THE ANALYST IN FORMATION

MARTICORENA Alberto

Psychoanalysis is the practice of a discourse that puts an ethic into activity. In the contingency of an analysis the analyst maintains a semblant of a that calls a letter as the rest of the existence of the unconscious.

Among the questions that open these statements, one of them is that of the formation of the analyst as a condition for the maintanence of the practice and the field. This formation comes to pass in specific cultural times and conditions, and I propose to consider two precise moments indicated by two texts: Can the laymen practice psychoanalysis? (Pueden los legos ejercer el psicoanálisis?), by S. Freud (1926) and Of the Psychoanalytical Discourse (Del Discurso Psicoanalítico), a conference given by J. Lacan in Milan (1972).

Because of the situation that Freud´s work has in the history of the psychoanalytical movement, we know that his spokesmen were not only representatives of university and judicial states in Viena, whom he proposes to distinguish between quackery and the laymen. This message is principally directed to the members of the analytical societies.

The Freudian procedure cuts one of the lines of resistence to psychoanalysis, that of the medical knowledge, that of the body that makes the medical knowledge, another body than that of the psychoanalisis. The polemic responds, as Freud warns, to a new situation, but the arguer is too judicious, he forgets the novelty. Does it falls under the repression of the Other? The exclusion of the particularly differential that advances the analytical discourse is evident with respect to the other discourses; this do not want to know anything about desire and jouissance. Freud saves two capital ideas from his theory, the one of the "beyond the pleasure principle" and the one of "death instincts". Could this be one reason for the failure admited in the Epílogo?

This becomes a problem for the formation of the analysts as it leads to psychoanalysis and analyses in those who are formed, to be reduced to poor knowledge, religious and dogmatic, worse than that of the universitarian. If the jouissance is not situated and worked on in regard to what concerns the speaker, it is repressed by the Amo discourse, and it returns in symtoms. Among these we find the analytical institution and the medical and psychological deviations of the psychoanalisis.

The patient who shares all of the prejudices of his (and I add: our) environment, has no reason to give us more credit than our critical scientists. (S.Freud)

What is "to practice psychoanalysis" in an afterwards that I seeks to punctuate: an afterwards with Lacan and with Foucault, who proposed, from two different places, resources that are convenient for bringing up-to-date the treatment of the problem.

The capitalistic reality and the capitalistic subject are found in good relation with science and technology and the discourses that are sustained by its knowledge (medical, psychological, economical, political), "partners" of the Amo discourse in the rejection of that conflictive truth which is castration.

Appreciation is the form that the cause of desire in the extension takes. The goods produced do not facilitate a jouissance that could detain the production, nor close the place of the cause that the capitalistic economy of the beginning of the century maintained as an ideal enticement. The imperialistic expansion is its historic form: far beyond any frontier the cause of the desire will be found.

Capitalistic articulation ... has its roots in the Amo discourse. (Sem. 18)

The Amo discourse sustains the being in relation with the accumulation (of knowledge, of goods, of gains, of jouissance) always to be completed, as is evoked by Lacan ....continue working, work must not stop. In no event is there an occasion for desire. The desires....let them wait. (Sem. 7). The medical-psychological knowledge accomodates itself very well to this waiting.

Each historic moment establishes different strategies to watch over and reveal the lack (castration).

Our present Amo discourse (end of the century and of the millenium, end of the ideologies, new forms of the malaise in the culture, new pathologies, scientific advances, etc.) take on other characteristics. It has suffered a mutation that at first Lacan proposed as a capitalistic style (Sem. 17) and continues in the shaping of a differenciated writing of a capitalistic discourse.

What happens if the being defines itself by the consumption and not by the accumulation? If there is, and it cannot happen that there is not from the moment in which the subject speaks (or from the moment that it enters into the system of production), that conflictive truth that escapes the subject has not the same destiny if a subject is proposed that could reach the object in the future, or if an object that IS THIS is proposed. Incest fulfilled, in terms of the old Edipus Complex. The object to which he who speaks stays close. Consumption of any of the objects produced by the discourse (drugs, actions, names, material things).

If the subject is the style of the Other to which it is headed, the capitalist of today seems to differenciate itself as Other of the modern Amo, the one who could sustain himself within a mandate of work leaving the desires for later. Is this the logic of the denial that substitutes that of the repression? A variation in that which is symbolic that produces a real imaginable in another way?

Is it that the ideal-object has arrived, we have it available for use, the product of industry that can simulate and imitate a plus-de-jouir inimitable? Does it make an illusion of fulfilling the place of the cause? Will this be the scheme of our prejudices, those of the present, those that Lacan observed in times that already were those of cultural and moral crises? If the Other changes its type, the speaker is modified, it remains written in another way. Precisely, the "style" refers to the manner or art of writing, relative to the use of the punch-instrument for writing. The style turns out to be the mark of the Other, the mark of its process. Could we suppose a style governed by the Verleugnung?

The proposal of the capitalistic discourse is put outside the rule of composition of the four discourses. Maybe Lacan put us up against the crisis of the four discourses, harmoniously sustained between each other, in unstable equilibrium, with the dominent of the S1 and of its envers, the analitical discourse?

Does that which is proposed as capitalistic discourse go out of the frame in which the analytical discourse has its place? What new difficulties does the Other of our time put forth to the practice of psychoanalysis, and in the first place of the formation of the analysts?

An opportunity to reafirm an ethic that rectifies the set of the effects of the scientific-technological discourses.

Alberto G. Marticorena, Buenos Aires, September 2000.