Looking at Francis Bacon's painting: Oedipus and the Sphinx
Not least there is money. Increasingly people turn to psychoanalysis as an alternative to the short-term, time-limited, and over-subscribed therapies offered by health care economics and the powerful ideologies that support them. Simply because of over exposure and tired promises, cognitive behavioural therapies, rationalising psychotherapies, and person-centred approaches too appear less attractive to both punters and practitioners.
In psychoanalysis such desires, wishes, hopes, and projects are addressed during a very long, systematic preparation -at once clinical, intellectual , and emotional. This is called formation.
Ad hoc crisis-intervention -responding to immediate needs- can be addressed quite successfully by most therapies and counselling. There may well be clients who are keen only to address such pressing needs and desire no extended analysis or further attention. Maybe too, there are therapy seekers who are not able to bring formal analysis to a conclusion. These need to believe their professional -or somebody similar to their listener- will always be available when required for support. To repeat myself an analyst is not necessary to address these therapeutic needs: most counsellors or therapists do this well enough.
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So why should anybody practice analysis??
After a period of considerable interrogation one may be left with just three reasons for psychoanalysis. First is the respect and reverence for the talking project initiated by Freud after experiencing its impact upon oneself. A second reason is a desire that this tradition should flourish: so that it remains available to new generations. Third -and finally- it is important to have people capable of supporting an analytic enquiry from its very beginning to a conclusion...... just in case people happen to need longer periods for analysis.
An analyst, therefore, is only required where and when a sustained, long-term, commitment is needed to accompany those brave souls who wish to go beyond therapy into the dimensions of absolute difference whereby
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
This exploration of the place from which we begin, to which we again return at the end, and then know again for the first time, is called symptom in contemporary psychoanalysis.
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Nevertheless it must be said that anybody seeking a psychoanalytic formation -must be- or even has to be- a bit daft. This robust English word, both noun and adjective, was commonly used in the Lancashire where I was born and bred. It has a variety of meanings. One meaning of the word daft is mad -crazy, insane, or -more prosaically- lacking common sense. Psychosis is not a perquisite for psychoanalytic formation -although there have been and perhaps still are- analysts who either succumbed to insanity or were well-mad before they started their psychoanalytic trajectory.
More precisely one must be crazy in three ways:
First of all before one dare even to think of any professional involvement with others whatsoever, there is the demand that one should become a patient -or if you like- client. One needs to have some appreciation of one’s own personal craziness before listening to others. This can take quite a long time.
A second aspect of this craziness is the lack of guarantees regarding the outcome and duration of the process. To this extent psychoanalytic formation is an anti-training profoundly subverting what is commonly regarded as training in modern “psy” professions -psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, counselling, end of life coaching -whatever. This, to my way of thinking extends to -and simultaneously de-structures- all notions of "cure", "treatment" "outcomes". Therefore one needs to be extremely cautious with business organisations retailing the title "analyst". Inevitably they end up marketing standardised products with built-in obsolescence.
Thirdly undertaking any analysis is daft in the sense that it is risky. Freud encouraged his patients to risk speaking and thinking associationally -uttering whatever came to mind, however crazy, disturbing, obscene, or odd it may be. His belief was that this counter-intuitive way of speaking helps loosen up the customary constraints of everyday life and discourse. One therefore risked seeming to be daft. This riskiness extended to time and money as well: for a great deal of both is demanded by a procedure which offers no guarantees in terms of outcome.
The sole justification for entering and persevering in analysis …..is that one needs it. This particularly applies those people who purchase analysis for the sole purpose of becoming psychoanalysts. Such people are invited to consider whether this aspiration may be a symptom or -using an old English medical word- “symbol” of some profound disturbance and/or need to control, help, or rectify others. After passing through such formation, one is probably unemployable by any state-financed enterprise such as the UK National Health Service.
Analysis and the practice of analysis can be daft-in yet another interesting sense. Carnival was not limited to continental Europeans and Latin-Americans: the annual festivities of Yuletide were once termed "daft days" wherein people could reverse political and sexual roles, indulge, frolic, get high. There is a certain amount of fun, humour, excitement, jouissance linked to the process, practice, and theory of psychoanalysis. This too, of course, becomes an invitation for further analysis.
Just as Freud’s word for uncanniness and the uncanny - unheimlich- may metamorphose into meaning its opposite (homely, familiar), so too with the English daft. When it was written for semlye he was and wounder dafte -dafte here connotes “skilful” . I would certainly say that the psychoanalyst is not without skill. What these skills are and how they are best used is the task of psychoanalytic formation …. which is… I am trying to suggest… a form of anti-training.
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Nevertheless, some social structure is required for these ways of learning, being, living, and conducting oneself; but it cannot be a rigid structure because they too easily become ends in themselves and get corrupted by power, family, and business interests. Formation in this sense is perhaps analogous to the structures used in formation dancing!! Psychoanalytic formation involves working with colleagues ….hopefully in sync. This is what we call a psychoanalytic school. If -or when- the sync ever stops, becomes dysfunctional, oppressive, or persecutory so that the learning system operates in a manner Bion once described as primitive or "basic" - it is then time for the music to cease, for people to rest, rethink, and maybe eventually regroup....... so that a new set is founded. So maybe temporary, finite structures, are now essential.
Poetry quote from TS Eliot Little Gidding,
Copyright simon fisher Monday, 2 November 2015 revised May 2019
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