisive. Freud’s own analysis was itself a written analysis — as his own comparison to Shakespeare’s Hamlet suggests — and the only analysis that was more than merely possible or impossible. After the early work with Breuer, Freud’s autonymic writing cure can be called the major clinic, in contrast to the minor clinic of the case histories, since Freud’s own self-analysis marks the first attempt to achieve an analysis in a written body of work presented to the public.
• Freud’s written clinical analyses are not limited to the spoken material of treatment. They also include cases constructed from texts, memories, works of art, and biographies — Gradiva, Leonardo, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Michelangelo — where analysis proceeds through reading, deciphering, and rewriting an object already inscribed.
• Schreber, however, occupies a singular place. Unlike Freud’s other written clinical cases, Schreber’s Memoirs do not merely provide material for a psychoanalytic interpretation; they already contain a systematic theory of nerves, language, God, sexuality, and bodily transformation that Freud, in many instances, considers a rival to his own (read Constructions in Analysis). Freud is therefore not simply reading or interpreting a text, but confronting a competing theory of psychosis. This makes Schreber a decisive part of Freud’s own analysis: the written text of Schreber is no longer interpretable in the metalanguage of analysis, but puts Freud’s own theory into question by retranscribing it in the very object language of the patient he sought to interpret. Or in the parlance of Lacan: “there is no metalanguage”. This difference is crucial since if Schreber was a psychotic for Freud, by the time of Lacan, Schreber had become more precisely Freud’s symptom and a sinthome for contemporary psychoanalysis in the major clinic.

10-What is the difference between the minor and major clinic?

• The contemporary Lacanian clinic is divided between two registers: a possible/impossible minor clinic, organized around speech and the treatment of neurosis and perversion; and a necessary/contingent major clinic, organized around Freud’s own analytic writing: his self-analysis and his reading-writing of the case of Schreber. The major clinic can be called necessary because, if anything in psychoanalysis was necessary to the invention of the cure, it occurred with Freud himself. It is contingent because Freud only approached his written clinic indirectly and without systematizing his self-analysis or psychosis. Lacan was the first to determine the modalities of the symptom in a logical writing.

11- Where is the clinic of psychoanalysis with regard to psychosis and neurosis-peversion today?

• The inclusion of psychoanalysis into its own clinic and the division between the minor and major clinic has significant consequences in the practice of analysis today. If the minor clinic offers only a possible treatment of neurosis and psychosis, then Freud’s well-known exclusion of psychosis from analytic treatment can no longer serve as a useful demarcation today – since it is not certain he could treat neurosis or perversion either.
• Furthermore, post-Freudians and modern psychoanalysis have sought to surpass Freud by claiming to treat psychosis today, whereas it is said that traditional Freudian analysis could only treat neurosis and perversion. The predictable difficulties that such claims have encountered are noteworthy: psychoanalysis has been largely sidelined in most countries and is not recommended for the treatment of psychosis according to the psychiatric and evidence-based theories.
• From within Lacanian analysis itself, the critique is more structural: psychosis cannot be treated by simply extending the minor clinic of neurosis and perversion. The question is therefore not whether psychoanalysis can add psychosis to its list of treatable disorders, but whether the clinic itself can be extended once psychosis is not held out as a nosological category. On the contrary, psychosis is first and foremost a symptom of its conjuncture with the place of the analyst in the major clinic. Lacan called contemporary analysis itself ‘a controlled paranoia’. Neurosis, perversion, psychosis, along with psychoanalysis itself, must be reconstructed from the distinction between the minor clinic of speech and the major clinic of writing. The information on the Clinic and Research page of this website situates this transformation in what Lacan began to call psychoanalysis in extension.

12 – What is a non-analyst?

A non-analyst is the term first introduced by Lacan to ground the major clinic and make room for an act that would not give up on a singular experience to be in conformity with the opinions of a group, whether that of a psychoanalytic association or another social formation. A non-analyst would not be, in this respect, someone who does not practice analysis, but someone who does practice analysis but who “would have the courage not to confound the analytic act with a professional being.” (Scilicet, II).

13 – What is the difference between analysis in intension and in extension?

• The opposition between intension and extension comes from two traditional ways of defining a term: a definition in extension is made by showing or determining a reference, while a definition in intension is made by specifying a meaning or sense. For example, if someone wants to know what a shoe is, it can be defined intensively as an item of protective footwear, or it can simply be shown or constructed in extension. Clinically speaking, a symptom shows what is impossible to understand and, therefore, lends itself to an extensive presentation. It is surprising, however, that psychoanalysis is traditionally defined in intension: within a pre-understanding of the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, reducing it to various types of talking cure. Left at this level, the extension of analysis becomes nothing more than a question of ‘interior design’: Which side of the couch does an analyst sit? Yet, with a more serious entry, we can begin to determine the extent of the analytic act itself in what Lacan first described as a topology of the subject. A construction that now opens up to the Cartesian notion of the extent of space and the attempt to situate an observer, which will only be made explicit in the move from Leibniz’s analysis situs to Kant’s Das Ding. The reader is referred to the Research page on this site for constructions that make use of this lineage.