Photo: Dan Dry
In a recent analytic hour, I was listening to an analysand hesitate. She was pausing more than usual, breaking the silence with mundane topics such as an upcoming meeting. As she entered into another pause, I asked if she noticed that she was pausing and whether there might be something on her mind that she was reluctant to say. She said she wanted to ask whether I could reschedule an hour but was afraid I would refuse. That opened up a wealth of associations and she then became rueful: all those desires throughout her life that she had been too fearful to ask. Turning back to her desire to reschedule, she said, “The rage I anticipate, the rage if you say no…no one has even said no. It feels like an eternal obstacle, a weight on my throat, keeping me from speaking.” It is easy to overlook what makes this utterance so remarkable.
Certainly, the statement was a sincere, accurate, and insightful account of this person's feelings and unconscious strategies, uttered by the person herself in the process of coming to self-understanding. As such, the statement was true and its utterance as such might have been of therapeutic value. But the truthfulness I want to characterize goes deeper than that.
On this occasion, the analysand found a way to inhabit her own words. Anticipated rage is not rage; nevertheless it can have its own phenomenology: There is something it feels like to be anticipating rage. And that feeling was right there in her words. Similarly, a patient might sincerely and accurately say of a long-standing inhibition, “It feels like an eternal obstacle.” But that alone does not capture the poetic intrusion of this moment. I speak of a poetic intrusion because the ancient Greek word “poiêsis” means most generally “a making, a creation.” A poem was a special case of using words and rhythm to shape the psyches of those who heard it. In this analytic moment the feeling of an eternal obstacle was right there in her words, getting expressed by those very words.
Freud tells us that the unconscious is timeless. I believe that there are breakthrough moments in which the temporality of experience shifts: The analysand can actually experience the eternality of the obstacle, as though it were a fate. And then “a weight on my throat”: I could hear a hoarseness enter her speech as her larynx contracted. This is a moment in which the distinction between subject and object collapses. What the speech is about is right there inhabiting the speech.
This speech is truthful not simply because it is accurate, sincere, and even insightful, but because it is full of truth. Think: true friend, true north, true blue, the true cross, rings true. We do not capture the peculiar nature of human self-consciousness if we think of it only in terms of a person's capacity to report accurately, sincerely, and even insightfully on the contents of her own mind. In reflective self-consciousness, there is often an experienced gap between the consciousness that is making the report (“I realize I am angry with you.”) and the state of mind (the anger) that is being reported. But Freud noticed—and it is crucial to his understanding of transference and the transference neurosis—that there are moments when the gap disappears: “I'm furious with you!” The emotion is right there in the speech. At such moments, intervening in speech is at one and the same time intervening in the emotion and, indeed, in the neurosis. Freud tells us that one cannot undo neurosis in absentia or in effigy, and this is part of what he meant.
In the moment, the analysand found a way to be in her speech. Might there be a way of expanding this sort of truthfulness to encompass a life? This would be to move towards a form of poetic living in which thinking, speaking, and being are one. But the unity would be an uncanny one, full of discordant notes and jazz improvisations. Psychoanalysis aims to facilitate such a process. And the other values we associate with psychoanalysis—freedom of speech, freedom of mind, freedom of action, freedom to be and let be, freedom to express one's aggression in creative and life-enhancing ways, freedom from tyrannizing inhibitions and unrealistic fears, vibrancy—are themselves different articulations of the same value.
Psychoanalysis is, of course, significantly concerned with the treatment of transference and the transference neurosis. But the ultimate transfer in a successful analysis is the transfer of an analytic capacity from the psychoanalyst to the analysand. Over time the analysand develops a capacity for living analytically himself. How are we to understand this transfer? It seems to me that this is a very unusual form of teaching. And that makes the analyst a peculiar form of teacher. There are no truths to be taught—no dogmas or beliefs, no theories, no views about any particular thing the analysand should or should not do (stay married, quit his job)—only truthfulness. Truthfulness is, I think, another name for the analytic capacity, but one which brings into view why acquiring it might matter.
In addition to discovering that much mental activity is unconscious because it is repressed, Freud had two momentous insights. First, this unconscious activity functions according to its
Jonathan Lear Ph.D., a professor at the University of Chicago and a practicing analyst, has recently been awarded the Andrew Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. His most recent book is A Case for Irony (Harvard University Press, 2011).
own principles: Not only is there condensation and displacement of primary process, the unconscious knows no contradiction and is timeless. This is not about what is getting repressed, the content of unconscious wishes, but how those wishes express themselves. And the fullness that enters truthful speech, for instance, the power of a metaphor, the ability of an image to transform how one sees the world, derives in significant part from healthy communication between these two forms of mental activity.
Second, core unconscious fantasies, as they emerge in the transference neurosis, will not only target the analyst but will spread themselves out in an articulated structure over the entire analytic situation. Unconscious fantasies interpret a world. This has enormous consequences for what we might understand a meaningful human life to be. For our task is not simply to discover this or that hidden wish. Rather, it is to come to grips with the fact that we are creatures who participate in two very different forms of mental life. What would it be to do that well?
We know what it is to do it not so well, to be trapped in neurotic symptoms, or to relate to manifestations of the unconscious as though one were confronted with an unalterable fate. Truthfulness is a capacity for bringing these two different forms of mental activity together in such a way that one can genuinely speak one's mind, inhabit one's life, get it all together in such a way as to become and be oneself. As every analyst knows, and as every analysand (in a successful analysis) learns, this is no mean feat.
We live in a culture that has an impoverished conception of rationality. We tend to think of rationality in terms of “rational choice,” a logical deliberation of what to do based on our beliefs and desires. From this perspective, we analysts must deal with something else, namely with the marvelous flora and fauna of irrational mental life, with the poetry of the unconscious, with the life-blood of creativity. And so we do. But if we think of rationality more generally, as the thoughtful attempt to take our whole selves as well as the world into account as we do our best to figure out how to live well, it would seem that psychoanalysis is essentially a manifestation of our rationality. In fact, aren't the tables turned? Is it not irrational to confine oneself to a constricted understanding of “rational choice”? (One lesson of the financial crisis we are all living through, I believe, is that economists have been living with constricted images of what our rationality consists in.)
It is psychoanalysis that crucially helps us take account of unusual and unfamiliar aspects of ourselves, as we try to work out how to live. (And by “take account,” I do not mean merely those tired images of rational deliberation. We might take account of these aspects through poetic creation, cooking a meal, letting our minds wander during a swim, or fruitful free associations.) The crucial insight is that it can never be just a matter of taking into account more items, such as hidden wishes and fantasies, as though self-conscious understanding remained the same, just expanding its purview. Rather, self-consciousness undergoes a transformation in its own activity. Suppose the first violinist of the symphony orchestra learns that he is going to spend the rest of his life in a room with Dizzy Gillespie. Is it rational to ignore him? To spend one's life locked in battle? Or is it rational to find new ways to make music together? This is a transformation not just in what self-consciousness is thinking about but a transformation of self-conscious thinking.
It is customary, indeed, it can seem inexorable, to treat the activity of practical reason as one thing and the psychoanalytic uncovering of the irrational unconscious as quite another. But this picture rests on confusion, one that pervades the modern age, of what practical reason is. The distinction between theoretical and practical reason, which goes back at least to Aristotle, is one of the most fundamental insights into the functioning of the human mind. In the modern world it has come to be taken as a distinction between subject matters: Theoretical reason contemplates truths about the world; whereas, practical reason contemplates what to do. But the great philosophers, notably Aristotle and Kant, recognized that the distinction concerned not so much subject matter as the very forms of thinking. In theoretical reason, our understanding of the cause of an event in the world is distinct from the cause that is understood. (The moon's movements may cause the flow of tides on earth, but my understanding of this does not affect the tides one way or the other.)
In practical reasoning, by contrast, my understanding of the cause is itself an essential part of the cause of what it brings about. So, to take a trivial example, my understanding of how to make a cup of tea is itself efficacious when I go about making a cup of tea. I cannot bring a cup of tea into existence in any other way than via my understanding of how to make one. My understanding of how to make tea is guiding my tea-making activity at every step. And, astonishingly, my understanding of myself as efficacious is itself part of the efficacy. It is only because I understand myself as capable of making a cup of tea and, indeed, as exercising my capability right now that I succeed in making this cup of tea. In the practical case, my understanding of the cause is the cause.
Once one recovers this ancient conception, it becomes clear that psychoanalysis is essentially practical in two dimensions. First, from the point of view of the practicing analyst, it is her understanding of the psychoanalytic process—of what is going on in the here and now of the transference and countertransference, of the analysand's unconscious fantasies and psychic conflicts, her understanding of technique and interpretation—that is everywhere guiding her work. She cannot proceed as a psychoanalyst other than via a psychoanalytic understanding of what she is doing. And her work is a practical therapeutic intervention in the life of another person. Obviously, theoretical insights into the workings of the human psyche may emerge by reflecting on this peculiar practical context, but the essence of the treatment and the basis of the insight are practical.
Second, from the point of view of the analysand, it is precisely his slowly emerging grasp of his unconscious fantasies, inner conflicts, and psychodynamic whorls that play a crucial role in his coming to live a more vibrant, meaningful life. Psychoanalysis, for the analysand, is an unusually rich way of taking oneself and one's world into account. That is why Freud's aim, making the unconscious conscious, is not just a theoretical discovery about some previously hidden contents, but a therapeutic technique that can actually help a person via his emerging understanding of who he is. Understanding is the cause of what it brings about, the enriched life that is the outcome of psychoanalytic treatment. Of course, by “understanding,” we cannot just mean a theoretical grasp of some true facts about oneself, even accurate and significant ones. That is too desiccated an understanding of understanding. It must be a truthful grasp: a living understanding that is itself active in the life that is being lived as it is being understood.
Practical reason is the truthful and thoughtful attempt to take oneself and one's world into account, where the thinking is itself efficacious in living a rich and meaningful life. Practically speaking, coming to know myself is the very activity of becoming and being myself. Viewed in this light, psychoanalysis is a marvelous and historically new development of practical reason.
This claim may seem odd, but only because we have inherited constricted conceptions of truth, reason, and practicality; a dubious gift of modernity. We are largely unaware that this inheritance is optional. Psychoanalysis has contributed so much to human self-understanding, yet it has remained relatively untouched by the thought that repression, inhibition, distortion, and splitting can occur not just within the human psyche but in our life with concepts. And yet it is with concepts that we try to understand ourselves.
As psychoanalysts, we aim at truthfulness, both in ourselves and in our analysands. This is not primarily a psychological claim about what is going on inside us; it is a constitutional claim about what it is for us to be psychoanalysts. To understand what this means is to understand who we are. But what kind of understanding is this? Here I want to say that it is a mistake, one that is extremely tempting in the current age, to think this is primarily a theoretical question, one that can be answered by gathering more facts about human beings, whether neurological, psychological, or social.
It is not that theoretical understanding is unimportant; of course, it is. But ultimately we are faced with a practical question that can only be answered through interpretive struggles in which one cannot avoid being implicated oneself: facing up to the historical distortions, resistances, and transformations of our concept of truth, as well as our interpretive struggles with ourselves and our analysands. We learn what truthfulness is by taking it on as a life-task. There is no other route.