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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