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.

 

RODNEY STREET COUNSELLING & PSYCHOANALYTIC PRACTICE

Appointments are available in Liverpool,

West Cheshire, & Online 

email: dr.simonfisher@icloud.com

fees 2022

single consultation £60.00p

four weekly appointments £160.00p

Rodney Street Counselling & Analytic Practice was founded by Simon Fisher in 2000. He has worked for universities, NHS Departments, private clinics, and community organisations. Born in Merseyside, he was educated in London, Israel, Texas, Germany, Italy, and Oxford. His initial academic passion was philosophy: especially hermeneutics and German philosophy. His interest in psychoanalysis began whilst he was a research fellow at Oxford in the 1970s and '80s. After much analysis and clinical training he returned to Liverpool in 1990 for clinical work.  After two decades in the NHS he became professional lead in psychotherapy. 

Now he is now working as an independent counsellor without ties to state, voluntary,  medical services, or employee assistance schemes.

ABOUT PSYCHOANALYSIS

Simon and Qtmir: Liverpool

Psychoanalysis, the original modern talking cure, was invented by Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer -a General Practitioner- and their patients. From these early days in Austria analysis expanded internationally until analyst and couch became the ultimate Hollywood cliche.

Psychoanalysis developed into different schools, but common to all is a dedication to spontaneous speaking and careful listening. Through analysis one may re-jig or re-programme oneself  by uncovering unconscious scripts and desires that determine expectations, behaviours, thinking, and phantasy.

What can-not be changed, re-cycled, or diverted needs to be accepted or mourned.

Because psychoanalysis is labour intensive for both customers and their professionals, it is rarely available for adults on the NHS.  Nevertheless contemporary psychoanalysis increasingly attracts people seeking an alternative to the generalized, structured, and highly regulated therapies promoted by health officials and governments throughout Europe.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century analysis remains a versatile and sophisticated counselling option for those who require unhurried careful listening.

Analysis may be long-term lasting several years. On the other hand, Freud’s counselling of Gustav Mahler occurred during an afternoon stroll in a leafy Viennese suburb.

SOME HAUNTOLOGOGIES 

Dame Edna: public domain

When I talked to you on Zoom last time, I was the recipient of an unusual and unsolicited experience. It was disconcerting. During my presentation the images or logos of each participant kept appearing for a while on my monitor, only to disappear, and then be replaced unbidden by another. As Dame Edna Everedge would say "Uncanny".

The format on my monitor was typical of a discussion forum, whereby the image of the person speaking, commenting, or asking a question, appears so that one can see, as well as hear, the speaker in question. But on this occasion I was the only one speaking. When you each appeared on my desktop, some were listening, others stroking cats, or smiling, or drinking from a mug, and occasionally grimacing. My dog Qtmir was present for the entire  transmission. Apart from the occasional yawn, he was largely unfazed by the experience and you did not get to see him at all. Neither -it seems- did anybody appreciate that I was approaching panic pitch: wondering if my technology was beginning to breakdown..... or something worse!!

Fragments, Chasms, Lacks

These events happened whilst I was introducing the seminar to Klein's musings towards the end of her life when she was preparing a major work on loneliness. Klein, a pluralist of sorts, was reacting against therapeutic ideals -such as integration- which were supposed to be attainable through popular therapies. Though Klein herself talked about "integration" for example in the famous child analysis book about Richard. As a result of her work with the boy, she believed there to be a greater integration between death and live drives in his daily living. The important word is "greater": it is a comparison between more and less..... not an absolute condition. Klein thought perfection at any level of analysis was a damaging aspiration, as well as being a dangerously punitive one, for both the therapy, customer, and retailer.

This has always given me some hope. At the very end of her life Klein was brave enough to say "look possums... I have never been able to get it all together" -or words to that effect. Nevertheless she staunchly believed that the analyses she received and later gave herself, where worthwhile.

I attempted to suggest how Klein's approach to a human being believes an individual to be fragmented from the outset. The claim is that humans begin life with desperate, and sometimes frighteningly volcanic and conflicting needs, that almost tear them apart and could well be termed "psychotic" . This set of experiences is projected outwards onto nature, caregivers, institutions so that the real itself becomes depressing, persecutory, threatening. For example, seeing random images of people on screen- like I did during the last seminar- might push me into thinking that I must be mad, the technology is attacking me, or the digits can read my unconscious!!! Was I becoming out of control? Maybe it was part of an CBT conspiracy against psychoanalysis. Be that is it may, there are more benign analogous experiences.  

Cats in Cheshire, as in some quantum theories, have a habit of being located in unexpected places at unexpected times; as well as the astonishing ability to fragment themselves -so that only a head or ear or smile or meow is available for public perception. Their comings, goings, traces, and tracks defy the normal laws or expectations that living beings are supposed to comply with. Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!  But the cat pointed out to Alice that his experience was very different from hers. 

Arriving in Wonderland Alice was utterly confused and bewildered. In desperation she thought the cat was supposed to know the rudimentary elements of geography and location in this country of wonders. She urgently needed information for her orientation there. So after asking which way she should go

`In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'
`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'

In an updated version of Alice (a video game no less) the cat's philosophy of life is distilled into a startling few lines:

Only a very few find the way, and most of them don't recognize it when they do. Delusions, too, die hard. Only the savage regard the endurance of pain as the measure of worth. Forgetting pain is convenient, remembering it... agonizing. But recovering the truth is worth the suffering and our Wonderland, though damaged, is safe in memory... for now.

This Cheshire Cat

a psychedelic poster, designed by Joseph McHugh 1967, California, US. Museum no. E.3796-2004. © Victoria and Albert 

This image is displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum's current exhibition of May 2021 

"Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser "

Please note: I am not suggesting that psychosis is some wonderful post-liberal life style option. 

What sunders, divides or fragments a Subject in Klein's theory is not a single lack or central lacuna (as some Lacanians would later teach very simplistically) but mass spectra of gaps, spaces, chasms -or what you will -between one's own internal experiences, emotions, and phantasies which may well be utterly unbridgeable. Here one's life ones life is constituted  in varying degrees of dissolution and deconstruction. The same is true of the outwardly constructed or projected world: disintegration threatens both one's internal and external worlds from birth onwards. 

This is how I approach the end of analysis, which was my reason for talking to you about Klein's final and unfinished pieces of work about loneliness.

Therapies may provide support, self-awareness, coping skills, promises of a liveable -if not successful- future: especially to those who wish to become professional therapists and analysts! But I doubt whether any amount therapy, analysis, or cognitive restructuring results in an absolute state that sets one up for life. The same goes for Lacan's recommendation that  "absolute difference"  is a sure recipe for avoiding upsetting entanglements or destructive "identifications" between therapists and their service users. In reality this apparently "absolute" state may only be partially and fleetingly attained. So when an analyst desires an absolute difference for her customers, she may well in fact be desiring something very similar to Melanie Klein's unsettling but unavoidable loneliness.

At the conclusion of a long analysis one of Melanie's own patients lamented  "the glamour has gone". Something that made life attractive, special, liveable, and worthwhile had disappeared during psychoanalytic therapy. Often phantasies, hopes, yearnings, ideals  -even about one's own favourite therapeutic technique- may  need to loose some of their glamour for an end or loosening up (ana-lusis) to occur.

Revenants and Hauntologies

The other evening I made myself watch the 2015 movie called Revenant starring Leonardo Di' Capri. It was the beginning an update of the traditional cowboy genre, whereby the American dream used to triumph over savagery. In this movie triumphalism and savagery are distributed a little more evenly in this movie so that baddies and goodies become entangled in a post-colonial revision. I did not particularly like the movie, though it was a welcome antidote  to the endless John Wayne movies I endured during childhood.

Tales about the living dead (or undead) are not new. The word Revenant originates from an Old French verb meaning to return. 

One such tale, dating from the twelfth century, recalls how a notoriously wicked man, killed his wife during a fit of jealousy. Though eventually given a religious burial it benefited him little, for issuing 

from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.

After a post-mortem killing spree of townsfolk,

snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames...

My first encounter with the word revenant was in an incredible work by the French analyst, Didier Anzieu. Relying upon published works by Freud -as well as unpublished manuscripts- he attempted to reconstruct the course of Sigmund's self analysis. Anzieu emphasised how a very young boy called Sigmund, thought himself to be very special to his mother, one might say her "favourite". His father Jakob was nevertheless the stronger competitor for Amelia's affections, despite being twenty years older than her. Archives suggest Sigmund also hated and despised Jakob for his weakness -particularly for what seemed cowardice towards anti-semitic bullying. The infant Freund, preferred mum to dad.

The word Anzieu uses for the spectre of Jakob in Freud's dreams, thoughts, and fantasies is revenant -precisely because his son, Schlomo, makes this image he created constantly return in dreams and dream-thoughts. Like the Ratman, he was haunted by his father. One could say that Jakob became Freud's symptom.

Haunted by the future?

Most zombies, vampires, revenants, golems, dibucks, ghosts, poltergeists come mainly from the past according to traditional fiction. Psychoanalysis too it would seem -particularly in its Hitchcockian version- is about an individual's past and infancy.

Recall the Bates home in Psycho. At one level -the ground floor- Norman is an ordinary human coming home after working in the motel. On the second floor he dialogues and argues with a bossy and threatening mother. But what is in the basement??? Perhaps you can tell me while I have a brief rest...........

I hope now to indicate how images, dreams, transferences, may visit from the future as well. 

In order to survive, particularly in a digital age, it is unavoidable to live in a world of immediacy. Though dominated by current demands, hopes, and anxieties; the immediacy demanded by digital technology allows only "compressed space " for future and past events. But unconscious processes -according to Freud- possess times of their own that studiously ignore clock and digital time.... or reconfigure them into weird patterns.

An example of temporal shifts -even in conscious life- is portrayed in the poetry and reflections of Denise Riley in Time Lived without its Flow where she writes about her new experience of time following the death of her adult son

A child’s time is 'quietly uncoiling inside your own', so when the child’s life stops, 'the purely cognitive violence of it' freezes the parent’s time, too

In the words of a Guardian reviewer

The “altered condition of life” Riley experienced was “the curious sense of being pulled right outside of time”. For two to three years after her son’s death, she felt that time was arrested – stopped short – and most of the book records her contemporaneous efforts to write about this state of “bright emptiness”

These descriptions of time without her son, should not be reduced to euphemisms about the trauma of bereavement. No the very texture of reality had changed so much that she was living in a "pocket" of time with its own tembre and characteristics.

My approach to being haunted by the future is indebted not only to Klein, but Mark Fisher a critic, author, and blogger known online as K Punk. His devastating article "Exiting the Vampire Castle" appeared in 2013 was quickly followed by Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. He firmly believed that mental health should not ever be detached from bodily health -as well as from current political and cultural configurations of living. If you read anything as a result of this course, I hope it will be the article by Melanie Klein and a piece from the Guardian by Mark Fisher called Why mental health is a political issue dated 2012.

The word hauntology is a neologism that works better in French than in English. Its two components are "haunt" and "ontology'. Something about being that won't let you go. Fisher's work highlights popular music and bands like Joy Division about which I knew nothing until reading this book. Historians of such post-punk music suggested it is haunted by a future that never took place. After the victory of the second world war there were hopes that the welfare state and a renewed moral commitment for the good of all classes -members of which had all been bereaved- would create a very new Britain. You've never had it so good and a new Elizabethan Age were its ideological slogans.

If you view the 2008 video called "Joy Division" there are explicit references to post war Manchester, Salford, Mansfield; which along with many other northern cities were to undergo slum clearances.Traditional communities were uprooted and transferred into concrete barracks: which themselves became havens of crime, drugs, ill health. Singing and performing in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, in which the concept of the social was being dismantled and abolished, singers like Curtis who himself began to suffer from epilepsy and manic-depressive states could not shake off this unfulfilled future. A haunting atmosphere is chillingly created in music and lyrics:

Someone take these dreams away,

that point me to another day,

a duel of personalities,

that stretch all true realities.

That keep calling me,

they keep calling me,

keep on calling me,

they keep calling me.

Where figures from the past stand tall,

and mocking voices ring the halls.

imperialistic house of prayer,

conquistadors who took their share.

That keep calling me,

they keep calling me,

keep on calling me,

they keep calling me.

Calling me, calling me, calling me, calling me.

They keep calling me,

keep on calling me,

they keep calling me,

they keep calling me.

Dead Souls

In post modernist eras, ecology and the need to achieve now weighs  heavily upon the "mental health" young people. It is hard to remain sane if your grand children and great grand children face devastation. 

An alternative to despair, melancholy, and haunted living is the desire to change the future -if and when- anger or aggression can be deflected from oneself and channelled elsewhere to create difference -albeit not perhaps an absolute difference.

And what shoulder and what art  

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?  10

And when thy heart began to beat,  

What dread hand and what dread feet?  

 

What the hammer? what the chain?  

In what furnace was thy brain?  

What the anvil? What dread grasp  15

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?  

 .....

Tiger, tiger, burning bright  

In the forests of the night,  

What immortal hand or eye  

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?  

 

Postscript :  Support and Knowledge.

Anxieties of disintegration at the ending of a prolonged therapy or analysis are very real. Indeed the very prospect of ending an ongoing talking therapy might intensify them. 

This particularly happens especially where the analyst is not so much seen as a support that allows an analysand to work, but rather as an absolute and enduring underpinning of everyday life. Should this occur, it  does not imply failure on the part of the user, provider, or therapy. It means rather that anxieties of disintegration are so pressingly urgent, that the individual needs to believe there will aways be an analyst available to shore-up ones structures .... like an architectural scaffold maybe.

Another tragic anxiety is that knowledge provided by analysis, theories, and therapies is not real. The analyst is supposed to know how you can best lead your own life, the solution to life's enigmas and challenges, how to live well; or even provide an answer to social and political discontents of the day. This is a need or demand for An Answer -if not The Answer. Here, like a believer, the desperately aching question is: to who else do I go -you have the words of eternal life?

These deep, persistent, or gnawing needs are not only present in clients or patients. They become all the more tragic when analysts, therapists, counsellors, or doctors believe themselves to actually dispense such commodities.

Some References

Didier Anzieu Freud's Self-Analysis (The International Psycho-Analytical Library ; No. 118) 1987

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

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures 2014

Adam Phillips Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life 2013

Slavoj Zizek On Norman Bates' House 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKH6FmPV1_o

Fort-Da

Making things, people, history, disappear and reappear

Freud's mediations on watching his tiny relative play with a cotton reel/Real are to be found in

Sigmund Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Penguin Modern Classics 2003)

It is worthwhile looking at the encyclopaedia articles such as NO Subject:

Fort!" and "Da!" are exclamations that Sigmund Freud heard his grandson Ernst utter while playing. This pair of words—meaning "Gone!" and "There!"—has become shorthand for repetition in early childhood, and for the primary processes that such behavior mobilizes. In psychoanalysis, allusions to fort/da refer to the second chapter of Beyond the PleasurePrinciple, where in a few celebrated pages Freud described and interpreted a game played by the little Ernst at the age of eighteen months. At the time, Freud was tackling the thorny problem of the compulsion to repeat in traumatic neurosis, and this digression into normal childhood experience was in fact meant to help contextualize the question. Ernst was a "goodlittle boy," manifested no particular symptoms, was rather calm by disposition, and "never cried when his mother left him for a few hours." But he "had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed. . . . As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out 'o-o-o-o,' accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word 'fort."' Freud interpreted this behavior as a way of obtaining satisfaction by causing things to be "gone." A short time later he observed the child playing with a reel that had a piece of string tied around it: He would toss the reel away from him to where it could no longer be seen, before pulling it back into view and hailing its reappearance with a gleeful "Da!" ("There!"). Freud also noticed that the boy would utter his "o-o-o-o" sound with reference to himself—notably when, by crouching down below a mirror, he made his image "gone." Freud stresses the fact that the fort part of the game was much of the time sufficient unto itself, and was "repeated untiringly" by the child (1920g, pp. 14-15). This observation leads to a number of fundamental questions: Are we confronted here by a method of mastering a painful experience by reproducing it oneself in an active manner, as children so often do, for example when playing frightening games? Or is the child literally taking revenge for the treatment visited upon him by redirecting it onto the other, or onto himself? In the end, the answer is not of any great consequence, for the real problem is the contradiction, which here is seen to arise very early, between the compulsion to repeat and the pleasure principle. How is it that satisfaction is to be derived from repeating actions that have been sources of unpleasurable feelings? The great interest of this discussion of Freud's is that it sums up and condenses his subsequent exploration of the issue of the repetition compulsion. This very early children's game shows this compulsion to be one of the fundamental processes of the psyche, with two enigmatic aspects, one making manifest "mysterious masochistic trends" that resist all attempts at analysis (p. 14), the other revealing an irreducible primordial violence that takes an especially virulent form, according to Freud's account, when little Ernst, at thirty months, throws aside a toy and unequivocally identifies it with his absent father who has been "sent to the front" (p. 16). https://nosubject.com/Fort-Da

Stephen Frosh Gone for good: Charting three generations of psychoanalysis. The Times Literary Supplement https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/anna-sigmund-ernest-freud-psychoanalysis/ 

This is a review by Frosh published in the TLS. He was reacting to a book about the sad later life of Freud's little grandson, Ernst..... the child whose game so intrigued Freud. Apart from Anna, he was the only other member of the Freud family circle to become an analyst.

For Alice Riley see John Self in the Guardian 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/12/time-lived-without-its-flow-denise-riley-selected-poems-review

ALICE

One could say that Fort-Da is one of the everyday "laws" of the real world of Wonderland. Quotations are taken from Lewis Carrol's famous book.

The other passage quoted is from Alice: Madness Returns a video game directed by American McGee, developed by Spicy Horse and published by Electronic Arts on June 14, 2011 in North America, June 16 in Europe, and July 21 in Japan for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Madness Returns crosses genres such as action-adventure, platforming, and fantasy horror.

Madness, however, was already part and parcel of the cat's discourse before well before Madness Returns.

Interesting though is the question of what madness meant for Carrol and the later video game.