Paper presented at the 44th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, July 2005, Rio de Janeiro.
In this paper I will refer to some facts and questions first developed by Freud and, later, by W.R. Bion.
I will begin with Freud’s well known affirmation regarding the three impossible professions or bad jobs: psychoanalysis, pedagogy and politics, touched on by Bion’s reflections in Attention and Interpretation (1970), in which he highlights the work of the analyst (among whose qualifications a love for truth is required) as being carried out in the hunting territory of human predators (that absolutely employ lies, misconceptions and untruths), such as thieves, burglars, sexual perverts, murderers and extortionists. About those predators Bion says: “The world of the mind is complemented by an external world of reality that serves their mental states through the established international and commercial organization of spying, police forces and religious organizations. One group being complemented by the other” .
In other words, I would like to emphasize, that in general terms, none of the three professions expose human vulnerability in such a profound way as psychoanalysis, although the other two bad jobs also do this significantly (It is sufficient to look at the current politics all over the world and the educational system proposed in most of places).
However, in spite of the importance of the external world matter, I will not deal with the vulnerability of analysts caused by the cultural limitations of the historical era, nor of the political and ideological environment in which psychoanalysis is exercised. Of course such question is even more important the more we consider the consequences for psychoanalysis while it is being exercised in an environment threatened by terrorism or devastated by technological and consumerist coldness. Diverse philosophers and thinkers have been discussing this question, which can be summarized in the following way: The development of the current technological civilization brought a valorization of the value of liberty, leaving the value of security, which endured for many centuries, on the second plane. However, if security carried oppression as a by-product, liberty carried uncertainty with it opening the road for new aspects and possibilities of the human predator, and for new configurations of the groups that gave support to them.
I will also not deal specifically with the vulnerability of analysts produced by traumatic losses of love objects, money, power, or prestige, as particular personal problems in their private lives. Those are problems commonly found behind many negative acting-outs with patients as emotional involvement and physical contacts of any kind, including sexual ones.
In this work I will consider the job of the analyst predominately from the vertex of the internal world, especially from the vertex of what is known as oedipical configuration, having as the principal guideline the notion of oedipical pre-conception developed by Bion (1962,1963,1965). The first question is how and how much such configuration becomes vulnerable while psychoanalysis is being performed? And how such vulnerability turns the psychoanalytic job into a bad one?
A part of the answer is: an invulnerable analyst does not exist, for the profession, by the unconscious vertex, has nothing to do with the analytical mental state, nothing to do with the desire to analyze someone, but with all types of predator mental states, such as the desire to eat the patient (as a cannibal would), to copulate with them, sodomize them, to control them as slaves (as a tyrant), to cut to pieces (as a serial killer), to evacuate them, to live off them (as a parasite extortionist), to murder them (as an assassin), to rob them ( as a thieve), transform them into a baby ( for kidnapping), but into no state suitable for analysis.
The analyst, as we know, is a transformation, through personal analysis and training (especially training intuition), of these primitive mental states in an oedipical configuration expected to be capable of corresponding to the job of being an analyst. We suppose that this would make psychoanalysts prepared to enter into the “hunting territory” of the predators, without any connivance with them. Nevertheless experience shows that one can also expect to discover one of the predators mental states mentioned seriously unbalancing the oedipical configuration to the narcissistic pole (preferred by the predators) instead of moving to the social-istic pole.
Such spectral vision of possibilities and vulnerabilities is provided by my reading of the work of W.R. Bion, particularly the concept of analytical object, which proposes a development whose consequences are reflected in the analyst’s way of interpreting, which I am trying to clarify in this work as far as it is possible for me to do.
The psychoanalytical object possesses two principal vertexes: an ethical vertex, which is implied in the behavior of the analyst in the presence of the unknown (which is the unconscious) and, an aesthetical vertex which is related to his interpretative capacity. It is the association of these two vertexes that establish the principles of observation in the analytical field. With them one can be open to observe and follow preconception’s realizations that produce concepts in the narcissism⇔sociali-sm spectrum. The analyst’s interpretations are in accordance with the concepts that the analyst is able to observe at any point of the spectrum.
In other words, what we know as oedipical configuration is a way to organize emotional experiences, mental states, and unconscious desires, in spite of the fact that one of them, or more than one, can be more intense and unbalance the configuration, driving it to the narcissistic pole.
The main idea is that it is through oedipical configuration that all human communication is produced. In a certain way this makes psychoanalysis extremely simple, but like every simple thing, it is awfully difficult to carry out. It is simple because one can characterize psychoanalysis as an activity following a simple idea: everything you say reveals who you are (or we communicate to each other whether we like it or not). What could be simpler? But the trouble is that, rightly or wrongly, there is a complexity translated by a theory about a personality or a character or a mind, which is revealing those things – the whole of psychoanalysis is based on that ubiquitous theory. So this very simple activity is complicated because the personality concerned has to face caesura after caesura created by the things revealed, which metaphorically is like having a baby, which means that there has to be a long preparation beforehand – many years of it anyway – and a long time in analysis afterwards.
Like the caesura of birth, saying things to someone is not definitive and most of the time nothing at all, or something quite complicated. Some things can be a sort of milestone – but to be like that it is required a long period of development before and after it. When it comes to the mind or to personality, we never know how long it takes to create a concept that make some real change. In psychoanalysis one cannot follow the rules of medicine – no matter if nowadays almost all of them are extremely sophisticated – interpretations are not intended to be like a pill to solve problems. The psychoanalyst is much more somebody who is trying to work under pressure to bring out or give birth to a function – the psychoanalytical function of personality - the function that deals with blind intuition seeking for a proper concept of development of living. That’s real life and this is why a lot of development is necessary. Moreover such function interacts all the time with other functions in a kind of circularity that the following diagram would mean to represent:
Bion’s proposition, as I understand it, intends to emphasize that the development in analysis depends on the kind of development caused by interpretative decisions, about which I will make now some reflections.
My initial clinical question has been the experience with patients that bring analysis to extreme areas for which the classical theory does not give a theoretical and practical support. Therefore, it is a point where the interpretations one has to give to the patient becomes quite serious and sometimes deeply painful and dangerous. However, I do consider that these problems may exist to some extent in any analysand because we are always reaching some caesura. I am referring here to diverse states of confusion caused by some contact with uncertainty, whose defenses against it cause a devastating emotional desert. They are patients who confuse (sometimes grossly and at other times subtly) intelligence with cleverness, error with damage, criticism with depreciation, failure with prejudice, sincerity with sociability, intimacy with lack of privacy, sex with love, thought with thinking, voracity with efficacy, envy with jealousy, love affair with psychoanalysis, courtship with courtesy, etc.
In a general way, we are dealing with the point where oedipical configuration becomes more fragile and unstable, which translates itself as an analysis with little mobility.
Some patients, as a hard kind of defense, develop an ability to capture in the oedipical configuration of the analyst those mental states which may weaken it, exposing their vulnerability to a point that could place the analyst at risk or paralyze them. They are patients who suddenly become uninterested in understanding how their minds work, but only in obtaining more efficient formulas to satisfy their desires (many times following a model of success that finds support in various social organizations), or to obtain advantages in a world that is always moving faster from day to day and therefore consumes them emotionally. A world that they do not manage to accompany with the mental equipment they possess. In this situation, I think it is convenient to consider Bion’s suggestion (Bion, 1997) that we are facing mental states that are neither conscious nor unconscious, but inaccessible.
This type of analysand possesses a distortion of ethical and aesthetical values, and an attachment to values that collide with the main value of psychoanalysis, which is the love for truth. They are unable to perceive, as Meltzer (1997) says, that beauty and truth are synonymous. Such inability can bring devastating consequences to their system of social values. One of the characteristics of this problem that can be remarkable and seriously compromise the analytical process, is when those patients are unable to avoid the confrontation with the void region – the void of connection between beauty and truth – and develop the capacity to satisfy the mental state of others to obtain advantage, in this case, that mental state that exposes the vulnerability of the analyst and, in this way, the analysis “goes on”, without modifying this void at all. It is again a very simple situation. These patients often know a lot about the dangerous of exposing themselves while talking. One can say that they are under the pressure of the following motto: you can run but you cannot hide. Therefore they keep running in order not to be discovered. But it is a very rigid run that impairs their psychic mobility.
As Bion shows, we are facing a clinical situation in which an analysand may arouse memory and desire in the analyst that are elements of expression of the unbalance of the oedipical configuration. This means that, for his part, the analyst will be led to give interpretations based on this stimulation. His interpretative decisions are at risk of loosing real meaning.
In previous works (Chuster, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005), starting from the problems of thinking caused by memory and desire, and the way that these elements hold back or make difficult the interaction with the psychoanalytical pre-conception (Bion, 1962), I tried to show the importance of the imaginative capacity of the analyst, for it is only imagination that will allow creative interpretations, that permits mobility, contrary to interpretations based on memory and desire, that possess a reduction of several degrees of mental mobility. Nevertheless, even creative interpretations are inadequate – because it is real life and not a game. The belief in the existence of an analyst who gives correct and adequate interpretations is part of the mythology of psychoanalysis.
To better explain this opposition between what it is described as two groups of interpretations I suggest a spectrum of possibilities, which I may describe in the following form:
Memory ⟸ ------(1)---------(2)--------(3)--------(4)------ ⟹ Desire
1 – Explicative interpretations
2 – Routine interpretations
3 – Seductive or doctrinaire interpretations
4 – Pompous or grandiose interpretations
These forms of interpretation are based on the types of transformation described by Bion (1965):
1) The explicative interpretations correspond to what he calls transformations in K, whose range goes from the simple explanation regarding for instance the hour of the session, to a statement by the analyst that suggests counseling in day-to-day matters. But can also be presented as knowledge “about” the patient, which will lead, or serve as a base for a deeper posterior transformation (transformation in K⇒O).
2) The routine interpretations, a term used by Meltzer (1987), correspond in my understanding to the transformations in rigid motion, that are the traditional Freudian interpretations, in which a connection with the past always explains the present.
This transformation involves little deformation: the term “transference”, as Freud used it, implies a model of movements of feelings and ideas from one sphere of applicability to another. The feelings and ideas appropriate to infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex and its offshoots are transferred, with a characteristic wholeness and coherence to the relationship with the analyst. The main question is a kind of “unwelcome fidelity”.
For instance, a woman patient, 62 years old, very depressed in her third experience in analysis, says:
– “Doctor, I was thinking to bring you some of my paintings, but suddenly I felt afraid of being criticized in doing so”.
An analyst could say:
– “Well, maybe you felt afraid because I look like a father or a mother who in the past were not really able to accept such drawings”. This is rigid transformation. The analyst is saying the same thing in a different sphere.
One must try to shift from it to a kind of interpretation that could show something happening in the present, which had not been properly dealt with in the past. It is very important to describe what kind of failure is still happening in the present with emphasis on feelings. For instance: “ The feelings that you describe to me have a long history, I suspect they are originated from such and such…”
But one can also say: “ You are free to bring your paintings or any kind of associations and dreams, I wish I were a painter who could understand painting language. But I am not. Nevertheless, something may arise from our talks at the present moment”.
3) The seductive or doctrinaire interpretations correspond to the projective transformations, which are the classic Kleinian interpretations, deeply steeped in technical terms that do not leave space for the analysand to think. One can include here Strachey’s mutative interpretations because of the contained conviction on it that the analyst is giving the correct interpretation, in the perfect timing, which is going to change the patient for good (according with Meltzer, 1997 this may sound like a brain washing model). It is again the fallacy of psychoanalytic training that one is told the correct interpretation to give.
For instance, one may be tempted to give an interpretation like:
“You projected your ideas into me and this is why you think so and so…”
The patient can react to it and say: “ No, you are the one that projected your ideas into me and that is why you saying this…”
It’s a waste of time. Such situation can go on and on forever.
Another example taken from a classic Kleinian paper:
Patient: “ Doctor, I am tired today. I don’t feel up to saying anything”.
Analyst: “ This is happening because you are quite envious of my capacity to withstand here. You think I am the good breast that can give everything without asking for”.
Patient: “No, doctor, I am certainly not”.
4) The pompous or grandiose interpretations correspond to the transformations in hallucinosis, and are frequently found in the situation where the analyst is only talking about himself and nothing about the analysand. It is based on a false premise that is developed through a correct logic to achieve a moral conclusion. It is important not to loose sight from this false premise in order to avoid such interpretations. The false premises are created by the kind of confusions already described.
I think that, in a general way, all these types of interpretation inevitably, at some time, can occur in the analytical process, but it is convenient to avoid the last two forms of interpretation as described in (3) and (4), for they are much more based on the exposed unconscious desires of the analyst than on something that has a real significance for the analysand. In order to do this it is necessary to resist, to insist to yourself that you are going to go on listening to what the patient has to say until you are convinced that you want to say something. Otherwise you can find yourself in the horrible situation of spending your life giving what you think is an interpretation that somebody else would give, instead of giving the interpretation you want to give.
The question we must consider now is: how to reach a mental state in analysis that permits us to give creative interpretations, that correspond to what Bion called transformations in O?
Some procedures can be carried out, such as to follow Bion’s (1967) recommendation to work in a mental state as free as possible of memory, desire and the need for comprehension. In a more specific way, the analyst must have in mind to avoid repeating interpretations (what was said is said, there is no reason to repeat it, because the repetition speaks more for the analyst than for the analysand); avoid giving an interpretation that appears easier or less painful for the analysand (when we should give an interpretation that we feel is the most difficult to be given that is probably the interpretation to give at that moment because one has reached the point where true resistance to the unconscious is located), avoid giving interpretations that are the only ones to come to mind (we should, if possible, be divided between two or more interpretations) and, finally, respect what I call the ethical-aesthetic principles of observation.
I have worked on this question during recent years, trying to show that the analyst behavior is always a compromise. Therefore, I am describing here the kind of compromise that follows the proposal of change of paradigm made by Bion in 1979, in the work “Making the Best of a Bad Job”, where he says we should change the two principles of mental functioning of Freud to three principles of Living, which are those described in the following way:
1 – Feelings
2 – Anticipatory thinking
3 – Feelings+ thinking+ Thinking (the latter is synonymous with prevision or prudence⇒action)
I found in Meltzer (1994) a statement that may justify this proposal, that is, the two Freudian principles of mental functioning have the tendency to create an understanding that puts the problem of psychic suffering beside reality. This is a false premise that in certain way psychoanalysis should treat reality in order to relieve pain. Psychoanalysis can help to diminish the pain caused by confusion of concepts; confusion caused by the failure in some degree of the alpha function, but can do nothing for the pains of life. Life is to be lived and not to be anesthetized in some way that has been the liking of psychiatrists.
In previous works I described (1999, 2002), that the principles of Living mean a union of analytical sensibility (trained intuition), with an satisfactory selection of theories so that personal sensibility can be adequately expressed by imaginative capacity, which step by step with the analysand, constructs a knowledge, that will lead to a transformation in O.
These ethical-aesthetic principles also emphasize how arduous the work of psychoanalyzing is, for the analyst needs to tolerate the following and simultaneous mental states in order to achieve a creative interpretation: the uncertainty of his work, the incompleteness of his interpretations, the infinitude of his field, the undecidibilty of his observations, the negativity of his attention, the singularity of himself and of the analysand, and finally, the complexity of his objective.
More specifically the principles express the following ideas:
1) Uncertainty: There is not in any code, in any formula, or in any language, a transcription or possible equivalent of the global state of the unconscious. When something is observed, something else is left unobserved.
In the practice of psychoanalysis the analyst has to make up his own mind what the situation is; there is nobody to tell him this – only his capacity to grasp the psychoanalytical object. It is the fallacy of training that one is told the interpretation to give and, what is worst, the correct interpretation. There isn’t a correct interpretation.
2) Incompleteness: If there is uncertainty, no observation can be regarded as complete; no investigation concluded. The Ethics of psychoanalysis propose the non-attendance of desires, the maintenance always of something open.
It is very important not to forget that we may be much more used to analysis than the patient is, therefore if one wishes to keep our hopes and go on improving, is necessary to leave oneself a chance of learning something and not to allow the patient, or anyone else, to insist that the analyst knows all the answers (which means have nothing to learn from experience, or no chance to learn anything), leave also room for the person to be able to behave like an ordinary human being, do not accept to be condemned to be a great analyst or great anything. Finally, one has to have room to live as a human being who makes mistakes. In psychoanalysis it is one’s obligation to try to help, but one cannot be under an obligation to help. We are not obliged to succeed.
3) Undecidibility: There is a point in all relations where it cannot be decided what is of the analyst or of the analysand. At this point we encounter the “O”. Only its evolution is what determines the point of intersection of the meanings. Analytic theories are quite useful for a short time. When we start an analysis we don’t know anything about the patient and this is why we can fall back on theories, after three sessions all the answers are with the patient on the couch and in what one can see and hear.
4) Infinitude: the unconscious is in its essence infinite and unknowable. The phenomenon involved in its observation is of the order of ineffable and remits the infinitude behind the term truth.
5) Negativity: analytical observation only occurs in a state without memory, without desire and without the need for comprehension – negative capability as mental state.
6) Singularity: analytical observation involves an ethical ideal that is the communication of discoveries. But they occur in the first instance in the ambit of analytical relationship, where they acquire the singularity of the history of each analysand.
7) Complexity: Covers all the other principles and indicates that in analysis, as in life, it is necessary to consider that everything is very much more chaotic and complex than that we succeed in reaching with our understanding. Absolute facts can never be known and can only evolve as transient systems.
If the analyst succeeds in tolerating these principles he has the possibility of modifying his way of working, for he will begin to consider all and any material just as a painter would consider the paints with which he will paint a canvas, in a free form, or as a composer will play the notes of an instrument freely until a sound or a form emerges spontaneously. Thus the analyst will go on listening and talking with the analysand in a spontaneous way forming a picture that appears in the mind more like a dream.
It is very interesting to observe this form of working, especially in people who have had previous analysis. They are very surprised when they come into contact with an analysis that privileges emotional experience beyond words, for they are accustomed to routine interpretations that privilege only understanding. I have already had the experience more than once of being severely criticized by an analysand, who tried to convince me how an analysis should be conducted for, in his understanding, I was speaking of matters that had nothing to do with him. But how did he know this, I asked him? How can anyone know everything about analysis, as it is something inside us that is expanding? This analysand simply did not tolerate the uncertainty of interpretations and sought a relationship that did not place his liberty in question. It was too dangerous for his system of values to become a free and autonomous person – that involves a lot of respect for the differences between human beings.
The application of ethical-aesthetic principles proposes that we cannot understand or construct a psychoanalytical language without considering its points of support, between those, which include the objectives of analysis, itself and the social support points, where it is carried out. In what measure does the sustenance of the language by a specific group of analysts transform the objective of the analysis and the search for the truth into an allusion? In totality, all the points of support cannot be formulated without a social-historic vision within a binocular individual-society vision, contained-content. It is this that I call the social vertex of psychoanalysis in the work of Bion. His phrase in Attention and Interpretation (1970) is very enlightening: “Some of us seek to enlarge the psychoanalytical method in order to make its application to group situations possible. Such a development made without the mutilation of the essential character of the psychoanalytical method, would initiate the change from private to public communication. The language does exactly this in the dominion of sensory experience. Poetic and religious expressions make possible a certain degree of “public-action”, containing formulations that acquire durability and extension”. This language is what Bion calls the Language of Achievement in contrast to the Language of Substitution.
One of the goals of psychoanalysis is to bring to light conditions to move from a Culture of Guilt (language of Substitution) to a Culture of Responsibility (language of Achievement).
The Culture of Responsibility promotes anticipatory thinking, but essentially permits feelings that favor individuals to become more autonomous and more able to assume their thoughts, also to perceive the dependence that experiences have on emotions, as well as the fact that they belong to a collective, which cannot live without laws, much less without ethics, nor by miraculous spontaneous agreements. Psychoanalysis functions by an act of faith, which in turn is transformed into constant criticism of past and present influences and into the maintenance of the hope of transformation. We are dealing with the basis for the autonomy of the subject defined as the objective of analysis.
The Culture of Guilt is the culture of the feelings of shame and of morality, and frequently produces the predominance of the link –L (Puritanism); and also when the Culture functions as a gloss for pride (narcissism) it creates a hermetic situation. It loses the best hypothesis, which is the transformation of pride into self-esteem. The worst hypothesis predominates, which is the transformation of pride into arrogance. Even more, the social structure of Guilt tends to create totems permitting the transference of omnipotence to another object without modification of quality, thus maintaining heteronomy as the status quo.
Another aspect of these questions is in respect of the progressive incapacity to tolerate the principles that have been succeeding in accordance with the type of interpretation, and in accordance with some type of failure of the analytical function derived from personal vulnerabilities. For example, explicative interpretation denies the principle of undecidibility, routine interpretation also denies this as well as the principle of incompleteness, seductive interpretation does not tolerate incompleteness, not uncertainty or singularity and, finally, the pompous interpretation does not tolerate any of these principles, leaving them completely to one side.
At the end of this paper, I ask myself if there is anything new in it that would be useful to the practice of psychoanalysis. All I can say is that it has been useful to myself and some few others who worked with me in its production. After all, we had moments of thinking in the way Nietzsche said thinking should be: thinking it is joy…
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