Freud certainly does not consider that forming an ideal—which necessarily implies overestimating the object and is always a cause of tension—can possibly serve as a guarantee for the end of analysis. Ordinary people, he tells us, are less subject to this kind of conflictual tension since their ego ideals are not the measure of the legitimacy of their desires. In these conditions, repression will not take place, since the ideal is the agent that brings it about (“On Narcissism”, pp. 94–95).
By following Lacan’s commentary in Seminar XI we can deduce that since analysis is the opposite of hypnosis—and therefore of idealization—the analyst is not the Ideal, but the little a. Little a and the capital I are indeed as far removed from each other as they possibly can be (p. 273). In other words, far from trying to ease the tension between them, the psychoanalyst’s desire aims at accentuating the radical difference between the ideal and the object of desire.
As I have stated, if the ideal imposes repression and the analyst wants to lift it, she cannot indefinitely maintain the balance between what Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, calls the individual’s sensual and ascetic sides. Analysis should, instead, aim to disclose the underlying connections between the object of desire and the object of identification, a task that is elaborated in detail in the second topography.
Freud’s conception of “neutrality” consists, as we know, of precisely not seeking to suture the patient’s unconscious conflict but, on the contrary, of trying to maintain a distance between ego and object libidos, without dreaming of any reparative harmony.
Freud’s prudence in relation to therapy—which led him to conclude that a cure is simply an “added bonus”1 of the treatment—is part of an ethical perspective that allows the subject to choose which path she will take. This prudence should be understood as an attempt not to fall into the thaumaturgical ideology that is part of the analytic process. Freud recalls this again in 1925: “There was something positively seductive in working with hypnotism. For the first time there was a sense of having overcome one’s helplessness; and it was highly flattering to enjoy the reputation of being a miracle-worker” (“An Autobiographical Study”, p. 17).
Freud, on the contrary, attributes therapeutic results neither to his own personal talent nor to the desire to heal as such. Indeed, without consequently undermining the value of his own act, he did not hesitate to appeal to God—that is, the subject—for help. This is why he appropriates Ambroise Paré’s dictum: “I dressed his wounds, God cured him” (“Recommendations to Physicians”, p. 115).2
The analyst’s “surgical” action serves as a metaphor not for theoretical apathy, and even less for the analyst’s “benevolence” but, on the contrary, for the safeguard against therapeutic pride. The psychoanalyst does not accomplish therapeutic “feats” as such. While Freud’s modesty could be interpreted as a sign of apathy—the proof of a lack of desire on his part—I find it clear that Freud is indicating the analyst’s inability to cure; however much he may want to do so, this wish may not receive his patients’ consent.
Besides having no particular calling for charitable work,3 Freud explicitly emphasizes the danger of having a therapeutic ideal in a letter to Jung in 1909: “Just give up wanting to cure; learn and make money, those are the most plausible conscious aims” (McGuire, p. 203).
Further, he points out that not only are an analyst’s therapeutic aspirations always thwarted, but there is also a certain baseness in requiring these as a reward for his efforts:
… you [haven’t] yet acquired the necessary objectivity in your practice, […] you still get involved, giving a good deal of [yourself] and expecting the patient to give something in return. Permit me, speaking as the venerable old master, to say that this technique is invariably ill-advised and that it is best to remain reserved and purely receptive. We must never let our poor neurotics drive us crazy. (McGuire, pp. 212–213)
Freud later becomes even more distrustful of the therapeutic effects of analysis when he discovers, in the 1920s, that his patients’ resistance to recovery points to an unconscious desire, on their part, for punishment.4
Orienting his desire once again on that of the subject, Freud warned his disciples against an invasive desire to cure, one that would not take the subject’s unconscious desire into account. In 1917, before discovering the negative therapeutic reaction, Freud had already emphasized a clinical phenomenon that was clearly related to the physician’s desire: his patients’ manifest “unwillingness to burden [themselves] for the second time in [their] life with a load of gratitude” (“Introductory Lectures”, p. 290). He thus recommends a certain therapeutic apathy to his disciple, Weiss: “The patient with whom you were here to see me will probably not give in as long as she can guess how much her recovery means to you” (Weiss, p. 75).
The fact that Weiss’s patient “knows exactly what special importance her recovery has for your cause” is a hindrance to treatment (Weiss, p. 76). In the same letter, Freud also points out that a patient’s desire to “spoil the physician’s triumph” clearly implies a negative transference for which the analyst is not innocent (Weiss, p. 76). “It is often enough to praise them for their behaviour in the treatment or to say a few hopeful words about the progress of the analysis in order to bring about an unmistakable worsening of their condition” (“New Introductory Lectures”, p. 110).
Thus, in the absence of a “desire to cure”, what can the analyst possibly want that does not have the effect of arousing the patient’s hostility and “the aggressive repercussions of charity” (Lacan, Écrits, p. 87)?
In The Ego and the Id, Freud explains that the patient’s “resistance to recovery” cannot be described without reference to the physician’s desire, which is provoked by its “defiant” character (p. 49).
Freud, as we have said, attributes the subject’s need for punishment to his refusal “to give up the punishment of suffering” a form of resistance in which he discerns a “moral factor”, one that can unfortunately, on occasion, tempt the analyst to “play the part of prophet, saviour and redeemer to the patient” (The Ego and the Id, pp. 49, 50).
The patient’s attitude of “defiance” nevertheless requires the analyst to take responsibility for this “aggressiveness” in order to disclose its symbolic character. If the mediation of the Other is clear here and if there is also an obvious appeal to the desire of the Other, is there really any need to hypothesize that the refusal to be cured is caused by a “need for punishment”, a primary masochism?
In “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis”, Lacan tries to explain the negative therapeutic reaction by emphasizing the intertwining of the patient’s narcissism or “self-esteem” with his desire for death:
What appears here as the arrogant affirmation of one’s suffering will show its face—and sometimes at a moment decisive enough to give rise to the kind of “negative therapeutic reaction” that attracted Freud’s attention—in the form of the resistance of amour-propre, to use the term in all the depth given it by La Rochefoucauld, which is often expressed thus: “I can’t bear the thought of being freed by anyone but myself.” (Écrits, p. 87)
Abandoning the furor sanandi for another battle, Freud undertakes, with the patient, a “struggle” (Kampf) on the field of the transference, the outcome of which is uncertain: “This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference” (“Observations on Transference-Love”, p. 171; “The Dynamics of Transference”, p. 108).
It is the ethical dimension of this fight that we now wish to consider (Écrits, p. 323).
Freud’s readers have occasionally been surprised by his advice to psychoanalysts who try “to make everything as pleasant as possible for the patient” (“Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy”, p. 164). His technique, on the other hand, clearly did not allow his patients to simply sit back and indulge their symptoms: “A condition of privation is to be kept up during the treatment” (p. 164).
Far from implying that a patient should renounce jouissance in the name of an ascetic ideal, this rule brings about the sort of compromise that characterizes the symptom. Symptoms are merely deceptive “substitutive satisfactions” that spare the subject from seeking a “real” object (“Lines of Advance”, p. 164; “Introductory Lectures”, p. 453). They are, however, according to Freud, not nearly as bad as replacement satisfactions. The analyst should never be in a hurry to cure symptoms, since the pain that they contain is precisely the real of forbidden jouissance.
The patient’s frustration in analysis thus serves to mimic the real, since the latter prohibits jouissance. Physicians who prefer to indulge their patients, on the other hand, “make no attempt to give [them] more strength for facing life and more capacity for carrying out [their] actual tasks in it” (“Lines of Advance”, p. 164).
The psychoanalyst therefore imposes the rule of abstinence in order to counter the impulses of his “good heart”.
It is this real that substitute satisfactions, by appearing in the “place” of symptoms, attempt to circumvent; in taking this place, however, they also take on its “accursed share”: the prohibition and punishment that result from it. There is a truth in the symptom that is muzzled by curing the analysand, for the symptom’s double signification—the condensation of pleasure and punishment—disappears as a consequence. The subject uses replacement solutions, but it is the symptom itself that is replaced by pleasures, interests, and habits: these are so many diversions that had once been covered over by the symptom. This “liberation” of the libido that has been imprisoned in the symptom is, however, purely illusory. The object of desire, conquered in analysis, becomes a symptom in its turn. If, for example, the love-object takes the place of a symptom, it carries with it a punishment that is disguised as success.
What replaces guilt will now, for example, be an unhappy marriage (“Lines of Advance”, p. 164). Object choice is once again alienated in the form of self-punishment or organic illness. The fundamental rule thus derives its “cruelty” only from its goal, which is certainly not the subject’s “comfort”. Freud indeed explicitly states that:
Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient’s suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones. (p. 163)
A choice therefore has to be made between replacing the symptom and obtaining the object. One must remember, however, that when a symptom is abandoned, another appears in its place, producing exactly the same guilt.
It is significant that, for Freud, a symptom can be identical with a situation in which a man “prematurely [attaches] himself to a woman”, a comparison that throws light on Freud’s ethical position” (p. 163). A love choice is determined by the repetition compulsion. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets”, he explains that if a woman is a symptom for a man, it is because of an inevitability that pushes him to choose someone who will destroy him: Atropos, the Inexorable or Terrible. “A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women” (p. 299).
The strategy, which Freud elaborates in his “Lines of Advance”, is based on the dialectic that would be illustrated later in The Ego and the Id: the symptom is nourished by guilt, and the superego is both its agent and the prosecutor. Freud thereby not only puts the psychoanalyst’s “indulgence” on a par with the neurotic’s “distractions”, but also posits that the rule of abstinence is the equivalent of the harsh reality of life.
Freud does not, however, advocate adapting to the demands of civilization, which require the subject to give up desire and renounce not the symptom but jouissance, in favour of substitute satisfactions. Freud’s answer to this prudent morality was, as we have seen, precisely to renounce the renunciation and to take a radical position on the object of desire. What, fundamentally, is Freud’s thesis? It is certainly not that one satisfaction is as good as another. An analytic technique could have been promoted in which, by virtue of the signifier and the displacement and detours—or “turning[s] away”—imposed by the lost object, might have led to a certain form of liberalism (“Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”, p. 18). According to Freud, however, the displacement of satisfaction, as a substitution, is both good and bad. “Replacement” satisfactions in themselves simply postpone “true” satisfaction, since the neurotic is incapable of either acting or experiencing jouissance (“Introductory Lectures”, pp. 453–454).
Freud derives a number of both technical and moral consequences from this situation, consequences that throw light on how his own desire was oriented regarding sexual relations:
It is the analyst’s task to detect these divergent paths and to require him every time to abandon them, however harmless the activity which leads to satisfaction may be in itself. The half-recovered patient may also enter on less harmless paths—as when, for instance, if he is a man, he seeks prematurely to attach himself to a woman. (“Lines of Advance”, p. 163)
What Freud uses to oppose civilization’s effort to sedate the real of the symptom is a “surgical” technique, a metaphor that refers to the reopening of the unconscious, which had been sealed off by the pleasure principle. This is the meaning to be given to his statement that psychoanalysis is “inimical to culture” (“The Resistances to Psycho-Analysis”, p. 220). Indeed, in opposing the claims and demands (revendications) of the individual to civilization, Freud was not setting up an opposition between the real—as the “order of the universe”—and the individual’s search for “free love” (jouissance sans entraves). Instead, he was emphasizing the profound connection between the person’s well-being and the social organization of the libido. Society’s distractions, it seems, do not in the least affect the common order of pleasures (Civilization and its Discontents, p. 76).
What divides the individual is not civilization, but is, instead, the price he has to pay for his well-being: his renunciation of jouissance, which incontestably contains an element of pain, and which the pleasure principle attempts to transform. “The task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background” (p. 77).
Civilization and its Discontents further elucidates the strict connection between Freud’s criticism of civilization and his rule of abstinence, which aims to awaken the subject to his desire. The neurotic forms a secret pact with civilization in exchange for the sedatives and “auxiliary constructions” (Hilfskonstruktionen) it can offer (p. 75). Since it attempts to relieve suffering, this programme is not opposed to the pleasure principle. Substitute satisfactions, drugs, art, and religion are all, in this sense, part of the same programme: that of helping us to “bear life” and to anaesthetize us; they are, as such, merely “illusions in contrast with reality” (p. 75). These tempting humbugs are directly opposed to Freud’s ethical imperative, which is founded precisely on the insistence of the drive. Civilization and psychoanalysis thus have completely opposing views on the role of illusion: “We must not forget that the analytic relationship is based on a love of truth—that is, on a recognition of reality—and that it precludes any kind of sham or deceit” (“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, p. 248).
Freud himself was most surprised to learn in 1904 that his doctrine could be reduced to a mere sexology, a theory that “regard[s] sexual privation as the ultimate cause of the neuroses” (“On Psychotherapy”, p. 267). Not only does such a notion completely undermine the whole concept of psychoanalytic practice, it also neglects to take into account what is the sine qua non of neurosis: “the neurotic’s aversion from sexuality, his incapacity for loving, that feature of the mind which I have called ‘repression’” (“On Psychotherapy”, p. 267; also see “’Wild’ Psychoanalysis”, p. 223).
This text shows the moral quality that Freud attaches to this concept of repression, and it thus anticipates his “Constructions in Psychoanalysis”, in which he associates the neurotic’s guilt with his inability to love.
It is, unquestionably, the inhibition of sexuality in the largest sense of the term—including the inhibition of love by hate in The Rat Man, the different forms of impotence, and especially, the neuroses of destiny— that draw Freud’s attention to the difficulty of desire. He invariably sought the solution to these neurotic conflicts in a detachment of libido from the objects to which it has been linked, rather than by forcing desire onto the object of the phantasy. His encouragement of his patients— under the influence of Ferenczi’s active therapy—to remain abstinent should thus be understood as a renunciation of the pleasure principle, which is a condition for reaching a real jouissance. The following anecdote provides us with an example of this.
Freud’s Italian disciple, Weiss, came to him to ask for supervision for a case of an impotent patient. The patient’s problem had first arisen after his wife’s suicide. In order to calm Weiss’s therapeutic ardour, Freud begins by insisting that he take his time. The root of the conflict turns out to be the subject’s relation to his father for whom, it seems, his wife is a substitute. According to Freud, the patient’s impotence is a consequence of his “fixed renunciation of women” (Weiss, p. 35). Faced with a subject who cannot connect with woman, Freud advises Weiss to discourage this patient from resorting to substitute satisfactions in the form of masturbation or prostitutes. There should be “no attempt to burden him with our more liberal opinions about sexual intercourse” (p. 36). In fact, Freud sees in this man a problem that is not sexual, but, instead, “moral”, since the symptom is linked to remorse and repentance. Since nothing can be done in absentia or in effigie, this state of tension should be maintained in order to be able to analyse it.
The accent here has been displaced from the Oedipal conflict to a conflict with the superego. Weiss’s impotent patient is not described according to the precepts of Freud’s 1910 text, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love”, in which a woman, as a representative of the mother in the unconscious, short-circuits desire, instead of being its object (see Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object”). It would thus be the barrier of incest that renders desire impotent. In Weiss’s case, it is, instead, the subject’s inability to consider woman as anything other than a Name-of-the-Father that bars the way to desire. Inhibition is no longer motivated by a fixation on the mother, but by an intense fixation on the father.
As in the cases mentioned earlier, Freud suggests that the subject is resigned to avoiding woman, and consequently invites him to confront the object of his desire.
Notes
1.The expression is Lacan’s: it is justified by Freud’s thesis that the analyst should abstain from making any synthesis. See, for instance, Freud’s letter to Pfister dated 9 October 1918: “In the technique of psycho-analysis there is no need of any special synthetic work; the individual does that for himself better than we can” (Meng & Freud, p. 62).
2.Freud also tempers the therapeutic ardour of Smiley Blanton, an American in supervision in 1935: “You are perhaps too anxious about your patients.” He adds that “You must let them drift. Let them work out their own salvation” (Blanton, p. 76).
3.Freud writes to Ferenczi: “I lack that passion for helping” (Jones, 1955, p. 496).
4.“The ego treats recovery itself as a new danger” (“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, p. 254).