You are into psychoanalytics, no?
Twenty years of involvement in and ambivalence about a set of civilised Western meanings
In a text conversation with a friend on Friday, I wondered ‘aloud’:
Also, Ukraine.
I'm not *surprised*.
But I'm still incredulous.
Like. Really?
What's to be gained?
To which my friend replied, among other things:
You are into psychoanalytics no?
This question sent me on a weekend-long reflection, trying to reflect and ascertain the extent to which its true.
(Analogously, if you do want an amazing book that adds some psychoanalytic depth to key insights, including from Fromm’s characterology, read Gessen’s The Future Is History. Her account of the character structure of Homo Sovieticus, how people have adapted, the kinds of subjects they’ve tended to becom – and that Putin may be – is insightful.)
You are into psychoanalytics no?
Am I…. I’ve been wrestling with this for twenty years, since reading (and not quite loving) One Dimensional Man and reading (and not quite getting) Anti Oedipus while living in Japan. In the early 2000s I also engaged a lot with Zizek’s work, based on my encounter with his great anti Iraq invasion and GITMO-Abu Ghraib torture op-ed pieces from those years, which seemed to get at things other commentators did not or could not. The profoundly irrational and excessively destructive folly of the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror has never left me; I need to account for it, as a formative political experience.
When I started studying social theory in 2006, it was with that constellation of points in mind. In our psychoanalytic social theory classes, we looked at Freud, Lacan, Cixous, Kristeva, Klein, Winnicott, Chodorow, and Cash’s own work on Northern Ireland. My response to this corpus was complex enough to give me a complex; hence you are reading this.
You are into psychoanalytics no?
No, but yes; but no. And yet, yes… but…
If I can boil it down (lol, sorry, it’s long as usual), a few things. Freud introduced some extraordinary critical concepts into the analytic vocabulary of western thought:
the unconscious, and the role of language and fantasy ‘in’ it (and it in us),
the drives (and not just sex drive but also death drive),
the elaborated idea that the ego is not master in his/her own house (Freud’s self-professed third dethroning of the human, after Copernicus [we’re not the centre of the universe] and Darwin [daddy was an aggressive ape, mummy a horny chimp]),
the way that pleasure (which is eternal) and reality (which is historical) never quite align, such that we pursue pleasure (but can’t get no satisfaction), yet reality pushes back and precludes it (yet never in a way that stops us from wishing and wanting for the release into pleasure),
the complex formative effects (and complex-forming effects!) of our relation of parental dependency (attachment, detachment, objects; pleasure, utility, virtue),
the importance of how the body repeats what we fail to remember, and what the unconscious knows about what we have ‘forgotten’, which is unknown, yet bubbles up in dreams and neurotic symptoms…
And, as I’ve been exploring, the idea that ‘civilisation’ necessitates repression, cos of something abyssal in us, but/and/so this makes us unhappy and guilty, no matter what…
Those are all huge innovations in Western analytic thought, concepts we all live by, that permeate the culture; we are all into psychoanalytics, no?
In the clinical setting more specifically, the extraordinary innovation was, I think, the development of the technique of free association: the idea that, by giving people a safe space to talk, by moving the analyst behind them (literally into their blindspot) and then very actively listening to how their experience, their memories, their obsessions, their formative influences, their sticking points, the elaborate repetitions around their traumas and struggles and strivings, is arranged in language. The elaboration of sticking points and sticky fantasies in language, the comings and goings of love and loss, getting dropped or being hung up, as well as how language circumlocutes the traumas of the heart and the woundings of life and the body.
Therapeutic, too: by going and going ‘inward’ and ‘backward’ we can, with work, remember much of what we typically cannot recall, and by working to remember it’s at least possible (or more likely) we will become a little less repetitively rutted in our struggles, a bit less obsessively ‘stuck’ in our focus and purview, so that, ideally, we can (eg) forgive our mother and live with a more richly reconnected and alive sense of our formative influences, accept our baggage as our own (and stop dumping it on other people and blaming them for it), and develop some self-awareness about who-and-what we tend to get stuck (in)to and why (and how!).
In practice, the technique of free association actually turns out to be very challenging for many people, myself included. This is not chat, life coaching, Esther Perel, or a typical conversation – and that’s very unusual in our culture. The idea that one could speak and speak and keep speaking: without turn taking and interjecting, without sharing or responding to the interplay by which unusually good listeners support the topic, and without all the many trips and parries where most-normal self-absorbed subjects block or let slip or shift the topic back to themselves. The idea that one should and must speak and speak unsparingly and that, when we do, we will not be interrupted, and that one must push for that and be as unsparing as possible and try as hard as possible not to deceive oneself or the analyst, and just keep speaking for fifty minutes…. this can be extremely liberating, but it can also be totally exhausting. And it’s also especially hard ‘cos flies in the face of what most of us have as a kind of cultural training (the need to not be a bore who monopolises the conversation; the need to be responsive [or just give lip service] to the conversation partner’s topics and obsessions; the constant interruption by phones and children and work), and our internalized repression. I have a terrible fear of boring people (which is hilarious because my communication style is far too intense and too detailed for most); other people I know are so bottled up and cagey, they would do anything to avoid saying what they really feel, what they’re most deeply afraid of, what their experience is really like.
In sum: the therapeutic process of analysis in the clinical setting shows us that it is actually very hard to speak, both because most of us have never really been listened to, and because many of us (monomaniacal bores and egomaniacs notwithstanding) live in fear of our own topics. This is a great thing to learn, most people could really benefit from it.
Actually, what I’ve discovered is that I hold some of my own life stories, experiences, hangups and dreams in contempt, think I have nothing to say or offer, don’t want to burden other people with what I’m really thinking, feeling, and wishing. I’m more like the stereotype of an ‘invisible’ late middle aged English woman than I’d prefer to think of when I think of myself. It’s hard to elbow past yourself here, you have to push past, knock old Doreen over to get back to young Pete. Where speech is concerned I guess this means we’re paradoxical creatures: although we’re bursting to tell someone what’s in our hearts, to share our stories and hurts, we’re also clammed and dammed up and, when it comes time to speak, often it’s hard to say. We want to say so much, but it’s so hard to say so much. It hurts to say, we want to say; we don’t want to say how much, we want to say, so much. It’s called the talking cure, but talking is actually really hard to do properly.
This in spite of the blah blah that surrounds us. You don’t have to look far in the culture so see how prolix, how discursive, how fucking opinionated it all is, and how this goes hand in glove with an epidemic of loneliness. So many people talk and text way too much for my liking or their own good (me too); very few people actually listen (it’s hard to do, many people are excruciating to listen to); real conversation is so precious in part ‘cos it’s incredibly rare. Hard to give and hard to earn. And actually, I feel I also learn from clinical analysis, the majority of people never really started listening to themselves, haven’t started yet, are procrastinating on looking after themselves, avoid listening to what’s in there, evade the cues and clues their loved ones have tried to give them (so many times!), thus have no idea what they want, how they feel the way they feel, why they want that man, that dildo, that promotion, that milkshake that brings all the boys to the yard.
And/or are totally unpracticed in expressing their desire for ‘said shake in a concise and respectful way: witness the stereotype of the mother-in-law who ‘talks at’, the father-in-law who mansplains everything, the uncle who has never said a word and just drinks in the corner, the aunt who won’t shut up about Qanon or some other people you don’t know and won’t ever meet or care about. Arendt captured this with her ascerbic sharpness when considering the Auschwitz survivors giving testimony at the Eichmann trial. Like singers given a big solo stage who couldn’t hold a tune, most of them couldn’t tell a story, most of them turned the abyss of what had happened into something very boring to hear tell of. Only Abba Kovner made the room come alive for her. This is in Benjamin’s storyteller too: telling a story is an art, and in our age of information, mostly a lost art (just like listening [to ourselves and others], just like conversation). It’s strange, given that baby got back, and that our mouths and eyes are in the front of our heads, that most people’s tellings are all middle: the Old Testament and, and, and, and…
Freud reminds us that – in the absence of remembering and formulating this – we’ll keep acting it out over and over – fuck fuck fuck, blah blah blah – with whoever and wherever our purview pulls our attention, obsessively. I think realising that could be another huge therapeutic dividend of analytic treatment, and would suit many people I know. I wouldn’t necessarily point anyone having pyschoses and other disassociations, major depressions and panic attacks right toward an analyst (and they have to be a good analyst, and analysis is protracted and expensive and 100 sessions aren’t gonna be covered by a mental health plan). But: nearly everyone I know could benefit from undergoing this challenge of free association, doing that work. It’s precious work, and (again) so rare.
Zooming out to the culture…. Have you ever really thought about what it means that the culture offers nearly no spaces for people to actually take their own lives and baggage seriously? We talk about dehumanization, but we dehumanize ourselves in subtle ways by not listening to ourselves, not heeding our hearts or respecting our own wishes and wants, and actually we’re usually extremely mean or ungenerous to ourselves before being mean and ungenerous to other people. At heart this is because we’re not able to think that what’s going on in there is worth listening to, all the way through – but not boring or bombing the shit out of ourselves and others with the pseudo version of.
But I learned very quickly with free association: there’s nowhere to hide (but you’ll try); it’s an enormous amount of work (but sometimes you’re so tired, and so is the analyst), and in certain respects, because everyone hates themselves in some way (or hates something about themselves), because everyone talks incessantly to themselves but doesn’t want to listen to what we’re is saying, it’s hard to get through. The number you have dialed has been disconnected (or there’s no call waiting, it’s the 80s); please dial again. Yeah, everyone holds themselves in contempt a bit… but everyone also demands everyone pay attention to whatever little psychodrama they’re experiencing (without any critical rejoinder, ideally). We want our friends to be the cheerleaders of our samsaric psychodramas, and when our ego is robust (how often is that), we’re trying to do with with-and-for-ourselves. But we go up, so we go down, then we lie down (or we stand on our own, and we leave on our own, and we go home, and we cry and we want to die). And when you lie down and go, there’s a kind of ‘stage fright’, most of us actually have a very deep fear of having to speak, the moment we know we’ll really be listened to, maybe for the first time in our lives (and how sad and lonely is that!). Then, *if* we have the courage to persist and sit with this, face up to what ‘what we’re trying to say’, we can learn to re-narrate and think more clearly about what this means for who we are and where all that comes from. That’s a lot!
So: of course in these senses I’m into psychoanalytics. And Putin maybe-probably needs analysis, like we all do; and he’s been telling us obsessively for years about this powerful, repetitive story he’s convinced himself of, or just tells himself, about Russia and Ukraine and the USSR and the West and NATO and the Russian military &c &c &c. Oliver Stone gave him a whole interview to talk it out. Ukraine is there so he can ‘bomb it all out’. As Spike Milligan had put in his gravestone: I told you I was ill.
You are into psychoanalytics no?
So, well, I concede all of the above in a clinical setting as having value for all of us, and yet… back in that classroom in 2006, there was something about all the analytic theory which never *quite* rang true to me. Why?
The deeper I went into psychoanalytic social theory, the closer I got (more like Morrisey than Reznor) the more of a conceptual Monet it felt like, to me. And how universalizing its pretentions were. And Monet is great and his canvases are well hung and they’re meant to be viewed at a distance and squinted at in their majesty. Stand back and cop a lily petal in the face, breathe in the pond air, feel the caress of the willow by the breeze. Analogously, if we take free association as the basic technique and consider the extent to which, as I’ve been riffing, everything in the culture prevents most people from talking and being listened to and getting in touch with what animates the incessant voices in their head and what keeps them repetitively doing all the neurotic shit they just keep fucking doing although they know it’s destructive and bad for them and they keep fucking up, all the drugs and booze and bad relationships and every time we lose our nerve and go back to our old games and get up to our old tricks (again), the way every new flame resembles every old flame (who kinda looks like your mum or is like the shadow, complement or opposite of your mum), the way we convince ourselves that it’ll be different this time, the way we delude ourselves by thinking we’ll apply the same set of techniques and tactics to the same kinds of scenarios but get a different result this time… well, at that level of specificity, all of analysis makes sense, and the theory is sound enough. It will do. Your analyst could even be a Freudian or a Lacanian or a Kleinian and you might not be or disagree with that at close range, but provided they listen and interject very precisely and handle the transference okay, it kinda doesn’t matter who their Primal Father or Totemic Animal is. They could be a Collingwood fan, it could stll all be okay.
But up close to where the paint was brushed against the canvas, where the Monet starts moaning, and if we get closer like Reznor and X ray the canvas to see what’s behind the theory, it’s sketchier. Let’s glance at this schematic scene and see who’s who and who’s doing what.
Digression: I have to mention Anglopsychology, scientific psychology: psych. For decades, decade after decade, psych rejects analysis, and tries to kill daddy. I feel like all of psychoanalysis in the Anglo countries at least is reactive to the cultural-institutional dominance of psych (with psychiatry up there as the doctor pinnacle, the white coats who deal with the mad). This is super catty and anecdotal, but the couple of clinical psychs I know, to be honest, they love citing evidence by saying ‘studies have shown’, and they love to label behaviours with the names of all kinds of pathologies, and they love to psychologise social and cultural and political phenomena, based on studies of aggregates of individuals. But the limited experiences I’ve had with psychs in clinical settings indicates to me that it avoids depth, it’s a bit to cocksure about its model, too quick to know and label and categories, and sometimes a bit contemptuous of other ways of knowing… Psych is basically a middle class white Anglo guy who’s never confronted his shit and still doesn’t really get what drives people. Yet again and again, whether it’s system one and system two for Kahnemann’s schema (which does get us some depth back, cognitively, and with a lot of scientific rigour), or that way that Peterson’s manospheric psychometric psychology also relies on Jung, if one goes past all the studies and the labels and CBT in the CBD, one cannot do without some account of the enigmas, the unconscious, as well as a way of accounting for the role of fantasies, the symbolic, narrative, culture &c &c. In other words, analysis is very reactive to psych’s dominance, but ultimately, when psych gets interesting again, it starts needing a lot of the insights from the analytic tradition – at least as metaphors – but wants to do on its terms, and be the top. But analysis always wants to be the top, too… tensions…
I set up all this as it’s the dominant model in contemporary Anglocapitalist countries, which also have extraordinarily high rates of mental illness, distress, and general alienation and loneliness. Which also, like: if psych aligns so well with the capitalist labour market, and all of the psych students end up working in HR and hospitals (by which time it’s too late either way), what does this ultimately tell us about our culture and how well its dominant experts deal with its discontents?
Then within psychoanalytic social theory – which is a niche within the privileged margin that psychoanalysis still has carved out – you have a scene of splits and dissents, factions and ostracism, from the 1910s ‘til now. Honneth and Allen are playing around – write now, as I write – with object relations and Klein (but fuck me they are so boring), Zizek insists we need go no further than Lacan (but with Marx and Hegel), othrodox Freudians insist we need go no further than The Man Himself, and are always returning to the Father of Psychoanalysis (but also by like not reading anyone else, by doing year after year of seminars on the old texts… it’s very similar in its method to a lot of the Monotheisms in that way). I’m not sure if the daddy issues of the Freudians and Lacanians are meant to be ironic, or a full admission, literally a joke or literally a metaphor, but it’s funny how hung up on their father figures they are. What a bunch of Lack Skywalkers. Or as Brian’s mother says in response to the three wise men expressing a wish to pay homage to Brian in the manger: ‘omage, you’re all drunk; it’s disgusting!’
So for me the empirical history of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic social theory, as movements and countermovements, *is* a history of splits and projects, of factional formations and seething, petty disagreements: like Marxist and anarchist groups, or any social science discipline you want to name, the long twentieth century of analytic movements is a unity observable by the narcissism of minor differences. And there is also a psychoanalytic theory one might have of that, as well as a sociological theory (and both might be interesting, though neither would mesh neatly in the middle).
The question for me has always been: given that the rest of the social sciences has metabolised Civilisation and Its Discontents and responded to it in many interesting ways, why to the psychoanalytic social theorists forget all that and just wanna go back and keep reading Freud?
Consider the drift in the following, in summary detail: in the 1910s, Jung split with Freud over dreams and the unconscious (and the Jungians and Freudians still exist and still suspect one another and are convinced they other camp has it wrong); in the 1920s, Reich, Fromm and other Weimar analysts split with the orthodox Freudians about the interpenetration of the social-historical and the psychological and the body (still heresy to the Freudians); in the 1930s, Elias historicised a thousand years of the civilizing process, showing what a coarse bunch our ancestors were, showing the intergenerational, intercultural process by which we stopped shitting and fucking in front of one another, and learned proper manners, courtly courtesy, and the civilized reality of repression (both the bodice and the desire to rip it very much). I should say: historical sociology, like anthropology, has amazing things to say back to psychoanalysis, but it seems like many analytically-persuaded people don’t read sociology or anthropology with the attention and respect they might. In the 40s, Fromm returned to Marx and Weber to give us an account of the historico-cultural (contingent, specific) aspects of Nazi character structure and destructiveness; in the 1950s, Levi-Strauss, like Fromm, a European Jew who’d survived the Holocaust, went ‘back’ to the ‘savages’ in Brazil and discovered (alongside the first generation of anthropologists who weren’t racist or believed implicitly in the supremacy of Western Civilisation) the sheer diversity of ways in which people have lived well, the contingency of hierarchy and destructiveness (even seasonally, even within one tribe), and the extraordinary loss of ecologies and cultures and civilisations since 1492; in the 1960s, Marcuse showed us one possible set of ways we might liberate ourselves and one another from the excess-surplus repression and destructiveness in the kultur; in the 70s, Deleuze and Guattari demolished the idea of the essentially lacking-and-Oedipal nature of our desires; in 1978, Nancy Chodorow reminded us that women mother (which, like… y’all hadn’t clocked that?).
We can then add to this that by the 1970s – the key decade – for the first time, we had, perhaps, an outline of a full spectrum insight into what ‘we’ (civilized Westerners) had done in and to the world since 1492, all the destructiveness and aggression that has attended the expansion of our own civilization (but not all others) since then and before, since the Norman Conquest in 1066, since the foundation of Rome in April 753 BC. It’s neither causal nor entirely coincidental that the project of neoliberalism and globalization that has obsessed the Anglocapitalist world also transpired from roughly this time, and has reacted to the critiques in ‘all of the above’ by way of kulturkampf and identity politics. It’s our civilization and the way we’ve inflicted it that’s the problem, it always has been: Levi-Strauss is right, we shit on the world, we’re emetic.
So like: nearly every single one of these dissenting factions has gone on to develop an incredibly interesting account of the deeper causes of civilisation’s discontents than sexual repression, and nearly all of them have called for starting and pursuing a different story of who we might be by becoming better, different people, embracing less repressed, repressive, destructive, extractive ways of being in the world, and moving beyond the nuclear family, the feudal structure at the heart of the division of labour of modern industrial society (where it’s little wonder we can’t get laid and aren’t happy and feel alienated and exploited).
You are into psychoanalytics no?
So, I’m into what we can inherit from psychoanalytics via ‘all of the above’, but only once we’ve pushed through its presuppositions about where we come from, who we are, and where we’re going. The intra-analytic question for me – with the theory – has always been about what the orthodoxy demands. That is, being ‘into’ psychoanalytics, really, is about whether we accept the universality-and-primacy of drive theory, the fundamentally Oedipal nature of desire, and the need for repression if there’s to be civilization, because of the fundamentally destructive aspects in our nature. I’ve never quite bought the story. I can never be wholeheartedly into psychoanalytics.
It's a more powerful story of who we are and why we do what we do than Christianity has given us, and it's an even more powerful critique of our Christian values’ origin and meaning than Nietzsche reached, and it can say insightful things about how and why why living in the way we call civilized feels so bad, is so unsatisfying, frustrating and lonely, why even those who don’t suffer exploitation still experience profound alienation, why the enacted fantasies of the ultra rich are still so lame and so infantile and don’t protect them from dying alone or just being boring people with shit fantasies and bad taste. Is it not amazing that the only thing most superrich people can think to buy is a superyacht?
To the last word…. the theory of the death drive also gives one account that at least tries to ‘go there’ and explain the surplus of aggression, the excessive destructiveness we see around us. I can neither reject nor accept it, but I still ‘do with’ it. But, like everything else that’s dominant in Western civilization, it’s a theoretical explanation grounded in an alaboration of concepts, expressed in language, and it craves expansion based on a claim to universal jurisdiction by claiming to know what’s fundamental to all human experience. Its orthodox adherents do not see its own historical contingency and cultural self-involvement, and – we we’ll see in the next post, when I’m back to C&ID – Freud is too spellbound by his own just so story, too convinced of its primacy and ‘final instance’ meaning as what’s most deeply inside of all of us. There’s more to life than Eros and Thanatos.
~
Grace Jones, Private Life
J'en ai marre with your theatrics; your acting's a drag
It's ok on TV, but you can turn it off
Your marriage is a tragedy, but it's not my concern
I'm very superficial, I hate everything official
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Sentimental gestures only bore me to death
You've made a desperate appeal, now save your breath
Attachment to obligation, regret shit that's so wet
And your sex life complications are not my fascinations
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Oh!
You asked my advice; I say use the door
But you're still clinging to somebody you deplore
And now you want to use me for emotional blackmail?
I just feel pity when you lie, contempt when you cry
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Oh!
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out
Your private life drama, baby, leave me out