Quanta of Solace?
TRAGEDIES AND ENTANGLEMENTS
entanglement.......is a state in which the location of one particle is closely correlated with that of another. In other words, it is the nearest practical thing to having a said particle in two places at once
Evolving Science 2020
Overview
The term entanglement is not intended to re-introduce scientism into psychoanalysis; it is a metaphor to help me -and hopefully others- to explore the great complexities surrounding approaches to transference in both theory and practice.
Though popular psychoanalytic theory discourses endlessly about "the subject", human beings are also immersed in "otherhood" from conception onwards. Otherhood includes human societies, culture, bodies, behaviours, the raw physicality of the environment. It is not just language.
Entanglement is a necessity for human animals and their destiny: for their well and woe. Separation and Loss are inevitable; they may also become passages into other entanglements because no subject can live on island of absolute self sufficiency.
entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
John Donne : modern version of No Man is An Island
Transference Entanglement.
This is an eventful -and sometimes fateful- situation where one person (or maybe a group) makes some other person (usually an expert) responsible for ones well-being and symptoms: especially their eradication or -at very least- their amelioration.
Lacan did not go far enough when he said the analyst is the subject who is supposed to know. Not merely knowledge is demanded of the professional. She is the subject who is supposed to satisfy desires, longings, expectations, and not just know them.
There are always at least three demands in transference entanglements. Often it is the joys, hurts, fears and hatreds of a suffering individual that largely determine the situation and fantasy properties attributed to the expert. Next there are also market influencers : like health care systems, insurance, popular media nostrums, university departments, therapy trainings, and professional associations. Third are the phantasies, ideas, and ideals coming from the therapist and his beliefs about the therapy he conducts.
Most theories about talking therapies hope that the experience or skills of the expert will reduce entanglement on his/her/its side. This ideal does not always attain fulfilment, because the expert imports a whole cache of personal entanglements into the talking session. Some traditions of psychoanalysis use the concept of counter-transference -which seems to me just one theoretical exploration of entanglement.
So as well as expertise, "love", "understanding", "sympathy", and a whole host of other needs are also demanded by sufferers. For example on the more sinister side : one customer might want to kill her therapist. Another has a keen desire to stalk or rape you. Maybe a third has a great need to humiliate your expertise and prove your therapy wrong as well as to adore you.
Very often therapists or analysts for their part see themselves as somehow "giving" understanding, love, knowledge or some other emotional or intellectual gift to their clients. This is especially the case amongst those who wish to train others.
Indeed phantasies about "empathy" and "training" or "supervision" are rife in therapy organisations; and they have retro-effects on their providers. So the whole problematic of giving and receiving intensifies entanglements even before a patient comes along.
An individual’s fantasies for hopes about love, desire, and satisfaction are like quanta. They are minute unconscious object-like events from which bigger psychic realities are constructed such as rewards, punishments, satisfaction, distress.
Externally they become entangled with what an individual calls reality. Not only private hopes or demands, but relationships, one own physicality, that of others, as well as the enveloping cosmos. These are deep entanglements often stirring in transferences. Does analysis help reconfigure one’s love-loss fantasies along with the delights and anguishes they bring?
If transference is a sort of entanglement, then maybe the aim of a therapeutic process is a disentanglement. This will be considered amongst the tragic effects of transference; for one must ask is disentanglement at all possible without entering into other entanglements elsewhere?
Sequence
These considerations were originally Zoom talks. The title of each discourse was
Mourning, Separations, and Losses
In Freud’s writings love, sexuality and loss implicate each other sometime asymmetrically, other times symmetrically.
Transference becomes less of a comedy and more tragic.
Some Hauntologies
Here begins an exploration of “endings” in analysis and psychotherapy. Maybe endings can be absolute or partial, as well ambivalent presences. Too there are imaginative scenarios which want to predict iii advance what a satisfactory ending might involve.
Dissolutions
The end of analysis as a dissolution/de-solution/desolation.
Reading
In the last series I mentioned how comedy, sleaze, and phallic fun may be found in transferences -both from the side of the client and that of the therapist. Now follows some tragedies.
As a prelude for this final series can you please read a very brave text I mentioned once before from Bryan Thorne. He is a man whom I have respected for decades, and a staunch promotor of the person-centred approach in the United Kingdom. Thorne gives an account of his therapeutic relations with a female client from his (the therapist's) view point. It is an exploration of "boundaries" in psychotherapy. This article became notorious for a while and earned its author much censure. However for me it is a wonderful introduction to the tragedies of transference and brave exposition of a therapists fantasies, entanglements, and ideals.
Next there is On the Sense of Loneliness by Melanie Klein. It is a short article published after her death. I found a copy of it on Google Read; the text is also to be found in the third volume her Collected Works. Written towards the end of her life, there are different versions of the Loneliness text in the Klein archives. She broached the topic in a number of lectures, as well as discussing it with colleagues like Bion. The evidence suggests that Klein was preparing to write an entire book -or substantial monograph- on the topic of loneliness.
My final recommendation from professional writers dates from an even earlier period. It is from Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality. Essay two is about infantile sexuality: please dip into this if you can. It is old fashioned and the style off-putting and of course everybody knows what Freud had to say anyway. These essays are reminders that when Freud and his colleagues wrote about sexuality, libido, instincts ..... they were not referring to adult sexualities, relationships, pornography or coupledoms. If you read these essays carefully they are about basic, crude, though complex forms of satisfaction, enjoyment, pleasure. Often these occurred preverbally, though when accompanied by sounds and vibrations, the sounds themselves were part of this eroticism and its lacks. It is my belief that contemporary therapies tend to sanitise, tidy, prematurely mature their clients. The existence and perdurance of atavistic satisfactions is needful in this situation.
Everybody will be able to recall novels and stories of their own about entanglements. My favourite for illustrating the tragic complexities of searching for an ultimate, complete, fulfilment is by Baron Corvo, otherwise known as Frederick William Rolfe in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Romance of Modern Venice. This text exits in a variety of editions and formats. An unexpected and amazing follow-up is offered by AJA Symons in The Quest For Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (New York Review Books Classics 2001).
My Preparation
General Literature
Lucy Foulkes: Losing Our Minds: What Mental Illness Really Is – and What It Isn’t Bodley Head 2021
Denise Riley: Time Lived without its Flow
Clair Willis : Learning to Grieve: A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead. New York Review of Books November 19, 2020 issue
Freudian Tradition
Sigmund Freud: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
see also the fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
Adam Phillips: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012)
Hauntology, Psychoanalysis, the living dead.
Didier Anzieu Freud's Self-Analysis (1987)
BBC Radio Four: The Green Lady in the Toilets 2020
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mj1m
Mark Fisher: Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014)
Stephen Frosh: Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (2013)
ibid : Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Studies in the Psychosocial 2019)
Suzanne O'Sullivan: The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness
Picador 2021.
Kate Summerscale: The Haunting of Alma Fielding 2020
Dissolutions
Peter Ackroyd: Poe: A life cut short. Chatto and Windus 2009
Jean Allouch Erotique du Deuil au Temps de la Mort Sèche. For an English translation of the introduction to Erotics of Mourning in Times of Dry Death
http://www.jeanallouch.com/pdf/226: mourning is not simply a work, it is also an act.
Jean Allouch: Lacan Love: Melbourne Seminars and others Works. 2007
Marie Bonaparte: Edgar Poe: étude psychanalytique. (2 Volumes 1933ff) there is also a very rare English translation dating from 1949 with an introduction by Freud)
Edgar Allan Poe: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. This is a short story dating from 1845. It is available online and in countless publications, The story contains references to mesmerism; some early readers deemed to be an account of an actual medical experiment. During the nineteenth century there was renewed fascination about mesmerism and its potential advantages as a cure. Eventually mesmerism disappeared into hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Contemporaries sometimes regarded the early Freud as a "curer" in this tradition.
Quotation from Jean Allouch
"Psychoanalysis has been submerged under a tsunami of different psycho-techniques; from psycho-logy, psycho-coaching and psycho-self-help, to psycho-tropic drugs, and so on and so forth. This, among others, is one of the reasons to consider that the method inaugurated by Freud, and duly subverted by the path followed by Lacan, has neither an assured continuation nor a certain future. Rather than being either didactic or exhaustive, our intention is to caution the reader. It has become clear that the symptom in psychoanalysis – jouissance and suffering – manifests itself when something does not work, when the imaginary cracks and it cannot any longer hold the realm of common sense; reality. This is something ignored both by the soul-managers and the soma-managers who, a contrario, and aided by some Lacanians, renovate and reinforce common sense, trying to suppress the symptom whilst simultaneously attempting to reject it.The multiple religious promotions of psycho-techniques, born out of it, are the attempts to return to the statu-quo-ante.Lacan used to repeat that life is like a river going from bank to bank, knowing nothing of itself. And it is in this same non-sensical river that the psychoanalyst, like the analysand, is up to his neck. The psychoanalytic method as such does not offer the consolation of religion, philosophy, or a Weltanschauung. It is for these reasons that a certain degree of reticence, if not scepticism, is not only welcome but also necessary when we are confronted with the Promethean popularity of psychoanalysis. Such recognition, or denigration, even when apparently addressed to psychoanalysis, often shows that the addressees are instead the different and varied aforementioned psycho-versions. Perhaps it is preferable, and also timely, to inaugurate the figure of the transference as the subject supposed not to know rather than the misused and abused aphorism of Lacan concerning the subject-supposed-to-know. This in fact would not be antithetical with the notion of the unconscious as a knowledge that is not known"
See http://www.jeanallouch.com
