If the inauguration of psychoanalysis was a shock to the body politic, an erotic wake-up call, is our preoccupation with ethics the long drawn out reaction formation? The erotics of the psychoanalytic dialogue were first elaborated by Freud in Studies in Hysteria. The typical symptom was the unreadable score of a duet encrypted in a singularly painful female body. One became two when a new notation was invented through the workings of transference love. Sigmund, our hero, started off quietly enough but, like his operatic namesake, got involved with his host/patient's story and became enthralled. Anyone undergoing a psychoanalytic session or the first Act of Die Walküre is still likely to be carried away, only to realise afterwards that he has had revived within himself
the vicarious passion of incest. Whether it is The Ring or psychoanalysis, to which one commits oneself to after this first ‘act’ the rest, after some considerable time has passed, will have become history. That is, if we face the music and stay till the end.
Freud, like Nietzche and Wagner, was steeped in a classical education. The late 19th century Trauerspiel provided the form for at least one founding myth of modern subjectivity—the Oedipus complex. Tragedy reborn was the rite of passage into civilization for every neurotic. Freud also came to sing the praises of the ‘divine Plato’. In classical times, it was Eros rather than ethos that called the tune. A declaration of love was the stimulus for thought and discourse. The protagonists of the Symposium displayed their prowess through the quality of their passion as much as the subtlety of their speech. A good life was, in variegated ways, a love life and, depending on the turn of events, could become happy or tragic. We have come a long way since the erotic could be spoken of without suspicion. The papers in this issue articulate in various ways the dilemmas in which analysts and patients find themselves when the erotic has deserted daily life and found refuge in the banal (divine chocolate) or the bureaucratic (clipboard love).
Werner Prall's contribution poses a question which comes out of the current equation of function with virtue, where standards and skills have taken the place of a quest for truth and an ‘education sentimentale’. In his paper, ‘Am I good?’ he revisits the Greeks. His purpose is to shed light on the question as to what may go into the training of a ‘good’ psychoanalyst. Is it the production of a skill deployable for commonly agreed goals of health and safety where the ‘virtue’ implied by this good is as marketable and disposable as any service you might find in the Yellow Pages? He approaches the question through the work of Martha Nussbaum on Greek philosophers and dramatists. The Good is always fragile. Plato, Aristotle and the Attic Tragedians give a complex view of what it is to be a human being. A contemporary psychoanalyst should still be educated in these elements. Following Freud's first topology of the soul (conscious, preconscious and unconscious), Prall proposes an ethics of ‘impossible honesty’. In the second topology, the precarious conflicts of the psychical agencies of ego, id and superego imply an ethics of ‘impossible balance’. Psychoanalysts however, perhaps trying to keep their balance, are, like anyone else, prone to stasis. The mere
diagnosing of a ‘situation’, however accurate, is not enough. He turns to Alain Badiou whose work on the transforming properties of an ‘event’ might inform the analyst's clinical orientation. The event is constituted by the unforeseen and the unexpected in any given situation. On a political level, this might be the emergence of a social movement; on a personal level, falling in love. The psychoanalytic session itself can be an event. Welcome back Eros.
No sooner said however than qualified. Rob Weiss explores the structural limits to enjoyment as theorised by Freud and Lacan. The destination of his paper is ‘towards a psychoanalytic ethics’. His point of departure is the suffering ‘erotics of pleasure’ of a patient addicted to chocolate. This is only a sweetener. There are other aspects of his desire which cause him anguish, not least his sexuality. The patient becomes a kind of stage on which the forces of prohibition and enjoyment compulsively exchange places. But from another point of view this exchange is only ever apparent rather than real. Both prohibition and enjoyment are really in occupation of the same place. The enjoyment or jouissance never reaches beyond the idiotic. The non-sense of the pleasure is simultaneously mortified by the cruel censure of the prohibition. Weiss's account describes a familiar contemporary story. Subjects on all sides are incited to enjoy without apparent limit, often to be beset equally with guilt without limit—the superego at its most obscene and sadistic. The paper finishes with a metaphor of an unfinished journey. There is no destination. One can only equip oneself to follow the truth of one's desire and this will invariably transgress every moral cartography.
The literature on countertransference has conceptualised the various ways in which the analyst is affected by the patient and in some instances posited that this affectivity provides material for interpretation to the patient about his/her unconscious feelings or impulses towards the analyst. How this phenomenon is interpreted depends on the position the analyst takes up. In his paper on counter transference, Nic Bayley seeks to move from the position of a straightforward counterpart to a less definite, enigmatic place; the actual other opening on to an ever present horizon of ‘alterity’. He begins his paper with a story of an applicant psychotherapist who is subject to what one might term the wild countertransference interpretation of his interviewer. The wildness is in itself an unanalysed effect of a tameness—of current psychotherapeutic
piety. Your memory of your former patient and your continuing concern for her is evidence of a lingering unanalysed pleasure. You fancied her! Enter countertransference as the erotics of suspicion.
Bayley lays this at the door of an object relations tradition in which the other is rarely a lover because invariably mother. He turns to Levinas and Laplanche for whom the ethical and the erotic are implicated in a continual co-structuring or de-structuring of self and other. For these thinkers, the subject is also always other to another subject and is liable to be either reduced or seduced. The primal scene, both sexual and persecutory, is the traumatic origin for both philosopher and psychoanalyst. In this original ‘face to face’, Levinas counters primary persecution with the thought that the other is not knowable in any finite way. For Laplanche, the offering of analysis produces a transference where the unconscious sexual messages of the original parental others might travel back to the other (analyst) for de-translation. What has been stigmatic and opaque for the subject becomes significant and enigmatic. Judith Butler is cited in her work on these two thinkers. Since 9/11 she has produced meditations on the primary dependency and vulnerability of human beings who are always already given over to the other; to have a body is to bear a life which is inevitably ‘precarious’. The responsibility that analyst and patient are bound to face is an epiphenomenon of what she defines as a ‘scene of address’; a scene, like the primal scene that it echoes, assailed by unconscious sexual messages and an ethical call.
Haya Oakley's paper, ‘The Development of the Capacity to Differ’ starts as a variation on a theme by Winnicott. The variation may be subtle but the theme is impassioned. As the paper progresses, she makes the theme her own, in a call for the continuing autonomy of contemporary psychoanalysis. State regulation is likely to end up creating therapists with false selves. Psychoanalysis must stay true, even if alone. Winnicott and Oakley herself (in her previous publications and clinical work) have thought about and created environments where they could stand and work with ‘the primitive needs’ of human beings with psychosis. This gave rise to the sort of disciplined experimentation in treatment and in living in communities such as those run by the Philadelphia Association which could never have been envisioned by a government bureaucracy. Winnicott's name may not be immediately associated with the erotic, but only a man with the devotion and indeed love of the thousands of
patients that came his way could write a paper entitled ‘Hate in the Countertransference’. A ‘Skills for Health’ committee would probably collectively choke before they thought of that. Oakley argues that this creativity came about through the researches and the differences between analysts. A standard prescription would have produced nothing. In an interesting look at a 1959 conference, Oakley describes how Winnicott makes clear his disagreement with the British Jungian Michael Fordham, particularly with regard to the uses of transference. Similarly, Klein, Winnicott and Lacan evolved different theoretical approaches to psychosis. As Oakley points out, they all produced terms and concepts which are bound to be problematised, but the important thing is that their thinking came about as they ‘struggled endlessly’ with the phenomena they encountered in their clinical work.
This paper was presented at The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis conference ‘Why Winnicott?’ last year. Like the other papers in this issue it proposes that ethics in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis must be felt from within. The practitioner or student of psychoanalysis has to have the time and freedom, as Oakley says of Winnicott, ‘to seek answers to his questions wherever he can find them’. This is the ethic of a quest that goes back to Freud and further back to the philosophical heritage of the Ancients. In its fearful prescribing of rules, a modern state counts its costs. In such a state the psychoanalyst, like the poet, won't count. They may be able to continue however to develop the capacity for both invention and poverty; the conjunction of which once gave birth to the irrepressible Eros.
Finally, we are looking forward to Issue No. 3 which will examine the complex and timely issue of class in its relationship to psychoanalysis and philosophy. The ‘Call for Papers’ section sets out our hopes and expectations.
Stephen Gee