disidentification in a Lacanian psychoanalysis

Dis-identification applied to the end of analysis* * Based on a paper first presented at the Seminar of the Freudian Field on Lacan’s Direction of the treatment, held in Tel Aviv, January 2004. Guest lecturer: Marie-Helene Brousse. . Rivka Warshawsky Disidentification. Disidentification is a very strange term, a neologism, and it appeared as a hapax in Lacan's work. Not only does "disidentification" appear only once in Lacan's Seminars, but also it shows itself at a very particular point, right at the end, in Lacan's “Dissolution”, the moment he dissolved his school (1). However, since this one single time that Lacan uses the term “dis-identification” occurs at a moment of such an extreme crisis in the School and in its discourse, we can sense immediately that it warrants further examination. We will see in Point 5, below, that the way Lacan uses the term is very concentrated and very illuminating. 1) Analysis inhibited. It is striking that, very early in his work, Lacan chooses to approach the direction of the treatment by examining the analyst (2). This is something that may go unnoticed, because when one thinks about the development of the treatment, one usually thinks about the working through process and the patient. In fact, the question of the analyst is at the heart of psychoanalysis. It was Lacan who placed it there. In a surprising twist, he also reminded us that the analyst is first of all defined, not by the quality or size of his practice, or by the years of his experience, but by his own analysis (3). (How often this is forgotten today, even by Lacanian psychoanalysts.) Nevertheless, today I want to consider Lacan's text, “The Direction of the Treatment” from the viewpoint of the practice, from my own practice, and to pose some questions which have been occupying me lately. I will allow myself a certain freedom to speak about other, later moments in Lacan’s teaching in the light of this early text. “The Direction of the Treatment” is a text that Lacan constructed of five parts with five subtitles. The first four subtitles are formulated as questions: “Who analyzes today? What is the place of interpretation? Where do we stand in relation to the transference? How to act with one's being?” The fifth part is the answer: “Desire must be taken literally”. I can start out from Part IV which is subtitled "How to act with one’s being?” In Part IV Lacan is speaking of the end of analysis as it was conceived by the British psychoanalysts of that time, mainly through Balint's work, as the final identification with one’s analyst (4). I propose to speak instead about the Lacanian end of analysis, which, on the contrary, comprises an effort of disidentification. There are two kinds of end to an analysis. There is a logical end of analysis, and a circumstantial end. The latter alludes to the decision to stop the meetings somewhere comfortable, somewhere safe and practical for the patient, somewhere successful for the cure. The logical end is, I want to propose, anything but comfortable or safe, it has more in common with the act and with the "moment to conclude" from "Logical Time", and it is a moment of certainty about the new analytic desire (desire of the analyst) which has appeared. All this has to do with identification, and with disidentification. Those operations are thus shown to have been present in Lacan's work even since his very early paper on "The Prisoners' Dilemma" and the logical time of the subject (5). 2) A hypothesis, which is also a testimony. The way one conceives the end of analysis is present from the very start of the treatment. The end conditions the beginning, the end is present, it is there, from the start. In a Lacanian practice it is the question of the production of an analyst, as a completely contingent product, which may or may not take place, but nevertheless there, from the start, as a new horizon. When the question of the production of an analyst is not present in the treatment, when it is lacking, I want to call it: “an inhibition of the analytic function”. Before this inhibition is lifted, it cannot be noticed. So what I am indicating after reading The Direction of the Treatment is not that the patient can be treated, (we all know now that this is perfectly possible up to a point), but also that the analytic function itself can be "treated", that the direction of the treatment can undergo a transformation, that an inhibition of the analytic function can be lifted. The element that is usually inhibited in the direction of the treatment is the function of the formation of an analyst, when the cure is directed toward the therapeutic goals alone. Then, I would propose, something in the treatment is not being listened to properly. Even further, though this separation of the didactic analysis from therapeutic analyses has been maintained for many years in most psychoanalytic societies which do not follow Lacan, I am proposing that it amounts to not listening in a properly analytic way to the analysand and to his clinical desire. One forgets very easily, that the first and basic case that trains the subject in clinical knowledge is the subject's own case, his auto-clinic. 3) The first question: the nature of the inhibition. What is the nature of this inhibition of the analytic function? Listen to this sentence of a colleague from Buenos Aires: “When the question of the training of the analyst is silenced or does not exist, i.e. is not raised, things begin to be organized instead by better or worse models” (6). The author continues “(these models) have as a starting point the supposition that the central question is solved just by suppressing it in act.” Here we have the beginning of an answer to the nature of the inhibition - the central point is suppressed by an act of cure, and the central point is the question of the training of the analyst. What is inhibited is the question itself, the question of what, if, how, when, an analyst is formed, does not even appear, the paradoxical presence of this contingency is foreclosed. A question can be inhibited, can be silenced. The result is that the analyst unwittingly falls back on a program, or on a model for a preconceived cure, without even realizing he is doing so. In the best case, the analyst is no longer in the analytic position toward the new knowledge which is toward a decompletion of knowledge (Bion's "without memory or desire"): in the worst case, perhaps he or she never even entered the analytic position. The question of the formation of an analyst is the Trojan horse of analysis; every new analysand is a Trojan horse for the fortress of doctrine. This pertains to logic. And to the empty set, as I will explain in point number 5. In a logical ending of analysis something of the irreducible jouissance of the subject is named or written in a new way. Even as early as in “The Direction of the Treatment” Lacan stated that "Desire must be taken literally" (7). That is to say, the Real of letter or writing is involved. Dora’s second dream is about finding a letter from her mother, a letter which says: “If you want? You can come” (8). Freud notes the incongruous place of the question mark in the dream letter, the fact that a question mark appears in the middle of a sentence, cutting the sense into two parts. However, Freud does not comment on it, other than showing that it is a quotation from a past letter from Frau K., and is linked to the invitation to the famous lake of the slap. A Lacanian reading by contemporary analysts shows that the question: “If you want?" must be read as a question about desire and about jouissance – "But, do you want?” (9). This is the question of Dora regarding the desire of her mother and the desire of Mme K. The question mark read as a letter, "?" represents the question about the unknowable of the sexual relation. Later, in the same dream, Dora sees herself tranquilly reading a dictionary. This "dictionary" is the subject’s specific response to the investigation about sexuality. I am calmly reading the dictionary, because of course everything must be written there. It is from this point that the end of the analysis could have been different. Freud could have posed the question about the cause of desire, instead of offering the signifier as interpretation, Freud said to Dora: "You love your father". Instead, on the contrary, the whole point of the analysis could have been to succeed at finding the lack of a signifier (decompletion of knowledge to open a way for desire) The dream's question mark was silenced, till analysts inspired by Lacan read and discovered it there. The cure ended, a circumstantial ending, not a logical one. At one time it was believed that analysts had first to be “cured” in order to function as analysts, therefore traditionally the end of analysis was situated at the level of symptoms. The level of symptoms is the level of therapeutics, while the level proper to psychoanalysis itself, is that of the fantasy, as an immutable incurable real. This recall of the historical changes in our belief system about therapeutic ends and analysis is undoubtedly valuable, so I include it, but in fact, it is not what I am thinking of here. There you are - that is an example of the difference between knowledge and certainty. Certainty is only a moment in the logical time of the advent of the subject; it decompletes the knowledge that exists and that has value for orienting our reading. But existing knowledge cannot satisfy the question, though it may sometimes silence it. Satisfaction has more to do with the object, and with jouissance, and less with the signifier, or with identification to an existing knowledge, as wonderful and as serious as that knowledge may be. “What is a signifier is what is shared in common, while the petit a itself belongs to the subject alone.” (10). Here I am trying to refer to the presence of the object, as a perhaps immutable constant whose action on the signifiers can be glimpsed from time to time. 4) Transference. Let us return to the first question: so, what was being inhibited in the analytic function? I retake the question, which did not find its answer in the previous section. The production of an analyst, even though it is contingent, has certain necessary conditions. One of these necessary conditions, I want to propose, is what Lacan calls “the whole transferential development”. This emphasis on the "whole development of the transference" indicates that there can either be a partial transferential development or, on the other hand, there can be a whole one. We can assume that only the whole transferential development will allow the production of a new analyst. My conclusion is that this full development of the transference Lacan alludes to is something that is inhibited in the case of a purely therapeutic analysis. The fullness of the transference itself. This was a revelation for me and resulted in a new way to direct the analytic treatments. Of course, the revelation must be located within the whole experience of my personal analysis and psychoanalytic training which allowed me to read Part IV in a new way. And how does the analyst obtain the "whole transferential development"? Lacan tells us explicitly in his text – (how wonderful this text is; there is so much to learn from it). Lacan says that Freud “immediately recognized that the principle of his power lay in the transference – in which respect it did not differ from suggestion – but also that this power only gave him a way out of the problem on condition that he not use it, for it was only then that it took on its whole transferential development (11).The analyst has to be able to bear the whole transferential development, and to interpret from “what the patient imputes him to be” (12).This is to bear something quite difficult, that is why Lacan starts the text with the difficulty of the analyst, he also has to pay for the analysis , not only with words, not only with his persona, but he must also pay “for becoming enmeshed in an action that goes to the core of being (Kern unseres Wesens...)with what is most essential in his intimate judgment” (13). This heavy “outlay” demanded of the analyst is the reason Lacan asks: ““But who will say what the analyst is there, and what remains of him …?” (14). To allow myself a poetic license I would neologize here, but I cannot prove this neologism just now, so I will risk it, what remains of the analyst at the place of interpretation, is a kind of “terminal being”, only a style. Analytic style is just that. It is not a special style of dressing, or of writing, or of speech. It is a style of analyzing. 5) A thesis: to begin from the perspective of a certain kind of contingent end, which is nonetheless not a goal. Only when one begins from an impossible or a void will it be possible to verify a contingent production. I cannot demonstrate this thesis here, but I can speak of it. The Lacanian training is articulated to S(A/), to a hole in knowledge. When something is unmarked, unwritten, i.e. unidentified, you can believe it does not exist. That was the case for the empty set. Till the day that set theory named the empty set, and showed that it is logically operative, it would have sounded like a crazy idea. The analyst cannot be mass produced, because he/she is not yet named or identified in existing theory: according to the existing psychoanalytic knowledge he/she could still sound like a crazy idea . One can only verify the product, one by one, within an analytic community worth its name. In fact, the existence of an analytic community is vital for that reason, otherwise the function of verification of the new analyst would fall to different governmental, academic, or mental health authorities who would seek for a way or a model to standardize the process as an evaluation, believing that this would ensure an impartial and accurate result. This would effectively eradicate the field of psychoanalysis in a very short time. Unfortunately, this is the already the chosen way within the I.P.A., who even granted one such model of evaluating candidates a prestigious prize. In 2004, David Tucker received the "Psychoanalytic Training Today Award", for proposing a model based on a ticking squares on a standard evaluative form he had constructed to use in the final decision to accept or reject analytic candidates for membership in the I.P.A. after their training had been completed. The question of a principle that cannot be a standard in psychoanalytic praxis is, I believe, related in an essential way to the question of the end of the treatment. It is by a nachtraglichkeit (retroactive) effect that the end transforms what could otherwise be the therapeutic aim of the practice. This is my thesis. This even includes the way a single session is ended. This is why the present Psy amendment in France, and its even worse counterpart in Great Britain, is so dangerous. Because these State Psy regulations want to touch the formation, to buckle it down into a systematic pre-planned model. Whoever touches psychoanalytic formation, touches the future. Whoever touches formation, touches the real. To eliminate the real at stake, by a pre-programming of the formation, is to eliminate the Trojan horse on which Lacan wagered for the Freudian aphorism “Wo Es war soll Ich warden” (15). Following Lacan we translate this aphorism as: Where It (the Real) was, there should an I (Je) come to be. The analysand is the Trojan horse who objects to something in the existing doctrine with his negative therapeutic reactions. We have to verify his objection in order to direct the treatment, and in order to find the new analysts. If we give up on this kind of unforeseeable formation process of subjects in their singularity, the formative moments that take place at the most difficult points in a psychoanalytic treatment, then even if we obtain, as David Tucker managed to do, what would seem like a solid and well-defined model to follow in order to evaluate all the new analytic candidates in an identical manner, based on "Freudian" or "Lacanian" attributes, psychoanalysis will be finished, extinguished, because it will necessarily be based on comparisons which are really rooted in identification and group processes. 6) Lacan’s “dis-identification”. We may now return to our starting point, i.e., the moment Lacan used the term "disidentification". Eric Laurent indicates: "In the place occupied by the identificatory trait, the Lacanian orientation sets the lack of definition of what it is to be a psychoanalyst" (16). So Lacan’s School actually empties out the place where other orientations try to put an ideal standard for a good psychoanalyst. One can begin to use the term of disidentification at this point. As mentioned, Lacan uses this neologistic term only once, in 1980 during lesson no. 5 of S.28, the last seminar, called “Dissolution”. Lacan speaks there of a letter he received from Francoise Dolto. She was concerned about his intention to dissolve his school, which was called the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. It seems that Francois Dolto considered that "the School was Lacan", so that she was afraid that by closing the School Lacan was also destroying himself. Lacan writes: “I absolutely do not identify with Francoise Dolto. And also not with the Ecole Freudienne. What justifies me is that I endeavored, at any price, to build the Freudian cause. That which already exists enough to dis-identify with the school.” (17). Reading this sentence was an absolutely revelatory experience for me. I want to repeat it for you. “I absolutely do not identify with F. Dolto, and also not with the Ecole Freudienne. What justifies me is that I endeavored, at any price, to build the Freudian cause. That which already exists enough to dis-identify with the school.” What was revelatory was this triad: the School - to disidentify - the Freudian cause. I read it this way: first, “to disidentify” appears in the infinitive form, without a subject. Second, one can dis-identify, only on condition that the analytic cause already exists enough. And, thirdly, apparently, it exists enough only if one endeavors to construct it. This “enough” is a special kind of quantifier, not comparative but absolutely disparate, like the “enough” in Winnicott’s “good-enough-mother”. It can be measured only according to a particular satisfaction, and it serves as a kind of anti-ideal insurance. "Enough" satisfaction can only be a particular measure of a singular subject's satisfaction, it cannot be whole or pre-measured, one must make do with enough, it is a guarantee against the ideal. There is an investment, a building of the cause, to the point that “enough” existence has been produced. This evokes Jacques-Alain Miller’s Turin proposition, where he speaks of each analyst’s solitary and absolutely different relation to the cause, and where he states that these solitudes are what a school consists of, so that it is not really a group. The membership in a School of analysts cannot be based on identifications, but on solitary and different relations to the analytic cause and its ideal, each of which the Lacanian School can verify if the subject chooses to present it in the Passe procedure. 7) Disidentified is not the same as non-identified Jacques-Alain Miller shows us why the end of analysis does not produce a non-identified subject. One must distinguish disidentification from non-identification. (18). Disidentification means that the subject has passed through identification and separated himself. He did so via his experience as $, as lacking being, as manque-a-etre, which is in fact, the possibility of putting into question all identifications. Thus disidentification is an ironic effect, a Socratic effect, a subversion of the identifications. It is a Clinique Ironique, which partakes of what Lacan called the psychotic's effort at rigor. (19). During an analysis the subject can even put his own existence into question, even his auto-identification as a living body. The analyst may try to argue with him. I remember a Clinique Ironique joke I heard from an Israeli psychiatrist. It concerned a psychotic patient who claimed he was dead. One day he fell and some bleeding occurred. “You see” said the nurse, “You are alive. You are bleeding.” The patient looked completely astonished. The nurse thought that he was having a great “insight”, that he was cured “What?” said the patient, “I’m bleeding? So dead people also bleed?” As I said above, to “make the cause exist enough” seems to me related to allowing the whole transferential development, because “enough” is a particular kind of quantifier, it can only be accurately measured according to a certain subject’s satisfaction. It also points to the Freudian schema of the ego ideal and the object, from his “Group Psychology” which Lacan later developed (e.g. SXI) as the mainspring of the analytic operation, i.e. separating from the chain of signifiers and maintaining the greatest distance possible between the I and the objet petit a. We have to evoke here Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, because mourning, like hypnosis, is a kind of group relation between two members. In his Editor’s Note to this text in the Standard Edition, Strachey says it is “a call for an examination of the whole question of identification” (20). What is at stake in mourning could be seen as an enormous work of dis-identification, a passing through “each memory and expectation”, and detaching the sticky libido, like a plaster on the skin, which one tears off, very slowly. Reality’s orders are “carried out bit by bit, at a great expense of time and energy.” Again and again in this text, Freud expresses a certain astonishment regarding the mourning process. He tries to understand why it is considered normal, and why any interference with it is even regarded as harmful. That was Freud’s basic attitude, a curiosity together with incredulity, toward any psychic aspect which went beyond the Pleasure Principle. It was a male attitude, and it always induced Freud to wonder at the instances of the Other jouissance he encountered in the clinic, (for one example, we can recall his work on "moral masochism"). Thus Freud adds in regard to the excessive jouissance of mourning: “Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us” (21). 8) How does the analyst occupy his place for disidentification to occur? The master discourse formalizes Freudian identification. “The subject identifies because he is lacking in identity. …he pays for it with the repression of his truth.” (22). The analytic mode of free associations goes against repression and unties the identifications that stabilize the subject in his symptom. Why are the identifications untied? Because “repression is put to the test of the truth, the truth that one always says … which is related to the real as impossibility”. The analyst consequently does not identify, he de-identifies…” (23). The subject in analysis comes up with the impossible to say, he turns here, he turns there, he diligently enlists every master signifier in his repertoire, he uses every word and association in "Dora's encyclopedia", it is still not exactly what he wanted to say. He is losing his tight hold on the signifiers that identified him. How does this process of freeing the subject from identifications take place? And why does the subject not simply immediately re-identify in order to stabilize himself in his anguish? After all, he must re-identify, even at the end of analysis, because as subject, he is still in the discourse of the unconscious. What is the analyst doing all this time? The analyst occupies the place of the master in an unusual way, “not as a master, not as a signifier – by that I mean an identificatory factor – nor even as a subject…. He is that silence in the name of which the patient speaks… But he must be there; he holds the place of what cannot be said.” (24). He incarnates the impossible to say. The real as fiction. The master place is never occupied but by a semblant. He is the make believe of the lost object. The analysand - subject can now identify in a new way, not with the signifying facet of the symptom, but with the limit by which his symptom approaches the real, with S of barred A, S(A/). In a passé testimony an AE (25).tells us that the fall of identifications did not give her a solution of how to get by without the ideal. In her case, she found that, in fact, when she disengaged from her sad identifications, which she called mélancomiques, she was also cured of a feeling of acute and chronic desolation. 9) Dis-identifiation of a woman Dis-identifiation of a woman is the title of the passe testimony of Dominque Laurent. I want to end with this (26). In her analysis, Dominique Laurent isolated two signifiers, which served as a binary opposition, and as mathemes, “The Sun King” and “The Queen of the Night”, both master signifiers from Mozart's "The Magic Flute". These identificatory signifiers allowed her to organize, to name and to metaphorize jouissance. (27). At the end of her testimony she tells us what remained after she had “crossed this game of fictions” (28). I think this testimony goes beyond the matheme, and also tells us what can happen with the ideal. What remains is, I think, the most interesting part of this very interesting testimony. The experience of disidentification has revealed the nature of the master signifiers as semblants, as mere fictions. But the passant tells us – these semblants are precious, there is nothing more precious. After crossing the phantasm, it’s not a cynicism toward the semblant, which necessarily ensues; there can be an even greater interest in the semblant. The ending of Dominique Laurent’s “Disidentification of a woman” reminded me of my first reading of St Exupery’s “The Little Prince”. Both demonstrate how far the subject has to travel, even to another planet, in order to no longer be afraid of innocence, which is really the most dangerous condition in the world. The Little Prince’s problem with the lies of his friend The Rose show us, I think, how one must treat the “thorns” with which the hysteric makes believe she can defend herself. In Dominique Laurent’s treatment of the semblants, she seems unconcerned with any therapeutic ideals; she leaves the so-called thorns intact, after isolating them, only with some perfume added on. Bibliography Lacan J., “Dissolution”, Lesson 5, in Seminar XXVII, 1980, unpublished. Lacan J., (1958),“The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power”. In: Ecrits, Transl. Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton and Co. Inc., 2006, pg 489 Tarrab, M., (2001) On analytical training and the School. In Papers of the Ecole Une, unpublished Lacan J., (1958),“The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power”. In: Ecrits, Transl. Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton and Co. Inc., 2006, pg 534-5 Lacan, J., (1945) Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism. In Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 2, Fall 1988, pg 4 Tarrab, M., (2001) On analytical training and the School. 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