DISSOLUTIONS: Bits, Pieces, Alternative Endings

Alternative Endings

 

Margaret Atwood, famous for  "The Handmaids Tale,"  decades ago wrote a short essay called "Happy Endings". It was about a couple: John and Mary

This short writing is fascinating. There is not just one ending, but several alternatives. And you get to chose the one you most fancy. Nevertheless when it comes to endings, writes Atwood,

You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.

The only authentic ending is the one provided here:

John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

There have been dozens of ideas about what an ending might be like for a psychoanalysis. Moreover there is no universally recognised methodology known to me for counting the number of analysands that do complete. Lecturing in the early 1950's, when analysis was still prestigious in Europe and America, Michael Balint estimated the number of international analysands completing each year to be somewhere between 200-400!

Probably there are as many endings as there have been analysands. But why should all analyses end alike anyway? It seems to me that demands to codify, phase, "stage" or provide some checklist, do's and don'ts, or indicators for an ending of analysis arise, more often than not from pressures external to the analysis. True, some analysands want to know at their very first session when an ending will take place and what they will have achieved when it arrives. In my experience many such people do not stay around for very long! But if they do, the entire analysis might well be dominated by this worrying set of questions. At the end of their analysis, the subject might exclaim "what happened to my analysis" and start another.

Contrariwise, other therapies impose a time-limit at the very beginning. This is customary in Cognitive Analytic Therapy for example, which justifies the procedure on therapeutic grounds, such as claiming it to be an incentive towards change and moving on. In other words it methodologically discourages patient dependency and promises health economists a quick, cost-effective turnover. Freud did this at least once in his career and Ferenczi regularly for a while. Such procedures are commonplace in regimes where supply, cost, and demand are urgent preoccupations -like national health schemes, employer assistance programmes, private medical insurance, consumer counselling, or life event coaching.  All this is quaintly enshrined in the odd word "modality", which for me is primarily a musical concept, second a logical term, and only in third place is it something to do with trendy fashion. 

In an online article Owen Hewitson notes another irony about endings:

Leaving aside the question of its ends, many people who consult a psychoanalyst – perhaps any form of therapist – do not stick around long enough to even begin. Indeed, the majority of those who come to a psychoanalyst for an initial consultation never come back.

Words like end, ends, ending are richly complex signifiers. They can mean goals, purposes, achievement, completion -as well as the act of finishing.  Older analysts, influenced by medicine, preferred the word termination. But in modern times this word is associated with procedures like "termination of pregnancy" or "termination of life" which have their own ethical imperatives and moral baggage.

Frequently discussions about "endings" are therefore related to clock-time, rates, and money. Perhaps inevitable, but in my own experience of psychoanalysis "time" is one of those everyday coordinates that became transformed, enriched, more complex. Pearl King, an analyst in the British independent stream, shared this perspective too.

The analytic relationship and what happens within it, is both within Time and beyond Time. It is also out of Time. I suppose that we are dealing with a paradox. The Psychoanalytic relationship takes place in time, and keeping time, with its intimate link with space, and therefore with place, (which links with togetherness and with separation) has to be acknowledged in the present of the session. Yet according to Freud we have to be able to work and to see our patients within the context of their whole life span. Pearl King 1996 

More often than not, a judgement of sorts falls upon people who fail to achieve goals -whether set by themselves, analysts, significant others, employment agencies paying fees, or psychotherapy training organisations.. Several times I mentioned Melaine Klein in these talks. She was convinced that an analysis did not end -or rather failed- if the analysands concerned did not become fully practising heterosexuals. This was a commonplace goal in all psychoanalytic organisations throughout the 1950's, 'sixties, seventies and beyond; despite the fact that even Freud never went as far as this. As late as the 1990's serious professional conferences were discussing whether gay men should be admitted to trainings in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Becoming an analyst or child analyst was inconceivable for gay men! One concession allowed by these analytical organizations was this: they had no objection to gays becoming fee-paying patients. But never colleagues apparently.

The easiest statement about ending an analysis is that it occurs when analyst and analysand stop meeting. This is a factual and descriptive statement. But it is rather empty and says little about hows, whys, wherefores, outcomes. These meta-questions refer to those "central bits" that Atwood claims are the most challenging -and absorbing- task facing any novelist. The descriptive statement is also a little simplistic. I remember a former NHS user turning up at my private practice without any booking. He was desperate to talk, despite having finishing over three years previously. During the past three years a first-class degree was obtained in a technical pursuit, which had incredible employment prospects. The individual concerned attended just twice on that visit. For decades  now I have neither seen nor heard anything more from the individual concerned. Which was session was the end? What was his end or ends?

During several decades of involvement in the psychoanalytic scene, I have known several analysts who opted for more analysis after a formal ending or even after being processed by the sometimes gruelling Lacanian pass system. There were others, practitioners of psychoanalysis for a very long time, who seemed to have endings that are "ongoing", "interminable"  "indefinitely delayed", "hypothecated", or "resumable". Such instances of apparent endings followed by resumptions, come from my personal observations during several decades of involvement in this scene. Manifestly they contradict another official criterion for satisfactory psychoanalytic endings which was championed during the fifties and sixties of the last century -namely irreversibility. Nevertheless, even professionals appear to need shoring up from time to time -if not permanently.

But why should an analysis or psychotherapy end at all ...especially if the participant wants more? Such an individual may be a valuable asset to any therapist as well as simultaneously reducing costs upon scarce state or social services. Less facetiously, but equally pertinent, is the issue of why a professional operating with talking therapies should even introduce topics about endings if a fee paying client wishes not to discuss them?  

As previously noted, it is regularly the demand for short-term treatments that forces professionals to discuss endings or set dates for an ending at the very first meeting. But in the private market presumably, one could continue listening indefinitely......... or until external events intervene in some irrevocable way such as disruptions to employment status, organic changes for better and worse, strikes, divorce, birth of a child, death of a relative and more. In my experience it is intervening and unforeseeable events such as these that, more often than not, become harbingers of a finishing.

To complete this section, I need to note one extremely pervasive trend influencing ends or endings: namely the commodification of training. In the article previously mentioned, Hewitson refers to two contemporary Lacanian trainings which claim prospective analysts need a minimum of four years in analysis. This particular commodification is due to a massive shift in psychoanalytic paradigms. Once it was medicine that provided the main professional paradigm for analysts. You will remember how Anna Freud, though never becoming a doctor, was made to attend medical school for a while by her father. Older colleagues of mine, still living, were encouraged to change degree courses from arts subjects to medicine in preparation for their future careers. During basic medical training, as well additional training in psychiatry, these people not only received an ongoing analysis, but a training analysis as well -if their candidature was accepted. In the United States it was once almost impossible to become an analyst without possessing a medical degree. 

Now this four years requirement commended by some UK trainings fits unsurprisingly well into existing paradigms promoted by national psychotherapy councils. It also dovetails neatly into the academic training structures required for clinical psychology or counselling psychology registrations. One could almost say, like treatments, academic commodification has turned preparation into a "mode" of training geared towards  particular marketable "skills". Presumably, after submitting to such minimalist regimes and paying their fees, a candidate feels entitled to call her/him/a self an analyst and licensed to operate in that mode. Maybe this is inevitable. Maybe psychoanalysis is always adapting itself into something that can always be sold!  Maybe the most successful application of psychoanalysis is market advertising! But these repackaged profession is something I would not personally wish to buy..... or sell... or necessarily call its mass produced end-product "an analyst". 

Finally there are genuine instances in which people are unable to bring their analyses to any ending during clock or digital time. In previous eras they were termed unanalysable, psychotic, disordered, or perverse. Most of these words may seem to be a little pejorative to contemporaries -being laden with moral suspicions directed towards anOther. If somebody does not complete an analysis in a way you approve of, the failure can always be accounted for by the abuse of pseudo-clinical names or disparaged in some other way. If it is about anything, psychoanalysis has to do with desires, hopes, and phantasies which are not fully consciousness or admitted or talked about by subjects. How is an analyst then supposed to know in advance about the whys and wherefores of analytical processes that have not yet occurred unless he or she has become a fortune-teller or clairvoyant?

Elasticity and Exhaustion

 Bungee jumping at Victoria Falls  public domain

  

Writing about The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique in 1928 Sandor Ferenzci wrote this  "The analyst, like an elastic band, must yield to the patient's pull, but without ceasing to pull in his own direction, so long as one position or the other has not been conclusively demonstrated to be untenable". This is his own version of what "dialectic" could be in psychoanalytic technique.

Ferenczi's use of the term "elasticity" is primarily related to his experiments with three types of technique: active, relaxational, and mutual. A fourth innovatory technique should also be included for the sake of completion. This is analyst formation. He believed contemporary preparation for practice was somewhat trivial and too truncated, to serve as any realistic formation for professionals wishing to work analytically. To this extent he advocated fiercely another "fundamental rule" of psychoanalysis namely, that nobody should practice psychoanalysis unless the professional in question had received as full a personal analysis as possible. This was -and still is- a proposition adopted near-universally by psychoanalytic associations. I say "near" universally because a number of modern self-founded associations for training that gloss this requirement in both theory and practice by promoting truncated analyses or the purposes of retailing trainings.

His motives for experimentation with technique were varied. Chief amongst them was a drive to make psychoanalysis more clinically effective, briefer, and more affordable in an era where there were few national health schemes.  Secondly there was his clinical attraction to patients who were incredibly complex and demanding. He proudly took referrals from analysts who could not handle their customers. Whereas most analysts confined themselves to mainstream neurotics -like Freud's hysterics and obsessives- Sandor Ferenzci's list included significant numbers of people with psychosis, personality disorders, perverse traits, and criminals. To support the analyses of such people, analysis needed to be stretched in another sense. Not only the traditional patient type needed to be stretched, but the content and style of the analysis, as well as its atmosphere, needed to be stretched too. Balint defused the elasticity debate a little, arguing that a large element of what Ferenczi called elasticity was  clinical "tact" and knowhow gleaned from listening hundreds of demanding analysands. But that was a little misleading.

Analysis of complex clients, he argued, sometimes demanded full reconsideration of pre-Oedipal events. So he and his colleagues welcomed the occurrence of "regressions" during clinical sessions.This tradition was continued in the United Kingdom by emigre analyst Michael Balint, for whom it was a viable alternative to Klein's work with primitive states (but without utilising her regime of heavy interpretation). When dealing with such clinical phenomena members of the Hungarian School contested that the atmosphere of the analytical setting needed drastic alteration: ..... so that contemporary analysts should create a more welcoming relaxed environment than they were wont. For more profound observations about this, it is best to read Ferenzci's article about unwanted children and their death drives.

In this context it should be recalled that many of Freud's published case histories were of limited outcome, if not complete failures. But he tried to learn from them. It is now obvious that his actual clinical practices often veered  dramatically from recommendations in his official writings. One might say that despite what he wrote, Freud's position during the analytic hour was somewhat very elastic, if not downright wild at times.

Ferenzci became, almost by default, the international analyst of last resort and obstinately persisted with his adaptations of technique to match his clientele. Freud himself began to warn his former analysand, friend, and co-founder of international psychoanalysis, that though his theory and practice originated from highly commendable motives, they were nevertheless dangerous to both himself, his patients, as well as the the future wellbeing of psychoanalysis. The changing professional and personal differences between Sigmund and Sandor is best studied with the aid of the three volumes of correspondence between the two men.

Another factor in Ferenzci's clinic was his markedly personal need to rethink and revise -nearly continuously- what transference is supposed to be, along with its benefits, limitations, and failures. Though seemingly obsessive, something similar occurs with Lacan who also found his own analyst and contemporary normative techniques somewhat undigestable. Ferenczi's own experience of transference in his own psychoanalyses seems to have left him unsettled, disappointed, wanting more. His first spell of analysis consisted of several intense phases with Freud -the first of which was separated from the others by the First World War.

His second analysis was with the "wild analyst" Georg Groddeck, a private physician and independent healer, famous for his controversial volume The Book of the IT. For a period at least Freud called him a good friend of psychoanalysis. Other senior analysts like Max Eitingon consulted him with Freud's blessing. Like Sandor, Eitingon was also a member of Freud's inner committee responsible for directing international psychoanalysis. Similarly Eitingon's own analyst had been none other than Freud himself and equally as brief. Between 1908 and the following year, this analysis spanned just five weeks.

Commemorative Postage Stamp of the Georg Groddeck Association

Ferenczi's third and final analysis was with Elizabeth Severn -a patient with whom he conducted mutual analysis for a while. His work with Severn, was probably the most important for his own personal therapy and inspired a number of his essays on trauma as well as his notorious clinical diary. In Freud's estimation Severn was an "evil genius" of psychoanalysis.

Severn, was a working American psychotherapist who came regularly to Budapest for  chunks of intensive analysis with Ferenczi. A number of her own psychotherapy clients went to Budapest with her, forming a somewhat intense "American psychoanalytic enclave" in which everybody talked freely about their emotional problems, the course of their analyses, as well as the shortcomings or heroisms of their analyst. It sounds to me a little like an hyper-extended training weekend. Nevertheless Severn being a self-employed female with no inherited wealth, needed fees from these well-heeled Americans to finance her trips to Hungary.

Before mutual analysis began with Severn, her analysis seems to have become moribund, but with this new technique it began flourishing when her severe -and almost paranoid- distrust of her analyst began to ease. To use Balint's phrase "a new beginning" of her analysis dawned. Like Thorne, in the article I have mentioned often in this series, Ferenzci began working almost without boundaries during his experiments with the technique of mutual analysis. He met Severn for analytic sessions several times a day, at nights, and weekends. She even went on brief holidays with Sandor and Madame Ferenzci. It was perhaps for this intensive pattern of working, that Ernest Jones put the rumour around that Ferenczi could no longer hold professional boundaries and had become psychotic towards the end of his life. In fact he was suffering from pernicious anaemia: an illness which eventually killed him. Along with his stretching of traditional techniques and the traditional analytic clientele, Jones insinuated that Ferenczi was simultaneously stretching himself beyond the point of physical collapse into paranoid psychosis.

Ferenzci and Madame Ferenzci with Severn Public Domain

It is not surprising that Fernenzci canvassed the idea that exhaustion was an indicator that an analysis was approaching  termination. As in the recent pandemic, there are doctors, nurses, therapists who were greatly admired for their dedication above and beyond the call of public duty. This situation becomes insidious when such altruism becomes demanded or expected daily -whether by patients, national health managers, and of course oneself. Of course one must never be blind to the fact that all clinical work has its own jouissance which may include deathly pleasures and destructive actions. But even Ferenzci's clinical altruism at time became exhausted, forcing hims to recognise that he, and perhaps his clients, had talked enough. With Severn, Ferenzci seems to have both benefited and then exhausted the possibilities of mutual analysis. He then encouraged Severn to resume regular psychoanalytic technique about which she was initially a little ambivalent.

For Ferenzci exhaustion involved having

• thoroughly explored all available options many times and in considerable detail
• worked through new perspectives or perceptions gained in analysis during several cycles of talking sessions
• become fatigued, fed up, or physically and emotionally drained.

Ηe hoped his clients would have reciprocal perceptions and feelings. 

After resuming the couch and the more traditional technique, Severn's analysis was terminated by Ferenzci's own death. She departed Budapest to be with her daughter, mourning her friend, analyst, and colleague, as well as the unscheduled ending of her psychoanalysis.

Dissolutions:

dissolution/de-solution/desolation

I conclude this seminar with a somewhat austere restatement of Lacan -though it is near impossible for anybody to generalise about Jacques Lacan and his teachings.

There is no Lacanian system: albeit admittedly there are oft-repeating themes throughout his oeuvre. Nevertheless there is no whole. His works are patchworks joined together in sometimes ingenious ways, but on other occasions left fragmentary.....more suggestive than rigorous. He was a great teacher and performer, rather than a systems integrator.

Like many pre-1940 analysts, he had been educated in Greek and Roman classics. When he lectured on transference or the ethics of psychoanalysis, the traditions of Greek tragedy and comedy were paramount to his expositions. Freud's famous tragic hero was from Ancient Greek drama was Oedipus. Lacan instead chose a female character who was "daughter" of Oedipus; a woman called Antigone.

Oedipus fathered two daughters Antigone and Ismene, as well as two sons named Eteocles and Polynices. After Oedipus' death, it was agreed that each son would take the throne of Thebes in rotation annually. At the end of the the first year Eteocles, the elder bother, refused to step down from the throne so Polynices, the younger prince banished to exile, recruited mercenaries to lay siege to Thebes. The infamous Seven against Thebes became a tragic play in its own right. In short during the bloody rout of the city and its people, the two brothers successfully killed each other.

Capaneus scales the city wall of Themes in a red-figure Neck-amphora attributed to the Caivano Painter, ca. 340 BC, Public Domain

Now lacking any legitimate male ruler, a more distant member of the royal family called Creon became king. This new king's first command was a state funeral in Eteocles' honour. The corpse of the disgraced Polynices by contrast was ordered to be left unburied outside the city walls, so as to rot in public and become prey for animals and raptors. Anybody daring to disobey that order was to be killed by the military. This edict was a great affront to the dignity of any family.... especially the survivors of an ancient royal house. Antigone after much introspection decided to uphold traditional family law and break the new law of the new king. She undertook a ritual burial for her brother by scattering earth on his exposed corpse.

When this disobedience was discovered, Creon the new king was outraged and imprisoned Antigone along with her sister Ismene, -despite the fact that Anigtone was due to become his daughter in law. Creon's son Haemon not surprisingly pled with his father to release his bride-to-be, but in vain. Though Ismene was eventually released, Antigone was condemned to a living death -by being incarcerated alive in a cave far from the city so that the guilt or pollution caused by this disgraceful punishment should not contaminate Thebes and enrage gods.

Though Creon soon regretted his imperious actions, it was too late to change fate. Antigone was already dead in her cave. His son too had committed suicide because of his fiancé's cruel and  disgraceful death. So it is a much changed King who mournfully returns to Thebes only to find yet another horror. Upon hearing of her son's death Creon's wife had already killed herself.

When Lacan writes about the situation of a former analysand being helpless or desolate after the dissolution of an analysis, it is imperative to recall Antigone. She dies alone in a cave, her lover committed suicide, her future mother in law dead too.  Nevertheless Antigone choose which law to obey and adhered to that choice and her desires. This is utter nonsense by modern standards -one must be mad to die over a funeral- but for Antigone it was a matter of life and death, of ethics, of integrity, and valour.

When he talked about his hopes for people ending an analysis, Lacan expected them to be able to assume their own ate. Ate is what the heroine Antigone did. She desires an action, acts on it, performs it, and refuses to disown it come what may. Not surprisingly, Ate in Classical Greek includes luck, fate, delusion, infatuation, blind folly, rash action and reckless impulses which may lead people to ruin!! 

Now Lacan admired people like this. He hinted one should be prepared to face desolation like Antigone in her cave when analysis ends. Completing analysands need to know, experience, and fully understand, there is nobody -and no phantasy, no transference- to help or rescue you from yourself. This admittedly austere take on life after the end of analysis; yet was not meant to be literal, but rather metaphorical I would suggest.

The aim of analysis here, is not happiness, cure, recovery, fun, healing, experience or anything beneficial or even useful. The aim and end of analysis is your own personal truth or fate and your full acceptance -or identification- with your own lot in life. To this extent the only end of an analysis can be "absolute difference"

This was the understanding of analysis -and its end- that I adopted during my own trajectory through psychoanalysis and beyond. I utterly, accept, however, it is not an end attractive to every one and appears pretty bleak.

However, there is another variation on this theme that appears much later in Lacan's work which notes how art, especially literature, -along maybe with song, music, and dance as well- can support the desolation and transform it a little:

I'm in pieces, bits and pieces

Since you left me and you said goodbye

(I'm in pieces, bits and pieces)

All I do is sit and cry

(I'm in pieces, bits and pieces)

You went away and left me misery

(I'm in pieces, bits and pieces)

And that's the way it'll always be 

See the Dave Clark Five

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brXhBHRO_EM

Some Reading

Margaret Atwood 

Happy Endings 1983.

https://www.napavalley.edu/people/LYanover/Documents/English%20123/English%20123%20Margaret%20Atwood%27s%20HappyEndings.pdf

Michael Balint

Changing Therapeutical Aims & Techniques in Psychoanalysis Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1950/ 31:117ff

On the Termination of Analysis as above 197ff

New Beginning and the Paranoid and the Depressive Syndromes Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1952/ 33:214-224

Carlo Bonomi 

Flight Into Sanity: Jones's Allegation Of Ferenczi's Mental Deterioration Reconsidered.

International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 80/ 507-542 1999

Sandor Ferenzci

6 Final contributions to the problems and methods of psycho-analysis. (Mosbacher, Trans.). USA  Basic Books on Psychiatry 1955. The following chapters:

The elasticity of psychoanalytic technique. 

The unwelcome child and his death instinct

The problem of the termination of the analysis

G. W. Groddeck

The Meaning of Illness: Selected Psychoanalytic Writings Including Correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Hardcover 1977

Das Buch vom Es: Psychoanalytische Briefe an eine Freundin was first published  in 1922 possessed an unusual structure. Each chapter was a letter addressed to a female friend: it is available in many English editions. Equally valued by European analysts was his novel of 1921 Der Seelensucher. Ein psychoanalytischer Roman is also available in English.

Owen Hewitson

What Does Lacan Say About… The End, and Ends, of a Psychoanalysis I & II ?  https://www.lacanonline.com/2012/01/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-end-and-ends-of-a-psychoanalysis-part-i/

Pearl King

What has happened to Psychoanalysis in the British Society?

https://independentpsychoanalysistrust.uk/articles/what-has-happened-to-psychoanalysis-in-the-british-society/ 1996

Melanie Klein

On the Criteria for the Termination of a Psycho-Analysis http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Klein-On-the-Criteria-for-the-Termination-of-a-Psycho-Analysis.pdf  1950

Jacques Lacan

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII Paperback 1992

Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII Hardcover – 1 Sept. 2015

Joyce and The Sinthom Seminar 23 edited and translated by C. Gallagher 

http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-23-Joyce-and-the-Sinthome-Part-1.pdf

The Sinthome - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII ed.Miller, trans. Price, 2016

Library of Congress  

Symposium about Sandor Ferenzci and Elizabeth Severn in The Evil Genius of Psychoanalysis  Library of Congress 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1_7df7ReE

Martha C Nussbaum 

The Fragility of Goodness: Luck And Ethics In Greek Tragedy And Philosophy. Paperback 2001 

John Rickman 

The Criteria for the Termination of an Analysis  Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1950/ 31:200ff

After-words

dissolution/de-solution/desolation

I chose this particular signifying sequence quite a while ago. 

It has long been a habit of mine to spend a few months in Italy every: usually a few weeks in Spring and another period during the Autumn.One visit occurred in the the February 2019. 

The recent Christmas of 2018 makes the funeral of my 95 year o. This was the chief reason for varying my pattern and going to Italy earlier than spring. I needed time alone in a place I loved.

Each day Italian tv news channels brought ever increasing coverage of Covid infections. Living just south of Naples, the nascent problem initially seemed far enough away for ordinary Neapolitan life to go on. Within a few weeks, things had changed so much and I had returned home earlier than planned

As soon as I returned, a flareup of asthma prompted doctors to  advise me to isolate myself at the end February (2019). So what had been ordinary, everyday, life was not available any more .....and for millions of other people too. In my thirties I was professionally involved in early the Hiv/Aids crisis. This had prepared me to understand how often medical science can lag behind the advances of a clever virus.

I suppose the death of my father, the beginnings of an international pandemic, and  "self isolation" brought to mind this account of endings found in Lacan.  

When I checked the word desolation in an online English Dictionary, this message greeted my eyes after choosing to reject all:

"People Born 1940-1970 (With No Life Insurance) Should Claim This Benefit In July 2021"

This piece of unsolicited information came from a sponsor called "Quote SearchDeals", enquiring what my life would be like if could have a £200k life insurance policy for just £10.00p per month. This sponsor also left all sorts of marks, links, punctuations, formatting instructions, and other garbage on this blog which took me ages to eliminate.

In retrospect I am glad about this because it allowed me to expand what desolation may refer to:

1. the action of desolating

2. grief, sadness

3. loneliness

 4. devastation, ruin

The automatic interactions of signifiers (words) and market-dominated technology caused a considerable and frustrating diversion. My normal pattern of writing became almost obliterated by words and operational technologies that I could not control. So as well as the four dimensions of desolation noted by Webster, others were forthcoming.  Would this communication become utterly annihilated at an advanced stage of completion. I other feelings and words were coming to mind: anger, frustration, curiosity, lostness, bewilderment. Might my entire blog be obliterated completely??

This may seem overdramatising an everyday occurrence: but this is what my mini-self analysis revealed in terms of concepts and feelings. They were very real to me and urgent,  though their time-span now seems evanescent.

I hope this anecdote will help to convey just two elements of my appropriation of Lacan's thoughts about endings.

First of all there are real things happening in and around me over which I have little control. Like the appearance of the life assurance advert on my computer screen, my dad's death, the onset of an intentional epidemic. Living through, with, and in these desolations full-on (without consolation of magical beliefs about medical science or the abilities of politicians) is a sort of desolation. It becomes a "castration" in Lacan's sense, when phantasies flee and the real devastates with its terrorising presence. 

Second, Lacan is chiefly celebrated as the analyst of desire rather than an analyst of defence. It seems to me that an analysis may proceed in either direction. A great deal of autobiographical testimony would be necessary in order to discuss how the directions of each trajectory might differ. Lacan himself realised the craziest of delusions may often be consoling, strengthening, aids for living and defensive in its most enabling sense. Sinthomes in short.

 Come and go what may, both desire and defence discover their limitations, contradictions, incompatibilities, in pleasures or unpleasures of love, death, others, and thinking about one's biographical reality.