In An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Freud explains that the analyst plays an active part in the patient’s psychic conflict.1 Through the transference a “pact” is made, according to which the patient agrees to say everything that comes to his mind in return for the analyst’s help. It seems, however, that once Freud had gained his patients’ trust, he did not hesitate to use his power for what—somewhat surprisingly— appears to be educational purposes. Did Freud seek to be the object a of the phantasy or the master?
My aim in this chapter is to define the analyst’s role in the transference, and thus Freud’s strategy in his analyses. I shall show that Freud’s desire ultimately emerges beyond the educational tone of his discourse.
It is generally thought that Freud took on the role of a father in his analyses, as he indeed explicitly suggests in a number of texts, for example, The Rat Man.2 More often, however, he thinks of the analysand/ analyst relationship as a form of tutelage, whereby the latter becomes a model or master to the former. These are the terms he uses in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (pp. 219–224). It is primarily the active character of these terms that strikes us, before we even begin to consider how they affect his tactics and strategy. In this context, one must ask whether Freud considers that the term “model” relates to the analyst’s person per se—his real talents—or whether, on the contrary, it is precisely its fictional character that allows an analysis to be successfully concluded.3
In his last work on analytic technique, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Freud discusses the analyst’s relation to his patient in terms of the symbolic or even legal mediation provided by a contract. The power struggles that arise in analysis are immediately situated in the dimension of semblance. The treatment finds its metaphorical basis in military strategy. The terms “strong” and “weak” ego and his occasional references to the “strengthening” of the ego, became, as we know, so popular that they inspired a whole branch of psychoanalysis to adopt the re-education of the ego as its credo: “The ego is weakened by the internal conflict and we must go to its help. The position is like that in a civil war which has to be decided by the assistance of an ally from outside” (p. 173).
This ally is the analyst, but does this suggest that her role is to rein-flate a subject who has already found refuge in his narcissistic fortress? Does this not, however, undermine Freud’s ethical imperative: “Wo es war, soll Ich werden” (Where id was, there ego shall be) (“New Introductory Lectures”, p. 80)?
Freud goes on to say explicitly that “We serve the patient in various functions, as an authority and a substitute for his parents, as a teacher and educator” (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, p. 181). Does the ideal of the analyst rejoin that of the master? Is the analyst supposed to glue the dispersed pieces of the personality back together, and thus to ally herself with the so-called “healthy part of the ego”?
Let us examine more carefully Freud’s use of military and political metaphors when describing the analyst’s actions. In order to shake up a neurotic ego, the analyst—serving as the ego’s crutch or prosthesis—intervenes, as Freud tells us, and this enables it to regain power over an area over which it has lost control. What is really at stake in these texts is to rearrange the patient’s intra-psychic equilibrium in a way that is advantageous to the ego. If she represents the patient’s ego, the power struggle must first tip over to her side. Freud is not quite so conclusive, however, regarding the final outcome of this combat:
… the final outcome of the struggle we have engaged in depends on quantitative relations—on the quota of energy we are able to mobilize in the patient to our advantage as compared with the sum of energy of the powers working against us. Here once again God is on the side of the big battalions. (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 181–182)
Yet is it really a question of allowing the ego to reconquer what it has lost? In an ironic comment on the fate of ego psychology, Lacan explains that the “community to which [Freud] bequeathed this remedial task has proclaimed the synthesis of a strong ego as a watchword, at the heart of a technique in which the practitioner believes that he obtains results by incarnating this ideal himself” (Écrits, p. 677). The result, unfortunately, is that “the pre-Socratic tone of Freud’s precept, ‘Wo es war, soll Ich werden’, [is replaced by] the croaking strains of—’the ego (the analyst’s, no doubt) must dislodge the id’ (the patient’s, of course)” (Écrits, p. 714).
It is certain that a number of Freud’s expressions have led to a degree of confusion, or at least to interpretations suggesting that the analyst’s role is to re-establish or reinforce the ego. This is particularly true, as we have seen, of his An Outline of Psycho-Analysis.
The reason why Freud makes the ego the analyst’s partner is to be sought in the model of construction in analysis, which bridges the gap between the ego’s judging activity and the construction proposed by the analyst. Sometimes Freud, faithful to his theories of the ego in the Project, detaches the activity of judging from the pleasure principle; at other times, he makes the ego the reservoir of narcissism. It is always a matter, indeed, of finding the symptom’s password, of interposing signifiers: “The function of the pleasure principle is to lead the subject from signifier to signifier, by generating as many signifi-ers as are required to maintain at as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus” (Seminar VII, p. 119).
This programme conforms to the reality principle, the task of which is to make alterations, corrections, or detours, in order to call us back to order. Now, the constructive role of the ego, according to the Outline, “consists in interpolating, between the demand made by a drive and the action that satisfies it, the activity of thought” (An Outline of PsychoAnalysis, p. 199).
Freud’s theory of the ego is thus the key to understanding the ideal that the analyst creates for herself and her purposes for doing so. His description of the ego’s powers in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis does not differ greatly from his earlier version in the Project. The ego always has an inhibiting function; it prevents the free circulation of excitation and lowers the level of pleasure. Lacan says that behind the Project, there is an ethical experience, and the same can be said about The Ego and the Id and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. In the latter works, however, Freud also introduces a new character: the psychoanalyst.
A certain number of analogies can be drawn between the ego’s activity and that of the analyst, whose task is to represent reality. This confers a properly metapsychological status on what Freud, in his technical writings, simply terms the analyst’s “attitude”. Freud specifies, for instance, that the analyst’s “reserve” is more precisely a “reserve of quantities”. There is, he tells us, “a group of neurones which retains a constant cathexis and which thus constitutes the vehicle for the store of quantity required by the secondary function”. A bit later, he adds that “Where, then, an ego exists, it is bound to inhibit psychical processes” (“Project for a Scientific Psychology”, pp. 384–385).
The ego thus builds, creates reserves, and inhibits. These texts on the ego also shed a great deal of light on the psychoanalyst’s position, despite the fact that they seem to exclude it as such.
Is not the rule of abstinence the counterpart of free association in an analysis? Such an association would confer a metapsychological status on the pact between the analyst and the patient. The analyst comes to represent the psychic apparatus, since she serves the secondary process, while the patient, in following the fundamental rule, is effectively subjected to the primary process.
The ego, in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, seems to obey the command to be prudent, a quality that becomes related to the reality principle. The ego, for instance, decides whether it is advisable to postpone a particular undertaking or whether:
… it may not be necessary for the demand by the instinct to be suppressed altogether as being dangerous. (Here we have the reality principle.) Just as the id is directed exclusively to obtaining pleasure, so the ego is governed by considerations of safety. The ego has set itself the task of self-preservation, which the id appears to neglect. (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, p. 199)
A closer examination of this text, however, leads us to conclude that, far from seeking to contradict the pleasure principle, the ego simply institutes reality-testing, which is precisely what it is no longer able to do in neurosis (“Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis”, pp. 183–187). The ego’s effort to moderate primary activity is therefore less a means of erecting a rampart against excitation than of providing representations—signifiers—by means of which reality-testing in relation to previous satisfactions becomes possible.
A metaphor drawn from the inexhaustible field of political and military strategy in The Ego and the Id not only gives us another conception of the weakness of the ego, but also clearly reveals the ethical dimension of psychoanalytic experience. Having first reminded us that “Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id,” Freud goes on to explain that:
As a frontier-creature, the ego tries to mediate between the world and the id, to make the id pliable to the world and, by means of its muscular activity, to make the world fall in with the wishes of the id. In point of fact it behaves like the physician during an analytic treatment: it offers itself, with the attention it pays to the real world, as a libidinal object to the id, and aims at attaching the id’s libido to itself. It is not only a helper to the id; it is also a submissive slave who courts his master’s love. Whenever possible, it tries to remain on good terms with the id; it clothes the id’s Ucs. commands with its Pcs. rationalisations; it pretends that the id is showing obedience to the admonitions of reality, even when in fact it is remaining obstinate and unyielding; it disguises the id’s conflicts with reality and, if possible, its conflicts with the super-ego too. In its position midway between the id and reality, it only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour. (p. 56)
With the introduction of the second topography, the weakness of the ego should be understood not as a sign of cowardice or impotence, but as a simple indication that it is weak enough to submit to the id in order to avoid anxiety. Freud’s references to narcissism and the anxiety of losing love throw light on this “function” of the ego, where anxiety is produced as a signal. Compromise, self-betrayal, and lying are all ethical considerations that point by their contrast to the ethical position of the analyst who substitutes herself, as Freud tells us, for the threatened ego. The neurotic is a divided subject in quest of a partner with whom he can make himself loved. Freud, in this context, uses the analytic relation as a model of the patient’s psychic activity and not the other way round the relation between analysand and analyst becomes simply a way of staging the neurotic’s scenario. The ego attempts to create a transference that will ensure it is loved by the id. It is striking to see Freud, considering his knowledge of the real, credit the ego with having the qualities of a psychoanalyst. This is precisely his mistake, since the id itself clearly has no such consideration for the real. The ego, indeed, makes itself the instrument of the death drive:
Towards the two classes of instincts the ego’s attitude is not impartial. Through its work of identification and sublimation it gives the death instincts in the id assistance in gaining control over the libido, but in so doing it runs the risk of becoming the object of the death instincts and of itself perishing. In order to be able to help in this way it has had itself to become filled with libido; it thus itself becomes the representative of Eros and thenceforward desires to live and to be loved. (The Ego and the Id, p. 56)
The conflict thus appears to have been displaced. It is no longer on the terrain of the ego and the id, but, instead, within the id itself that the battle between Eros and Thanatos rages, while the ego looks on in the role of an umpire. The ego signs its own death warrant, however, in taking a position against the libido in the process of repression, since, as Freud points out, it thereby effectively liberates the death drives.
Identification with the father does not have a pacifying effect in this respect. While winning the father’s love admittedly signals the end of the Oedipus complex, this process nevertheless results in a splitting between aggression and libido (a disassociation of the drives). Aggression is thus freed, with the result that the ideal is itself split between the ego ideal, on the one hand, and, on the other, the cruel superego, which directs the aggressive drive back against the subject.
Freud thus concludes that narcissism is not a defence against the death drives. The libido detaches itself from external objects in order to fix onto the ego, which thereby comes to represent Eros and becomes the reservoir of the libido; thus the ego itself is put at risk in the ensuing combat: “[T]he ego, by sublimating some of the libido for itself and its purposes, assists the id in its work of mastering the tensions” (The Ego and the Id, p. 47). Here is a true chiasmus, a paradox, and a nightmare. The stronger the ego is, in the sense that it has become bloated with love, the weaker it is in the face of the death drives, which have been separated from the object libido (and vice versa). Freud expresses this paradox in the following comparison: “In suffering under the attacks of the super-ego or perhaps even succumbing to them, the ego is meeting with a fate like that of the protista which are destroyed by the products of decomposition that they themselves have created” (The Ego and the Id, pp. 56–57).
The effect of repression is thus to liberate the death drive. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud explicitly states that the more one renounces jouissance, the more exacting the superego becomes. If this is true, it becomes rather comic to claim that the aim of analysis is to harmonize relations between the ego and the other psychic agencies. The ego makes compromises and syntheses, but the goal of analytic therapy is certainly not to permit the ego to do so, even if it has always spent its time doing this. There is a clear alternative between analysis and synthesis; there must be either an analysis of the symptom or nothing at all. Lacan has shown that Freud, in his second topography, portrays the ego as a function of misrecognition. This implies that the ego, which is unreadable to itself, has the structure of a symptom: it is an enigma to itself.
The psychoanalyst, entering the conflict and becoming one of its protagonists, thus constitutes a new psychic agency. Why would her desire be to fortify the ego if the latter is a symptom? It is structured as a symptom and is a function of misrecognition. These two characteristics, indeed, amount to the same thing, since it is by making compromises with the drive that the ego is able to assimilate it, and this reconciliation can only take place at the cost of the ego’s misrecogni-tion of the drives. This is particularly clear in chapter III of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. In discussing the ego’s resistance, Freud evokes the notion of an illness’s secondary benefits. After having remarked that there is no natural hostility between the ego and the id, and that there is therefore no need to install a barrier between them, Freud insists that if there is an inherent contradiction, it is to be found within the ego itself: “In this […] defensive struggle [against the drive] the ego presents two faces with contradictory expressions” (p. 98). Since the ego aspires to making connections, to unifying, and to synthesizing, it tries to incorporate the symptom. In other words, repression creates the symptom, which is a compromise between a satisfaction and a defence. The ego, by its nature, seeks to assimilate the symptom and therefore makes a compromise, but in doing so, it misapprehends the repressed twice over. Symptoms, indeed, satisfy the requirements of the superego—considered here as an agency of repression within the ego— but are also the expression of the return of the repressed. According to Freud, symptoms are frontier posts that are occupied by two countries:
In this way the symptom gradually comes to be the representative of important interests; it is found to be useful in asserting the position of the self and becomes more and more closely merged with the ego and more and more indispensable to it. It is only very rarely that the physical process of “healing” round a foreign body follows such a course as this. (p. 99)
Resistance to analysis thus merges with the benefit that the ego derives from an alliance with the repressed. This does not make the analyst’s task any easier, especially if we consider that the foreign body that the ego is attempting to assimilate is the analyst herself. It is in this sense that the transference can be said to be a resistance, but not a defence. Instead, resistance and defence appear as two contradictory processes, one of which seeks synthesis and compromise, while the other acts as an agent of repression. Freud states: “When the analyst tries subsequently to help the ego in its struggle against the symptom, he finds that these conciliatory bonds between ego and symptom operate on the side of the resistances and that they are not easy to loosen” (p. 100).
The symptom, however, is only a negation of the repressed drive, and also represents it: it plays the drive’s role. The repetition compulsion constitutes the limit of this compromise since the drive relentlessly requires satisfaction. Nothing can stifle or silence it. Any attempt to do so simply “obliges the ego in its turn to give the signal of unpleasure and put itself in a posture of defence” (p. 100). How can the analyst “help the ego” in such contradictory conditions, if the latter is structured like a symptom (p. 100)? Is not the division of the subject what the analyst must finally desire if, in her surgical function as separator, she must disjoin the ego from its untenable coalescence with the symptom?
A supplementary difficulty arises in this context: how can she possibly succeed in doing this if she herself has become a part of the patient’s phantasy, if—thanks to the transference—she has herself become the object a, the foreign body that the neurotic is attempting to “introject” (see Ferenczi, “Introjection and Transference”)?
Freud explains that the neurotic is able to let go of his symptoms out of love for his analyst in the transference, but this change does not improve the situation. The analyst herself has become a new symptom that needs to be analysed: a new foreign body that the ego is attempting to assimilate. Should the analyst really lend herself to this cannibalism? Her desire is the function that counters identification in favour of an absolute difference: the object a, which opposes the ego. These formulations, it is true, are Lacan’s own and nothing in Freud’s work indicates that he himself wanted to occupy the place of an object in his analyses. This is nevertheless the place that is necessary if we are to have any hope of situating his act.
Notes
1.“The analytic physician and the patient’s weakened ego, basing themselves on the real external world, have to band themselves together into a party against the enemies, the instinctual demands of the id and the conscientious demands of the super-ego. We form a pact with each other” (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, p. 173).
2.Freud himself confided as such to Kardiner: “I have several handicaps that disqualify me as a great analyst. One of them is that I am too much the father” (Kardiner, p. 69).
3.“What we desire, on the contrary, is that the ego, emboldened by the certainty of our help, shall dare to take the offensive in order to reconquer what has been lost” (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, p. 178).