When the Ethical Seduction Has Been Forgotten… Boundary Violations in Our Institutes

On July 25th, 2019 Jane Burka and Angela Sowa gave me the opportunity to share with them some of my ideas on the question of boundary violations while we were on a panel at the IPA conference, held then in London.2 They had had a paper published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis a year before, “From the talking cure to a disease of silence: Effects of ethical violations in a psychoanalytic institute,”3 and they asked me to discuss their ideas with them during our panel. We had an important meeting with productive exchanges. And I am grateful to Howard Levine who invited me to share in this journal my own thoughts around the large question of boundary violations. I thought it could be of interest to relate here to this specific issue touching upon ethical violations in our institutes while their sources as well as their implications remind us of those found in families where sexual abuses between adults or sexually matured youngsters and children are occurring, in other words: The forgetting of the ethical seduction, in life, in analysis, and in teaching psychoanalysis.

I will begin with the text of my panel abstract and, following it, I will articulate some of the ideas that I have developed before and have continued to develop up till now. These ideas relate precisely to the ethical seduction of the analytic situation. I argue that these ideas may be relevant to the issue of boundary violations or, better said, of ethical violations in any human situation but especially during an analytic process

or, as it is topic here, in the context of a psychoanalytic institute. These ideas may be of help in understanding the iatrogenic effects of any ethical violation.

Here is the abstract and I will underline the points that I will later insist upon:

This article presents an in-depth study of one institute's efforts to recover from effects of ethical violations by two senior members.

Qualitative data analysis from voluntary member interviews details the damage that spread throughout the institute, demonstrating that a violation of one is a violation of many. Members at all levels reported feeling disturbed in ways that affected their emotional equilibrium, their thinking processes, and their social and professional relationships. The aggregated interview data were reported to the institute community in large and small group meetings designed to reverse the “disease of silence” and to allow members to talk with each other. Outside consultation helped with this emotionally arduous process. The authors offer hypotheses concerning the nature of group anxieties during ethics crises. We assert that both sexual and non-sexual boundary violations break the incest taboo, as they breach the generational protection required of professional interactions. Ethical violations attack the group's foundational ethos of care, unleashing primitive anxieties and defenses that interfere with capacities for thinking, containment, collaboration, and integration. Since the full reality of what happened is unknowable, hybrid truths emerge, causing conflict and disturbances that inhibit thoughtful group discourse.

As I prepared this discussion, thinking about my institute, knowing that boundary violations may occur in any institute or in any society, it appeared to me, while remembering crisis moments that took place in our society, that probably iatrogenic effects, that were not dealt with properly at the appropriate time, remained as strange bodies in the society's

enclaved unconscious,4 playing eventually their unrecognized lethal role at the origin of unclear internal conflicts. It may be appropriate to speak here of “A disease of silence.” The task is obviously very complex as ethical violations are dealt with by the ethics committee which is by definition a non-reporting committee. The issue is to realize that a distinction has to be made between privacy and secrecy and I will come back to this point later on. Burka's and Sowa's paper is precise in its dealing with this complexity and showing that it is possible to give the membership a way to express feelings and thoughts while keeping private what has to be kept private. It has been very crucial that in this case the society presidential committee agreed to get the help of an external consultant to facilitate this task. By making such an agreement, this committee has in my view functioned as a matricial third for the whole society and institute. I will explain myself further in the following.

Coming back to the question of the “saying” instead of succumbing to the “disease of silence,” I have spoken lately of an “ethics of saying well” in the context of contemporary parenting arrangements and new modes of procreation . I try to take into consideration the timing, the tone, and the style parents use when they finally have to let their children know about the way they have been conceived. But I have stressed earlier, inspired by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, that the saying is often even more important than the said. While I speak of ‘saying’ I insist upon my address to the other person, that is, my approaching them as a human subject (Levinas 1974,1982).

Let's think of our analytic practice. We know well today how any intervention on the part of the analyst always has a sensory part that is, in Laurence Khan's words, “a semantico-phonic part,” and in Julia Kristeva's words, “a semiotic part.” I will say that the tone, the rhythm, the length of the sentences, as well as of the silences, participate in the eventual transformations that will hopefully take place in our patient's psychic space. But are we attentively aware that while we are intervening, or when we are finding ourselves in a significant silence, we are addressing our patients as subjects? How much are we realizing that this address is crucial? As a matter of fact, it meets a fundamental need existing, in my view, in any human being from birth, a need for an ethical environment, what I refer to as: an environment in a position of matricial space able to function as a matricial third.

What do I mean by ethics and why these terms: matricial space5 and matricial third?

Levinas has defined ethics as asymmetrical responsibility towards the other (1961). He sees it not as part of philosophy but as being primary to any philosophy. He was able to reach this understanding after considering and taking to heart the meaning of the Shoah, the eradication of humans by humans. This helped me to formulate how an ethics of asymmetrical responsibility is primary to psychoanalysis; better said, it is intrinsic to contemporary psychoanalytic practice. I have proposed that the analyst's ethics is an ethics of emotionally loaded asymmetric responsibility towards the other as much as an ethics of truth . As Cecilia Taiana, who chaired our panel, has suggested in her introduction, my proposition is more radical than what is called an ethics of care. We may remind ourselves that the word radical comes from radix, which means root. Levinas has suggested that one of the best metaphors of ethics, understood as asymmetric responsibility, is “maternity” (1974) and he notes that in Hebrew and Arabic the womb is Rechem; and from this word, we get Rahamim, which means compassion. It is noteworthy that, at the molecular level, the matrice is a place in which elements are rooted, where a development may occur.

By using the term matricial space position I wished to point toward this ethical space, once originated by the parent or expected by the new born to be there at the very beginning of human life. I have proposed that in life, the parents' matricial space position, their position of radical responsibility towards the other, born out of the transformation of their recurring ethical shock (paradigmatically the mother's or the father's) while they meet with the neonate and then the child. This shock results

from the violence related to the encounter with the alterity of the neonate, with the uncanniness of this encounter; with the recurrent realization of the grandeur of the phenomenon of bringing into the world and encountering a new living being who is in a total dependency, faced with this impossible task of raising a child in a good enough way. Included within this shock is the injunction coming from the benevolent super ego: Thou shall not kill. I allude here to the unavoidable hate that comes out together with love and curiosity in this so special encounter. As an implication of these recurrent shocks, there will be a release by the parents of enigm-ethical messages. What do I mean by enigm-ethical messages? These messages are a combination of the parental messages compromised by the repressed unconscious derivatives of their sexual drives of death, and of the parental ethical messages, derivatives of their sexual drives of life (Chetrit-Vatine 2015). In other words, they are emanating from the parents in an ethical seduction that is unavoidably present from the beginning of life and throughout the child's development. I have proposed that traces of these enigm-ethical messages will get inscribed in the infinite zone of the child's psyche and will remain at the very origin of each human subject's ethical capability as they will facilitate, later on, the transformation of the child's, and then the adult's, sexual death drives into the sexual life drives (, ).

When in analysis, as in life, I speak of an emotionally loaded asymmetric responsibility, I am referring to the analyst's passion, as Bion (1963) defined it: Love, Hate, Knowledge “without any suggestion of violence.” We know better today the role of affects in development. With our contemporary cases, we have to deal with identity, narcissistic, and post traumatic problematics, often expressed through perverse acting out combining reality denial and unknowing of the other. We do know that too often these problematics are linked with an inadequate parenting, violently influenced by a world of incessant technological transformation. We are dealing with patients who have often suffered either from too great emotional abandonment or from disqualified spontaneous subjective experience, or both. As a result, we meet people with impeded ability to symbolize and to transform their sexual death drives into sexual life drives or, in other words, unable to find ways towards sublimation. We know that on the contrary, an adequate emotional parental environment, able to cathect positively their children, is essential for allowing a healthy

development of the symbolizing ability (Roussillon 2006). While we have to keep in mind that practicing analysis is very often about helping our patients, at least as first, to reach such a good enough level of symbolizing capacity, we may already realize how the analyst's task becomes a complex one. I will come back to this point as it is important to connect this emotionally loaded responsibility with the Sexual (Laplanche 2007), that is, the seductive aspect of the analytic situation.

When I speak of the ethical seduction of the analytic situation, I am referring in part to the asymmetrical primal seduction transference Laplanche spoke about (1987), transference incited by the enigmatic position of the analyst—combined, in my view, with their passion and re-actualizing the primal seduction inherent in the “anthropologic fundamental situation” and, from the other part, the analyst's matricial space position.

I am convinced that the supervisory situation, as well as the teaching situation, is functioning following the same givens: the analyst, the supervisor or the teacher will have to be, throughout the analytic process, the supervisory process, and the educating process, in a matricial space position, a position that will allow them to function as a matricial third.6 During each of these processes, when the analyst, supervisor, or educator meets again and again with their patient/supervisee/candidate, an ethical shock is occurring over and over again. It is, hopefully, transformed into a matricial space position, provoking in the patient/supervisee/

candidate a non-linear matricial space transference.7 In other words, the matricial space transference is evoked from the beginning of the analysis and up to its end by the very existence of the person of the analyst, defined as the ethical subject, locus of ethical passion, that is, the one able to be responsible for the other, the one who is or has in themself a matricial space for the other.

I insist upon the asymmetry of this responsibility as well as of the asymmetry of the primal seduction, that is, of the asymmetry of the ethical seduction. Like in the child/parent situation, in the analytic, supervisory or teaching situation, we are dealing with the same necessary respect for the difference between generations. This respect requires that the analyst or the supervisor realizes that their matricial space position is linked from the start with the active presence of the infantile sexuality in their unconscious and pre-conscious, a sexuality which does not know limits, a polymorphous sexuality that Freud defined in the Three Essays on Sexuality (1905) and that Laplanche called Sexual. In other words, respect by the analyst for the differences between generations, assumes they are aware that at the heart of the analytic situation, as well as in the supervising situation, they may be the prey of their infantile sexuality. I see this realization as remaining at the basis of the respect for the so-called incest barrier, a barrier that it is their responsibility to respect.

Masochistic, sadistic, exhibitionistic, or voyeuristic fantasies, conscious, as well as pre-conscious, all related to our death narcissism, are solicited by our encounter with the other. We have to realize that there is a violence inbuilt in the analytic encounter. Consequently, practicing analysis, supervising analysis, teaching analysis are risk taking. But even though this sexual, this violence, and this risk do exist in the patient, in the supervisee, or in the student, as well as in the analyst or in the supervisor, the one who is offering analysis is the analyst, the one who is offering supervision is the supervisor, and I see them as having all the responsibility for it.

I am reminded that there is this injunction “coming from the face of the other,” in Levinas's terms, coming from our own unconscious, in our terms: Thou shall not kill. I am pointing here to the possible hate in the countertransference that Winnicott spoke so well about. He proposed that the analyst function with an “objective love” as well as with an “objective hate.” And I argue that our matricial position is what allows us to deal with our love and hate, as well as with our curiosity, in an “objective way” and not in a “subjective” one. I spoke of an ethical shock, because it relates to the difficulties and the risks linked to the fact that the analytic situation—like the supervising one or the teaching one—is by definition a seductive situation.

In the child/parent situation we are dealing with two kinds of seduction: a precocious seduction characterized by necessary and important physical expressions of love, and a primal seduction, related to the messages necessarily compromised by the parents' unconscious. In the analytic situation, a talking cure by definition, the only seduction will be the primal seduction, a seduction provoked by the enigma inherent in this so strange situation, in which the patient is invited to tell all that is occurring in their mind, while the analyst will be here for them, emotionally available, in a proximity born of vulnerability, respecting their internal and external limits, listening and intervening while in a sustained, attuned, and active receptivity. Again, I have spoken of the ethical seduction of the analytic situation. Any other kind of seduction would be a perversion of the analytic practice.

As such, it will be possible to speak about the analytic situation itself not only as the incitement of a matricial space transference but also of a primal seduction transference. While assuming the inherent seductive dimension of the analytic and the supervision situations, analysts and supervisors will have to respond to the basic ethical essential need, this “trusting expectation” (attente croyante), Freud spoke about (Coblence 2000), with which any patient comes to the analysis, any candidate comes to their supervision, and with which any neonate comes into this world. Taking this phenomenon into account will help us to understand why ethical violations are so deeply traumatic.

In their paper Burka, Sowa and their collaborators show what happens when there has been an ethical violation on the part of senior analysts

and, in my terms, when the ethical seduction of the analytic situation has been confused with a narcissistic one and, even worse, with a sexually traumatic one. They wrote: We assert that both sexual and non-sexual boundary violations break the incest taboo, as they breach the generational protection required of professional interactions. So, disorders were generated in the whole institute and not only in the direct victim. Members at all levels reported feeling disturbed in ways that affected their emotional equilibrium, their thinking processes, and their social and professional relationships. And we know how this is precisely the case when ethical violations have been perpetrated in a family.

I think that any ethical violation, including a breach of confidentiality, has a sexual component. In family life, as in our Institutes, there is the need to respect the differences between generations, related both to the reality of it and to what it is as the product of transferences. In our institutes, as in our regular analytic practices, there is an analyst who, by his very presence, has incited a situation which is, by definition, seductive. In cases of ethical violations, they have misused this situation, they have abused it, for their own sake, that is, for their own interests. As such, there has been, as in proper sexual violation, a subversion of the ‘awaiting trust.’ In my view, any boundary violations, from the part of a parent, an analyst, a supervisor, a teacher or, in general, any boss, are related to the sexual and are specifically the expression of their sexual death drives.

As I mentioned before, in cases of child sexual abuse, the whole family, not only the direct victim, is necessarily concerned. In such situations, we know how too often, a policy of silence is adopted which strengthens still more the traumatic effect of the abuse upon the victim. As a result, we meet in the victim that comes for treatment, as much as in the larger family, splitting, denial, dissociations, and very primitive defenses. Coming back to what is happening in an institute following an ethical violation, it is deeply moving to realize that Burka's and Sowa's colleagues found in their memberships precisely the same type of defenses, following such a policy of silence. In the interviews, that took place after the ethical investigations had been completed, it appeared that during the whole period of silence which followed the ethical violation, people seemed, in Yolanda Gampel's words (2005), to have been contaminated by a kind of radio-activity. Like the victims of social violence, like the victims of sexual abuse, they were the locus of psychotic-level anxieties, anxieties that

have generated psychotic-level defenses. These defenses had interfered with the capacity to think and to contain each other, in other words, they had interfered with the entire institute's collective functioning from a matricial space position. The data have clearly shown the nature and extent of a great emotional disturbance within the institute while, at the same time as, on the surface, it was operating smoothly.

In our panel, Sowa raised the question of the collective responsibility for the abusive analyst, and she referred to the guilt that may be produced in the collective after an ethical violation by a senior analyst has occurred. She described the case of a teacher who was too much idealized. We know that this need for idealization comes from a very infantile part of ourselves. A collectivity or an individual, either in search of its identity or destabilized by survival difficulties, will tend to search for a leader, an analyst, a supervisor, with a longing to idealize them. This idealization will give the collectivity or the individual some sense of security, as I have tried to show in a recent paper revisiting Freud's exchange with Einstein relating to the motivations for war (2016). A question remains unanswered: Why this teacher and not another one?

In any institute there may be several very gifted analysts, but one might provoke more idealization than another, or than all of the others. People will speak of a particularly charismatic teacher/analyst. This kind of charismatic personality is often correlated with a childhood experience of mistreatment by the parental environment: this very gifted child might have been, in one way or another, the object of a perverse narcissistic seduction that they were unable to metabolize. Automatically using splitting, and eventually dissociating, as a way to defend themselves from annihilation anxiety, they would have incorporated this seductive stance while denying in their self the traumatic effect of it. Becoming then a senior teacher, in an atmosphere where there is searching for idealization, the temptation is great to reenact, particularly with patients that have been suffered the same kind of ill treatment, what was not sufficiently transformed during the analyst's personal analysis.

Is not the guilt, resulting from unconscious and preconscious transmission of poisoned messages (this order of guilt eventually being shared by the collective and, obviously, by the direct victim), the product of the denied guilt in the abuser himself, as Ferenczi has rightly shown in his

paper on the Confusion of tongues between adults and child?

Having taken all that into consideration, the senior teacher's responsibility is radical, and I see it as absolutely asymmetric. The fact of having provided the possibility, authorized by the board for the membership as well as for the other senior teachers, and for the candidates, to be interviewed even years after the ethical violation has taken place, allowed for some form of reparative experience. This was mandated by the authorities that had recovered in the meantime their matricial leadership. The interviewers had functioned as witnesses, while they took on themselves the emotional experience of each interviewee, their agonizing sadness, loss, discouragement, disillusionment, anger, confusion, and their being silenced. The interviewers, listening from a matricial space position, have functioned precisely as matricial thirds.

In an atmosphere of non-saying there is a possible confusion between confidentiality, privacy, and secrecy, a confusion enhancing an experience of distress and impotency. As Sowa put it: serious violations are rarely performed in public, they are unrelated to intimacy or to privacy, quite on the contrary, it is here a question of the denial of the other and of the larger group he/she belongs to, it is most often related to secrecy. We could say that, in this context, while privacy is related to the respect for limits, that is, to responsibility, secrecy belongs to a perverse order, having to do with reality denial and with the arbitrary.

When we agree to consider ethics as intrinsic to psychoanalysis, while defined as asymmetric responsibility towards the other, we are not dealing only with deontology. We are not dealing either with Law. Here, I would say as I mentioned in footnote 4, precisely what I mean by matricial third, that for the Law not to be arbitrary, it has to first take into consideration the responsibility towards the other. As Levinas put it: The question of justice will arise when the ones towards whom I am responsible will hurt each other. This is precisely the case when such ethical violations occur in the heart of the same Institute. It will be the responsibility of those in charge of justice, after the ethical committee has completed its job, to judge and decide the price to be paid.

So I will end by agreeing with Jane Burka when she proposed, referring specifically to ethical violations in any of our institutes: Talking

together… being transparent when confidentiality is not professionally required… arriving at nuanced, difficult, imperfect conclusions about how to proceed, what to communicate and how to care for those who are affected most... In other words for the persons in charge to realize that dealing with psychoanalytic matters is dealing with ethical seduction, being able to contain the dilemma, to assume a matricial space position and to function as matricial thirds, that is what is demanded from an ethical community.