Endurance

How do we stay still for long enough to allow something to happen? Is it only me who finds it difficult to follow a thought through to its conclusion, or to remain alert in a conversation when someone is struggling to say something difficult, or to sit and wait for an outcome that might be uncertain? Impatience has its virtues: it gets things done. But it also has its costs. It is one reason for the unfashionable status of psychoanalysis—to be in psychoanalysis demands a seemingly impossible ‘expenditure’ of time, when so much else beckons. Yet it might be claimed that this is precisely what psychoanalysis contributes to the contemporary scene of encounter. Psychoanalysis reminds us that there is something important about stillness, about remaining with a situation until it organizes itself under the pressure of its own desire; it reminds us, that is to say, of the virtues of endurance. But how hard it is to manage this, how hard. In this paper, I try to invoke the pleasure and pain of endurance and to consider it in the context of analytic relationships and analytic method.

I start, however, with a more general issue that underpins this paper and much other related work: that of ‘relational ethics’ (Frosh, 2011). What can be learnt from psychoanalysis to inform us of how to engage ‘ethically’ with others? And conversely, how does psychoanalysis itself respond to the challenge of what Judith Butler, for one, has termed “ethical violence,” by which she means the temptation to force into practice a version of the other that makes the other something it should not be? Avoiding ethical violence in this sense demands a mode of recognition that has a certain hardness about it; she writes, “one can give and take recognition only on the condition that