EFFICACY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS BETWEEN SEXUAL AND SOCIAL

LEVIN Hugo

If something characterizes the practice of psychoanalysis in society, is the

presence of the psychoanalyst himself, as the real presence of someone who

is ready to do the work. Actually he is asked to give an answer about

"mental health" cuestions, confusing the limits between his work and the

medical activity, and sometimes mixing both knowledgements.

Suffering is considered a body ailment with an added psychic component. The

analyst is asked to segregate this excess, leaving free way for the medical

cure.

For medicine, illneses are the names given to the different tipes of

suffering, essential for the formulation of a correct diagnosis and treatment.

The problem appears when the medical cure fails. This responds in many

cases, to the resistance of the patient to leave his sick position.

This failure is the starting point for many alternative therapies, from the

most esoteric oriental doctrines, to the "hidden ciences", and the

incorporation of informatic tasks wich includes some added psychological

knowledges. The so called anorexia, bulimia, obesity, psychosomatic

illneses, are ways of naming things to create new buissnes for speciffic

operators to work over - a degradated form of medical specialists - , inside

the field ruled by medicine, and some "psy" practices, wich leades to an

experimentation with individuals like rats in a laboratory, coinciding the

being with the body and excluding the speaking subject.

There´s a place in society for the treatment of suffering, and other one

occupied by certain sociotherapeutic practices wich deals with sexuality.

One of them is sexual education, dedicated to divulgue knowledgement wich

would improve peoples life, in the way that "knowing more" about sex would

give them access to a forbidden "jouissance". Ignorance is supposed to leave people

unsatisfied giving place for sinthomes.

With the same supposition a sexology and its correspondant sexologycal

therapies is developed in the medical-psychological ambit, as a complement

of the education failures. Not discussing its efficiency, we can hear that

this tipe of practices would "improve the population´s health" , affirmation

that responds to the progress ideals demanded by the actual world. Its

effects, when there are so, are rudimentary susteined by the suggestion that

practices the one who is placed in the position of ideal.

We talk today about the medical character, whom we must distinguish from the

medical professional, indispensable for health attention and research.

It could happen, as it had some time ago in an event transmitted on t.v for

several days, that this character falls on a professional in activity.

The event was about a pensioned man who had enchained himself to a tree as a

claim for his situation. T.v cameras made a heroe of himself showing the

police trying to force him, and not being able to solve the problem. Finally

he is freed, not without showing some violent scenes with the congregated

people, and he is taken to hospital by ambulance.

After a publicity cut, the hospital director appears sitting at his desk,

with his impecable white uniform, saying in a soft voice full of authority

that "the sick person refuses to be examined".

The problem was solved. This individual, unjustly chased, victim of his own

condition, imposible to convince or reduce, and who had said some disturbing

things on t.v, is absolutly silenced by being treated like a sick person

where he has nothing to say.

The sexual load in the scene, goes trought the obcene exhibition of

violence, included the last scene where something of the impecable, without

sin, is subtly said by the character whose work is to put things in order.

Psychoanallysis also deals with sexuality, but from its own point of view, desire.

In front of this there are no "choices".

The analyst gives an answer getting away from the ideal position, because

his own analysis experience leads him to know that he is not indispensable.

The commitment he assumes with the subject who suffers keeps him away

from the position of whom is distant and can not be reached. This, demans a

dinamic thought, that plays a no less important function in this commitment,

and that is the protection of the freudian discovery of the unconscius and

it´s sexual reality.

The psychoanalytic speech reveals that the idea about what a man and a woman

are, is not based in an original reality fact, male and female gives name

only to an anatomic-physiological difference. On the other hand, the femenin

and masculin is something built through each one´s life, stating the fact

that men and women are not what they believe they are but what they

represent to the other.

Postulating the sexual difference as an originary reality, puts things back

to the biblic text, when taken as the truth about origin and not as a story.

Religion was never comfortable with sex, mostly when cuestioned about the

relation between passion and desire.

Nevertheless, the analyst is not excent of the prejudicies about sex, and

takes part of his commitment and effort not to persist in this confusion.

His formation must guarantee this.

In other way, literature and art gives constant prove of their advances over

prejudices, producing effects on society and in other speeches including

psychoanalysis.

Relating to religious speech, the film "The last temptation of christ" shows

a different way of understanding passion and desire. Another films, like

"Goodbye my concubine" or "The crying game" shows from different places the

incidence of transvestism in sexuality and the effects produced when, in

relation with desire, anatomy is cuestioned. Through the characters

vicisitudes we see the role that plays the phantasmatic trama in the

individual´s constitution.

Is interesting to remark, that transvestism today has also become a mediatic

and police task, means public, with all the difficulties this brings; not

being a minor problem when putting a gramatical article correspondant to the

word becomes necessary to name this situation. Problem without solution,

since languaje has only two ways of placing sex, and having no chance here

to appeal to the neutral. The interlocutor of a transvestite will always be

turbed, wherever he uses the femenin or masculin article, turbation that

reveals his "jouissance".

The analyst works where suffering of the individual arises from his mortal

condition and from his legitim aspiration to "jouir". The sinthomes are the

resultance and the instrument of work in this field is the word. For our

discipline the body is made of words, and the proposal is for the individual

to make them his, as an instrument of his own cure.

For this the analyst lends his word and offers his presence, implicating

himself in a different way in the listening of what the other comes to tell,

his attention is susteind by this way of implication.

Since its discovery, psychoanalysis found many ways of opposition. The most

persistent one is on the basis of what has been removed since Freud, and

comes from a medical-religious conception wich considers that getting sick

and "jouir" are two ways of evil. This idea makes men guilty and gives

place to tratments wich seem real sacrifitial exculpation practices,

simulated sometimes by quick, breaf and easy proposals.

We, analysts, have also contributed to make diffuse the limits and the reach

of our work. This obligue us to a permanent and rigorous critic, although

clinic and conceptual.

In certain psychoanalytic ambits was believed, and still is, that the

ensemble of rituals composed by the use of divan, time limits and fee, is

what mainly susteins the analitical cure. This gave place to a sort of

phsychic-orthopedy with its consecuent effects wich accentuates confusion.

From here results a neutral analist, more neutralized than neutral, who

confuses abstinence with inaction, reafirming a position of pasivity wich

can leade to indolence.

An analyst, wether he can not promise well-being and happiness, can not show

dispensable, and it is his responsability to participate activly in the way

taken by the one who has started analysis.

About time, extension of treatments is usually criticized, and is suggested

that during the cure treatment nothing of importance would happen in the

analizant. The thing is not waiting untill the end to get cured, but to get

cured to give an end.

This inversion of the logic, proposes a differnt way of analysis,

implicating -as Lacan teaches- that the sinthome is languaje whose word must

be freed.

The analitic act is nothing but a word act, the sexual act itself depends on

the effects of word, and so is that "jouissance". is arranged around a body,

composed further of its organic reality.

This presumes an ethic that doesn´t regulate thinking but act, putting the

analyst under its protection so that he would refrain each time he becomes

aware of wanting something for his patient, to hold up wich leades him to

objetivize the subject.

It is about reducing the inffluence of thing´s names, so that other names

can take place, relating the individual with the world, as Italo Calvino

suggests when he affirms that "..my operation consisted almost on taking

load off...taking weight to the structure of the story and languaje".

There is a definition by Lacan wich endures something of that lightness that

the italian writter transmits us, it says: " psychoanalysis is a practise

bias to feel better". Oblique direction whose way opens new shortcuts to

attenuate the uneasiness of human condition.

HUGO LEVIN