For the first time since Freud's death, this question was revived in Lacan's “Ethics” which gave psychoanalysts a chance to remember that Freud hardly shared a belief that every conflict should be successfully resolved, provided the behavior of all the parties is reasonable. Moreover, according to Freud’s thought – that still remains non-digestible – it is precisely the hatred that drives the subjects in their mutual relations even if there is no a sign of a conflict between them.
For most of Freud’s readers, this assertion could at first appear as a subjective and unjustified exaggeration. It can indeed be doubtful but ironically it appears to be fully justified among the psychoanalysts themselves whose practice has to take into consideration the countless acts of mutual intolerance among their own colleagues.
This intolerance bears all the marks of inexplicability typical of hatred, which sharply contrasts the idea that the collisions provoked by analysts, considered to be the representatives of a more or less scientific way of thinking, are centered exclusively around the so-called “views.” However, experienced clinicians are well aware that the disinterested scientific or therapeutic motivation proclaimed by their colleagues has very little to do with reality: in reality, a single random psychoanalyst cannot profoundly tolerate another one, usually also a random psychoanalyst of the same or similar direction. This intolerance almost always correlates with the similar scale of their professional influence albeit there is no rational reason for competition here, since, unlike politicians, various clinicians do not contest their patients’ “electorate” and usually coexist amidst the independent distribution of resources.
In this context, it could seem surprising how little the analysts themselves are ready to admit that the excesses of internal strife in their communities, as well as the insufficiently restrained both one-sided and mutual hostility between individual influencers in the clinical field, somehow affect the analysands. On the one hand, it is well-known that psychoanalysis is distinguished by the clinicians’ ultra-deterministic approach to the analysand’s situation, keeping their eye on every single detail presumably affecting the treatment. In this sense, in light of its possible influence on patients, the demonstrative silence that accompanies psychoanalysts’ mutual hostility cannot be considered as anything but denial.
On the other hand, if taken seriously, this hostility should not be analyzed in the imperatively humanistic way that demands to end it at any cost for the sake of those in treatment or those who intend to become one. Instead, one should start with the initial acknowledgment that its consequences have never been studied and, in this sense, the role of this hostility has never been clarified. First of all, it is not enough to claim that the disunity observable in the clinical community provokes anxiety and its equivalents in the patients. It is not enough to demonstrate the banality of the fact that rivalry, gossip, intrigues, and direct confrontation between the individual specialists confuse analysands, compromising the psychoanalysts’ passions as presumably deviating from the “desire of the analyst” in its presumably “pure” form.
Clinical experience indicates that, on the one hand, this sort of peripeteia is the first thing the analysands can report (for example, when they change a psychoanalyst), provided they are able to articulate this anxiety at all.
Yet, on the other hand, there exists a process of even greater importance that makes the analysands the unwitting participants of the psychoanalytic community’s internal professional life. This is precisely what the analysts themselves wish to avoid armed by the principles of professional neutrality. Whereas, the very attempts of avoidance – which is about time to finally say out loud – can lead to anything other than the increasing pressure of anxious curiosity coming from the analysand. This curiosity can be disguised as justified, nearly commendable when it is experienced by someone whose didactic analysis trains them to enter the professional community. At the same time, one should not be deceived here because this curiosity is of the same artificially-symptomatic character produced by psychoanalysis itself as the curiosity about the details of the analyst’s personal life. Nevertheless, there is a significant difference that must not be ignored: in contrast to the curiosity-about-the-personal, the curiosity-about-the-community is not unjustified because the latter implies that the analysand makes observations about the dimension of the psychoanalysis per se, of the very fact of its existence.
Moreover, these two curiosities are not necessarily in contradiction since something in your analyst cannot arouse interest unless the corresponding professional community is taken into consideration. For example, the analyst can reign this community even informally, or she can be settled with the role of the modest hard worker, the sheepish good fellow, or even an errand boy. In some cases, the analyst’s potential popularity can be quite inconvenient for her colleagues, or, on the contrary, as an underestimated specialist she constantly suffers from them (which quite often and even regularly happens simultaneously). Even considering that this is not something the analysand passionately wants to know in her analysis, she is definitely not deaf to the situation in this field in any event.
Instead, the very attempt to make her deaf in this matter is nothing but the expression of the specific desire of the psychoanalytic institution that prefers to see the analysand in the role of the creature, shortsightedly concentrated on their symptom and the suffering it causes. As if the patient views the analyst and her contribution as totally disconnected from everything else. This approach makes it possible to retain the patient in the role whose main feature, as we demonstrated above, is not so much a theoretical unawareness about the conceptual side of psychoanalysis, but rather the innocence in the question of the existence of such a phenomenon like the psychoanalytic community. This innocence is carefully rigged, of course, and is constantly approved from above.
This does not mean that the patient can become a hostage to the possible transformations in the psychoanalytic method or its technique, albeit there is no shortage of this sort of clinical observations published by clinicians themselves, particularly, when it comes to the methods of a rejected direction or presumably hostile school whose practice is subject to condemnation almost automatically. But there is also another connection, opaque to the clinic itself due to the conditions of its functioning since it becomes visible only beyond the clinical boundaries where psychoanalysis acts as a zone of theoretical struggle on the territory of the psychoanalytic knowledge. Despite the specialists’ intention to view what happens on this territory as a process closed from the analysands’ eyes (at least for the time being), it should be said that the patients gain access to what is called “the analyst’s anxiety” precisely as the consequence of this struggle. “The analyst’s anxiety,” in its turn, is analogous to the anxiety reproduced in the institutional field but it is via their analysts that the patients acquire the data about it at their disposal and add them to other things that they extract from their analysis.
The consequences of this “anxiety cash-out” carried out by analysands have not been openly discussed so far and they are not obvious to clinicians. However, most probably, it certifies the structural unity of the analytic field at one level while introducing a very peculiar discordance at another one: the anxiety here is fraught with non-reciprocal and also discorded blindness for both the analysand and the analyst since none of them knows how this anxiety will eventually turn out for them.
This sort of blindness is, most probably, irreversible because entire generations of analysands keep on in their unawareness concerning the expected results of their analysis. The point is not only that with certain changes in the clinical sentiment, or with the emergence of new theory and its representatives, the analysands start getting from their analysis something completely different than their predecessors whose analysis was marked by the dominance of the other analytic knowledge. In any event, the patients are not even aware of the changes due to the invisible limitations described by Freud in “Recommendations to the Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” (1912). These limitations imply that analysands take into consideration only certain things concerning their analysis while completely leaving out some other things. The question about the “psychoanalytic product” that the subject could have gotten if she had come to analysis ten years earlier or later – in terms of the analysts’ own ideas about this product – is the last thing that comes to the patient’s mind.
Instead, something else occurs to analysand not only as a more or less substantive reflection but as a significantly more fundamental guideline determining her relation to psychoanalysis in a broad sense as a phenomenon of a specific nature, including its social aspect. This definitely affects the analysand’s own treatment. From this point of view, the analysand knows – given all the reservations and refinements inherent to the Lacanian concept of “knowledge” – about her analyst much more than the latter is able to imagine. For, just as there is something unimaginable in the situation of analysis that remains invisible to the analysand, there is a similar blind spot for the analyst.
Returning to what was mentioned earlier: the specialist may suspect her analysand, caught in the flames of love transference, in the innocent espionage in the details of the analyst’s personal life, her family status, or matrimonial plans. But what she suspects the least is that the analysand already knows certain things, namely, some facts about the analyst’s status in the institutional field. The analysand intends to keep track, as far as she can, of the troubles and even miseries befalling her analyst in the context of the latter’s relations with this field. The analysand is curious – even if she does not attempt any special investigations on these matters – whether her analyst is sufficiently recognized in this field, what her status considering her internal dependence on the field is (if she belongs to a particular “School”) or outside of it where she is forced to self-authorize in this way or another.
These data are also covered by the patients’ hysterization described by Lacan that originates, according to his thought, from the psychoanalytic procedure itself but it is also caused by the figure of the analyst as such. It is impossible to ignore that this sort of hysterization often appears in a far-reaching, even extreme form: having at her disposal some information about the professional position of the analyst, the analysand can be impelled to support her analyst’s desire by reinforcing her status or, on the contrary, to push her to the edge.
We should remember that since this urge stems from the very form of the psychoanalytic process it is not the product of private relations between the psychoanalyst and her patient. As was already mentioned, being historic this form originates from the very essence of something that Freud was meticulously and irremovably implementing not so much as his own desire but as his “desired object.” As the two major forms of the embodiment of clinical institutions, the “psychoanalytic school” and “association” are targeted against the transference side effects. By virtue of their influence on the specialists who belong to them, the latter become resolutely encouraged that their verified affiliation is one of the best ways to prevent the excessive hysterization that jeopardizes the treatment. They bring it back on the track of traditional psychoanalytic relations where the analyst, functioning as the opposite to the absolute Other, admits but still prevents a full realization of the analysand’s passionate appeal. This appeal varies from “what you can do for me as a specialist?” to “what I myself can do to strengthen your institutional position?”
“The mixture of the private and the theoretical” mentioned by Tupinambá should not be understood as a naïve indistinguishability of these two factors in the institution. On the contrary, it should be understood as an advanced and sufficiently covered consequence of the fact that as former analysands, analysts themselves are diachronically and synchronically exposed to the same influence and processes that affect their own patients later, including those of them who do not even think about didactic analysis and their own practice. Thereby, what emerges here is a somewhat pathological underside of the analysts’ repetitious assertion saying that “didactic analysis” does not differ from a regular one. It is implied here that the didactic analysand, supposedly having no specific privileges over the “regular neurotic,” would be treated as thoroughly and as partially as the latter is.
In fact, this comparison should be taken in a different direction: it is the regular analysis that does not differ from the didactic one in the sense that for the analysand both of them equally present a temptation of knowledge about what happens in the psychoanalytic institution. As a rule (especially in the case of the “traditional,” non-didactic analysand) that is almost completely overlooked and the attention is focused on totally different aspects of treatment differences that are not, in fact, worthy of serious consideration. Thus, it’s hard to argue that there is a need to do away with the thought that the didactic analysis delves into the subject less because, allegedly, it is just a formality that acts as a disguised condition for the opportunity to launch one’s own practice.
In fact, all the tedious and wordy debates on this matter were only a deceptive shadow of the real attempt to discuss how didactic psychoanalysis can actually differ from psychoanalysis which is not ended with “becoming the psychoanalyst.” It is only in the didactic analysis that what was “personal” for the specialist during their own analysis becomes “theoretical” after their entrance into the clinical community. There, they receive deceptive news about the normalization of their preceding transference aspirations and the realization of their desire to have relations with their analyst. At the same time, it is not only the phantasy of “personal” relations with the analyst, as the analysts are being told right from the start, but the phantasy about the place occupied by the analyst in the professional community that is normalized in the course of transference resolution.
The same happens in the so-called “regular” treatment but it is never subsequently justified – in other words, the relations in the course of the treatment which ends with becoming the analyst are marked by the movement opposite to the dialectical movement of the “class-in-itself” to the “class-for-itself” described by Marx. The subject who becomes the analyst is hardly more enlightened or more properly sober: on the contrary, unlike those who due to their unwillingness to become the analyst leave analysis on time, the newly minted analyst becomes even more deeply hystericized. This hysterization is no longer maintained by the intra-analytic transference but directly by what could be called the signifier of the name – the name of the maître as the one who – whether dead or alive – has in any event, so to speak, “passed” as a signifier in a community.
