In his 1989 paper, ‘Transference: Terminable, Interminable’, Francois Roustang introduces us to a patient he was treating at the time, ‘a young psychiatrist, seriously disturbed, who had initially come to see me thinking only of reducing his suffering’ (p.141). Roustang explains how, after several years of analysis, the psychiatrist's condition improved considerably. ‘But then’, Roustang tells us, ‘he had the idea of becoming a psychoanalyst. He had been complaining for some time about my not belonging to a society providing psychoanalytic training, since he would like to meet me inside an institution’, and this, despite the fact, that the young psychiatrist reported how those colleagues of his who were training in societies to which their analysts belonged, were encountering what Roustang glosses as ‘all sorts of difficulties’ (p.141). As such, the young psychiatrist was ‘having a great deal of trouble putting an end to his analysis, that is, freeing himself from the transference to me which takes the place of an institution for him’, a situation that leads Roustang to wonder: ‘What happens to the colleagues [of the psychiatrist] whose analysts belong to a society providing psychoanalytic training?’ Roustang immediately answers: ‘You know as well as I do what happens: the transferential attachment to the analyst has not been resolved. Either it has been transformed into a transferential attachment to the analyst in the analytic institution or to the institution itself’ (p.141).
In other words, the transferential place held by the analyst in the analytic relation becomes occupied by the society itself, a matter naturally inviting the unconscious expectation, by the prospective member, of encountering there what their transference had led them to find in relation to their analyst. Given that analytic societies are not therapeutic relations, this presumably is one of the factors leading to the ‘difficulties’ Roustang reports the psychiatrist's colleagues as facing. As Roustang cautions in Dire Mastery (1982), becoming an analyst is frequently the best way to put an end to analysis, because what one should desire is always already answered in advance by the assumption of an analytic identity, forged
via the transferential attachment to one's analyst and then, latterly, by the society to which one's analyst belongs and to which one becomes, upon membership of the same society, bound in perpetuity. This is part of the constellation of personal and institutional conditions prompting Roustang to speak of the ‘transference of the transference’ and why he gravely counsels that ‘psychoanalysis never lets go’.
Those familiar with Roustang will know only too well the sceptical destination these and similar considerations lead him to: namely, that the notion of a psychoanalytic society is a contradiction in terms and any attempt to harness the transference, in such a way as to found a community upon it, constitutes not only a socialized form of violence but a slide into those illiberal modes of libidinal organisation Freud presents in his group psychology, the allied pairs of the military and religion, hypnotism and being in love. As far as Roustang is concerned psychoanalysis, in its communal instantiations, shares in these organisations of libidinal investments insofar as it, too, depends upon inspiring and then harnessing the transference.
Initially, it might appear puzzling that psychoanalysis should bear any resemblance to either the authoritarianism of the military or religion, or the uncritical attachments of the lover to their beloved or the hypnotised to the hypnotist. Are not such libidinal attachments antithetical to psychoanalysis, given that psychoanalysis must surely be, if it is anything at all, an emancipatory practice? In its discovery of the transference, at the heart of all relationships, does not psychoanalysis work to help the patient gain greater freedom from the demands of transference, loosening them from its lures?
In the translation of the psychoanalytic treatment, into the psychoanalytic community, Roustang is, therefore, claiming the transference undergoes a reversal, in which the psychoanalytic community becomes the mirror image of the treatment. Because the analyst-patient couple is organised around the foundational asymmetry of the patient's transference, it is a deeply illiberal social formation. In the treatment dyad such asymmetry is, however, a necessary means towards the promotion of greater freedom insofar as the analyst, through
the analytical deconstruction of the transferential tie, hopes to help the patient recognise how their devotion to the analyst constitutes a form of freely assumed bondage, that must eventually be given up if a more profound freedom is finally to be obtained.
Roustang is of course not absurdly suggesting that psychoanalysis should, even if it could, subtract the transference from relationships. About the treatment, Roustang comments: ‘If we give to the transference its initial sense of a relation to a given analyst, it can be said that this transference can and must come to an end, since one cannot stay in analysis for an entire lifetime.’ (1989, p. 140) However, ‘If we define it as the way in which we relate to others, the transference obviously cannot come to an end, otherwise we would no longer be able to form relations with others…the transference cannot come to an end, but the form taken by the transference can be repudiated’. (1989, p. 140). The crucial difference for Roustang therefore, is that unlike the lovers lost in one another's gaze or the devout, genuflecting congregation, psychoanalytic treatment invokes the transference only in order to ‘put an end to the transference’, by unmasking the transference as a ‘necessary fiction’. The direction of the treatment thus becomes the traversal of this fiction, freeing the patient from the manner in which they fetter themselves to the Other, a fetter that – to paraphrase one of Roustang's favourite descriptions of human flourishing – forestalls them from dreaming, fantasising and thinking for themselves.
As Roustang regards a principle aim of psychoanalytic treatment to be the emancipation from any kind of group-think or servitude to the Other, he can see no way in which the ends of analytic treatment and the reality of analytic communities can be reconciled. By displacing from the analyst to the analytic community their transference, the prospective member of an analytic community merely perpetuates the ego-ideal they had, initially, found in the figure of the analyst. Once this happens, warns Roustang, ‘the problem of the resolution of the transference cannot even be mentioned’ (1982, p. 28) because what has to be preserved, at all costs, is ‘the master-disciple couple [that] is formed’ at the ‘origin of a psychoanalytic society’ – formed, precisely, in order to ‘put a stop to
the dangerous consequences of the unspeaking [déparole], that extends outside analysis, after the dissolution of the transference’ (p. 34). The bond of the analyst-patient couple is elevated, transubstantiated in to a kind of universal Law, a Law to be defended no matter the consequences as it assumes, for the patient, the origin and guarantee of the social order itself. Where the patient's analyst is not the founder of their own association – Freudian, Kleinian, Jungian, Lacanian – then such proper names start to function as the ‘analysts of last resort’, the underwriters of the Law, whose theoretical pronouncements are appealed to as holy writ when settling differences of theoretical opinion and therapeutic practice between members.
Such a reading clearly has profound and far-reaching consequences for the kind of community it is possible for psychoanalysts to imagine building together. A strong, cohesive analytic community, a united community, is always, then, a community in which the individuality of its members are annulled by the collective substitution of their ego-ideals by that of the group's leader(s), ethos or ideology which, as we have seen is, according to Roustang, nothing other than the embodiment of Freud's group psychology. ‘A primary group of this kind’, writes Freud in his famous formulation, ‘is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’ (S.E. 18, 1921, p. 116, Freud's italics)
Freud's assessment of groups is well known for its anti-Utopianism, given that the many become subsumed under the one and individual difference is subordinated to collective sameness. The inescapably totalising nature of Freud's theory and the way of belonging it allows for has long been critically noted – by Theodor Adorno and Mikkel Borch-Jacobson, amongst others – and, as has likewise been frequently remarked upon it is, of course, highly relevant that Freud was writing in Europe during the age of the rise of sectarianism, nationalism and authoritarianism on the continent. The implications for communal analytic life is that, at root, one community presupposes a community of one, as in the Great Seal of United States that announces, E. pluribus
unum (‘Out of many, one’).
For Roustang, the only alternative to this homogenous community is an antagonistic heterogeneity that, frankly, does not sound any more attractive. The kind of community Roustang envisions as a successful translation of the private ends of analytic treatment into the public comportment of social life, is one recalling Hobbes's Bellum omnium contra omnes (‘war of all against all’). In Roustang's words, ‘only when [a psychoanalytic society] sees itself as a gang of killers, as an assembly of madmen, or, according to Freud, as a savage horde, does a psychoanalytic society take on the only form suited to it, the only image it can uphold without misrepresenting itself’ (1982, p. 14). In Hobbsian terms such a community is, strictly speaking, the pre-social state of nature, which is of course no community at all because, for Hobbes, communal life is founded only when its members willing renounce something of their naked self-interest in the name of an over-arching social contract. If we follow Roustang's assessment we are faced with a predicament, one that Roustang ultimately does not seem to believe is resolvable within the terms offered by psychoanalysis itself. Either psychoanalytic communities exist as personality cults, consenting to a kind of institutional strain of soft-Stalinism, that is, a willing and knowing acceptance of a social organisation cultivating idolatry and discipleship, a social aspiration subverting the emancipatrory ends of the analytic treatment, or they spiral into internecine warfare. In this respect, Freud's famous assessment of psychoanalysis as one of the ‘impossible professions’ might be heard not merely as the impossibility of realising the fantasy of the ‘complete treatment’, but also as the impossibility of psychoanalysis as a collective pursuit. Is there any way out of this problem? In fact, I believe there is, as I intend to argue that what Roustang offers is, on closer scrutiny, a false choice.
Whilst Roustang is, I believe, correct in his assessment of the authoritarian tendency of psychoanalytic societies, I do not agree that the ‘only form suited’ to analytic communities is a state of perpetual internal strife. For what Roustang overlooks, to the great detriment of his otherwise incisive assessment – owing, ironically perhaps, to the
transferential concern to dethrone his own great oppressive master and one-time analyst, Lacan – is the Lacanian recognition of a crucial distinction between the ego-ideal and the ideal-ego. Although this distinction is to be found in Freud, he is not everywhere consistent or explicit in drawing it out. Lacan and others have their own way of formulating the divergence between the ego-ideal and the ideal-ego. As I wish to mobilise this distinction here, the ideal-ego refers to the ‘self I ideally see myself’ as, the ‘self of the Selfie’ or the ‘Instagramatic self’; whereas the ego-ideal, on the other hand, is that second-order Other for whom my ‘performances of selfhood’ are secretly enacted, the spectral omni-observant Other whom I wish to please and impress by my efforts at self-cultivation. The ideal-ego and ego-ideal are, thus, interdependent: insofar as I strive to better approximate that image I have of my ‘perfect self’, my ‘self as a yet-to-be-realised Other’, I presuppose the voyeuristic gaze of that, so to speak, ‘other Other in myself’ – the Other for whom the dramas of my self-actualization are, ultimately, undertaken.
With this distinction in mind, it seems to me that, whilst the kind of analytic communities organised on the hysterically narcissistic basis of a community of one—a community built around the suspension and re-finding of the individual ego-ideal in a collective ego-ideal—warring, self-cannibalising communities, have regressed to a different, more primitive narcissism, the narcissism proper to the possessive individualism of the ideal-ego. What ought to be apparent, is that given the interdependence of the ego-ideal and ideal-ego, those communities that attempt to jettison a collective ego-ideal do not, actually, succeed; they merely repress the ego-ideal. Thus, the ego-ideal is bound to return with a renewed force. For the return of the repressed ego-ideal, in the guise of the critical and self-berating omni-observant Other, I wish to reserve the title of the super-ego. This super-ego is the Law in its paranoid manifestation as the punitive, vengeful Other. Such characterisations of are, of course, theoretical abstractions. No community is purely organised around a monolithically vertical collective ego-ideal or populated solely by the lateral jostling of individualised ideal-egos. Rather, all communities in practice are ‘mixed modes’, made up of multiple axes of intersecting emulations of others
and affiliations to oneself. Nevertheless, this distinction between the ego-ideal and the ideal-ego provides a framework offering the hope of some clarity to the otherwise murky problem of troubled psychoanalytic communities.
If, as Roustang believes, discipleship characetrises societies (predominantly) built around an ego-ideal, also have a better chance of mutuality and civility—owing to a horizontal axis of identification amongst members of the community, regulated by the community's stratification below and submission to, a universalised Law embodied in a particular figure, credo or ideology—whereas hostility and suspicion are frequently characteristic of communities that have (supposedly) overthrown the paternalistic and masterly ego-ideal in favour of competing ideal-egos, the ‘all for one and none for all’ rule of individual hearts and desires, the question becomes the properly dialectical one of moving beyond this antagonism. Let me put the problem like this: how can we retain the civility and coherence, the sense of shared mission and purpose that is characteristic of a community internally identifying with itself because organized around a communal ego-ideal, whilst not jeopardizing the freedom from repression that permits self-determination? Formulated in its most hyperbolic mode, this is the tension between a politics of the same and a politics of difference, which is very much a key socio-political tension of our times.
It is perhaps no bad thing that I have strayed into the drawing of socio-political parallels, since it is worth pausing to note what is at stake. Both the politics of difference and the politics of the same collapse back into an implicitly shared and divisive conception of belonging because both, ultimately, tarry with the unresolved dialectic between ego-ideal and ideal-ego that presupposes reference to a meta-group, a transcendental community of one. As such, both tend inherently towards to the perception of divisions and, therefore, to the possibility of conflict between factions. Whereas communities primarily invested in a collective ego-ideal might externalise their aggression by battling with other groups, putatively destratified groups comprised of competitive ideal-egos focus aggression inwardly and clash internally, through individuals vilifying
other individuals because, as we will see, these kinds of internal group imbroglios bear witness to the return of the ideal-ego qua persecutory super-ego, as an injunction for the preservation of individual autonomy and self-realisation, a punitive injunction that can be assuaged only by locating others in the community as prohibitive assailants, out to thwart the aspiration of self-actualisation. Before we can properly grasp this we need, first, to spend a moment thinking about two notions of community that are regularly suggested as alternatives to the decidedly unappetising pair we have so far been considering.
The naïve and clichéd answer to the choice between a group orgainsed around a shared ideal or a group championing the pursuit of competing self-interest is, in our age, the one now most popularly associated with those movements, largely beginning in the counter-cultural sixties, that turn away from the Occident toward the Orient and its traditions and practices. These traditions, as popularly received and articulated in the West, locate the problem with the ego itself. Thus it is the ego that must be overcome, in building non-authoritarian, tolerant and peaceable associations. Indeed, in the Roustang paper we met with at the beginning, this is ultimately the path Roustang advocates (1989, p. 145). In exasperation at what he perceives as Western narcissism and, as he regards it, the West's need to continually contrive ways, such as in psychoanalysis, to forever be seen, heard and acknowledged by the Other, Roustang suggests we look Eastward. This turning towards the supposedly non-narcissistic East is, in fact, co-relative with Roustang's formulation of the analytic cure: the end of analysis amounts to the overcoming of the ego and the conquest of narcissism, clinically evidenced in the exhaustion of the urge to address another with one's complaints so as to receive what the Person-Centred therapists call the ‘unconditional positive regard’ of that Other.
As we have established, even in those pursuits that hold out the possibility of dispensing altogether with a hegemonic ego-ideal, in practice this only ever amounts to its belated, disguised, return. That is, it becomes a symptom: the injunction to ‘overcome the ego’ starts to function in a super-egoic fashion. It is for this reason, perhaps, that
Eastern philosophies and practices in their pop reception in the West, with their emphasis on the dissolution or, at least, temporary suspension, of the ego, have found so much favour amongst the most enthusiastic advocates of the expectation of today's capitalism, namely the ‘rational’ pursuit of individual gain through what Michel Foucault derided as the ‘entrepreneurship of the self’. I can work harder and party harder, consume more, more efficiently, by removing that ultimate impediment to the realization of my own selfish desire – namely, myself. When I have becalmed my soul, found inner peace and respite from the continual, competitive demands of turbo-charged twenty-first century capitalism, I am better equipped to meet the steep requirements of participation in the economy. In other words, the suspension of the ego in our age of supposed liberation from indenture to this or that ego-ideal, reappears in the very act of the suspension of the ego itself. By ‘taking a break’ from my ego for a week on my mindfulness retreat, I performatively enact my dependence upon and exemplification of, the very system I am retreating from. It is not so much mindfulness, as it is mindlessness.
An allied solution to that of the pseudo-Oriental ego-death, also explored by Roustang in other essays (e.g. 2000), is the invocation of vitalist and process philosophies. Roustang's candidate is Michel Henry, but we might here equally think of those bodies of thought belonging to Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead or Giles Deleuze, that often attract advocates of the ‘de-subjectivisation of the subject’, who wish to promote an overcoming of the ego by absorption in the animating energy of life as such – a rendezvous with what Dylan Thomas waxed-romantic as, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. From the perspective of Lacanian theory, the attempt to ‘de-subjectivise’ oneself by immersion in the ‘raw becoming of the life force’ or the ‘denuded pulse of being’, is an attempt to vacate the Symbolic and Imaginary coordinates constitutive of social space, by inhabiting the place of the Real. Since, in Lacanian terms, the Real is defined as the impossible this is, accordingly, achievable only at the price of psychosis. Famously, this was the fate of Nietzsche, who sank ever more irretrievably into delirium the closer he approximated the ‘Real’ of his own philosophy, the eternally recurrent
flux of becoming, the Will to Power. Given that a ‘assembly of madmen’ is one of the idioms Roustang resorts to in order to describe the warring analytic community, the analytic community manifested in its Hobbsian pre-social state of nature, this is quite obviously no solution. Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the sheer grandiosity of vitalism: what could be a more perfect fantasy of omnipotence, than the belief that I can absent myself from the ordinary, humdrum human world, to unshackle myself from the constraints of the phenomenal, by penetrating to the core of the noumenal, the beating heart of being that is the thing-in-itself?
What both these solutions miss is, precisely, the properly dialectical moment inherent to the ego-ideal and ideal-ego; that is to say: the dialectic doesn't turn on the ego, as the quasi-Orientalists and vitalists would have it, rather it turns around the problems of identification. To simply expunge the ego, without addressing the foundational libidinal investments constitutive of it is, merely, to enact a passive and (no doubt, temporary) suppression of critical consciousness, leaving everything as it was. By way of analogy, we might say it's akin to the fantasy that the furniture in the room will rearrange itself when the lights are switched off for a while. In order, then, to find our way out of the impasse posed by the false choice between the ego-ideal and the ideal-ego we must, therefore, find a way of addressing the dilemmas posed for psychoanalytic communities generated by identification.
On this, both Roustang and Lacan are in full accord: identification with the analyst should in no way be taken to comprise the end of an analysis nor a condition of membership to a psychoanalytic community. Roustang's critique of Lacanianism, however, evidences how hard this goal is to actually achieve in practice. Whilst Roustang applauds the Lacanian's stated aim of ushering identification with the analyst out of the front door, his charge is that it is busy quietly smuggling such identification back in through the side door, via the politics of its institutions and the relation to the theory of ‘the master’ it encourages.
Clearly then, if analytic communities are to function in a way that dodge both the hysterical identification with a hegemonic ego-ideal or the narcissistic warfare of competing ideal-egos, the entire project of forming
associations based around the claims of identity, whether individual or collective, must be reconsidered. A new politics of belonging has to be sought. If the politics of the same aggrandises ego-ideals, we have also urgently to recognise how the politics of difference, as buttress to the culture of possessive bourgeois individualism, merely represses the ego-ideal thereby paving the way for its return in the guise of the monstrous and socially corrosive super-egoic injunction of realising maximisled self-interest. We are now in a better position to appreciate why this leads to internally rather then externally focused aggression. Under sway of such an injunction, suspicion abounds, as everyone is my enemy, my competitor. It is not enough that I fashion myself after my own image; I have also to fashion the community to which I belong after myself too, in order to best secure my future from those against whom (I imagine) I am competing against, for fear that they are similarly so doing. It is, in brief, the unempathetic and compassionless politics of ‘beggar thy neighbour to better thyself’.
Given the profound difficulties that arise when communities are formed around the valorising of individual identity or appeals to shared identifications, it must surely be clear that a politics of dis-identification is called for, a psychoanalytic politics championing not only a disidentification with the analyst at the end of the treatment but, crucially, a dis-identification with psychoanalysis itself, that is neither a rejection nor an abandoning of it, but the assumption of a critical distance toward it. In such a guise, psychoanalytic politics would be a politics of indifference, a praxis that suspends, makes inoperable, the conceptual opposition between sameness and difference. For their part, the Lacanians have a version of the dis-identification with the Other, that they regard as proper to the end of analysis: ‘identification with the symptom’. As far as I can tell, I am unsure how, in practice, as lived in the social and institutional life of psychoanalytic communities, a collection of people who have all ‘identified with their symptoms’ doesn't ultimately amount either to a disguised identification with Lacan (Lacan qua symptom) or differ in any significant respect from Roustang's ‘gang of killers’. Thus, it smacks to me of just another opportunity to further an insidious culture of divisive
individualism, an encouragement to wage war on behalf of myself, albeit on the basis of the sovereignty of my symptoms, if not the imperialism of my ego.
My proposal is to go even further than the Lacanians. I am suggesting an image of the psychoanalytic community that cultivates praxes of dis-identificaton, encouraging a severance with psychoanalysis, performatively achieved through multiple practices of indifference towards the bait of psychoanalytic identity. In my conception, readiness to qualify as a psychoanalyst can be gauged when psychoanalysis becomes, for the trainee, just one practice amongst many others; when it can be regarded as just one theory amongst others. To be a psychoanalyst is, in this conception, to be indifferent to the fact that one is a psychoanalyst and, furthermore, to feel unpartisan toward the community whose membership one seeks. If one way of conceiving of the end of analysis is the ability of the patient to assume the position of one who recognizes that they do not correspond to themselves, that their identity is non-(self)-coincidental, then the institutional life of psychoanalysis cannot be premised upon the assumption that its members coincide to the institution to which they belong. But the question is: what would this look like? How can we begin to think of what this means? As a way into picturing such a scenario, I wish to conclude this morning by offer the following analogy that is to be taken loosely, as a sketch or prop, as an to aid thinking, rather than an ‘explanation’. A community founded upon a principle of dis-identification might be regarded as one striving for the social embodiment of a paradox. In such a community, from the point of view of the member, the aspiration would be to belong to a community to which they do not belong or, articulated slightly differently, to not belong to a community to which they nevertheless find themselves belonging; whilst, from the perspective of the community, this would be a community that aspires to be group without any members or a collection of individuals that do not form a group. Such formulations seek to fundamentally undermine the possibility of any appeal to a transcendental community of one and, as such, resist the dialectic of ego-ideal and ideal-ego, thereby creating a fresh set of conditions of possibility
for the nature of communal psychoanalysis and what belonging, in psychoanalysis, might mean in the future.