I have always shrunk from the act of beginning, from the first word, the first touch. The restlessness when the first sentence has to be formed, and after the first, the second.
This is the opening sentence of an award-winning novel by the Flemish writer Erwin Mortier. The English title is While the Gods Were Sleeping, which I consider a weak translation of the original Godenslaap. The Dutch title is much closer to the Wagnerian idea of Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the Gods. I'll come back to that later. When I read the novel, the opening sentence confronted me with a familiar feeling. Familiar, but at the same time uncanny. How often are we confronted with the act of beginning? Starting an analysis with someone new belongs to this rare category, and what I experience on such an occasion is very well rendered by that opening sentence. At the beginning of an analysis, I always feel a particular form of anxiety.
I had this experience when I began my work as an analyst three decades ago. I still have it today, although the underlying dynamics have changed. Three decades ago, when I saw my first analysand, I was convinced that I would fail, that it would only be a matter of time before I was unmasked as a fraud, as someone who was not up to the job. The anxiety that I feel today is different. It has to do with the structure that is involved and that ascribes to the analyst the ever-impossible position of the master. And of course, that is a position of fraud, of imposture (‘impostor’) as Lacan calls it. In both cases, my anxiety is a transference anxiety. In a classic Freudian reasoning, it would be considered a countertransferential reaction. In a Lacanian reasoning, it is just plain transference, working both ways between the analyst and the analysand.
This brings me to my thesis: I consider anxiety a central affect in transference. Freud described love and hate as the two transferential affects, Lacan added a third one, the passion for wanting not to know. To my knowledge, neither of them devoted much attention to the idea of
transferential anxiety. This is remarkable, because as I will argue, anxiety belongs to the very structure that explains the phenomenon of transference.
This structure is well known; it comes down to what Lacan in his Seminar XI calls the becoming of the subject. The central element in this structure is the lack, better known as Lacan's invention, the object a. It is positioned in-between the subject and the Other and causes the never ending interaction between those two. The subject identifies with the signifiers coming from the Other, with the aim of answering the desire of the Other. This alienating answer will never be enough, and the net result is separation. It is never enough firstly because the lack is such that there is no final answer to it (it is a lack in the Real, ‘for real’), and secondly, because an answer via a signifier is beside the point. Consequently, the process starts all over again, with another attempt, and yet another, thus continuing the back and forth movement between subject and Other, as demonstrated in this drawing (Verhaeghe, 2006: 226).
As a structure, it can receive many different contents, depending on the signifiers that go back and forth between a subject and his or her Others. These different contents explain why, whilst presenting the same structure, every subject and hence every analysis is different. In Lacanian theory, the particular form and content this structure takes for each subject
constitutes the basic fantasy, in which both the subject and the Other dance in a particular way around the ever lacking object a. Transference then, is the actualisation in our everyday life of the particularities of this basic fantasy, based on our own history.
Because of the processes involved, meaning identification and separation, transference entails three passions. Love is the passion that drives the subject towards identification with the desire of the Other. Hate is the opposite, as it causes the separation from the Other. In both instances, the subject does not want to know, which is the third passion, either because it identifies far too easily with the signifiers coming from the Other, or because it refuses them.
A closer study of these passions reveals that two of them can be understood as a driving force, emanating from the two basic motives that according to Freud govern our lives: Eros and Thanatos. Eros drives us towards the union with the Other; Thanatos does the opposite. The third passion, our not wanting to know, is all-together on another level. I consider it a consequence of the two others: the more we identify with signifiers coming from the other, the more knowledge we acquire, and paradoxically enough, the better we can avoid our own truth.
Anxiety then, is the affect that we may experience during these processes. In neurosis, the most well known anxiety is that of not being able to answer the desire of the Other, of not being good enough to fill in his or her lack. The consequence is that the Other leaves us, the dreaded Veut-il me perdre, does he want to get rid of me? (Lacan, 1994 [1964]): 214). For Lacan, this is central, both in the becoming of the subject and accordingly in transference. Less well-known is the anxiety of being the perfect fit to answer the lack of the Other. The dreaded consequence here is that we disappear into the Other. The first version is typically hysteric; the second one is typically obsessional-neurotic; both of them determine the transference in a particular way.
For a neurotic subject, the start of an analysis implies a confrontation with the desire of the Other; the analysis is experienced as a test with a predictable result. The prediction derives from the basic fantasy of the subject, meaning his or her basic anxiety concerning his or her ability to meet the desire of the Other. In the well-known case of hysteria, that result is failure; whatever the hysterical subject brings to the analysis, she will consider it not good enough. If the analysis fails to produce the expected results, the hysterical subject (be it the analyst or the analysand) takes the blame; it is yet another illustration of personal impotence. In the less well-known case of obsessional neurosis, the predictable result is failure as well, but this time for the other (again, be it the analyst or the analysand). The obsessional subject produces exactly what is demanded but does not involve herself, thus demonstrating the impossibility of satisfaction.
For both the hysterical and the obsessional neurotic, the transferential affect at work is anxiety, either the hysterical anxiety of being not good enough resulting in rejection and separation, or the obsessional-neurotic anxiety of being far too good resulting in incorporation and alienation.
My transferential anxiety of three decades ago is the same anxiety as the one experienced by my neurotic patients today. The anxiety that I experience today is different – at least that is what I think – and is caused by the ultimate impossibility of analysis as such, because of the position that is ascribed to me, as an analyst.
The first transferential anxiety is easy to explain, it is the bread and butter of our clinical practice. The second one is a lot harder to understand. Today, this is all the more the case, because something has changed in the position that is ascribed to us. This change is not an isolated one, on the contrary, it is taking place at the level of the society as such, and it has to do with the contemporary Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the Gods – to be more specific, the twilight of the fathers and the disappearance of patriarchy. Before going into that, I will present a description of the first transferential anxiety, the neurotic one. At the same time, this will be an evaluation of Freudian analysis.
Classical Freudian analysis is experienced by the hysteric as a test. The patient is the one who takes the exam; the analyst stands in the position of the Other as a master figure. He—notice that the Freudian archetype of the analyst is not only male, but necessarily a paternal male—he is the one who will decide whether the patient gets a pass or a fail. He expects the patient to give him what he demands: a totally free association that will lead the analysis to unexplored fields of infantile memories about repressed sexual experiences, maybe even some trauma, who knows? If the patient does produce what is expected from her, as a reward she will enter the promised land of sexual enjoyment and become free of feelings of guilt and anxiety. Alas, right from the start, the patient does not feel up to the job, and indeed, her anxiety proves to be right: the more she tries, the more it becomes obvious that she does not succeed in producing the expected free association. She does not manage to give what is demanded from her, and because of her failure, she feels rejected and left alone. In most cases of hysteria, the patient will blame herself: she was just not good enough, she still craves to have what is lacking. In a smaller number of cases, she will blame the analyst: he was just not good enough, he did not give her what she desired, and she will start looking for another and better one.
Freud interpreted this failure in terms of castration anxiety and penis envy. In ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ he formulated a pessimistic conclusion: even a long term analysis does not bring women to the point where they give up their desire for a penis, nor does it allow men to leave the phallic competition behind them (Freud, 1978 [1937c]: 250-252). The anxiety of not having what the other demands and desires, the envy because somebody else might possess it, appears to be insurmountable. It is obvious that Freud situates both affects in the relation of the analysand to the analyst. Nevertheless, he does not elaborate it in terms of an unsolved transference, let alone recognize his own part in it—he is the paternal master who is supposed to possess it, whatever that ‘it’ may be. What Freud describes in that paper is the classic deadlock of
neurosis, meaning imaginary castration.
Lacan's introduction of the imaginary order as structurally different from the symbolic order is one of the major advantages of his theory over Freud's. The imaginary is the phallic order of meaning and of belief in meaning—if something is lacking, it is by pure coincidence or because someone made a mistake. The symbolic is the order of ever moving signifiers around a central lack – this opens the possibility for creativity and change. Together with his neurotic patients, Freud believed in the phallus as a much-desired biological given. Lacan degrades the phallus to an imaginary object, the dreamt-of perfect object to answer the desire of the Other—but it never does. Consequently, every neurotic relation between a subject and the Other remains endlessly focussed on the search for this imaginary object, and every neurotic subject has their own particular way of taking their position in this relation—which explains the repetitive character of transference.
The accompanying affect does not have to be anxiety, it can be transformed into jealousy and envy (the other has it); it can be depression (I will never have it). There is even a neurotic subject who is very sure that he has the phallus—this is the genital character as described by Wilhelm Reich, a diagnostic category that is far more frequent than its absence in Lacanian theory might suggest. In our clinical praxis, the hysterical anxiety of not having it and not being able to give it, is the most frequent one, because it fits the classic analytical scene best. This is not the case for Reich's genital character, or for the obsessional subject. The hysterical discourse puts someone in the position of the master, the one who knows. She herself stands in the demanding position—she wants the knowledge that will open the doors to the desired agalma; therefore, she has to be the perfect analysand—but time and again, she fails.
This is the deadlock of Freudian analysis, as he himself described in a paper with a very apt title ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’. In Lacanian analysis, this failure is understood as a structural necessity. Even
more so: it is welcomed as the condition for change. If a Lacanian analysis succeeds, it entails sublimation. A beautiful definition given by Lacan runs as follows: Elle élève un objet à la dignité de la Chose, sublimation elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing (Lacan, 1986 [1959-1960]: 133). No object will ever be satisfactory; we have to elevate it ourselves to The Thing, to give it that dignity. In my reasoning, the aim and the end of a Lacanian analysis is sublimation on a structural level. Elevating the object to the dignity of the Thing means that we have to give up our belief in the imaginary phallus without becoming a cynical person. In this respect, the Lacanian terms are confusing, because one might still have the impression that the symbolic phallus stands for something. This is not the case, on the contrary. The symbolic phallus does not indicate an empirical thing, nor does it indicate an absence; the symbolic phallus indicates simply a necessary structural lack without which the symbolic order could not function.
The deadlock in Freudian analysis may end in three different ways: by way of solution the patient can take up one of the three positions present in the formula of the basic fantasy. The hysterical subject can remain stuck at her imaginary identity, blaming herself for her failure, anxious for the next meeting with the next Other. Or she can identify with the object a, i.e. with the lack as such, and become a typically postmodern cynic: anything goes; nothing works. Or she can identify with the position of the Other and become a master him or herself—the postfreudians called this the identification with the analyst, that is, the Freudian analyst.
The latter solution implies a consolidation of the belief in the imaginary phallus and hence a belief in final answers. The initial anxiety is resolved because of this consolidation, and the guarantee lies in the analyst and his knowledge. When Freud was consulted by his youngest patient (Little Hans accompanied by his father), he told him that ‘Long before he was born, he knew already that…’ (Freud, 1978 [1909b]: 42). On the way home, the little boy asked his Father: ‘Does the professor talk to God that he knows all these things beforehand?’ (Freud, 1978 [1909b]: 42). After Freud's intervention, the child is considered to be cured; his anxiety has more or
less disappeared. In the same period, a young hysteric came to see Freud. She was sent by her father as well, albeit against her will. Eighteen-year-old Dora is looking for answers concerning her sexuality and gender, and her search is very obvious in her dreams. In one of them there is a recurring sentence: Sie fragt wohl hundert mal—she asks a hundred times (Freud, 1978 [1905e]: 97). Freud doesn't bother about the questioning; he produces answers and presents himself as a guarantee for the correctness of those answers. Unlike little Hans, Dora does not accept his authority, and leaves. At the end of the case study, Freud notes in triumph that he has been appointed as a professor and that his nomination must have meant a slap in the face for the young hysteric who refused to believe him and hence who refused to be cured.
Both case studies are exceptions, the typical Freudian analysis ran in two stages. The first stage was usually successful. The interpretation and the deconstruction of the neurotic symptoms brought relief. As a result, the questions underneath, to which those symptoms had given an answer, became conscious. What does it mean to be a woman? How can we think and live a sexual relationship? What does it mean to be a father? During the second stage, the one that is obvious in the case study of Little Hans and Dora, Freud presented himself as the one who knows. He gave answers to those questions, based on the patriarchal society of his time. That is: based on the social order that had caused those symptoms in the first place. Freud even elaborated an anthropological guarantee for this social order. According to him, the paternal authority harks back to an underlying historical reality. Once upon a time, there was a primal horde, dominated by an almighty primal father who forbade his sons access to the females. The sons revolted, and one day they killed the father. After the murder, they fell prey to feelings of remorse and guilt. The memory of the original deed and the feelings of guilt were stored in the collective memory of mankind and provided the foundation of our patriarchal moral system. (Freud, 1978 [1912-13]), and 1978 [1939a).
Freud took the transferential position of the reassuring father who guaranteed that everything would turn out for the best. A number of his patients were not convinced, meaning that their analysis became
interminable. Even Freud himself was not convinced. His doubt appears in a casual humorous remark about the three impossible professions, Educating, Healing and Governing (Freud, 1925f). Each of them is impossible if one expects an infallible father. Any educator, politician or analyst who believes himself to be an infallible master, will do a disservice to his pupils, his constituency or his patients.
In his first theories Lacan will endorse the Freudian father. In his later theory, he will share Freud's doubt and give it a structural explanation. This shift in Lacan's thinking is quite spectacular: from the almost religious paternal metaphor, with the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus as the massive answers to the desire of the crocodile mother, to the ‘There is no Other of the Other’. In this shift, the original reassuring function of the Freudian father turns into its Lacanian opposite. Instead of guaranteeing that the primal father exists, it is the function of the father to guarantee that something is lacking, that the big Other is not whole. This opens a pathway for the subject to assume symbolic castration and to leave the all-embracing determinism of the imaginary order behind him (for an in-depth study, see Verhaeghe, 2009). It is the basis for human creativity.
The very idea of symbolic castration is unthinkable in Freudian theory. In Lacanian praxis, it is crucial and it presents a radical reversal in matters of transference. Based upon his theory and his personality, Freud used to take the guaranteeing paternal position towards his patients. Based upon Lacan, the analyst—insofar as she or he wants to guarantee something—will take the opposite stance: that is, there is no final closure, there is a lack and an opening in matters of desire and enjoyment, and this opens a possibility for change.
‘Castration’ then is just another denomination for the human condition. It is no longer castration, because that expression still refers to a phallic omnipotence. The better term is ‘the not-all’. From that point onwards—that is the recognition of the not-all—the subject needs to
rethink his individual position towards authority. In the best of cases, the mourning for the failed father may give birth to a subject that is able to make a number of choices, knowing that there is no final answer.
The trouble for a Lacanian analyst is that every analysis starts with a transference that puts him in the position of the subject who is supposed to know. Meaning in the position of the Freudian father. This position is impossible, and as long as this transference is at work, psychoanalysis is a sham—une escroquerie—with the analyst as an impostor, as Lacan said in 1977, in Belgium of all places (Lacan, 1981). No wonder that he considered shame to be the most appropriate affect for the position of the father.
This brings me back to my introduction, as it explains my anxiety today, when starting an analysis with someone new. Will I be able to take this position without being the dupe of it? Or, without making the patient the dupe of it? How can I help someone to traverse his basic fantasy with the result that he can make his own choices? The analytical discourse is the reverse of the discourse of the master, and the formula of the analytical discourse shows that the analyst has to take the place of the object a. But this is an impossible position as well and requires creativity from us—there is no recipe.
The way transference is handled, determines the way an analysis runs and ends. In Freudian analysis, more often than not it becomes interminable. Let us not forget that analysis is about love and hate, just as transference is. Analysis can end as every love story does: in disappointment and hate; more often it ends in mere banality. In the best of cases the end of an analysis mirrors the beautiful description by Lacan: ‘L'amour, c'est donner ce qu'on n'a pas’. Love is all about giving what one doesn't have. In my reading, this is yet another formula for sublimation. We elevate the object to what it can never be; we give what we don't have.
This kind of solution goes way beyond the paternal metaphor and requires mourning for the patriarchal master. Such mourning used to be the privilege of those who had a successful analysis – although there are other ways to reach that solution as well. Today, because of the changes in our society, this privilege might become less rare, because we
are living in a time where we are leaving patriarchy behind us. By way of conclusion, I will give you my thoughts on that.
It is my hypothesis that we are exchanging a patriarchal neurotic society for a Big Brother network (Verhaeghe, 2015). Patriarchy, especially in its Christian version, was based on the recognition of and the belief in a superior being, compared to which mortals were always incomplete and sinful. Hence the typical need for a top-down control, as exemplified by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. The patriarchal superego, based on the identification with this gaze, is essentially a prohibiting one. The controlling gaze is always accusing and neurosis and feelings of guilt are paramount – hence the attempts to hide oneself from it.
Today, this is no longer the case. There is no superior authority present in the contemporary Panopticon, only a powerful computer server, permitting everyone to watch and be watched, to see and to be seen. In these times of Big Brother, we have to expose ourselves continuously to every-one. The net result is a horizontal control, operating through so-called social media. Instead of hiding, the postmodern subject exhibits himself constantly to the controlling gaze of his peers. In an apt description by Zygmunt Bauman, we are living in a Do It Yourself Panopticon (Bauman & Lyon, 2013).
During patriarchy, we identified with the do's and don'ts of the father, resulting in a voluntary obedience based on fear of punishment. Today, we identify with the likes and don't likes of Big Brother, resulting in a voluntary obedience based on fear of exclusion. In the case of failure, depression and shame are the result, having taken the place of neurosis and guilt.
One advantage of the patriarchal system was already included in Freud's self-constructed myth: from time to time, we can kill the Father and replace him by a supposedly better version. To kill Big Brother is impossible, since he is virtual, anonymous, and hiding in the World Wide Web. It is – as the contemporary saying goes—‘in the system’. The
resulting superego is probably more severe and offers fewer possibilities for escape.
All of this sounds rather negative. Conservatives deplore the loss of traditional values; liberals deplore the loss of individual freedom. Most intellectuals are very critical of this evolution, pointing to the way social media are abused both by ordinary people (hate campaigns), by the government (social control) and the corporate world (targeted publicity). The disappearance of traditional authority is deplored by many; this illustrates how selective our memory is. Patriarchy, in its religious, political and educational versions, proved to be a disaster, because half of the population was excluded; many men did not live up to its precepts, and abused their position for their own benefit.
Without being naïve, we should ask ourselves what is potentially more interesting: a top-down authority, based on an imposed story; or a horizontally operating authority, based on mutual social control. Both the French-American philosopher Michel Serres (2015) and Alessandro Baricco, the Italian writer (2014), are far more positive about the latter. Serres refers explicitly to the hundred millions of dead caused by what he designates ‘the libido of collectivity’. He considers the disappearance of patriarchal society to be a good thing; he prefers what he calls ‘connected collectives’, governed by shifting interests and mutual control. The complicity of patriarchal times, presented as loyalty, gives way to transparency and accountability. Baricco describes in a very convincing way the silent revolution caused by the Internet. It brings far more democracy than we might imagine: a horizontal one, instead of the traditional top-down control. Both of them emphasize that there has never been a ‘democracy of knowledge’—knowledge was for the privileged, looking down on the common people. Today, knowledge is accessible to everyone.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, we should not forget that both Freud and Lacan advocated a surpassing of the Oedipal complex and its submission to the father. It took both of them a long time to come to that conclusion. Especially for Freud, the move was never whole hearted. Lacan laconically summarized his position in one of his last seminars: ‘In that respect, psychoanalysis—if it succeeds—proves that one can go
beyond the Name-of-the-Father. One can go beyond on condition that one has used it.’ (My translation. In the original: ‘C'est en cela que la psychanalyse—de réussir—prouve que le Nom-du-Père, on peut aussi bien s'en passer. On peut aussi bien s'en passer à condition de s'en servir.’ (Lacan, J., 1976: 136).
This is the challenge we are facing, and I think that we are living in the middle of history being made. Patriarchy entered our world with the agricultural revolution. It will leave the world with the digital revolution. It is always impossible to make predictions, but a number of changes are already clear. Our contemporary gender relations are totally different from the male dominance of the recent past. The traditional nuclear family is disappearing very fast. Generally speaking, the digital revolution is replacing a vertical patriarchal society with a horizontal ‘big brother’ network. The question is: what form of authority will emerge from this network? As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1954, this is ‘to be confronted anew by the elementary problems of humans living-together’.