Psychoanalysis as an Enlightenment Practice
An analysis terminates only when the patient realises it could go on forever.
(Hanns Sachs, quoted in Wilden 1968, 311)
(Hanns Sachs, quoted in Wilden 1968, 311)
Psychoanalysis came into being within the domain of medicine. Its place there has often been questioned, however - not least by Freud himself. In his Postscript To The Question of Lay Analysis, he says emphatically that psychoanalysis is not a specialised branch of medicine. I cannot see how it is possible to dispute this. Many other analysts have queued up to dispute this with Freud, though, and have continued to situate psychoanalysis within medicine. Perhaps this is a happier fate than the more recent one of being thrown in with the so-called 'caring' or 'helping professions'; but it is really no more appropriate.
Here I can only assert, rather than demonstrate, that the whole supposed 'analogy' between physical illness on the one hand, and emotional distress or unusual mental states on the other, is worse than dubious: philosophically untenable, a metaphor or myth that serves as point of purchase for techniques of social control - in much the same way as calling communism 'a cancer in the body politic'. Psychoanalysis cannot be part of 'mental medicine' because there is no such valid category to be part of.
It has always been understood that psychoanalysis, as well as being a way of treating those identified as sick, is a way of thinking about human beings and the human situation in general. Through the so-called 'second fundamental rule', the demand that analysts be analysed - as well as through the more or less continuous informal mutual analysis in which the early analysts engaged - it soon became clear that there was a great deal of benefit in analysis for those not defined as 'sick': in other words, that it is a way of working with human beings in general. As Freud says in the next sentence of the passage quoted above, 'the possibility of its application to medical purposes must not lead us astray': astray, that is, from this crucial non-medical purpose of psychoanalysis.
One convenient locus for discussion of these issues is the 1927 debate on 'lay analysis'. Arguing against the many analysts supporting a medical identity for their profession, Hanns Sachs, himself a non-medical practitioner and a prominent training analyst in Berlin, insisted that although severe recognisable neuroses are naturally far commoner among my patients than among my analysands in training, ... as the analyses proceed one observes that this fact has no decisive significance. Character-anomalies, inhibitions, disturbances in the emotional life, which in ordinary intercourse have to be accepted as troublesome but unavoidable traits, reveal their true nature only during psycho-analytic treatment - no matter whether it is undertaken for purposes of cure or not. ... I have had to learn to regard the difference between 'patients' and 'pupils' ... as of merely secondary importance.
(IJP VIII, 1927, p 200)
Similarly, Robert Walder writes that psychoanalysishas so far enlarged the conception of mental illness beyond the truly narrow clinical boundary that it practically includes almost everything that lives. We now speak of the 'neurosis' of a person in the same matter-of-fact way that we speak of his 'character', 'personality' or 'abilities'.
(IJP VIII, 1927, 275)
And Theodore Reik, a lay analyst whose prosecution by the Austrian state was an important factor in the whole debate, is even more explicit:Our interest in analysis would not be less if its methods, points of view and result were valid only in the sphere of the normal mind.
(Ibid 242)
If we are all 'normal neurotics', then the question of non-medical analysis is - as many analysts argue in this debate - explicitly tactical: how far does psychoanalysis need the protective status of the medical profession to further its own, very different ends? (We may notice that the three 'impossible professions' come together around this issue: government attempting to regulate the practice of psychoanalysis, while pedagogy - that is, training analysis - reveals its non-medical nature.)
But if psychoanalysis is not a branch of medicine, what sort of beast is it? It is clearly a unique and specific pastime; but does it, in its undoubted individuality, stand wholly alone in the range of culture and history, or does it have membership in some sort of family or genre or genus of human activity?
I want to argue that, in a taxonomy of social formations, psychoanalysis is most appropriately positioned as an enlightenment practice: alongside such other practices as they occur within Buddhism; within Hinduism; within Islam; within Taoism; within Judaism; within Christianity; and in a few other settings.
I am not suggesting that psychoanalysis is identical or similar to any one of the above; any more than they are identical or similar to each other. The 'parallels' between psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, for instance, have been described more than once; I find such descriptions largely sterile and unconvincing. What I do maintain is that what I am calling 'enlightenment practices' have some identifiable features in common, which psychoanalysis - in at least some of its forms - shares: sufficiently so to be seen as another approach to the same task.
What is this task? What do I mean by an enlightenment practice? One necessary feature, it seems to me, is that an actual practice is involved: not just a theory or belief, but a technique or set of techniques, aimed at changing something about human subjects. (Several of these practices would say that there is no such thing as 'change', and/or no such thing as a human subject; but we will leave that to one side for now.)
The shift that is attempted can be described and conceptualised in many ways. But it seems to me that perhaps all the practices I am considering might agree that it involves a radical lessening of anxiety: a relaxation which follows from a reappraisal of our situation as human beings.
Broadly speaking, the enlightenment practices all lead us to the sense that something which previously seemed hugely important and hugely difficult is now quite unimportant. The relief which this entails is enormous and lifechanging. Through the techniques of an enlightenment practice, we typically become aware that we experience ourselves as subject to impossible demands. We further realise that these demands are, indeed and strictly, impossible: in other words, that they do not really exist.
I imagine that it may immediately be clear in a broad sense that this description applies also to psychoanalysis - at least in some of its forms, and in the hands of some of its practitioners. I will say more in a moment about how the shift of perception is understood within analysis; first, though, I want to make clear that, although most enlightenment practices exist in a religious context, I am not suggesting that psychoanalysis is 'really a religion'.
This connection to religion is circumstantial rather than essential. Until recent times, by far the most convenient - and safest - place to practice this sort of discipline has been within the locally dominant religious context. In fact, there is at least one exception: Stoicism appears to meet the criteria I have outlined for being seen as an enlightenment practice, but is basically agnostic or atheist in its position. One can also quote the famous Zen Buddhist slogan 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him'; and mention that, although most Sufis are Muslims, some Sufi schools exist quite happily within Hinduism instead.
My argument is that psychoanalysis, in the different conditions of modern times, has swum within the protective sea of medicine in the same way that other enlightenment practices use the camouflage of religion. Of course, many psychoanalysts are wholly unaware of this situation - as we can see very clearly, for example, in the 1927 debate from which I have already quoted. Suitably enough, analysis is an unconscious enlightenment practice! - Or rather, different practitioners have very different awarenesses of what they are about. And it's important to realise that equally within Buddhism, Sufism, etc, there is always a powerful tendency away from the enlightenment awareness, into institutionalisation, religion, superstition, even bureaucracy.
If psychoanalysis is an enlightenment practice in the sense I have described, what are its specific goals and techniques? What is it that disappears, is seen to be nonexistent, through a successful analysis? Among the entities which are said by different schools to disappear, or at any rate to diminish, are the centrality of the ego; sexual shame; Oedipal or pre-Oedipal guilt; the 'false self'. Often, of course, these entities have had to be hypostatised by the theory in order to make them disappear again! One might say that each formulation is what Zen would call 'a finger pointing at the moon': a more or less helpful indication of an experience which it cannot fully describe. Looking at the techniques of psychoanalysis may take us closer to understanding the goals.
Like other enlightenment practices, psychoanalysis works by substituting its own 'impossible demands' - primarily, the demand to free associate -for those which we experience in life in general. Like them, it does so with the effect of bringing the analysand to a realisation that other tasks which life seems to involve - for example, reparation, spontaneity, consistency - are impossible in the same sense as free association: that they are paradoxical, and finally meaningless.
In Zen there are koans, for instance: unanswerable questions which one is required to answer. In almost every tradition there is some form of meditation: where one is required to attend closely to one's spontaneous process without changing it. Free association, the 'fundamental rule', is equally a demand with which no one can fully comply; as Ferenczi first pointed out in 1927, it 'represents an ideal which ... can only be fulfilled after the analysis has ended' (1927, 210). In other words, as Adam Phillips puts it, one is cured not by free association, but when one can free associate. (1995, 102). I'm not actually sure that anyone can free associate; or rather that, while free associating, anyone can remain themselves.
One function of the demand to free associate, then, is to highlight its impossibility: to make the analysand forcibly aware of one's resistances and inhibitions - and, more deeply, of one's lack of title, so to speak, in what is said, thought and felt. The simple tactic of free association cuts deeply through our illusions, and single handedly de-centres the ego: the impossibility of 'saying whatever comes into your head' reveals the impossibility of accounting for oneself, the impossibility of both consistency and spontaneity. Or, from a slightly different angle, it reveals that we cannot deliberately be consistent or spontaneous because we can never be anything else.
What 'disappears', then, is the apparent distinction between me and myself. And in true paradoxical fashion, characteristic of the enlightenment practices wherever they are found, it disappears through being made absolute. In Lacan's or Reich's very different usages, it is the 'ego' which is shown to be only a figure of speech, a trick of the light - a state of bodily tension or of mental attention. In Winnicott's terms, it is the 'mind' as something distinct from and over against the bodymind unity:In the overgrowth of the mental function reactive to erratic mothering, we see that there can develop an opposition between the mind and the psyche-soma.
(Winnicott, Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma [1949])
'Acceptance of not-knowing,' Winnicott says. 'produces tremendous relief': a sentence which could stand as epigraph to this paper. Any Buddhist would be familiar with these positions; and it is certainly not by mistake that the word 'ego' has been taken over as the translation of Buddhist terms.
Transference, of course, is equally bound up with demand: the demands the analysand makes or would like to make on the analyst - and also the demands the analysand experiences the analyst as making, centred on the one actual demand that is expressed, in however liberal and moderate a form: the demand to free associate. The transference relationship is a laboratory for all the impossible demands we experience in life, demands to perform in various ways, to make reparation in various ways, to be a socially acceptable personality. It opens the possibility of substituting for demand, desire. And this sort of intense relationship, calculated to both foster and dispel illusion, is found in different forms in many enlightenment practices.
Take for instance the following description:The first stage of meeting one's analyst is like going to a supermarket. You are excited and you dream of all the different things that you are going to buy: the richness of your analyst and the colourful qualities of his personality. The second stage of your relationship is like going to court, as though you were a criminal. You are not able to meet your analyst's demands and you begin to feel self-conscious, because you know that he knows as much as you know about yourself, which is extremely embarrassing. In the third stage when you go to see your analyst, it is like seeing a cow happily grazing in a meadow. You just admire its peacefulness and the landscape and then you pass on. Finally the fourth stage with one's analyst is like passing a rock on the road. You do not even pay attention to it: you just pass by and walk away.
At the beginning a kind of courtship with the analyst is taking place. How much are you able to win this person over to you? There is a tendency to want to be closer to your analyst, because you really want to learn. You feel such admiration for him. But at the same time he is very frightening; he puts you off. Either the situation does not coincide with your expectations or there is a self-conscious feeling that 'I may not be able to open completely and thoroughly'. A love-hate relationship, a kind of surrendering and running away process develops. In other words we begin to play a game, a game of wanting to open, wanting to be involved in a love affair with our analyst, and then wanting to run away from him.
(Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 42-3)
I expect you will have realised that this is not, in fact, a description of analytic transference: it is a passage from a talk by a modern Vajryana Buddhist teacher on the relationship between guru and disciple, with the word 'analyst' substituted for 'guru' throughout.
From the crucial and intense nature of the transference relationship follows another interesting parallel between analysis and other enlightenment practices: the great importance assigned to analytic lineage, who was who's training analyst, traced back to Freud himself. This sort of 'transmission lineage' is very important in many traditions like Hasidism, Zen or Sufism, where direct transmission of understanding from individual to individual is seen as far more significant than written knowledge.
And, indeed, there are several figures in analytic history with the imposing, eccentric and paradoxical stance of an Hasidic rebbe, a Zen roshi or a Sufi sheikh. The most obvious of these is Lacan, of course; and for that very reason I will avoid him, and instead talk a little about W R Bion.
As an analyst, Bion starts out from the view thatthe most impressionable years of your life are devoted to trying to forget what you are really like.
(Four Discussions with W R Bion, Clunie Press 1978, p40)
On this basis, he understands his task as an analyst as the very difficult one of entering into an actual relationship, not dominated by projection and assumption - a relationship which make space for the existence of desire.For about three sessions the whole of psychoanalysis is very useful - that is all you have to fall back on anyway since you know nothing else. But it is only useful because it might enable you to say something appropriate to the person concerned, passing the time until you know who you are talking to.
(Ibid)
Bion says that the analyst, in order to meet the analysand, 'must focus his attention on ... the unknown and unknowable' (Bion, Attention and Interpretation (Karnac 84) p 27); must make himself 'artificially blind' (ibid p57). This is the project of working 'without memory or desire': Bion sees memory as a phenomenon of projective identification, a phantasy of breast and mouth, evacuating what is bad and retaining what is good - and therefore useless for analytic purposes. It occupies a space which should remain unsaturated in the analytic encounter. (See Bleandonu, W R Bion Life and Works (FAB 94), 221-2) In a typically paradoxical way, remembering who someone is means ignoring who they are; conversely, blindness means sight.
This unmediated, paradoxical encounter at the heart of the analytic project is very reminiscent of Zen Buddhism, for example. But I am not drawing parallels to suggest similarity of method or concept - within Zen itself one finds differences of approach at least as great as those between, say, Klein and Lacan. Content is not the issue, but similarity of social formation: that enlightenment practices by their very nature and goal - to facilitate spontaneity and lack of anxiety - throw up powerfully individual figures and place stress on personal encounter and transmission.
The project is paradoxical: I think Lacan would call it the project of connecting with the Real. What follows from this is firstly, that anything one says about it is untrue, at best a finger pointing at the moon; and secondly, that if every approach is wholly inadequate, it follows that an indefinite number of such approaches are possible. Among these inadequate and illusory methods, that of psychoanalysis is, perhaps no less adequate than the others.
Copyright © Nick Totton 1996
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