Two years before his death, Freud published "Analysis terminable and interminable" it came in the nick of time : a little longer, and left us without any warning about this excruciating question. The truth seems to be double, which is commonly understood in a pragmatic way.
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45 Does this end of an analysis deserves to be considered as an analytical problem ? .pdf
Two years before his death, Freud published "Analysis terminable and interminable" it came in the nick of time : a little longer, and left us without any warning about this excruciating question. The truth seems to be double, which is commonly understood in a pragmatic way.
Two years before his death, Freud published "Analysis terminable and interminable" it came in the nick of time : a little longer, and left us without any warning about this excruciating question. The truth seems to be double, which is commonly understood in a pragmatic way.
considered as an analytical problem ? Two years before his death, Freud published Analysis terminable and interminable. It came in the nick of time : a little longer, and he would bave left us without any warning about this excruciating question : is any analysis to be considered as an adventure which holds its end proper or, on the contrary, is every end of analysis an external event which would be out of reach of any attemp of explaining it ? Freud's answer in this text is clearly ambiguous : on one hand, he considers that any experienced analyst will be able to remember a set of cases in which he took leave of his patients on a long-term basis and rebus bene gestis (a latin expression which means : everything went off smoothly). And he goes on writing : I don't intend to assert that an analysis is in any case a work without conclusion (Abschluss). Put on the other hand, he points out that, over all the resistances an analysis can encounter, the castration rock is something in front of which every patient turns tail and, unlike Ferenczi who had pretended that every patient had to get over it through his own capacity to feel himself an equal of the analyst Freud simply wrote : My own experience makes me able to add that I found Ferenczi particularly demanding on this point. At no time during the analytical process do we have such overwhelming a feeling of working hard and uselessly than when we try to drive a woman to give up her penis envy, or when we seek convincing men that their passive stance towards one man has not always the signication of castration, and that can't be avoided in every human relationship. So the truth seems to be double, which is commonly understood in a very pragmatic way : of course, an analysis doesn't know any end by itself since there is always something unconscious to bring into light. Put otherwise, life is life, and even the best of it has to nish one day or another, under the pressure of external events. Such a stance can be read, for instance, in the statement of a previous president of the I.P.A., Serge Lebovici, who wrote : There is not any analysis end ; there are only analyses which come to an end. This is a clear refusal to take into account the analysis end as an analytical problem and, as realistic as this statement might appear, I think it misses the point of what transference is. I'd like to start with the following point, on which, I suppose, everyone will agree : every analyst is supposed to be able to know when a treatrnent must not end. And this, not only during the rst steps of an analysis, but as well after years and years of treatment. For instance, if the patient proposes to stop right now in the sole intention to catch in the end, precisely, a sign of love or hate from the analyst, the reply is simple : go on. The same if the alledged reasons are only leaning on a therapeutic viewpoint : the better if the patient feels good, of course, but if such a result was confused with an aim, or a goal, the whole undertaking would prove to have been a therapy, and not an analysis. And as much as analytical therapy and analysis might be close to each other in their style, their theoretical apparatus and their treatment of symptoms, they show a decisive difference in the treatrnent of desire, which rst depends on the positioning of the analyst's desire, and secondly, leads to another understanding and treatment of transference itself. A therapy is something in which patient and therapist agree (explicitly or not, I don't mind now) on the fact that the aim of the treatment is to recover sort of health, no matter which way is taken to reach it. 0f course, the beginnings of an analysis seem to present the same pattern : patients want to get better, one way or another (and if they didn't, they certainly wouldn't be there). But the point here is that the analyst keeps quiet on that matter because he knows that he then doesn't know anything about what this request is made of, what kind of desire is implied in this longing for health, what price has to be paid for the giving up of some symptoms, and he's not very willing to sacrice his patient's desire, whatever it could be, to any of his patient's demand. This slight difference between an agreement about a specied aim and, say, an assent on a blank cheque, a mutual condence without any kind of contract, can be held as decisive because it gives to the analyst's desire its unknown value ; the analyst clearly assents how many times does he (or she) say Yes ! but yes to what ? That's the question which deserves to be kept as a question because its central hole is really the sinews of transference, the hub everything turns around. So, we can't agree, neither in the beginning nor in the end in such a manner which would ll this place. In fact, everything coming from the analyst which could do damage to this hole must be taken for an analyt's defense against the sheer movement of transference. This doesn't mean that we never have anything to demand of the patient : but that we must protect the mystery of this desire through all our demands (of words, of money, of sessions), a mystery not only for them, but partly for us as well, according to each case. The complexity of ending is now to appear : if everything is clear enough each time the answer No is compelled, so that the only way is then to go on, when this negative reply stops being right, we are not allowed to turn ourselves to a simple Yes. And furthermore, I don't consider that we always have to say No to a demand to stop, or to be systematically and silently disappointing in reaction to any kind of demand. So what ? What could this kind of situation be, where a positive answer is no more available than a negative answer is appropriate ? A beautiful stalemate, isn't it ? But, by the way, what can this bloody matter of practice really be Freud was then talking about when he wanted to tell us the key word on this matter ? Is that matter of practice to be understood only in a pragmatic way, a sort of wise agreement between patient and analyst in which the latter would take the lion's share ? But why or at least how would this usual disparity between them suddenly break down ? Is this sort of equality what we actually have to expect as the end of an analysis, as Ferenczi wished ? Let me tell you now a little story to show what can come out of so nal en agreement. You can read it in a book titled : In the Freud's Archives, where a journalist of the american New Yorker Janet Malcom inquires about the Jeffrey Masson affair, after Masson bas been red frorn his job as Freud's Archives secretary. Masson talks to her about his own analysis. He had been very classically analysed for years, and some time after the end of his sessions, he meets his former analyst in some room of the local analytical association he then intended to belong to. And, in a sort of chat, he comes to say how transference can be a funny thing : for instance, during all the years of his sessions, he strongly believed his analyst was taller than him. And he said, what are you talking about ? Andd I said, Well, just the fact that I am taller than you. And he said, You taller than me ? You're out of your mind ! And I said, Dr. V., I am taller than you, I assure you. And he said Stand up and I stood up, and he stood up, and I towered over him, and he looked me in the eyes from a good four inches beneath me and said, Now, are you convinced that l'm taller than you ? So to be polite, I said, Yes, I see. But I thought, This guy is out of his mind. This is a marvellous story, for truth is rarely as obvious in this world. As everyone can read on pinball machines these pure inventions of democracy : lt's more fun to compete. This is a very good pinball ethic, but freudien analysis is not foreseen for the next olympic games in Atlanta, and we must seek another style of way out. Competition is indeed the effective ground of equality, and even if the end of the last session can appear as a gentle agreement between two civilized people, this view tells us nothing about what takes place in this precise moment. If I clearly went to dismiss these kinds of pragmatic arguments based upon an idea of equality, it is not because I think they are mere mistakes, but only that they screen what's happening within the framework of transference. I do say within, and not at all without ; that's the point. If transference was nothing but a device, maybe it could be let aside as soon as it would appear useless. But don't forget that this is the secret of symptoms : as much as they were very useful when they helped to face a conict impossible to solve, once this conict has disappeared from the stage, the symptom goes on. It never vanishes by itself only because its cause has gone away. Why would transference go away as well once it is out of use ? I don't want to rush right now into Lacan's words around this question, even if I feel guided by the insights he gave us from his own long experience, since he pronounced himself clearly on that matter only in his said Proposition du 9 octobre 1957, where he strongly asserted that analysis is to be understood as holding its end proper. A lot of previous indications and quotations can be given which go that way, but they are not as clear as in his attempt to set up what it is now called in lacanian's circles la passe. Lacan needed to imagine a sort of procedure to be able to assert that a way out of the analysis does exist, a very strange way out since we are going to see it is also a way in, so that we'd better call it a turning point, and not an end, if by this word we hear nothing but a sudden interruption of a line. This conclusion that analysis and bas to be conceived as a turning point is based upon a former idea, very wellknown in lacanian's circles, but very odd when you really went to approach it : the only true analysis would be the training analysis. It sounds really curious if we hear by that something like a medical statement which would say that the best treatrnent is only to become a doctor. But we have already seen that if analysis can cure and if it can, it must such a result, when it occurs, does not have to be held as an aim, or a goal ; therefore, this kind of happy end, reached through transference, put it in a state that a freudian analyst would be embarrassed to consider as an achievement proper, as far as he wants to differ from an hypnotist. But, in fact, training analyses are not commonly considered as real patterns of transference ending. Rather the contrary, when they feed the usual gossip between analysts which criticize how little the neighbourgh is conscious of the identicational features he took after his own analyst. So, what's really at stake in Lacan's assertion about training analysis as the only true one ? I bet that training analysis is the only kind of analysis in which transference can't be held only as a device, a means, therefore the only one in which the turning point of analysis ending is to be sought in a special step of our understanding of transference, an opportunity to catch what could be essential in it. Transference : birth and death. The assumption that transference can die leans mainly on the mere fact that, sometimes, we can attend its birth, taking part in it or not. It's possible to describe this moment in many ways, but I'II go on keeping aside a little longer any psychoanalytical vocabulary. What is obvious is the emergence of a movement of condence, sometimes very open, sometimes not. But the question immediatly crops up again : what is condence made of ? If is clear it's not a contractual thing, even if it is so often reciprocal, and so often present between partners of all kinds of contracts. But condence, real condence, must be conceived as a two- step movement : in the rst step, you make sure that the man you then try to trust has some capacity to carry your affair through to a successful conclusion. That means you verify that he possesses a series of features you are willing to encounter ; but this kind of inquiry, unlike analysis, can't be endless : an act must be engaged, since condence is an act. And so, what follows has the sheer structure of a logical induction : given the features a, b, c (and of course here there is not any and so on), I will or I won't trust him ( or her), which means I will or I won't acknowledge the fact of : no more features. This is a very classical obsessional difculty : how could I trust anyone if I can't know wether he will have the right feature to face a situation I can't imagine by now ? Here, there is a gap, and condence is a naming of this jump. I don't want to insist any longer because I think it's a very common feeling. But I want to emphasize that condence emerges only beyond narcissism, beyond the collection of features narcissism is made of. That's the second step : after the rst step has given you some narcissitic support through a nite set of features, you have to jump over the nitude of this set to conclude by an act. The assumption that there would be one special feature (or set of features) whose presence would be enough to make up your mind is particularly specious, according to condence proper . When I perfectly know what I expect from someone, I really needn't to trust him because I feel perfectly able to judge if my expectancy will have been fullled. But in the case where the aim is not so clear, when I can't rest on any image of the aim itself, condence is required, once again beyond any narcissistic image. If you agree, even a little, with this consideration, you engage a notion of transference langer than an assumption strictly narcissistic. As far as narcissism is implied in transference and it can very often appear as large as the latter it is not to be confused with it, and so we can hold the idea that a non-narcissitic something is at stake in the emergence of a transference. We are now to study if the destiny of this something wouldn't be the key problem of analysis ending, at least if we accept to suppose that analysis ending has to be, through one way or another, an ending of transference itself, which is a strict requirement for freudian people. We must distinguish here between the use of transference as a lever, the possibility of interpreting (of construing) through transference the key positions of the patient's libido, and the perspective of analysis ending. To put it briey : as precious as the interpretation of transference could be, this is by no means a way out of transference itself. And that for a very simple reason : the one who interprets is not the same as the one who is the object of the interpretation, even if the two of them deserve the qualier of analyst. The object of the interpretation is necessarily a feature (or a set of features) while the interpreter goes on being a voice or, at least, a place frorn which new words, new features can be expected. It is clear that there won't be any ending without the mere loss of such an elaborative point, and that leads us to specify our question in regard to ending. If transference is really a movement of condence (even if denied), its ending is therefore to be understood as a lack of condence, but not in the common sense that this condence would collapse, that this analyst would reveal himself suddenly and denitely wrong and would have to be abandoned. No, only in a very precise sense : this condence would be able to go on without showing any sign of decreasing, so that we must hear a falling of a condence still alive. And that's the problem we now have to treat, without forgetting that a condence still alive relies on a non-narcissistic something, a sort of hole from which an indenite series of words, of features, of interpretations could possibly come. The question of ending becomes then a question about how and why stop the ood, given it won't dry out by itself. What we've learnt from these considerations about transference and condence is the place and the value of this something which is not to be confused with any feature. And notice that this sort of place has always been classically attributed to the essential subject, to the mystery of subjectivity, all that our traditions, more or less religious, like to call : presence. Beyond the words in the prayer : presence. Beyond the draft and the colors of the icone : presence. In the quiet silence of love, as well as in the harping on of hate : presence. This word is a classical naming to signify that something has to be taken into account without any hope of equating it to any quantity of words. That is what Pascal named the aws of the discurse, or also the rst words, those for which it is denitely worthless to look for a denition. If someone tells you, some day, that he doesn't understand what you mean by the word presence, perhaps you will be lead to build a situation in which he could appreciate this meaning. For instance, you will drive him just on the edge of a very high bluff and, with your amical push on his back, he will certainly realize what presence means, especially because he will have to face the emptiness itself, which is the best situation to realize what presence is, like in an empty house, or any empty place. But don't try simply to put words after words to explain it : you would let the problem aside. But notice as well, now, that the lacanian assumption about the subject (represented by a signier to another one) forbids us to locate this subject in this presence, for this subject is quite nothing out of its representations and we cannot consider that it might be something independantly of its representations. This sheer property of God must be left to God himself : if He exists, He necessarily does without the help of representations because He possesses this unique quality : an immediate presence to himself. With a little more time, I could show you that this is an essential property of Newton's God, and that not only for theological reasons, but for physical reasons as well ; such an immediate presence is strictly required to sustain a system in which an absolute (time and space) is in constant contact with a relative world ; for an absolute, whatever it is, can't be based upon something else, whereas our subject is a linked-subject, inseparable and unthinkable out of its signiers. So, don't let's be lead into this idea that this something crucial in condence and therefore in transference, which is outside of any feature we could grasp and symbolize, should be the hideout of the mystery of subjectivity that we are more or less used to calling : subject, I, ego, agent, and so on.. What is still alive and is to be set aside to obtain a clear cut is therefore hard to think out since we perhaps begin to understand that our knowledge is strictly encompassed within narcissism, and that we will fail to articulate properly whatever we must consider as outside of narcissism. It seems we have reached the bottom of a sort of cul-de-sac. So I propose to you now to take another way of approaching the same point, but from a different topic. The drive's two faces. Since his very beginnings in that matter I mean his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Freud understood through the german term of Trieb something double, something impossible to reduce to a sheer unity because it has to be thought of as a two-faced thing : one face is made of a Triebreprsentanz (or, the same, a Vorstellungsreprsentanz), that is close to what I called a feature (or yet a signier), a symbolic mark which belongs, according to Freud's terms, to the psychycal apparatus ; the other face is more obscure, but must be conceived as coming from a place both inside the body, and outside the same psychical apparatus. This so-called quota of affect, now a psychical energy, now a somatic force, is strictly out of any system of representation, and that's what this concept of Trieb is made up for : to point out that, in fact a welding (eine Verltung) takes place which deserves to be named drive, and is compound of a signier, an indescribable affect and (all I want here to mean depends on the weight you will give to that and), and a welding between them. This point is decisive because it is one of the main ones which prevents analysis from being an idealistic system : something of the body proper is trapped, is linked, is associated with a symbolic feature and, according to Freud's words, after this welding, its destiny from now on will have to follow part of the destiny of this symbolic feature, which plays a completely different game on a completely different stage. Perhaps you can see now what I am getting at : the next question we must answer to get any follow-up is : is this quota of affect predictable or unpredictable in itself ? If I say anything about it, is it to be considered as already linked and welded to a symbolic feature, or not ? It is not that easy to answer because, on the one hand, we feel that affects in themselves are not always the same, that there does exist a palette of different tonalities ; but on the other hand, it's as clear as day that, when we speak of, say, a depressive affect, or an anxious affect, we are completly engaged in the symbolic world. 0ld problem, that we are not going to solve right now. I would only draw your attention to the fact that if you take the way of distinguishing affects in themselves, as if independantly of the symbolic order, you are on the way towards dissolving the freudian notion of fantasy. Fantasy has been conceived by Freud in the same way as drive : it is said to be eine Verltung, a welding no longer between a somatic force and an instinctual representative but, very close to that, between an auto-erotic satisfaction and a mnemic symbol (which can be part of a remembrance or not, as Freud shows in his Leonardo's). This satisfaction does not have to be more qualied, but must be thought apart of the psychical apparatus. For instance, in the Freud-Jung letters where this notion of autoe-erotism is clearly established, Freud didn't hesitate to assert that masturbation is an allo-erotic act because it brings necessarily into play the symbolic face of a fantasy ; and, on the contrary, autoe-erotism must be thought of as free of any necessary link with the symbolic order, up to its capture by a symbolic mark. But notice that, from a formalist viewpoint, Freud was compelled at rst to set apart symbolic order and autoe-erotism to be able, in a second time, to weld them. l'd like now to join these two kinds of considerations : the one which puts into play the very ground of condence as requiring a bodily element ; the other which articulates this part inside the body and outside the psychical apparatus as a sort of root of the symbolic order. I think these two very different parts come together according to the destiny of fantasy inside the framework of transference. The bodily element (which still means something irreducible to a symbolic feature) on which the game of transference has run (and is still running), and this part, which ballasts the set of representations acting in fantasy, converge to shape a crease, or a fold, or a pleat on which I am going to conclude. The transferencial plexus. The rst idea we can encounter here is that this place is neither inside nor outside. This duality is practicable up to the point where we couldn't help thinking that the two of them do have a common border, a sort of line which could allow us to know in each case if we are inside or outside, in the internal and mental world, or in the external and physical world. Numerous parts of Freud's writings go that way, which was considerebly emphasized by Melanie Klein and others l'd like to call the mentalists. But even in Freud's, when we really pay attention to the constraints at stake in his theory, there is never such a subject, even if he tried to be an honest associationnist in the style of Locke, Stuart Mill, and so on. This part both inside and outside is stricty inevitable and the metaphor of welding as precious as it could be is unable to explain us the link it performs. It lets aside the embarrassing question of : from where comes the third materiel used for welding ? What kind of glue is required here ? To answer that would bring us into too long-drawn-out a metaphor, so I prefer to suggest to you another gure, this gure of a pleat which has the advantage of presenting a continuity and a discontinuity. But let's clarify rst the crossing I suppose to be between the bodily element of fantasy and the non-narcissistic something at stake in condence and transference. This crossing can be such because of the analyst's body, strictly speaking : his (or her) physical body, with only one restriction. Not as a whole, not as a unity (this is the narcissistic side of all the affair), but as this pound of esh Shakespeare has marvelously invented to guide us through this dark passage. Remember the crucial point of the play : Portia recognizes Shylock's right to take from the poor Antonio this pound of esh which is his in the terms proper of their initial contract. He is pushed by Portia to frankly carry out his rights, this same Portia who comes to say to Antonio : You must prepare your bosom for his knife. Only the conditions of the contract itself appear to make this act simply impossible to perform. Shylock is entitled to a pound of esh but not one ounce more ; and of course not a single drop of Christian blood. This is not only a device to stay in a comedy : it is a very precise information about what a clear cut is. Shylock is recognized in his right to cut, but this cutting is not there to give shape to any object of this world which Shylock could possibly leave the Court with. And so, the pound is not at all a symbolic pound of esh ; at that place, there is a common mistake, dangerous for analysts only. This pound is impossible to separate because it is an imaginary pound, which must remain such, and it doesn't become symbolic because of its impossibility. It stays imaginary. And Shylock saves his life through becoming able to make some difference between the act of cutting (which is his) and any object which could be a result of such an act. He is the one who has the right to cut this denes him as subject of the law but he has to discover more : what he must lose to become such a subject of the law : his wealth, the reality of his wealth. The cutting makes the division between the imaginary pound (whose value would have been, if effective, close to zero), and the real of his wealth (close to that we could call his all-phallic power). This wealth can be called real not because we would be led to suppose he was rich, but only because the play needs to locate there the inescapable loss. The symbolic equivalence between the pound of esh and the weight of his wealth mustn't hide from us the slight and decisive difference between an imaginary lack and a real loss, a difference whose agent is always a symbolic mark. Condence has been based upon a lack lack of features, I said. As Columbus' egg, the analysis ending is made up of a loss. It's clear for everyone. But how to pass from a lack to a loss ? From a lack full of hope to a loss able to make ground for the subject ? The operator is, certainly, the ability of the analyst to have given sense to a lot of unconcious gures, to point out some keys signiers, but the question of ending will remain out of his eld of conciousness if he doesn't feel the part of the affair he will have been embodying, and which is always linked to his patient's instinctual life, to drives themselves. He will have been breast, or shit, or regard, or voice ; exactly, he will have been lack of it, till he comes to be loss of it and, in this precise moment of ending, real at this only title. Lacan drew our attention on the fact that these parts of body are not to be taken in a symbolic way. For instance, in his seminar of 24th of June 1964, he said : The anaIyst, it's not enough if he supports the function of Tiresias. He needs to have breast (or teats) " (What Tiresias had, naturally, for having been a woman and a man). And Lacan didn't mean by this that there are only female analysts. Likewise, he sort of joked many times about the fact that analysts have always been quick to realize that they were shit ; but unfortunately, he added, they didn't realize how much it wasn't a metaphor. And these remarks were not only for fur. The instant of ending is such a point, when the analyst agrees to take that place where a lack which, for years and years, has sustained the whole work, is going to be a loss, and as so : real. And my nal question will be : what can such an agreement be ? Who could be able to recognize through words that he is made of a loss ? I will answer, once again with the help of another Shakespeerean hero, Richard the second, the king who was compelled to disembody himself from kingship. When the real question arises, when Bolingbroke asks him : Are you contented to resign the crown ?, Richard's wonderful reply, with its pleat made of a huge homophony between the expected Yes (Ay) and the subject (I) supposed to be able to articulate it, is nothing but a ash of genius : Ay, no ; no, ay, for I must nothing be Therefore no no , for I resign to thee...