Wednesday 19 June 2019

FOUR DISCOURSES, ONE MORE, PLUS THE UBIQUITOUS CROSSING.

FOUR DISCOURSES, ONE MORE, PLUS THE UBIQUITOUS CROSSING.

AUTHORIZING

Jacques Lacan has become famous for many things.


One of his main gifts to the previous century was his formalisation of four discourses. These discourses were first explored in a seminar called The Other Side of Psychoanalysis during the academic year of 1969-70. This seminar, like the others, was an oral presentation, never to be published or edited during the lecturer’s lifetime. Keen auditors and followers who were avid notetakers left subsequent generations a variety of notes.

Over the years there have been attempts to produce just one officially approved text instead of this haphazard accumulation of transcriptions. This urgency -to control the legacy of Lacan- is understandable: there are obvious commercial and academic benefits, as well as those that accrue naturally to agents or agencies who believe their imprimatur bestows attributes of authority, authenticity. In short these are claims of supremacy to authenticate texts, legitimatise meanings, interpretations and intentions.

I prefer to rely on the unauthorised transcripts of Lacan’s seminars -simply because they seem more honest, real and trustworthy. Crucially they stress the emphatically oral and performative nature of Lacan’s productions. Along with this, there are inevitable variations befitting any personal record- or transcript- of valued material. Much gratitude is due to Cormac Gallagher, an auditor of Lacan, who later collated manuscripts and translated them into English. This profound contribution to psychoanalytic scholarship is available now to all free of charge -online.

It is decidedly odd to witness transcriptions and translations like Seminar XVII participating in an intuitional scramble to control
legacy and output. Of course this is only to be expected: similar things happened to the legacies of other analytic authors like Freud, Klein, Bion. In the case of Lacan however irony is intensified due to his thoughts about master discourses.

THE MASTER-SLAVE WAR IN PHILOSOPHY

It is not my purpose here to to explicate the four discourses in any detail; there is much excellent material available online. Rather I wish to comment upon a central irony which torments much of the Lacanian legacy. Prior to that though, it is important explore precursors the of master discourses before Lacan.
My first encounter
with the master

discourse came at a
Jack Bemporad: Philosopher and Rabbi
seminar led by
Rabbi Jack
Bemporad in the
philosophy school
of SMU Dallas,
Texas. Jack left Italy
with his family aged
five to escape facist
persecution. A great
polymath, he
eventually
distinguished
himself first and
foremost as an academic philosopher. His friends included Hans Jonas, Arendt, Aaron Gurwitsch, Maurice Natanson. Surprisingly to all, his career took a remarkably novel turn when he was drawn to the rabbinate. It was my great fortune to attend his graduate seminar on Hegel whilst he was working at Temple Emmanuel, Dallas, and an honorary professor at SMU’s philosophy department. I recall well his first graduate seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology “Some days the text appears, lucid, penetrative, insightful. Other days you cannot understand it all” ! His was a 
brilliant introduction to Hegel, a lesson in humility, and profound words about the limitations of philosophical discourse generally.


As well as being encouraged to engage with Hegel’s actual text (in English, alongside German if possible) the class was introduced to two notable French commentators on Hegel. One was Jean Hippolyte whose magisterial Genesis and Structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit had been translated into English and published by Northwestern. Another was Alexandre Kojeve whose work on Hegel Bemporard enthusiastically recommended. So I read Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit as well as Hippolyte. This took place decades before any interest in Lacan.

It was Kojeve’s introduction that impressed me more than the cautious Hippolyte. It was a remarkable way into Hegel. After reading Kojeve, the text of Hegel’s Phenomenology seemed welcoming and most hospitable. At times when The Phenomenology was indeed hard-going, but I recalled the tutor’s advice and looked forward to re-reading it another day. Bemporad warned his graduates how Kojeve’s reading of Hegel offered an unashamedly left-wing interpretation. This is evident in the chapters introducing the deathly nature of master-slave struggles. Struggle -or better- war -not dialectic, is operative in Kojeve’s interpretation. The struggle was not simply a historical development -concerning the slave revolts in the Roman Empire. Nor was this struggle an exemplary exhortation -warning European governments about liberality and the importance of being considerate to workers. Master-slave struggles were definitely not about the intellectual magic of metamorphosing concepts. No. The master-slave relation for Kojeve's Hegel was an ever-contemporary fight with a potentially deadly and lethally oppressive other. This is crucial. Talk is indeed powerful; but so are behaviours and actions. The conflict between masters and slaves was not simply a verbal joust or chattering gossip. It was deathly, organized, to do with physical survival.

To quote Roger Scruton:

The dialectic of Self and Other is the great gift of German idealist philosophy to modern European culture. From Fichte to Heidegger the point has been made in a hundred ways, and never without a measure of dignified obscurity, that we come to freedom and self- consciousness only by the path of alienation, and that the self is born from the confrontation with the other, in whose refusal to succumb and to be absorbed we recognise the truth of our own condition – the truth that we too are other, and limited by others like us.

Scruton quite correctly, indicates how Kojeve was seminal for the transmission this tradition to a new elite of future French academics:

this story, told many times, entered the culture of France through a peculiar route – namely the public lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology given between 1933 and 1939 in the École Pratique des Hautes Études by an émigré Russian, Alexandre Kojève, who occupied a high position in the French civil service. These lectures are now widely available in the edition of Raymond Queneau, who attended them. And if you are surprised to learn that the author of Zazie dans le Métro should have taken, at the time, a consuming interest in Hegel, then you should also know that the lectures were attended by almost everyone of that generation who was to make a contribution, after the war, to the emerging literary culture of a guilt-ridden France. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Lacan, Bachelard, Levinas, Bataille, Aron, Merleau-Ponty – and many more – all attended. Each came away from the lectures with his own version of the 'Other', and his own ambition to describe the Other in revealing parables. For de Beauvoir woman had been made Other by man, and it was in confronting her 'altérité' that woman could repossess herself of her stolen freedom. For the humane Levinas the Other is the human face, in which I find my own face reflected, and which both hides and reveals the light of personality. For Merleau-Ponty the Other is both outside me and within, revealed in the phenomenology of my own embodiment. For Sartre the Other is the alien intrusion, which I can never vanquish or possess, but which taunts me with its ungraspable freedom, so that, in the famous last line of Huis Clos, 'l'enfer c'est les autres'.

Scruton is admirable here. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Bachelard, Lacan and the rest where indeed stimulated and challenged by this essentially practical philosopher. To continue with Scruton

Kojève's treatment of the Other also fed into the Communist Party's programme of recruitment, by giving the French literary elite a language and a habit of thought that could easily be adapted to the war on bourgeois society.



This reading has some justification when it hints how obfuscation and neologisms become a sort of high fashion in-speak for intellectuals, though it is to be doubted whether the all the highly demanding French auteurs and auteurs of 1945 onwards were intentionally obscure in order to promote communism, stalinism, or sovietism. Scruton knew very well though, how Koejeve was eventually un- masked as a KGB collaborator, informant, and spy during much of this period, up to and including the formative years of the EEC in which he was deeply involved as a very senior civil servant.

Be that as it may, Kojeve’s writings and lectures transmitted the view that philosophy, academic thought, reason, and could help transform and reconstruct societies and their ethics. It was practical stuff and decisively important after 1945 to address an almost universal belief that moral and political society was in dire need of radical reconstruction following the blanket bombings and literal geographical destruction in Europe. Independently of Marx, Kojeve inherited -and transmitted- an emphasis on urgency and human need, which is fully evident too in his supervisor, Karl Jaspers, whose career embraced both academic philosophy and psychiatry. Practical philosophy in the German speaking world was not the sole preserve of Marx and his followers, but a legacy inherent in German philosophy from Kant to Albert Lange (1828-1875), the famous Marburg professor responsible for the three-volumed A history of Materialism that was to be so admired by Russel. Russel’s political sympathies were likewise pre-figured by Lange who was active in early struggles to establish trade unionism, constitutional reform, and a free press that could publish articles by left wing journalists and acaemics. Philosophy was certainly correct to devote itself to truths -after all why should a truth be useful? Yet in this later Kantian tradition of Marburg and Heidelberg, philosophy concerned itself with social justice, distribution of wealth, distribution, and rightness. Die Aesthetik became a new manifesto for open-access culture and non-authoritarian spiritualities. This form of philosophical socialism was already enjoying weighty political impact long before the more radical socialisms inspired by Marx.

Of course European idealism alone was not equipped to address the lethal barbarities of two European wars. No discourse was. On the very first day of the Somme, some sixty thousand British soldiers were dead or severely wounded. After four and a half months of engagement, the Franco-British front advanced all but five miles at the cost of 1,300,000 fatalities on both sides. From America Henry James felt the very weight of war had almost defeated language. “The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated.....” So did the academic philosophies of Europe too. They weakened to the point of collapse.


REPETITION


Twice Europe deconstructed itself. Its first reconstruction unravelled and failed abysmally. A second reconstruction after 1945 was felt to be even more urgent. Like the de-nazification programmes that accompanied post war reconstruction, the determination of all worthy discourse was “never again”. Never again should there be such genocides and lethal moralities upon European soil


During the 1920’s it was hard to be authentic in a Europe full of Nazis -without joining them- as did Heidegger. After 1945 it became apparent to continental academies that Heideggerian ontology and phenomenology was lamentably ill-equipped to raise the question of -let alone suggest answers to- “how should we live together” without betraying either subjectivity or social value. It was people like Kojeve, Arendt, Jaspers, and later Habermaus who transmitted and revived European philosophical traditions concerned with practical human need  -social as well as existential.


students at Nanterre June 1968

Lacan's seminars immediately followed this wholesale deconstruction of European certainties along with the inevitable quest for ethical being. Added impetus was given by the student and social upheavals of 1968. His seminar about the four discourses was contemporary with the massive social unrest convulsing French society. One philosopher, Paul Riceour, was also interested in Freud and ethics. The author of De l’interprétation: Essai sur Sigmund Freud, had a bin full of trash unceremoniously dumped over him in his office at Nanterre. He was subject to continuous physical threats and dumb intimidation at work. Nanterre campus where he lectured was annexed by protesters and literally turned into a battle field requiring decisive intervention from armed police. Lacan alleged Riceour to be guilty of plagiarism and got lackeys to conduct a distasteful scholarly assault. Oddly enough, throughout all this ferment Riceour was much in favour of university reform. Perhaps he became a target because of his deeply held religious views and continued reverence of phenomenology. Who knows?


Lacan’s reactions to these contemporary events inform his presentation of the four discourses in L'envers de la psychanalyse. Each discourse is a socio-political activity: governing, educating, protesting, revolutionising. It is the analyst who is the real revolutionising agent because it is analytical discourse that subverts all the others. The discourse of the analyst, is -as it were- supremely noncompliant when dealing with matters of sham authority and cheap knowledge claimed by the other three. Lacan is supposed to have told students manning barricades in Paris What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one’. In other words, despite revolutionary words and behaviour from workers and trade unionists, they still were locked into a discourse that craved a strong, all-knowing leader to fix things. In other words the real desire of these activists was for greater, more ferocious,  servitude. (See further Badiou & Roudinesco 2014)

This is why I suggested there is in-built subversive logic of irony undermining all attempts to edit, authenticate, limit, and brand Lacan’s oral presentations -which, after all, belong to the people who wrote them down as well as to their now dead speaker. These texts can not easily become “canonical” because their very content subverts, even mocks, all attempts to sacralize or magisterialize both their form and content. The same applies even more directly to their self appointed custodians or legacy-guardians, whose claims to magisterial supremacy and knowledge are as ludicrous as the discoursers using the master-speak.

Oda Sesso (1901-66), Zen abbot of Kyoto's Daitokuji monastery, warned, “There is little to choose between a man lying in the ditch heavily drunk on rice liquor, and a man heavily drunk on his own enlightenment” https://www.enlightened- spirituality.org/ Zen_Humor.html







A further irony is this. Subversion -as well as revolution- can so easily become empty surplusage: more and more as an end in itself. A recipe for subversive masturbation.  Supposed insight gained from the dynamics of discourses and their assemblage of knoweldges, allows one to preside with magisterial supremacy over all other discourses - psychoanalytic, philosophical, scientific, political -whatever: secure in the position that one’s own knowledge is far more revolutionary - far more subversive- than anybody else’s. So armed with the knowledge of discourse analysis, one will assuredly unmask all other knowledges as lacking, deficient, pretentious. This is a sure short-cut to becoming an intellectual magister. How convincing this position ultimately is will depend upon the strength of one’s own private delusions as well as the gullibility of others.


A FIFTH DISCOURSE?

So far the four discourses of Lacan have been examined according to an inner logic of irony that is crucial for their appreciation. Particularly rich are ironies of knowledge and supremacy that accrue with one’s claims to be a master-reader of Lacan and his psychoanalysis. 

I wish now to consider briefly whether there is an additional formal discourse -namely that of the capitalist. Later, to conclude this essay, I will isolate an attribute of discourse which may well operate in all four (or five): but with the result of discrediting and devaluing each in turn.


So, is there a fifth discourse? Lacan certainly began to think so






based on Du discours psychanalytique from Lacan in Italia 1953-1978. La Salamandra 1978. See http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/IIIIIin_Italia_chap-3.pdf


The incredible feature of this diagram lies in its asymmetrical relation to the other four. It does not fit with the others at all. It does not -and can not- rotate with the other four to produce a set of five . To be sure this diagram presents a mutant discourse: a parody of a master discourse. Capitalist talk it would seem mixes up desire and demand. The divided subject needs things-produced by markets to support its subjectivity: whether they be goods, services, and especially solutions. The great thing about solutions is their reassurance: there will always be an answer. But the answer is not “let it be” as in the famous Beatles’ song but rather: I need more. More solutions -whether they be ready-made, marketed, manufactured, or inserted subliminally- will always be handy......at a price.


Strange at first take, any solution offered by capitalist discourse fails constitutively; resembling the built-in obsolesce of consumer goods that ensures they will for ever need to be replaced by other substandard, already collapsing goods. One botox needs another, needs more, and must continue as long as there is life and money. Or -to change gear from body to driving- there will always be a better Jaguar or Porsche to be had. So too with psychotherapies, popularist philosophies, sound-bite politics and solutions offered by big business speak.



This was utterly transparent in a conservative leadership debate broadcast on BBC television, brilliantly chaired by Emily Maitlis. In the follow-up programme News Night, veteran conservative campaigner and former deputy-leader Michael Heseltine commented, highlighting both master discourse and city banker discourse.

"It was a masterclass in avoiding answers the questions. There was not a single new policy idea and there were a lot of assertions which make no sense. For example, we’re going to be tough with Europe. We’re going to imply leaving on October 31. But when it comes to it in Parliament it’s the same There is no majority for no deal. The Europeans know that. The Europeans have said that they will not negotiate the deal. So all this stuff about being tough is the language of city bankers who negotiate deals and know they have to have a hard line....... But if they fail, two companies move away and continue trading.If they fail this time it’s the savings of the British people, it’s the jobs of the British people, the investment in our economy, our living standards and the coherence of the United Kingdom itself at risk”

Daily Express 19 June 2019 
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1142221/bbc-newsnight-tory- leadership-debate-lord-heseltine-boris-johnson-brexit-news-no-deal emphasis added


CORROSION

For the remainder of this essay, I wish to consider a ubiquitous trait in discourse that may interpenetrate and ultimately decay, cross, corrode, or erase the other four/five. Like capitalism it is a mutant discourse of the master, though in this case of failing, envious, and resentful masters.

Recently I came across a new book that helped me to locate more precisely an increasing unease I had been experiencing with psychoanalytic discourse, trainings, and theories. It is called Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography published by Routledge in 2019. Blurb informs readers that the author is a psychoanalyst in Manchester as well as a research professor at the Metropolitan University of Manchester. Additional titles and distinctions include his current office as president of the UK College of Psychoanalysts, as well as secretary to the Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix. Never have I met this author; never before have I read any of his writings.



The book -as far as I can discern- is arranged autobiographically with many reflections about the writer’s fascination with psychology, politics, and psychoanalysis. Some chapters are related to stages of professional development. Chapter nine for example, concerns itself with the author’s need of training and whether -or not- this was best addressed by courses in group analysis which were then available in Manchester UK where the author worked. This group course was integrated advantageously well into local NHS mental health services which offered employment to group analysts. Presumably these were pre-IAPT days.


A Street in Clitheroe by Lowery


As I read this book all sorts of people seemed to emerge from it: walk across, through, or alongside the text- then disappear quickly. It reminded me of the match stick people of Lowery’s art: marching off in different directions whether to a local event, work, home, or a funeral. An odd mixture or pattern and randomness.




Names are sometimes given to these otherwise qualityless people: reference to their wider significance, achievements, or history is seldom proffered. Did the author, I wonder, keep lists of people and a diary of his ad hoc encounters? On page eighty-eight it is mentioned how the writer finished with Don -his “Anna Freudian analyst” Who is this Don? Do I need to know him? Shall I bother myself to inquire further??

Other people similarly receive brief mention -not even an introduction- then instantly disappear. In these pages the following characters are mentioned cursorily: Keith Hyde, a psychiatrist, Bill Barnes, Erica, Frank Margison, Terry Lear, Sheila Ernst -all of whom seem to have been involved with trainings attended by the author. Some receive approving comments like the aforementioned psychiatrist. Despite his ghastly shirts Keith Hyde is called “one of the good guys” but only with hindsight because the author learnt how “later on” this doctor had offered psychotherapy to unnamed political activists in distress. Others names appear and disappear with even less comment.

This intrigued me. What purposes are served by this endless procession of psy-people? Part of an answer suggested itself on page eighty-seven where it is stated that psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the United Kingdom is a tangled world of personal-political relationships and rivalries. “We often encountered the criss-crossing paths of people we admired, sometimes as role models, and the gossip about whom had been in analysis with whom was a staple of distracted conversation around the edges of seminars and conferences” Perhaps this is what the book is presenting -a criss crossing world of rivals and gossips?


In similar vein there is one single reference to a continental analyst named Brousse. The author met her in a seminar during which she commented upon his clinical paper. Some context is given. The author was training for psychoanalysis with group called Cefar. The rival group, we are told, consisted of “Millerians”. Nevertheless both groups appear to have met each other for mutual criss-crossings and castigations. Her comment was about the position of an analyst during therapy. This female Millerian felt that analysts, being neither discussants nor helpers, should position themselves as objets petit a. On the following page the author notes his contemporary associations to this position. He had tried very hard to present himself to his customers as loveable. Everybody at the seminar, including Ms Brousse and the author himself, laughed out load according to page one hundred and fourteen. Never again do we hear of Ms Brousse in this text. She seems to have inspired a humiliating encounter.


Page one hundred and thirteen mentions another Millerian called Richard Klein. In order to find more about this man it is necessary to consult the index. Schisms in chapter three purports to identify false masters, so that one can negotiate the treacherous waters of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The author attended a conference promoting Lacan in Cambridge during the June of 1984. Despite papers from luminaries like Terry Eagleton and John Forrester, the gathering is treated with contempt as a form of cheap entertainment. It was a sort of Lacanian circus offering a variety of weird acts. To this the author adds his own brand of comedy in the form of a pseudo anecdote about Freud and his daughter. Anna is supposed to have asked her dad what the phallus might be. Sigmund unzips his trousers and flashes his penis. Anna gets the point (in more ways than one????) “Oh it is like the penis only smaller”

Richard Klein’s allegedly comic turn at this circus receives a summary of sorts; readers are warned to read the provided summary very closely. Klein here is an 'American hard-core Lacanian' (“so there really were such beings” p 24) who was presenting Lacan’s Schema L. Klein’s presentation seems to have been powerful for it apparently both “bewitched” and “bewildered” the audience. Perhaps an audience survey had been taken to confirm this impression?


The author at this point, somewhat oddly, identifies himself with a smaller radical “we” that was participating in the audience. He/they/the we, whoever they may be, obviously hated Richard Klein who gives as good as he gets, responding to questions from the little “we” with repetition. Here again the book offers distracted gossipy conversation from trainees and enquirers gleaned from around the edges of seminars and conferences well familiar to the author from his experience with group analysis. His radical anti-group “we” appears once more -like a deus ex machina- on page 25.


I don’t know what everyone else made of it, but a little group of us shared notes afterwards, mystified by the way Richard Klein responded to almost every question by dramatically running his hand down from the bottom-left to the top-right hand of the board from “a” to “a prime” , declaring in an emphatic clipped drawl, “that this is the line of the Imaginary” and nothing more

Apparently at this point of his career Klein had become a contortionist; but the author himself needed his little “we” of an anti-group to support himself in some heady battle with these hard-line Lacanian masters or Millerians. To my way of thinking whatever Klein may or may not have said in his 1984 presentation, the fabrication of a mini anti-group to bolster ones supposed anti-authoritarian position certainly does have a whiff of the Imaginary about it.

There are a few minor, almost marginal comments about Richard Klein and his alleged loyalty to Jacques Allain Miller (104). Klein and Millerians become a temporary but nonetheless dangerous master group once more. This time they were bent upon destroying the plans of another oppressed group over the very contentious (and potentially lucrative) issue of analytic training. Eighty pages later, Klein we are told, left the Miller organisation and created his own “outfit”. Klein’s final cameo appearance occurs at another of those professional criss-crossings: only to make pointedly sarcastic remarks about a project promoting discourses about the Islamic in psychoanalysis. We also hear that Klein has become deaf.

I have dwelt on what might seem minor tittle-tattle to other worlds of more serious pursuit in order to illustrate my contention that all psychoanalytic discourse is subject to corruption, triviality or banality with gossip. This applies to all discourses whether spoken by hysterics, experts, capitalists, university administrators, or analysts themselves.


Gossip is an attribute of communication essential to the Lebenswelt. It is not necessarily good, or bad or neutral in itself. It can be revolutionary, technical, subversive or conservative. Gossip can be adulatory, prurient, self-congratulatory, identificatory. It is a form of social interaction and group identification. Nevertheless a surplus of gossip (whether circulating amongst in-groups, sub-groups, or master-groups, mini-groups, anti-groups) is guaranteed to make any discourse banal, trivial, boring. One’s own jouissance becomes the bane of others. However deadly serious such gossip may be to analysts themselves, it makes their profession appear silly and low-grade to outsiders. Another companion to this form of group-identity gossip is tactical misinformation; this is directly calculated to fuck up all meaningful discourse and action to preserve the desires and interests of both masters and servile. This too circulates equally well within the five formal discourses. I intend to return to manufactured truth in a further essay.


Before leaving Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context there is a remark in the chapter about group work worthy of some reflection. An analyst from London, Peter Hildebrand, visited Manchester to deliver a scurrilous conference paper about gay men. The author made a critical intervention with which he was pleased. Manchester had  been an articulate political hub of LGBT activism for decades. A number of gays had become volunteers, workers, and counsellors during the bleakest killing years of the UK aids crisis. In its aftermath former buddies or support workers of dying young men had developed a penchant for counselling or talking therapies and wished to explore training.

At that point of late twentieth century history anything with the prefix “psych” that preceded such suffixes as dynamic or analytic, was bound to exclude prospective male practitioners who were gay. So was Group Analysis North and its parent organisation in London institutionally homophobic? Did any gay Mancunians become group analysts? Did psychodynamic training organisations in Manchester eventually admit gay men to professional training? We are not told; but a hearty “well done” to this author for drawing attention to this particular example of psychoanalytic master discourse ......and its desires in practice. One wonders how much has changed: whether institutional homophobia is still protected by layers of gossip, misinformation, hate, and pseudo master-speak of analytic formation?


The joys, jouisannces, and internal politics of psychoanalysis are doubtless as inevitable, as they are fascinating. Nevertheless their appeal is probably limited in retrospect.... as it was with the "controversial discussions" when analysts were waging theoretical master-slave wars with much vitriol and mutual recrimination, as bombs were flying to-and-fro over London. 

But now even the politics of London/Westminster have lost much of their appeal to most regions of the UK: they seem naively provincial and self-referential.

c Simon Fisher 2019


notes


Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco: Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue. Columbia University Press 2014.

H P Hildebrand 1992 A patient dying with AIDSThe International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 19, 457-469.

Jean Hyppolite 1974 The Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Northwestern

Alexandre Kojeve 1969 Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures of the "Phenomenology of Spirit", assembled by R. Queneau Basic Books

Independent May 6 2018. The Paris Riots of May 1968
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/may-1968-paris-student-riots- demonstrations-sorbonne-nanterre-de-gaulle-a8335866.html


Richard Klein 2003 Responsibility in Psychoanalysis https://londonsociety-nls.org.uk/Publications/003/Klein-Richard_Responsibility-in-Psychoanalysis.pdf

Jacques Lacan 1969-1970 Seminar XVII Psychoanalysis Upside Down/The Reverse of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Cormac
Gallagher from unedited original manuscripts.
http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-17- Psychoanalysis-upside-down-the-reverse-side-of-psychoanalysis.pdf

M Nitson 1996 The Anti-Group: Destructive Forces in the Group and their Creative Potential Routledge

Roger Scruton 2012 Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile is available online at https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/284-confessions-
of-a-sceptical-francophile

Stijn Vanheule 2016 Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC5145885/#B19

Ian Parker 2019 Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context:
Subjectivity, History and Autobiography Routledge. 

Paul Ricoeur 1977 Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation Yale

Bertrand Russell 1925: Materialism Past and Present. Published to mark a popular reprinting of F A Lange’s three volumed work A History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/russell/ History_of_Materialism.pdf

UK Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality

In the USA internal psychoanalytic wars took place over this topic. Eventually it was a legal intervention that forced institutional change on psychoanalysts. To quote Juliet Newbigin:

........ in 1991, in response to a lawsuit, the American Psychoanalytic Association adopted an Equal Opportunities policy on admissions to training and issued its historic Position Statement, updating it the following year to cover recruitment of teaching staff and training analysts..... they also set up a system of committees to identify and address bias affecting gay and lesbian issues in their member institutions.


UK psychoanalysis did not encounter such legal battles about discriminatory practices based on gender. Instead large-scale service purchasers, such as the NHS, were withdrawing money from psychodynamic/analytical therapy services, not only grounds of what was thought to be evidence, but also because their services seemed to be provided by predominantly white, middle-class, heterosexuals and seemed geared to similar populations. This seemed at odds with the commitments of a national service. 

The British Psychoanalytic Council is:

 a professional association and voluntary regulator of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy profession, publishing a Register of practitioners who are required to follow our ethical code and meet our fitness to practise standards......We promote excellence in psychoanalytic thinking and psychotherapy; safeguard the public; promote the highest standards of training and research; and work to make psychoanalytic psychotherapy accessible to all.

Currently there are dozens of professional courses approved by this organisation. Despite the aspiration of offering a service accessible to all Newbigin, writing as late as 2015, acknowledged that even discussion about training gays had been remarkably absent in this national body which had a monopoly on registering psychoanalytic therapists.

One of the reasons for this silence has been a reluctance to subject psychoanalytic ideas about sexual development and sexual health to close questioning. In the UK, having survived the intense conflict over theoretical differences that led to the Controversial Discussions,[6] the British Psychoanalytical Society and those psychotherapy institutes whose training was closely connected with it have concentrated on preserving the connections within the analytic ‘family’, rather than open up divisive arguments again. In addition, psychoanalysis in the UK, while it developed alongside psychiatry and social care, was not initially accepted as a subject of study in universities.

https://www.bpc.org.uk/rethinking-our-approach-sexualities

Any UK university, ancient or modern, would not dare to offer courses automatically excluding LGBT from professional recognition. However, such practices still flourish in private institutions that have supposedly national influence like psychoanalytic councils or the Church of England. For reasons of economic survival, irrelevance, and failures in recruitment, Newbigin wrote about a psychoanalytic working group to consider theoretical and organisational changes. The veteran campaigner, Bernard Rattigen, attended a BPC sponsored conference in 2012 entitled Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality.


As someone not in membership with the BPC, though clinically finding myself much more in sympathy with it than some colleagues in UKCP, although there was much talk (rightly) of the day being momentous and a turning point, I felt it was surreal. There was a strong sense of déjà vu. It was as if the last 30+ years, since it was made clear that training as a psychoanalyst was not for gay people, had not occurred. I had made my career in provincial settings where being out as a gay psychoanalytic psychotherapist never seemed a big deal........

Hearing the history of the psychoanalytic engagement with homosexuality and the consequent perversion, domestication and the gradual growing heteronormativity of psychoanalysis as the twentieth century wore on was, of course, as it always is, useful. My problem was that I have been banging on about it for so long. I had to remind myself that for some present it might have been news. It was hard to believe that recent products of trainings in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy had not been through all this as part of their training. If not, why not, I asked myself? If trainings are integrating diversity into their curricula why was the conference necessary? What have the trainings that receive any form of public money been doing all these years? There is a serious question of accountability that needs thinking about......
Given the lack of presence in the public sphere by psychoanalysis it is not going to be easy to find a voice for psychoanalytically informed debate about contemporary questions regarding the sexualities and the looming culture wars .  Given the concentration of the media in this country in London and the parallel concentration of psychoanalysts surely there it is worthwhile giving more thought to out-reach than is current. It would be a pity if psychoanalysis just died out as a result of being so inward looking. There are excellent provincial examples, like in Leeds and Sheffield, of community-linked partnerships that do much to show psychoanalysis as part of the common culture not something just in the consulting room

I pay tribute and thanks to the late Bernard Rattigan.



Bernard Ratigan 1945-2012

See further

https://www.facebook.com/PinkTherapy/posts/obituary-dr-bernard-ratigan-25-january-1945-29-september-2012-bernard-was-one-of/10151237805116096/


Saturday 1 June 2019

LOOKING BACK IN ANGER AND GRATITUDE

Looking Back in Anger and Gratitude 




Cyril Taylor 1921-2000


This was written on June 1st 2019. During the previous week a number of news  items caught my attention. 


First of all there was a BBC Panorama programme waiting on my IPlayer  “watch list”. It was entitled GPs: Why Can’t I Get an Appointment? The programme was filmed in a health centre where staff were battling against closure, overwork, privatisation; in short the wholesale devaluation of  entire neighbourhood and its the health care needs. The BBC explained

The NHS is seeing the first sustained fall in GP numbers in the UK for 50 years, the BBC can reveal.The number of GPs per 100,000 people has fallen from nearly 65 in 2014 to 60 last year, analysis by the Nuffield Trust for the BBC shows.The last time numbers fell like this was in the late 1960s and it comes at a time when the population is ageing and demands on GPs are rising. Patient groups said it was causing real difficulties in making appointments.

“Real difficulties” is a massive understatement “real distress” is far more appropriate to characterize the sufferings of children, elderly, parents, workers -as they encounter a chronically underfunded, dysfunctional, system -even to get an urgent appointment. Distress also best describes the strain on all staff -receptionists, nurses, doctors- as they battle to provide a service despite the odds. Conditions are so demanding in such places, medical professionals so exhausted, secondary referrals so exasperatingly delayed that recruiting younger staff to work such decaying, compromised, institutions is becoming untenable. Fearing for health and sanity, younger health workers of all sorts prefer to work under less toxic conditions. 


in-sourcing liverpool

 A second item of news in the Guardian was, by contrast, more up beat. A recent report from The Association for Public Service Excellence had noted how many councils (including Liverpool, pictured above) are increasingly providing their own services, rather than relying on an increasingly outmoded, dangerous, and cranky model of tendering and outsourcing. This optimistic recipe promising excellence in service, economy in cost, has -apparantly- proved to be an illusion. Paradoxically it was the enforcement of this relentless austerity culture, that gave impetus to the reversal. As the chair of the report said:


In an age of austerity, councils can no longer afford outsourcing failures. Most can deliver quality services at a better price and without sacrificing the workforce on the altar of the lowest bidder


Now councils in Islington, Stoke, and Liverpool -to name but a few- have discovered that in-sourcing improves services, brings economic benefits, as well as producing more fulfilled -and less stressed- workers. The people of Liverpool -where I live- recently witnessed failures of outsourcing and privatisation on a massive scale. The new city-centre hospital was due to be opened some time ago. Thanks to the abysmal collapse of the outsourcing firm Carillion, its opening was delayed -despite the building  being 80 percent ready for immediate use. 


the not-yet-opened new hospital Liverpool city centre



Previous delays -one could say outsourcing disasters- in its construction (involving asbestos, creaky foundations, cracks in concrete, failures in weather proofing, inadequate and improper cladding) were being rectified. But then Carillon failed and the project halted. The British Broadcasting Association announced additional structural flaws in its news services of June 10th 2019. Apparently three of the original eleven floors were proven dangerous and not strong enough to cope with machines, patients, staff, or visitors. This "highly complex" structural deficit now requires more than 220 cubic metres of new concrete and a further 165 tonnes of new fabricated steelwork. A recent freedom of information request by the Liverpool Echo related to costs incurred by the empty hospital.  Between July and December 2018 taxpayers paid over three million pounds for the grotesque structure.  During January 2019 a further £523,000.00p had to be paid to keep it closed for that month alone with a recurring monthly electricity bill at over £100,00.00p. The Echo wryly noted that £523,000 would pay for  an extra163 fully qualified nurses per annum.

The legal, financial, and architectural messes caused by this abysmal failure of public finance initiatives is still being sorted out. Meanwhile patients and staff have to endure a dilapidated building with corridors that flood, surgical rooms that leak, equipment which malfunctions due to failures in wiring and plumbing. The merseyside MP Frank Field gave a pithy comment on the fiasco by labelling the public initiative project that financed the New Royal Hospital  as a monument to greed. Thank goodness for the new insourcing culture!

A final -and distressing news item- concerns allegations of anti-semitism in the UK Labour Party that have been accumulating in recent years. Like drips in the old royal hospital they are reaching flood proportions. Today, June 1st 2019, the UK Times reports

A member of Labour’s ruling body has been suspended after saying that Israel was to blame for the party’s antisemitism crisis. Peter Willsman, who was re-elected to Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) by party members last summer, said that the rows over antisemitism were “all lies”. 

He claimed that rabbis who had criticised the party were “obviously organised” by Israel and that party staff worked for the Israeli embassy. These remarks were allegedly made in America earlier this year to a man planning to write a history of Britain. The interview was recorded and is now the property of LBC. According to the Times newspaper article, Mr Willsman is also claimed to have said something equally outrageous last year …… namely that Jewish Trump fanatics were manufacturing claims of antisemitism. All this, following in the wake of more recent incidents, involving both groups and individuals, forced the deputy leader of Labour to admit "how serious the problem of antisemitism is in our party`".


Game, Set, and Match to Cyril Taylor


Dr Cyril Taylor was born in the merseyside town of New Brigthon which for many decades of the twentieth century was the holiday alternative to Blackpool for those families who could not afford the more expensive Flyde resort. His family was Orthodox surnamed Zadesky. Taylor was used later in order to make life easier for his dad’s clients who was, in fact, a taylor.

The  future doctor was educated at a local grammar school, then at Liverpool University where he studied medicine. During the war of 1940-1945, as an army medic he eventually became an officer in charge of a hospital in Khartoum. He enjoyed playing rugby and did so until he was forty. Later tennis became his passion

Though certainly an officer, it would be misleading to use the traditional epithet “and a gentleman”. Cyril was certainly a highly social being, kind, generous, and fun, but he was always something of a radical, fighter for justice, and interrogator of hierarchies. His earliest political involvements were with the Federation of Zionist Youth and later the Communist Party. A keen member of the  Socialist Medical Association, Taylor became active in promoting health service unions and  became a city councillor in 1966. 

One of his great contributions to the United Kingdom was his spearheading the notion of primary care health centres staffed by interdisciplinary teams. General practitioners, particularly in inner-city areas- were more often than not single-male businesses with sadly limited resources in knowledge, technology, pharmacology. Once a young doctor started work in such inner-city areas, he was often there until death. An amazing commitment, alas- more often than not marred by weariness, alcoholism, and condescension. None of this was acceptable to Taylor. 

The Labour Prime Minster, Harold WIlson, represented the Merseyside constituency of Huyton. When in 1975 Wilson established a Royal Commission on the National Health Service, Cyril Taylor was one of the members whose job it was to discover the best use and management of the financial and manpower resources of the NHS.  Cyril’s invention of the modern health centre spread quickly throughout the United Kingdom. His own vision, ideals, and commitment was incarnated in the great love of his life Princes Park Health Centre in Toxteth, Liverpool 8. There he established not just a medical centre, but a dedicated community of health workers devoted to their neighbourhood and the best possible medical practice. 

When I went to work at Princes Park some thirty years ago, Cyril had just retired but made regular appearances as a locum. As well as doctors and nurses, the health centre had clinics for men, women, post and ante-natal care facilities. There were health visitors, physiotherapists,  social workers, and advice clinics to deal with housing, benefits, legal rights. The local psychiatrist had a weekly clinic too -supported by a variety of counsellors, psychotherapists, and psychologists. This was an incredible achievement and its documentary history is now being collated, stored, and commemorated. Hopefully some source of funding can be mustered to record oral histories before former staff and patients die.

The question I ask myself is this: why did Princes Park Health Centre not continue to flourish after such auspicious beginnings and celebrated achievements?  There are many factors which come to mind; but I can only select those which seem important to me.


First of all the beginnings of privatisation -and along with that the correlative demands required for an internal market: tendering, bids, and outsourcings of the sort mentioned above. This trend began with a conservative government, but intensified under Labour. Health care provision was becoming not so much a lottery -as an auction. It was near impossible for just one local institution -albeit a feisty one- to withstand this massive thrust to “marketization”  with the consequent pressures for large-scale purchasing and rationing. It was my impression that the health centre was at times run on deficit financing;  that would become increasingly censured by a new health market as highly irresponsible. Though entrepreneurs eventually bought the centre, it was never going to be a profitable undertaking and services there became highly compromised for a time. Now they have greatly improved again.

Secondly, Princes Park Health centre depended upon massive commitment  from all its staff. Cyril, his colleagues, and immediate successors were driven by a vision. The present buildings were on the sight of a redundant Anglican Church in Bentley Road, closed for worship in 1972. Neither Princes Park Health Centre nor Cyril had much time for religion, but  running it demanded dedication, commitment, hard work, and a sort of faith. This faith -and perhaps hope- could sustain and encourage workers in a friendly environment. It could not survive the pressures of the market nor easily attract a new generation of workers who increasingly did not share such values.

A final thought is this. Taylor’s pioneer health centre was a very local undertaking. Cyril himself had been a city counsellor and the health centre had massive political support from the neighbouring community, city council, and health authorities. It was not just a place for dispensing treatments. Rather it was a socio-political hub fully involved with the hopes, fears, longings, and anger of its community. A historical paradox for me is that it was a socialist government that began relentless attacks localism -albeit under the auspices of some noble-sounding economic and social progrom. National minimal standards are indeed important and necessary;  but not when they impose a boring managerial minimalism on all. 

Some deeds of Blair years still make me angry. As far as mental health is concerned a new objective was dictated by central government eventually enforced by a swelling number of health bureaucrats and apparatchiks insisting on minimal care -and that only- everywhere. That objective was happiness. 

No longer was it acceptable for counsellors, nurses, psychologists, help ease and give voice to distress whenever possible. Now they had to promote happiness. This depression project was a sinister manipulation geared to masking real distress caused by the quickening pace of “liberal capitalism”  and privatisation in all areas of social and civic life including health. The absurdity -and delusion- of the project became ever more apparent as this current age of austerity relentlessly  pulverised all services including heath. Now austerity has become normalized. This was confirmed in a United Nations report claiming UK poverty to be both systematic and tragic. In a unbelievable BBC Newsnight interview, Mr Hammond, finance minister of the dying Teresea May government, was keen to  proclaim his legacy. He completely rejected the view that millions of UK citizens lived in poverty despite food banks, rough sleeping, increased child poverty, and so forth

CBT does not make happy workers or happy, grateful patients. Even more so in an era of enforced austerity. Threatening sick and distressed people, already living on basic benefits, with a magic and moralistic mantra- employment and compulsory therapy OR cessation of benefits- is a cruel manipulation reminiscent of the tortures of the inquisition. Equally abhorrent to me is the suggestion that depression, anxiety, or strain in workplaces can easily be remedied by a simple cognitive techniques that will automatically promote both individual and mass happiness. Even Marie Antoinette could not have dreamt that one up.

Marx once claimed religion was opium for the masses. Now it is becoming psychological therapy along the frightening amount of “pain killers” being consumed whether dispensed by the NHS or purchased directly from China on the web.

Dr. Taylor and his achievements engender a deep sense gratitude for a very special period of medical and social history. There is also hope. The project of marketisation has utterly failed. Already are the beginnings of new forms for financing and providing essential services that are sensitive to the needs of communties.  It would be naively stupid to suggest insourcing is the big answer to ensure equitable balances between need, provision, finance, and accountability. There is probably no one big answer, but maybe many small ones. As well as insourcing,  another new trend is the growth of buyers-coops to lobby for -and obtain- medicines which national rationing refuses to support. Another part answer might be to extend policies that actually work such as the Healthy Start scheme. Honesty about  mental health gaols, outcomes, state of knowledge, provisions, and treatments would also inject some honesty and realism into national debates. It is to be doubted, though, whether opening the entire NHS market to Trump grab and spin tactics will work. More likely it will utterly kill-off what remains of the steeply declining respect UK citizens have for their politics, which has been undermining of their heritage for decades. 

Cyril accomplished all his terrific deeds in a Labour Party at a time when having Jewish origins was no obstacle to achievement or membership.

 This too can happen once more.

 Dare to dream.

 Dare to act. 

Dare to change.


NOTES


Mr Hammond Chancellor denies dire poverty in UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48503170

Costs of running a substandard empty hospital in Liverpool 2019 Liverpool Echo
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/revealed-unbelievable-cost-keeping-liverpools-16249133

Mark Fisher 2012 Why mental health is a political issue  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue

A remarkable topography of English pain was published in The Sunday Times on 24th February 2019 as OPIOID DEATHS BY REGION




C Simon Fisher 2019

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