At the same time – and this is another side of this situation – one should not assume, instead, that the analyst’s intervention, in this case, results from a consistent and uncompromising application of a certain method. On the contrary, it is traced back to another structural boundary that could not be managed either by the analysand’s potential need in a particular style of analysis or by the so-called “desire of the analyst” in its strictly technical sense.
This boundary appears again in the objectified form of what is revealed in the specialist’s work as a specific ego-ideal regulating her actions. In contrast to the clinical superego which is a command to vigilantly care for the analysand’s welfare and to respect all the normative psychoanalytic restrictions (this kind of superego is responsible for the analyst’s concern regarding the quality of her counter-transference), the psychoanalytic ego-ideal, in this case, determines the place from where the psychoanalyst operates in reliance on the situation in the clinical field, including its institutional level.
Therefore in psychoanalysis, to act from the position of the analyst does not only imply intervening in the analysand’s psychic process, which is always risky but presumably effective, but it also maintains involving the latter in the processes where the “conceptual” and the “institutional” components mentioned in the book are linked – at the level of the professional community that sustains a specific theoretical tradition and operates with the history of psychoanalysis as a string of hypothesis-conceptions.
The moment of “direct” analytic action thus contains a structural complication associated with the fact that the professional ego-ideal that controls the analyst solves the technical problem of locating the analyst’s position at a certain point, displaced in relation to the analyst’s intervention. Reacting to the analysand’s speech, the analyst does not dispute the symptom expressed in this speech (which might seem to have happened in Kris’s case), and not even a more general patient’s phantasmatic identification (which would probably be the preferred clinical tactic).
By contrast, at the decisive moment of confronting the patient’s speech or making its interpretation, the psychoanalyst is also negatively conformed with the third instance in the form of a familiar to her professional analytic environment in both its “successful” and its weakest and erroneous effects (according to the analyst). Among other things, due to the weakening group identification processes, this environment can appear to the specialist as somewhat lagging and in this way forcing a different clinical solution because of this notorious “retrograde.” Acting as a part of the community and drawing her legitimacy from it, the psychoanalyst, nevertheless, does not wish to function as an average representation of this environment’s moods. That is why at the moment of communicating her interpretation to the patient, the analyst often rejects the most widespread theory in the institutional community (which happened to Kris who wished to make a somewhat unusual gesture by addressing the patient more directly since in Kris’s own professional environment it was absolutely natural to perceive any form of analysand’s misconceptions on the analyst’s account neutrally and impersonally, interpreting them contextually but not refuting the factual data behind them).
Thus, at the moment of making an interpretation, the analyst appeals to the second external (extimate) membrane of the psychoanalytic structure over the analysand’s head. This membrane is the professional community with which she maintains the connection and constantly disengages herself simultaneously because the position of her professional ego-ideal is organized in this way. But precisely at the moment of this disengagement, the analyst “attaches” the clinical dimension with the patient to the already existing adhesion of the conceptual and the institutional. The Borromean triadic figure is locked even if only for a second (the latter, being the measure of the logical but not the physical time, can easily stretch for the entire chronological duration of treatment).
This means that whenever the psychoanalyst convinces herself that in the analytic act she manages to stay focused only on her analysand and to keep the clinical community behind her back as a silent supportive background, it is at this point that she subjects the analysand to partial exclusion (in accordance with the idea that the analysand is outside of the analytic environment). At the same time, it is precisely this exclusion that affects the analysand in a very special way, revealing a partial analogy with the typical exclusion of the child described by Lacan. The child goes through this exclusion when in the early phase of its development it is forced to share the mother object with another legitimate pretender with whom the mother periodically retires into the matrimonial bedroom. Having no idea what happens between the two there, the child, nonetheless, has the knowledge about the dual belonging of the object on a different level. This knowledge is obtained in the form of the signs of satisfaction or lack experienced by the mother as a result of her interaction with the paternal instance. Up to a certain time, the influence of the latter is available to the child only indirectly, which does not prevent the child from extracting a whole range of data necessary for its psychosexual development from this indirectness.
It is worth keeping this analogy in mind since for the most part, the analyst tends to overestimate the directness and immediacy of transference’s influence initiated by her, imagining that her own figure – as a specialist and at the same time as presumably the only intra-analytic object – is the center of transference. However, there is something that parallaxes and displaces the analysand’s libidinal investments in transference since, among other things, they are addressed to something that acts as a product of the potential relations between the analyst and the representatives of her professional sphere, including, and particularly when these relations can be complicated by the analyst’s struggle at the level of produced knowledge or institutional positions.
All of this justifies and gives meaning to our disregard of the fact that quite often, or even for the most part, the analysands reveal no visible interest in the communities where their analyst can belong or according to which she is judged; as if the analysands do not even want to know any of this. The very “knowledge” in this case illustrates the meaning of this term implied by Lacan: to have this or that knowledge does not mean to be aware of having it. In contrast, to know is to somehow deal with the consequences: that is how mythical Oedipus practices his knowledge. That’s what access really is in its ultimate form.
The above also enables to shed light on the way the analysand enters into her analysis. Thus, whatever she tells us, what she actually chooses is not a “clinical method” because prior to entering analysis her ideas about the method are quite vague even if she is well-educated. It is also commonly believed that she chooses a specific analyst as if blindly following the light radiated by her name, which is also true to some extent, but again, it hardly explains the choice exhaustively.
Instead, it is precisely the situation at the extimate border of psychoanalysis, within the psychoanalytic communities, that creates the divergent waves of anxiety that throw the analysand to the shore of some office. Having entered that office or having called the analyst for the first time, the analysand keeps moving at the very same speed that was set by the psychoanalytic community together with the effects produced both inside and outside. Having started her analysis, the analysand is destined to the permanent interaction with the anxiety produced by this community.
Precisely for this reason, there is no need to think of analysands in a strictly patronizing way believing that they can only passively suffer from the high-profile conflicts between the analytic schools or from the squabbles inside their analyst’s school, enduring the indigestible consequences of incessant intra-professional disengagements. By contrast, it should be assumed that most of the patients even inexperienced in theoretical – and even more so in institutional – matters, are in any case affected by the indirect signs of the situation in the professional community presumably concealed from the analysands’ sight. Capturing the representations of the community’s influence in the image of the analyst’s analytic action, the analysands process the material coming from their analyst additionally when they observe how she deals with her institutional dimension on the one hand, and the instance of knowledge circulating there, on the other hand. This means that the analyst is “interpreted” by her patients on the subject of her relations with the authorities in this field and the knowledge she produces there no less than the patient herself is interpreted by the analyst, albeit in a different procedural guise.
It is precisely this assumption that should be taken as an answer to the classic question about the role of the so-called “enlightened,” perhaps improperly well-informed analysand and her place in the analytic process. The proper answer to this question is an assumption that regardless of their degree of “intellectualization” and psychoanalytic erudition all analysands are somehow “enlightened” about the representation of their analysts’ relations with the conceptual and institutional register of the psychoanalytic knowledge, and this impacts their analysis.
These consequences are the main difference between psychoanalysis – regardless of the direction taken by its post-Freud’s offshoots – and other types of so-called psychological work. As a rule, psychoanalysts are extremely proud of the difference between themselves and “other psychologists” and do not miss the opportunity to recall its presence. However, they understand this difference only up to a certain point, which prevents them from recognizing the role of their clinical circle beyond their own role in the treatment and, therefore, in the fate of their patients. What the analysts have yet to resign themselves to – although a clear recognition of this inevitable perspective can already be found in Freud – is the fact that the analysand is a part of the clinical professional community to a far greater extent than it has been considered before. Having no access to the “desire of the analyst” (the absence considered an essential condition of transference by Lacan himself), the analysand is, nonetheless, in certain relations with what could be called “the desire” of the clinical community where the analyst belongs.
Despite everything – and above all, despite the rules of the community itself founded on the exclusion of the patients – the analysand still has her “share” in the institutions, even in several institutions at once. This share is the acquired anxiety that she detects at the level of the clinical ego-ideal used by her analyst to navigate in the clinical community when adopting or rejecting certain guidelines. The analyst’s vigilant engagement in these matters serves the analysands as a guarantee of their own affiliation – that is why very often the latter prefer to address the “non-undisputed” analyst with a controversial reputation who acts as the community’s irritant, sting, or even as an instigator of internal institutional squabbles.
Speaking about the present situation, one might say that – whether the proponents of the classic analytic position like it or not – today’s analysands no longer pretend that they remain ignorant of the psychoanalysts’ growing inability to balance on the verge of the theoretical and institutional dimensions of the psychoanalytic practice. This situation is reinforced by the analysts’ increasing incapability to restrain their anxiety about these matters. Today, the peculiarity of the situation in the psychoanalytic discourse – and this can actually be considered a ripened need for change – is that the notorious acting out in all its forms is no longer reserved for the analysands but for the analysts since the latter produce the acts that give analysands food for thought.
Today, the functioning of clinical institutions confronts us with the analysts’ acting outs. Clearly, what we have in mind is predominantly Lacanian communities shaken by various processes the hardest today, which leads to the aggravation of relations along with incessant disintegrations and consolidations. In other words, these communities are far more in the process of incessant “consolidating disintegration” than in the condition of “consolidations’ disintegration” as such. The gestures made in the whirlwind of the institutional “consolidating disintegration” – e.g., typical mutual angry denunciations both inside the communities and outside of them, like those directed against the “philosophers” using Lacan’s apparatus, – are the evidence that the spinning of the “whirlwind hole” reached the tail section that is the narrowest and the fastest part of it. Therefore, the activity of community members began a steady shift to the right and downwards, in accordance with Lacan’s “anxiety matrix”: to the anxiety per se at the level of its manifestation, release, which is usually testified by acting out.
Concerning the sources of these acting outs, or the matter of their “prevention,” it should be immediately stated that it has nothing to do with the degree of “analyzation” reached by the specialist. Regardless of the results yielded by a “fairly well-restrained” psychoanalytic position up till now, the psychoanalytic discourse along with the adhesion of three psychoanalytic registers that condition it, has apparently approached its structural boundary while simultaneously continuing its inevitable movement beyond it.
This border was at one time eloquently described by Ernst Junger who determined that the fact of crossing the border, or as he called it “the line,” is verified by the impossibility of previously operative measures to produce the effect that was expected from them before. It is this disappearance of effects that is now taking place in the psychoanalytic institutional space. Neither a personal, however long analysis of the future specialist, nor a thorough post-analytic work, nor even a “passe” into the community, meticulously outlined in the book and elaborated by Tupinambá by a series of assumptions based on mathematical apparatus (which, most probably, won’t be taken into consideration by the mainstream post-Lacanian communities anyway), do not have any positive effect on the psychoanalysts’ capacity to handle the growing pressure of anxiety that splits both the clinical communities as much as the “analyst-analysand” pair.
In this respect, Lacan’s effort in advancing psychoanalysis – its thought and institution – forward has also a counter effect. The more speed the front wagon of the train gains – even with certain reservations, the Lacanian psychoanalysis is still generally considered to be the lead car, the driving locomotive of the psychoanalytic knowledge – the broader and more obvious the signs of the crisis of the entire “psychoanalytic train” are. There is no reason to ask about the dates of this crisis (although Tupinambá mentions certain past dates tempting with the possibility of forecasting). The crisis is something that has been inscribed in psychoanalysis as its fate from the moment of its foundation. In this way, we can only talk about the erosion speed of some of its pillars and the analysts’ ability to abandon the idea that these pillars are load-bearing in time.
