At the same time what is constantly reproduced in this context is a certain additional gap between the analysands and their analysts that does not fit into the distance regulation between the participants assumed by psychoanalytic setting. It can be said that this gap is concealed in the regular distance typical to the clinical setting which echoes Lacan’s anecdote about the missing page that can be hidden in the missing book but if the book is not in place, no one will notice the absenting page. 

Nevertheless, this gap reveals itself by producing unregistered tension in the clinical setting, a sort of leakage. It can be spotted by means of its typical feature that is completely unrelated to the tactics of analysis conduct chosen by the psychoanalyst. Instead, the source of the tenacity demonstrated by this leakage is located somewhere else – it is the psychoanalysis itself, behind its back, so to say. It is where the psychoanalyst does not act as someone’s analyst but outside her office where she is a colleague for the others, professionally similar to her. Strange as it may sound, but something in the existence of the clinical institution makes the analyst and the analysand close the ranks even stronger. As if even in their not entirely equal pair, as we know, they still equally need to protect themselves from something.

However, each has a different reason for this defense. Just as during the hour allotted to her, the analysand jealously strives to keep the analyst at her own disposal as if the latter was her personal item (whereas, the patient is never jealous of the very institution where the analyst belongs and seems to be nearly unaware of its existence during her sessions), the analyst tends to pretend that her apparent independence from the analysand’s possible encroachments is the exclusive product of her own well-maintained analytic position.  

Nevertheless, there is something that allies both attendees of the session, namely, the fact that the question of the institution has to be discarded: at its best, it is not a suitable topic for the intra-analytic conversation but not because it has nothing to do with the topics symptomatically important for the analysand. Yet, it is indeed systematically presented as something that has nothing to do with analysand: for example, the analysts are willing to answer the inquiry regarding their institutional affiliation only once – at the first session or the preliminary conversation when (if ever) they will be asked about their professional background. Quite often, the specialists react to this question with the same latent – or, on the contrary, intentionally pointed – abstinent bewilderment that they express when being asked about their marital status, for example. 

As a rule, the analysands obey this tacitly indirect prohibition quite easily if not willingly; they also begin to disregard that there always exists a community where the analysts belong, even if it functions spontaneously and the very fact of its existence has never been officially registered. In other words, what is hushed up here is that even an analyst who is not a member of any particular school cannot have the luxury of following Ovid’s motto to live her best life, i.e., to practice discreetly. The analyst’s activity will not remain irrelevant to the existence of the psychoanalytic community in any event.

Therefore, concerning the existence of the institution there exists a sort of conspiracy that is surprisingly familiar to the analysand as another conspiracy – a family conspiracy concerning the concealed reasons and the consequences of their own birth. Regardless of Freud’s accent on the birth’s technical procedure that, presumably, remains intellectually unassimilated, in fact, the decisive and the most symptomatic are not the physiological circumstances of this question, but the symbolic reason and the purpose of childbirth. Thus, the main question that the subject is solving with the outbreak of Oedipus and throughout her subsequent life is not the question “where the babies come from” but what precisely in the family history provoked their own birth and how they were supposed to be dealt with at the level of the parental phantasm. The answers to these questions are repressed by the child most profoundly, giving rise to the so-called “neurotic’s family myth” that forms the basis of the life-long neurosis. 

Is it not only logical – and if so, how to assess this logic? – that the very same story accompanies the becoming of the analyst who is always a sort of a bastard, a foundling in the profession no matter how venerable and nicely analyzed she is? Because what in the form of the community enabled her to be analyzed, never allows her, nonetheless, to get through to the source of the phantasm of the community that produced her.   

It is precisely at this level that the “admission” question should be raised because what this admission does is not covered by the so-called “passe,” since the latter itself is the further reproduction of new analysts in the previous, non-admission regime. It is noteworthy that “Desire of Psychoanalysis” has something that could be considered the initial condition of this admission (albeit the question about admission is not directly posed there). Tupinambá speaks about the potential “unity” between the analysand and the analyst, implying precisely that this unity is not created in the course of denying the institutional origin of the analyst but, on the contrary, on the basis of the existence of any sort of institution. Here emerges the concept of “counting-as-one” indebted from Badiou since the book owes a lot to him overall. 

To say that the analyst and the analysand should be finally “counted-as-one” risks saying too much. So, should we return here to the widespread admonitions prevalent among the clinicians’ communities concerning the “mutually-educative influence” of the patients and specialists or their mutual enrichment in the course of analysis? For some clinicians, overcoming the lulling intonation of such admonitions appears to be an extremely difficult task, considering the extent to which the practicing psychoanalyst, who on several occasions lacks broad intellectual or critical vision, is every now and then overly amazed, extremely agitated about the trivial but thrilling truth contained in these reasonings.  Without proper and also political reflection, the very term “unity” unbearably smells of treacle in which it is so easy to get stuck if we start developing distinctive strategies of the necessary “step towards,” of the unreasonable closeness with analysand. This would mean moving towards the reform of psychoanalysis in the spirit of another reform that the history of psychoanalysis has already witnessed.   

Instead, we argue that in order to make the “count-as-one” offered by Tupinambá possible and in order to make possible something political in psychoanalysis at the level of its history – which was so passionately and unsuccessfully promoted by the intellectuals – it could be achieved only and exclusively by allowing the analysand the access to the territory where the fate of psychoanalysis is decided as something institutional.

There is no doubt that the possibility of “access” as the real admission is a highly problematic point in this case. Does it mean a free “democratic” access or, in other words, ensuring the analysand’s voting right in the question of her treatment organization or the possibility of influencing the realization of the clinical method? The temptation to let this in always persists and it should be rejected but not out of common protective considerations, on the contrary, because in its naïve literalness, a solution like this is not the resolvent of the access issue but its repression into another level. 

This is precisely what happened in Jean Oury’s experimental clinic “La Borde” made famous by Felix Guattari and based on the ideal of “equality” and “creative mutual penetration” between the patients and the medical staff. Despite its attractive and even captivating character, the organization of treatment offered by this experiment was not a real “access” but a temporal delay of the question, because regardless of the free blending of the specialists’ and patients’ environments, the latter had still no idea how the desire of the clinical method’s founder was organized. This clinical model was offered to the patients as a fact, a fact that hid the mechanism of its invention since the institutional excess that initiated this model – in particular, the concealed part of the conflict between the breakaway clinicians and the representatives of another institutional form – was subjected to the deceptive sublation in the institution. Associated with this initial conflict, the ressentiment of the specialists fighting against the “repressive state medical system” came into existence within the framework of the clinical system created by them. The patients could neither obtain the admission to this system nor reject it one reason: they were not the subjects of the conflict that produced it.

To whatever extent the bold experimentality and demonstrative openness to various consequences of such initiatives were exhibited here, the declared goal of the alternative institution was to enable access to the full spectrum of the treatment’s benefits, presumably, unattainable for the patients before due to its alienated form. No matter how tenderly the so-called “free intellectual” views such an initiative from the outside, this already demonstrates that it has nothing to do with the “access” to the territory of the clinical institution. Benefiting the patients towards their alleged “spiritual and human needs” as it is implied by the step towards them – is the definition of the ideology on which such a clinical enterprise is eventually based. 

This demonstrates once again that in the matter of access, the desire to literally “reform the institution” should be the least of the guides. Instead, any reform that is successful from the point of view of its institutional results immediately shuts off the question of the nature of the analyst’s desire that induced it and that is disguised by various concessions made to the analysand. 

In this way, what should be understood as the access is not the opening of all the psychoanalytic doors in front of the analyzed – whether they are meant to shut off the so-called “mental state of the analyst” or to conceal the “diagnosis” from the analyzed. Leaving aside these disputes – since there is no lack of them anyway – it should be stated that in its principal form, the access should concern the recognition of the fact that the analysand is already dealing with a whole range of issues that emerge at the level where their analysts both produce various institutional effects and become the objects and the targets of the effects in question themselves. 

It is hardly a coincidence that what the analysts deny their patients most actively and in the most consolidated way is precisely the access to this level. Obviously, it is not possible to voice this denial directly, therefore, they fall back on the widest range of refusals. Being unaware of this, the analyst is deeply convinced that there is no need even to question in what way the analysand can be represented in psychoanalysis apart from appearing as the so-called “case.”

Concerning the last point, it seems that the constant reproaches about the possible “dehumanization” of patient’s status in this role miss the point because the analysts willingly address most of these reproaches to themselves. The latter can take the shape of various appeals to search for the symptom’s special “singularity” or its “irreducibility” to the basic clinical nosology. All these redemptive offerings addressed to analysands are intended to demonstrate that the last thing the specialists themselves want is to be perceived as some sort of a diagnostic machine. Nevertheless, it is precisely this active well-intentioned reluctance that is the symptom of the looming crisis in another sphere because what should be asked instead is something completely different. 

So far, no one has initiated anyhow broad discussion of the consequences of small and large collisions that constantly occur within the psychoanalytic community. It is well known that the eager discussion of the new institutional creations that emerge out of these collisions is immediately followed by silence, as soon as there is a risk of bringing to the fore what the participants of the psychoanalytic process themselves – whether the analysands, the analysts, or their supervisors – can make out of it. The psychoanalyst can pride herself on being really uninvolved in politics but as soon as she finds herself among her own kind, she immediately gets involved if not in “political life” (since the latter is unthinkable without the systematic influence on the opposing camp), but at least in the truncated version that is within her power. Tupinambá rightly remarks:

“The irony of finding, within psychoanalysis, the same dramatic scissions, the same accusations of revisionism, and the same mixture of personal and theoretical disputes which are so easily recognized in leftist political organizations— problems which psychoanalysts in fact commonly evoke as justification to keep away from the “neuroses” of political militancy—might have been so evident that no one bothered to reflect upon them.”6

However, just one step aside allows us to question directly what is mentioned here. There is no need to abandon the notorious “discourse of the analyst”: it is enough just to relocate appropriately the crucial question for the theory of psychoanalysis that was already introduced by Freud. This is the question of hatred that is the original foundation for most of the acts conducted by the subject. 

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