THE PSYCHOANALYSIS TO COME

VACCAREZZA Laura E.

But then, if psychoanalysis is successful, it will be extinguished until it becomes no more than a forgotten symptom.

J. Lacan (The third)

At a time when scientific advance allows the human being to accomplish that which he would never have dared to fantasize, we are faced with the concern of knowing which place, if one can be found, psychoanalysis can hold.

One could think that it will gradually weaken in proportion to the advance in science, since in recent times we have been able to verify how the latter responds precisely to the enigmas of the subject, giving a scientific explanation and at the same time offering a rapid solution, be it biological or surgical, excluding any implication in the symptom.

If mental problems are a question of genes, and therefore, the subject is not responsible for his actions; if a male is not essential in order to procreate (only the fluids are of interest); if there are no limits in feminine biology; if a womb can be rented, if the body can be modified, making it either feminine or masculine; if we can create clones of ourselves and have children after our own image and likeness as well as as many as we want; if a dead father can procreate, if a grandmother can be the mother of her own grandchild; and, well, a long series which we surely cannot even begin to imagine, I ask myself: what will become of the Oedipus Complex? And of the Castration Complex? Is it that we are to expect a world without differences? A brave new world? A world without any questioning? A perverse world? We know that perversion has little demand for psychoanalysis, therefore, we could wonder whether there will be room for it or not.

What does psychoanalysis say about this effacement of differences that is so accentuated in present social symptoms? What do we hear during the cure? How do we establish social bonds based on difference? How does the analyst cope with these events in the social scene?

Once again, it seems necessary to rethink a few things, such as: if psychoanalysis, as we have conceived it and practised it so far, tends to disappear, what would the psychoanalyst’s, each psychoanalyst’s position be before the changes occurring in his environment? It would also be necessary among analysts to reflect upon the new versions of social bonds, for example, globalization and differences; and perhaps something even more worrying that I would point out is: the insertion of the analytical discourse in society, in other words, how to transmit what we do and what its purpose is.

One can hear analysts say such things as "people don’t questions themselves", "that they are in a hurry", "that they only want quick answers", "that they don’t want to think", "that there are no patients", "that there are no couch patients", "that there are no patients who will accept to come to more than one session a week", "that they only request medication", and so on. Complaints? A symptom of the analyst in his demand for the lost analysand?

It is true that all of this that psychoanalysts are complaining about occurs to a greater or lesser extent. On the other hand, new therapeutic offers that provide the subject with imaginary consistence (naming him, not by his name, but by his symptom); giving these subjects a place, an identity, a group that they can belong to, a place in society, a lot of love and little questioning, - all of these collaborate in this "lack of demand". However, the price paid for this belonging, for this non-questioning, is that of forever admitting that they are ill or used to be ill . Thus are formed groups of anorexics, drug addicts, depressives, compulsive eaters, alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, migraine sufferers, and so on.

We could contend that these groups replace a weakened paternal function, acting as an orthopaedic device which, although it may help the subject achieve certain stability, prevents him from getting beyond this stage in the symbolic; in other words, preventing him from assuming his sexual identity and difference. On the other hand, I am not denying that these groups can be of great help at specific moments; after all it is a way of being named, of finding a place, an identity. On various occasions I have treated and at present treat patients who belong to such groups, basically alcoholics, anorexics and compulsive eaters; on the whole, these are people who have found groups useful for support but who want to know more or who come in order to get "unhooked" from the group, and so on.

This is the situation and this is what proliferates in the "psy" field; help, self-help, new medications that offer lasting joy and potency (Prozac, Viagra and so on.) Why should one undergo analysis if an object exists for each lack? It is only when these objects that are offered do not produce the desired satisfaction that we can hear some demand.

In a world full of objects, how can one promote the lack of an object? This is our problem.

On this point I ask myself: if the analytical discourse proposes or favours the subversion of the subject, if the analytical discourse is subversive in itself, how can it be related to the discourse of the Master? How can one speak about the subject of the unconscious if for science there is no subject? How can one make the other become aware of that which he wants to know nothing of, and about which he has no questions for us?

I believe that psychoanalysts, by fortune or misfortune, have tried to convey what we are doing. Freud believed, and so manifested, that psychoanalysis would produce great social change; on the contrary, however, psychoanalysis has encountered great difficulties entering universities as well as hospitals. It does not exist as a subject matter, either in the training of psychiatrists or psychologists and neither does it appear as a specialization.

What is such great resistance due to? Is it the way the attempt to transmit it is made? Is it the indisputability or authoritarianism of some analysts who, using grandiloquent words, try to give the impression that psychoanalysis is for a chosen few or does this really have to do with what psychoanalysis itself arouses and about which nobody, often including the psychoanalyst himself, wants to hear of? (I’m referring to castration).

Lacan said: one has to generate demand by making public what one does. This is true, but what must also be known, in my view, is that psychoanalysis must coexist with other sources of knowledge, which are neither better nor worse, but different. It seems an aberration to me to expect all of science to question itself; if this were so, there would be no progress. However, I do not discard encounters every now and then with scientists in our day to day task.

This is the environment that we have to deal with; it is neither Freud’s Vienna nor

Lacan’s Paris. This is a new millennium and if, just as we learned precisely from them, it is when the ideal of plenitude fails that discontent arises and if it is when the symptom sutures and denounces the lack that the unconscious emerges and some part of the truth can also emerge, then we will have to learn how to listen to the "new symptoms".

If the psychoanalyst, entrenched in his prejudices and fears, cannot listen, he will not allow the unconscious to emerge. At that point it will no longer be science but the psychoanalyst himself who will be going against psychoanalysis.