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For a new Gaya Scienza of Psychoanalysis
Dany Nobus1
“[P]sychoanalysis needs to survive, it’s a big problem. Will it survive after my
death?” (Il faut que la psychanalyse survive, c’est un grave problème. Survivra-t-
elle quand je serai mort?). This is how Lacan ended a lecture in Tokyo in April
1971, delivered on the occasion of the Japanese translation of his Écrits. It is
well-known that with respect to the survival of psychoanalysis, Lacan did not
expect anything from Japan, and considered the Japanese as ‘un-analyzable’ as
Catholics. Yet there is no reason to believe that what Lacan designated as the ‘big
problem’, here, would not present itself as such elsewhere, and that the survival
of psychoanalysis is guaranteed in the Western world.
Let us assume for a moment that we can reach an agreement over the
essential reasons as to why psychoanalysis needs to survive. Almost
immediately, the question emerges as to how—in what capacity and by which
means—this survival may be guaranteed. Does it suffice for psychoanalysis to be
sustainable theoretically, conceptually, institutionally, epistemologically and
methodologically, or should it also, and perhaps primarily, continue to exist as a
clinical practice? If one or the other, or indeed both, who or what should be
responsible for safeguarding its survival? These questions raise the issue of the
1 Paper presented at the International Conference ‘Psychoanalysis on Ice’, Reykjavik, 10 October 2014.
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transmission of psychoanalysis, and force us to reflect upon the nature and
function of psychoanalytic educational practices—a term which does not refer, in
this context, to psychoanalytically enlightened pedagogical strategies, but to the
teaching and learning of psychoanalysis as such. In a rhetorical question that
may be regarded either as narcissistically self-indulgent or as supremely ironic,
Lacan wondered whether psychoanalysis would survive after his death. I am
convinced that he knew it would, at least within his own sphere of activity, if only
because he had somehow already managed to ensure its transmission in the
appointment of an intellectual heir, and forty years later we can confirm that it
has, despite or perhaps by virtue of a series of institutional rifts. The question
remains, however, to what extent the survival of psychoanalysis, in whatever
capacity, is responsive to and dependent upon the commitment of one or more
recognized, ‘authoritative’ psychoanalysts. Restricting myself to Lacanian
psychoanalysis, the endless infighting and the ongoing internal dissent within
the broader Lacanian community may make us ponder the possibility that the
future of the discipline will not be secured in this case by virtue of, but despite
the existence of Lacanians. Paradoxically, Lacanian and other versions of
psychoanalysis may be kept more alive by those people—literary critics, hard
scientists and philosophers—who are committed to demonstrating its fallacies
and inconsistencies, with a view to killing it off. In other words, psychoanalysis
may not meet its maker at the hands of its detractors, because they may
involuntarily and inadvertently help facilitate its ongoing existence.
Of course, the very idea of survival conjures up philosophical, spiritual
and religious discourses about how a living entity may ‘outlive’ its expected
existence, like the famous dog Lazarus in the Ozark City Animal Shelter who was
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still standing in his pen after having been given a lethal injection. The notion of
survival suggests that life, in one way or the other, continues after it has
effectively or supposedly been ended, or threatened to the point of extinction,
either in the living entity itself or in one or more of its connected bodies. Hence,
the act of surviving always already suggests a certain end to life as it was
previously known, the termination of a certain unblemished, unchallenged
existence, which can only be recalled as forever lost, belonging to a historical
period in time that will never come back. Lacan’s insistence on the necessary
‘survival’ of psychoanalysis—and it should be noted, here, that the term is not a
hapax, because he used it again, for instance, in a 1974 press conference in Rome
(Le triomphe de la religion, p. 79)—thus implies that psychoanalysis should
endure, ought to persist, must continue to stay alive, despite the adverse
circumstances that undermine its ongoing existence. The survival of
psychoanalysis can only be considered from the perspective, and in light of the
assumption, that it has somehow already ended.
Taking account of certain broader socio-economic developments, at least
within the Western and especially the Anglo-American world, the death of
psychoanalysis is not unreal. Since the 1980s, increasing health-economic
pressures of cost-efficiency, quality assurance ideologies demanding ongoing
(self-)evaluation, government policies supporting evidence-based treatment, and
state-regulations controlling the organization and delivery of mental health care,
including professional training, have forced psychoanalysts to regroup, to
reconsider their options, and to reflect upon the clinical standards underpinning
their practice. Whereas direct scholarly attacks on the theory, practice and
institutional policies of psychoanalysis have come and gone without too much
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damage to the integrity of the psychoanalytic body, or at least without so much
of a lethal impact that psychoanalysts started developing survival techniques, the
same cannot be said about these indirect assaults—the newly imposed
governmental regulations and the changing economic conditions that transcend
the concrete singularity of the psychoanalytic experience, whilst all the while
reorienting and redesigning it at its core. Judging by the various high-profile
events staged in Paris, which continues to be one of the heartlands of (Lacanian)
psychoanalysis, and elsewhere on the implications and ramifications of new
social policies, many of which are being introduced as ‘quality and standards’
measures for the protection of public health, psychoanalysts are concerned and
alarmed. And they are definitely worried about the fact that psychological
treatment programmes such as cognitive-behavioural therapy are receiving the
type of official endorsement from government officials that may put their
discipline at risk.
I should probably correct myself, here, and specify that it is clearly the
practical side of the discipline rather than its theoretical corpus that is at risk.
Psychoanalysis lives on in academic departments of literature, but it is also
expected to survive in cultural studies, modern languages, women’s and gender
studies, philosophy, media and communication studies, film theory, political
science and management studies. And its use-value as a versatile conceptual
framework seems to expand on a daily basis. Since the 1990s, psychoanalysis has
become popular in legal studies, drama, educational science and classical studies.
I know of quantum physicists who are interested in psychoanalysis,
mathematicians who engage with it, and at least one chemist who regularly
attends psychoanalytic conferences in the US. Of course, over the past 20 years
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or so, Lacanian concepts have also regained momentum through the increasingly
prolific and all-encompassing interventions of the so-called ‘Giant of Ljubljana’,
i.e. the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ or, to call him by what is presumably his real
name, Mr Slavoj Zizek. Yet whatever some biographical blurbs may suggest,
Zizek does not practice Lacanian psychoanalysis—thank God!—and has never
had the ambition to the apply the theory within a clinical setting, despite the fact
that Lacan famously asserted in his 1958 essay on Gide that psychoanalysis “is
applied, strictly speaking, only as a treatment and thus to a subject who speaks
and hears” (E 630). Had Zizek been interested in psychoanalysis as a clinical
method, he would no doubt have been more instrumental in setting up training
centres for Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Anglo-American world, where he has
enjoyed tremendous success and where the survival of Lacanian psychoanalysis
as a clinical practice is (it seems to me) most at risk owing to the previously
mentioned social developments. And so we are confronted with a peculiar
paradox: whilst many people become intellectually inebriated by Zizek’s tasty
cocktail, there are relatively few opportunities, at least in the Anglo-American
world, to train in the Lacanian tradition, assuming that Zizek-readers would
consider doing this in the first place. Whereas at a cultural level Zizek has
managed to ensure the theoretical sustainability of Lacan’s legacy, he is unlikely
to counter the processes of ‘social selection’, which have singled out the practice
of psychoanalysis as an ineffective, inefficient and un-economical species—at
risk of sustaining itself, if not as already extinct.
Will psychoanalysis survive, as a clinical practice? Will it survive,
practically and professionally, without conventional scientific credentials or in
the absence of academic recognition by the representatives of traditional
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scientific rationalism? As I pointed out earlier on, the very idea of survival
presupposes that the end has somehow already happened, that the continuation
of life has been secured beyond the point where it should or could have ended. In
this way, contemplating the possibility of psychoanalysis’ survival can only be
predicated upon an in-depth consideration of its (f)actual end(s). What I wish to
propose, therefore, is that any debate regarding the future of psychoanalysis
starts with a conceptualization of its ends, in the broadest possible sense, that is
to say with a reflection upon the (f)act that psychoanalysis, as a theory but
especially as a clinical practice, has effectively ended or is in the process of
reaching its end. My proposition, here, is akin to what Jean-Pierry Dupuy
suggests in his work on enlightened catastrophism, which has been recuperated
by Zizek in such recent works as In Defense of Lost Causes and First as Tragedy,
Then as Farce. Following Dupuy, Žižek argues that to situate a catastrophe (say
the end of psychoanalysis) within a linear-historical temporal order—locating
the occurrence of the catastrophic event some time in the future, and choosing
preventative measures from a range of current possibilities—is inadequate,
because whichever actions we choose to take they can never be fully justified. If
the catastrophe still happens, our actions will be deemed ineffective or
irrelevant, in light of the fact that the disaster was no doubt impossible to avoid
in the first place. If the catastrophe does not happen, the result may very well be
the same, because one could easily argue that the anticipated disaster would
probably never have happened in the first place, it being merely a figment of the
ideological imagination or an effective bit of scare-mongering (the so-called
millennium bug serving as the prime example here). A more effective and
productive alternative, Žižek suggests, lies in Dupuy’s idea of giving full credence
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to the fact that the catastrophe will occur, or has already occurred. Instead of
approaching it as a future possibility, which will only be realised if we fail to act
appropriately, that is to say (if using the end of psychoanalysis as an example) if
we do not identify the major risks and refrain from managing and mitigating
them, we ought to confront the catastrophe in a much more radical way, as an
undisputed inevitability. The worst is yet to come, and it is not a matter of “if”,
but quite simply a matter of “when”. Once we have acknowledged and accepted
the unavoidable catastrophe, we then need to “project ourselves into it” and,
from this standpoint in the future, proceed to retro-actively contemplate the
existence of alternative possibilities, some eliciting the catastrophic event and
others diverting it, amongst which we subsequently identify the most
appropriate course of action.
Ironically, Zizek’s Dupuyian outlook, here, does not contribute anything to
the study of catastrophe as such. In other words, it presupposes that it is possible
for us to know what the parameters and coordinates of any given catastrophe
are, which is rendered all the more difficult as the catastrophe is still regarded as
something belonging to the future, which is merely actualized by us projecting
ourselves into it. What I propose, therefore, is that we consider the catastrophe
to be already here (Apocalypse now!), and that the catastrophic event—in this
context the end of analysis—has happened or is imminent and inevitable, and is
being analyzed on its own terms and with due regard for its internal conditions.
Of course, one might proffer that the end of analysis has been on the
psychoanalytic agenda ever since Freud wrote—notably at the very end of his
life, as if he wondered whether psychoanalysis would survive after his death—
his Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse (Analysis Terminable and
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Interminable) and no doubt already before the publication of this text. And
indeed, Freud himself had already reflected, albeit succinctly and without much
elaboration, on the end of analysis in his technical papers, most notably (and
rather paradoxically) in his paper ‘On Beginning the Treatment’, where he
famously disclosed that during the early years of his practice he experienced the
greatest difficulty in enabling patients to continue their analysis whereas now,
during the early 1910s, he had ‘to take the greatest pains to induce them to give
it up’ (130). Since Freud, numerous papers have been written on the end of
analysis, whereby the very notion of ‘end’ has been interpreted alternatively as
‘practical termination’ and ‘exit’ (when the analyst and the analysand stop
meeting each other for psychoanalytic sessions), as ethical direction and goal
(what analysis is trying to achieve as its most advanced aim), as logical moment
of conclusion (when the analysis is ‘finished’, irrespective of the occurrence of
the actual sessions), and as endings in the sense of remnants, trimmings (what
analysis generates as residual short-term and long-term effects).
Throughout his writings and seminars, Lacan introduced various notions
to capture the ‘ends of analysis’, ranging from the ‘realisation of the subject’ to
the ‘traversal of the fantasy’, ‘subjective destitution’, the transition of the
analysand to the position of the analyst (the notorious ‘pass’) and the
identification with the symptom, all the while discarding (especially in his
seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis) traditional views on the end of analysis
as social adaptation, the advent of subjective authenticity, the realization of
happiness, the accomplishment of genital object-relations, the disappearance of
the symptoms etc. Interestingly, many if not all of the aforementioned Lacanian
conceptions of the ends of analysis appear only once or twice in his works,
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although this has never stopped any Lacanian from elaborating on them and
turning them into conceptual cornerstones of the Lacanian edifice. However
well-established some of these notions may be now, in my reading of Lacan, the
most consistent, well-founded and encompassing principle of the end of analysis
in Lacan’s works is that of the signifier of the barred Other, S(Ø), which appears
at the most advanced junction in Lacan’s famous graph (circuit) of desire, and
which may be applied, at least in my humble interpretation, clinically as well as
theoretically, ethically as well as epistemologically. The only problem with
Lacan’s notion of the S(Ø) is that it defies easy access, escapes rigorous
definition, resists revealing its true meaning. Yet the problem, here, seems to
capture precisely what the term intends to convey. S(Ø) epitomizes the symbolic
representation (S) of a lack (in the symbolic order); it constitutes, by way of an
algebraic notation, the signifier for what does not exist (the big Other) as a
complete entity; in short, it represents the unrepresentable or, as I have tried to
capture it elsewhere, it constitutes the epistemic point where knowledge meets
and newly becomes ignorance.
The high level of abstraction, here, is by no means disadvantageous for
any consideration of the ends of analysis, in the light of its survival. If anything,
the focus on knowledge precisely allows for a comprehensive and non-pragmatic
perspective to be opened on the practice, the theory, the applications and the
future of psychoanalysis. More importantly, the focus on knowledge should also
prompt us to rethink what I referred to earlier as psychoanalytic educational
practices, i.e. the way psychoanalysis is being transmitted via strategies of
teaching and learning.
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As a practice based on a regulated series of encounters in a precisely
arranged space, psychoanalysis is by definition at risk of ending, and may have
already ended. Although, in all likelihood, somewhere in this world a
psychoanalytic session is being undertaken at this very moment, there is
absolutely no guarantee that this will continue, not so much as a result of social
selectivity—ideological regulations favoring other types of treatment—but for
logical reasons. As Derrida stated in a footnote to the published version of his
oration at the funeral of Emmanuel Levinas, it can never be excluded that the
salutation (say, the handshake) that someone gives at the moment of departure
is forever, i.e. it can never be fully guaranteed that the two people who said
goodbye (adieu) to each other will see each other again. Applied to the practice
of psychoanalysis, this means that neither the analyst nor the analysand can
accept to know fully and without doubt that the analysis has not ended at the
moment they say goodbye to each other. Yet paradoxically, perhaps, it is
precisely this awareness (this knowledge) that there is something we do not
know which keeps the process alive, which prevents it from becoming sclerotic,
and which somehow guarantees its continuation by way of indefinite
anticipation. From the angle of ‘knowledge as/of ignorance’, one should equally
reconsider the end of analysis as a theoretical corpus, as a body of knowledge. All
too often it happens, outside as much as within psychoanalysis, that when the
end is near or under the threat of extinction, communities try to defend
themselves by fortifying and solidifying their structures, asserting their
hegemony, closing the ranks, relying on the strictest auto-regulation, and
drawing boundaries between who is in and who is out, in short by favouring
adaptation and conformity, and re-affirming the solidity and gravitas of pre-
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established truths. Yet this is the type of doctrinal rigidity which may very well
expedite the end, partly because it is built upon and driven by perceived
vulnerability, partly because it moves the group into a direction that is no longer
representative of its original state. What I am proposing, here, is that
psychoanalysis takes advantage of its ends to reinvent itself, to challenge its own
boundaries, to feel comfortable about the fact that it does not know and will
never know what it is, to renew its knowledge-basis, and to transform itself into
a new gaya scienza, this old Provençal discipline of spontaneous, undirected
playfulness, pursued with the aim of fighting sadness and boredom, and
celebrating joyful educational practices through song and dance.
In pursuing gaya scienza, and avoiding any kind of established, doctrinal
knowledge production, the true value of psychoanalysis may come to light, and it
may become apparent what should happen to knowledge when it enters the
theory and practice of psychoanalysis. As Lacan’s formula for the discourse of the
analyst indicates, knowledge is held to operate on the place of truth, which does
not mean that psychoanalytic knowledge, as it is employed by the analyst in his
or her clinical practice, has to represent the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth, but paradoxically that the knowledge ‘in action’ cannot be too
serious, meaningful and austere, so that it can evoke the truth—much like the
medieval court jester would always speak the truth by never actually saying it.
When, in Television, Lacan posited that the end of a psychoanalytic process is
driven by the ethic of the ‘Well-spoken’ (l’éthique du bien-dire), what he had in
mind was not that the analysand at the end of his analysis would be more
capable than before to articulate his thoughts and emotions in a serious and
correct fashion, but rather that the analysand would acquire the capacity to play
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on words, to put his life into perspective, to see the humour of it all. As such, gaya
scienza is not just an aim for psychoanalytic educational practices, but also and
much more fundamentally a clinical principle, which lies at the heart of
psychoanalytic practice, psychoanalytic training and psychoanalytic
epistemology. It is related to what Nicolas of Cusa—who was not a troubadour
but a cardinal—designated as the docta ignorantiae, the wise ignorance, but it is
also connected to the Freudian structure of the Witz, which much like any joke
can be seen as a linguistic attempt at destabilizing an established set of
expectations, or at steering existing mental and social structures in surprising,
unanticipated directions. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas put it: “A joke is a
play upon form that affords an opportunity for realizing that an accepted pattern
has no necessity.” It should not come as a complete surprise, then, that Lacan at
one point defined psychoanalytic interpretation as a Witz—not exactly a joke
(and there is no evidence that Lacan ever told jokes when conducting his
analyses) but a quip, a wittiness, a wordplay, a little piece of gay knowledge. The
best we can hope for when it comes to transmitting psychoanalysis, pursuing
psychoanalytic educational practices, ensuring the survival of psychoanalysis is
that all those people involved—analysts and analysands, trainers and trainees,
teachers and students—do not become bogged down in the pursuit of absolute
knowledge and the quest for true meaning, but that they would be able to listen
to words as if they were coming from the sonorous mouth of a medieval
troubadour, that they would see the (not-so-funny) comedy of their own
existence, as dedicated followers of the gaya scienza. This, after all, is what Lacan
himself did with Freud’s contributions when he believed them to be at risk of
perishing at the hands of the ego-psychologists. It is no longer a matter of
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survival, then, but much more fundamentally a matter of taking the end
sufficiently seriously to ponder the conditions for, quite simply, being alive.
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