AND JUST as the major and minor religions have their disciples who can quote chapter and verse, and are determined to hold onto and hold aloft the core of the thing, there on the page, to suffer no deviance, often with formidable learning and courtesy, and others impatient, cold, ‘brooking no argument’, so too psychoanalysis has its disciples anxious to preserve its fundamentals, the way the original measurement of the metre is displayed in a glass case (somewhere in Paris). Much energy and refinement are spent correcting, or bringing back into the fold, heretics who veer off to form alternative schools, alternative readings, seen as interesting, certainly, but a watering-down or misinterpretation, at worst a travesty of the basic tenets; and as a consequence there have been scuffles, threats, committee-coups, proselytising publications and law-suits throughout Europe and North America, in turn producing various forms of psychological stress, some of which require treatment. Where more and more followers become involved, the purity of an idea is hard to preserve.
One difficulty is psychoanalysis cannot be ‘proven’, something a number of philosophers have pointed to. Meanwhile, those in analysis continue to attend their twice or more weekly sessions unaware of the turmoil at the centre. After all, what is of concern to them is the Self.
Other movements such as Surrealism back in the nineteen twenties have had their purges. Those who didn’t fit or follow the Manifesto were turfed out without ceremony. Another place to look are political movements, Marxism above all, the feminist movement more recently, or sporting associations, university departments, where rebels or independent thinkers have been ostracised, expelled, and in many cases exterminated (not in the feminist movement or sporting associations).
Beware of women who are or have been in analysis, even if only for a year or two. Surrendering themselves to a most intimate and self-revealing way of thinking aloud, of allowing layers to be lifted in order to reach and recognise the difficult Self, afterwards recognising the strange sense of well-being, of achievement even, as if cleansed, or beginning to be cleansed – lightened – can produce a quiet condescension towards anyone else who hasn’t undergone the same treatment (you would have no idea how hard work it is, and the layered benefits, the glimpse of clarity). Time spent in analysis is more intimate than believing in a religion; virtually no condescension quiet or otherwise is to be found amongst religious converts. Tread warily with those who have sisters in analysis or the earnest sister practising as an analyst in Chicago or Manhattan, Newcastle or Sydney, and who attends conferences elsewhere, for this filial connection exerts a double anxiety, double loyalty, on the already committed remaining sister. It can be seen to produce further competitive confusion between them, or a bristling defence against non-believers, occasionally obscured by a jokey manner to the subject in general, or rather, their own adoption of psychoanalysis in particular. Interesting, when one sister goes into therapy the other sisters often follow.