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In his recent book, Concerning the Nature of Psychoanalysis: The Persistence of a Paradoxical Discourse (2019), the Argentine-born, adoptively British author and psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon writes, “The real strength of Freudian psychoanalysis continues to reside in its insistence and tenacity, in its commitment to the remarkable persistence of its paradoxical discourse” (p. 2). It's easy to grant that psychoanalysis is a discourse—what isn't, these days?—but how is it paradoxical? Kohon doesn't say outright, but the answer seems bound up with his task of defending and defining psychoanalysis against the prescriptive, evidence-based, and overly simplified preferences of the health-industrial complex. In its defensive action, the book is something of a polemic. This can be heartening; but it's Kohon's attempt to define psychoanalytic discourse in itself that I find most engaging.
Maybe the paradoxical nature of the psychoanalytic discourse has to do with the seeming conflict embedded in a practice that seeks to communicate the experience of the analytic encounter, as expressed through the medium of the single case study. “Such study does not seek to formulate laws nor generalise results that are necessarily applicable to other subjects; whatever the hypothesis and/or conclusions, there is neither assumption nor certainty that they would correspond to other cases” (p. 7). Yet, when we learn to practice psychoanalysis, we necessarily do so by reference to the “exemplars” (Kohon uses Thomas Kuhn's term) described by such study. “People wanting to train in psychoanalysis will be expected to know the psychoanalytic exemplars, from Freud's original clinical cases onwards. And there is, of course, no fixed set, no limited numbers of exemplars” (p. 10). If, at the macro end, the set of exemplars can't be encompassed, the micro end is scarcely more manageable. “If that weren't slippery enough, it's all subjective, too: “two observers witnessing the same phenomenon may be stee