“Nothing escapes from the writer's words, on the contrary, all things are hammered into them, annealed, fixed forever in rows and rows of the language he composes.”
I very much appreciate Jane Hall's focus on the topic of this chapter: it has seemed to me for some time that, while psychoanalytic training has emphasized the importance of finding “analyzable” patients, the study of the unconscious is invaluable for working with the deeply traumatized. Perhaps more significant, from where I see it, is how much I have learned from working with such patients, which has come to seem to me much more than I could have learned from always working with the “analyzable” (a word that I believe must always be put in scare quotes, as Nabokov said of “reality”).
That said, I do have some issues with the case as presented and the discussion that follows. These issues have mostly to do with what I would call the problematics of knowledge as it is presented in the paper: the problematics of knowing what is going on for the patient, yes, but, perhaps even more important, the problematics of knowing what is going on for the analyst. These are issues we are all dealing with every time we do analytic work.
I will start with the quotes Hall uses as epigrams for the book. The first is from Thomas Ogden: “The analyst's feeling of certainty is often tied to the idea that there exists a proper ‘analytic technique’… . By contrast, think of ‘analytic style’ as one's own personal creation that is loosely based on existing principles of analytic practice, but more importantly is a living process that has its origins in the personality and experience of the analyst”. What struck me about this is the contrast Ogden makes between a seemingly objective, impersonal approach to the work, on the one hand, and the more personal process as developed by the analyst, on the other. I was struck by this way of thinking about the knowledge of the
analyst in the work, that it is something that one can count on having, either through the objective, impersonal “technique” or the “living process”. At least, there is no question of the role of knowledge in psychoanalytic work: the analyst must feel knowledgeable.
The second is from Rebecca Solnit, in which she states that “[t]oo many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark… . [T]here are limits to knowledge,… essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information”. Solnit here is clear that we don't have the knowledge, but I was unclear if she was suggesting that there could be “exact information”, but we couldn't count on getting it.
The final epigram is from a song by Peggy Lee, ending with the lines “I know a little bit about a lot of o' things /But I don't know enough about you”. I appreciated this, because there is nothing to suggest that the knowledge the singer is lacking can be obtained: it's just not there, and there's no way of knowing that it will show up.
What concerns me is the implication, in Ogden's quote, at least, and in much of the clinical material Hall presents, that there is enough information to guarantee that we can know the truth, and from that, act accordingly. Reading through this, I found myself thinking about the book from which I have taken a quote as epigram, Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide-Hôtel.
As I understand him, Sorrentino's point is that, whenever we try to speak truth, we are inevitably limited by our own words. There is never “enough information” to communicate or validate a truth. As one reader of Sorrentino has it, “Language is intentionally representational. It embodies our intention to represent extralinguistic reality. However, words inevitably replace the realities they intend to replicate, stand in for rather than stand for their referents. Distancing the ‘facts’ in this way, they defer our arrival at the epiphanies of truth they propose to facilitate. Language, therefore, is a system of representations that never succeeds in delivering what it promises. All we ever get is representations” (Mackey, p. 2). Mackey goes on: “[i]n the absence of an unmediated acquaintance with the represented, ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ designate selected groups of representations to which we ascribe the authority of
truth and reality. Our selection of these ‘authoritative’ representations is not grounded in direct perception of fact: ‘fact’ itself is a mode of representation to which factual status has been selectively granted… . That we designate certain representations as ‘factual’ and ‘truthful’ is probably traceable to pragmatic causes. Some ways of imagining the world serve our purposes better than others, and for that reason we take them as veridical” (Mackey, p. 2).
So, let's be real: if you are a psychoanalyst, you are ignorant. Period. But to be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, as I hope to show, this is a good thing, and one that we need to emphasize.
The first time I was struck by this was during my analytic training, when we read the “Wolf Man” case. This was in the final semester of training at my institute, when the class read through several of Freud's case histories. Here Freud writes about the assumption that the Wolf Man saw his parents having sexual intercourse a tergo, and that “[i]t must therefore be left at this (I can see no other possibility): either the analysis based on the neurosis in his childhood is all a piece of nonsense from start to finish, or everything took place just as I have described it above” (p. 56). But he goes on to acknowledge that it didn't have to be that way: the Wolf Man grew up on a farm, and could have seen animals copulating thus, “which he then displaced on to his parents, as though he had inferred that his parents did things in the same way” (p. 57).
What blew me away about this was the question, why did Freud write all this out? How could he go from saying that, if his interpretation is to be construed as having any validity, there's no possibility that his patient didn't see his parents having sex in this way, to acknowledging how complicated things really are? Why didn't Freud just delete the insistence for which he “can see no other possibility” and explain what he came to see as the likely source for the Wolf Man's dream?
To be clear, I had become interested in psychoanalysis because what I was learning in “evidence-based” and “scientific” psychiatry was not impressing me very much: I was at the local institute to learn what mental health was really about, as opposed to checking boxes on the DSM-IIIR. Reading this passage in the case was troubling to me: if Freud realized what he had claimed was wrong, then why didn't he just delete the
paragraphs in which he developed that argument, rather than go on to say, in effect, “oops”? By the time I had worked through this, though, I saw it very differently. This was my introduction to what makes Freud, in my mind, such an important thinker. His writing actually enacts the uncertainty that we are faced with in working with the unconscious, even though it seems clear to me that he would much rather things were more objectively clear, at least sometimes—like at the start of that paragraph about the Wolf Man's dream.
In the case of Lois, Hall clearly describes the complexities that psychoanalytic work can entail. When she writes, “So many things impinge on what we think of as normal development… all leaving cause and effect still mysterious… What appears as a normal family often hides chilling secrets”, she is revealing a radical truth: we don't know what's going on, especially in a world that we think of as “normal”. What is is communicated in language that is never—can never be—impartial and completely ‘objective’.
That said, we must also accept that we can't be sure that what we, as analysts/therapists, are doing is also “right”. To me, this means we always have to be thinking about the validity of our interventions and the understandings those interventions are based on. On this point, I agree with Hall re: the potential value of a different way of engaging a patient from what she describes as “the classical model of blank screen, neutral interpreter of conflict”. However, I don't necessarily see what we are doing as an advance over other ways of doing the work. Instead, I would argue that we are in a unique situation with everyone we work with, and it is highly problematic to assume we are just employing a superior technique. Like the situation with Sorrentino's writer, the dyad's words are fixed in our language: we cannot claim an understanding beyond our words. In contrast to Hall's suggestion that analytic technique improves over time and with research, my sense is that over time analytic technique just can't stay the same. Again, we are ignorant.
But again, I'm not complaining about this. Being an ignorant psychoanalyst is not a bad thing. Freud's backing off of his certainty about what is happening in the Wolf Man's dream is a valuable part of his report of the case, because he is acknowledging, at least sort of, the mysteries inherent in being a psychoanalyst. Or, to quote Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant
Schoolmaster: “…each of us describes our parabola around the truth. No two orbits are alike” (p. 59).
This is what the scholar Joseph Jacotot discovered, in 1818, when he was forced to teach French to Flemish students, after fleeing his native France because of the return of the Bourbon kings. He was given the chance to teach in the Netherlands, specifically, to teach French to students who only spoke a language he could not.
Without going into detail about this, I will note that, to Jacotot's surprise, the students were able to learn very well. Which was surprising to him, because the entire basis of education, as he understood it, was the ability of the teacher to explain to the student, which was definitely not what was happening here. This led to a whole new approach to thinking about education, one that had been minimized for a very long time but was explored by Rancière in the tumultuous aftermath of the protests of 1968.
Jacotot approached this seemingly impossible task not by trying to hold a position of mastery, but by focusing on “the minimal link of a thing in common” (p. 2) between himself and his students. He found this in a newly published bilingual edition of a French novel, and was puzzled by how well his students did: “How could these young people, deprived of explanation, understand and resolve the difficulties of a language entirely new to them?” (quoted, p. 2). In exploring this question, he came to realize that explaining things was of no benefit: in fact, explaining is a form of domination, “[a]nd this is why the explainers endanger our revolution” (p. 59).
If this is true for teaching a foreign language, it has to be true for the analytic process. In a very real way, I believe what Hall describes in this case illustrates that: she is not the master, applying the technique she learned in training to the case of Lois; rather, she is engaging with the analysand. My concern on this point is that she presents what she is doing as an advance over “classical” analytic technique, as though there is now a better form of explication for the analysand than there used to be. Instead, I would argue that her work is a place where analyst and analysand may come together and engage in the work they are doing. This, rather than any specific element of technique, is what brings value to our work.
But to be clear, it is a work that one will always have to think about and engage in. With every analysand, there will be places where our understanding is going to be off. E.g., where Hall writes “the contemporary therapist's calm respectful stance is often the first experience of concern for some patients,” I was reminded of a patient who had suffered years of sexual abuse as a child by a family acquaintance, but who, when she started seeing me, had no memory of this fact. It was only years into the treatment, during which I was always trying to give her a space in which to say what mattered to her, that she finally was able to tell me that my “calm, respectful stance” reminded her of how her abuser never spoke when he was abusing her. I felt terrible when I heard this, but also, on reflection, I realized that this was just the way this had to be worked out: even if I had, somehow, intuited what she told me long before she put it into words, it would almost certainly have been a meaningless intervention: she had to get to where she could verbalize what she felt, herself.
The issue here is not just my ignorance. It is also spoken to in what Sorrentino describes: words don't give us actuality, The Truth. In our work, actuality has to arrive: it was deferred action, not interpretation/construction/explanation/conversation—it was not me bringing the actual into the discussion, that had this effect. As Maurice Blanchot puts it, in The Writing of the Disaster: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; ‘I’ am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened… . Thus, the disaster is always being minimized and ‘normalized’” (Blanchot, p. 2). A Bosnian refugee once described to me an example of this: “It is not normal, but it was normal to see dead bodies, exploded limbs…”. The most horrific experiences become normal, and we can't just interpret them away.
I appreciate Hall's thoughtfulness and willingness to move outside a prescribed way of doing our work (wherever that prescription came from). I just want to be clear that we cannot speak of “progress” in our work: we will always have to be open, thoughtful, engaged—and ignorant.
In short, psychoanalysis really is an impossible profession, like teaching and government. Assuming an empirical advance in the field will never not be problematic, because it implies mastery by the analyst, which is an impossibility. But again, this impossibility is, I believe, an unambiguously
good thing: the work we do is for the liberation of the subject, and for that to happen, mastery, expertise, knowledge itself, are problems. Getting at truth is something we must approach very humbly.