When analysts write about analysis
29 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the sixteenth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here.]
Psychoanalysts who write about psychoanalysis have faced a dilemma ever since Freud and Breuer published their pioneering work, Studies on Hysteria, in 1895. On the one hand, psychoanalysts want to share their ideas and case studies with other practitioners; but on the other hand, when prospective or current patients read their writings, as they inevitably do, it complicates the treatment enormously by creating expectations about how analysis is supposed to work.
In the early days of psychoanalysis, until around 1910, patients were naive, in the sense that they knew nothing about the new form of clinical treatment which they underwent. The interpretations proposed by their analysts — that their symptom pointed to a repressed desire for sex with their mother, for example — caught them completely by surprise. And this was, no doubt, a significant part of the explanation for the effectiveness of such interpretations. Their sheer shock value was itself a vital source of their therapeutic power.
With the rising popularity of Freud’s ideas, especially following the foundation of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1910, things began to change. More and more patients arrived in the consulting room with at least a smattering of psychoanalytic theory. They knew about the Oedipus Complex, for example, and expected their analysts to behave in certain ways. And this knowledge became, in itself, an important source of resistance. Patients were no longer either surprised or shocked if the analyst suggested that they might harbour incestuous desires; on the contrary, they would be surprised if the analyst didn’t. They thought they knew how psychoanalysis was supposed to work, which confronted analysts with a dilemma: work in this way, and fail to surprise the patient; or disrupt these expectations, and risk being rejected as insufficiently Freudian.
Many of Lacan’s technical innovations, such as the variable length session and his Suassurean reading of Freudian concepts, can be understood as attempts to subvert the expectations of his patients and thereby to recover some of the shock value that gave Freud’s early practice its therapeutic power. But as soon as Lacan and his students started writing about these innovations, they paved the way for these techniques too to lose their shock value and become domesticated, routinised, comfortable.
Is there a general solution to this problem? Is there, in other words, a way of writing about psychoanalysis that doesn’t tend to reduce its clinical effectiveness and thus force analysts to continually produce new innovations in technique so as to stay one step ahead of their well-read patients?
One possible solution is esoteric writing — a style of writing that is deliberately obscure, cryptic, or intended for a small, specialised audience with the necessary knowledge to understand its deeper meanings. This type of writing often employs symbolic language, metaphors, allegories, and coded messages to conceal the deeper meanings from casual readers. Historically, esoteric writing has been used to protect sensitive or sacred knowledge from being misunderstood or misused by the uninitiated. By making the writing obscure, only those with the proper context and preparation can access the full depth of the information.
Lacan’s intentionally cryptic style of writing can be seen as esoteric in this sense, aimed at conveying profound truths to a knowledgeable audience while remaining deliberately obscure to others. But thanks to the publication of careful, line-by-line commentaries on Lacan’s writings, like the four volumes of Reading Lacan’s Écrits edited by Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook, and Calum Neill, these mysteries have now been unveiled to the uninitiated, revealing even Lacan’s well kept secrets to the masses. So it would appear that even esoteric writing is only a temporary solution.
This is where the tactical flexibility of the analyst becomes of paramount importance. Any analyst worth their salt will quickly pick up on the sort of expectations that each analysand brings to the consulting room, the assumptions that each analysand has about how the analyst should behave — for example, about how often the analyst is supposed to speak, or what kinds of things they are supposed to say or not say. It is vital that the analyst knows how to balance meeting some of these expectations with the well-timed disruption of others. The analyst must know how and when to upset the analysand’s expectations — to break the rules just enough to disturb the comfortable routine into which the treatment sometimes falls, and unsettle the analysand. This can be seen as a kind of feint or ruse to get the dialectic moving again. But this must be done with great care, for it also carries risks.
