IPA 2005 (Rio de Janeiro)
Training Today Award
PROBLEMS FACED BY PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING AND EDUCATION

 

A fact in our life is not significant because it is true,
but because it means something.
Goethe

Prelude

To write about psychoanalysis, whatever the direction taken, always presents difficulties. As we well know, discourse never succeeds in capturing the thing is aiming at; the impossible indicates the spot of a flaw in our discourse. However, from Freud’s initial preoccupations up to the present ones – those that stimulate us psychoanalysts to carry on thinking – a huge amount of ink has flowed onto paper: Psychoanalysts who think about the theme in question, taking training this way and that; Psychoanalysts who offer, through the experience gained, new representations to carry on reflecting.

When we think once again we confirm that the ‘terms’ which refer to training are elusive. They are so in a double sense: as “a word or concept to designate something” (every nominal reference sheds light on our path with that quota of illusory certainty that gives us the belief of knowing that ‘exactly those’ are the words that express the hypothesis we are trying to capture), and as a “limit, end or boundary of something” (our curiosity, always going round impossibilities, shall have to be aware of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries who punishes misappropriations).Within this chain, I could include this paper as one of its many links, that is, the contradictions and vicissitudes of training.

“The present discussions are a further development of some trains of thought which I opened up in Beyond the pleasure principle, and to which, as I remarked there, my attitude was one of a kind of benevolent curiosity”. (Freud, S., 1923, Preface).

With this phrase Freud opens the preface to The ego and the id. He writes there that his personal attitude is that of benevolent curiosity towards the trains of thought that gave rise to “those mythical beings, impressive in their indecisiveness”, Eros and Tanatos.

Freud also states there that The ego and the id develops further some trains of thought opened up in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is not clear whether Freud has these thoughts, or if they have him, so to speak. We could well conjecture that Freud is ‘taken’ by those thoughts, that in the act of thinking them, ‘something’ reaches the word (word-representation) to become his own. It gains expression and becomes communicable; it begins to circulate. This is the way in which he uses the psychoanalytic method in his thinking.

Our curiosity, not always benevolent, strives, among other things, to find the secret of  ‘doing well’ with the candidate who comes asking for psychoanalytic training; and even more when we are faced with one or more difficulties, a mark of castration that is also present in the psychoanalysts’ training and the transmission of psychoanalysis.

This is a permanent difficulty in our work that brings to light that other ‘unknown’ (unbekannt) with which we work. That other which resists any attempt to be captured by the words we utter. That is what psychoanalysis is about, in clinical work and in the transmission of psychoanalysis. An initial matter that starts to delineate the path we shall follow.

Second matter. In a letter written by Schiller, from December 1 1788, quoted by Freud in The interpretation of dreams, we read:

“In a passage in his correspondence with Körner – we have to thank Otto Rank for unearthing it – Schiller replies to his friend’s complaint of insufficient productivity: ‘The ground for your complaint seems to me to lei in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more concrete by a simile. It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in – at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial of very fantastic, but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most affective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason – so it seems to me – relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass (…)”

The preceding quotation introduces the idea of self-observation that pays attention to each occurrence without banishing any of them from one’s own thoughts. This is the path followed by Freud in The ego and the id, just as he says in the Preface.

Therefore, we understand that the way in which Freud operates on producing a paper is as if it were a psychoanalysis or the interpretation of a dream. “The ego and the id is presented as a self-analysis oriented towards scientific creation (…) critical judgement will then act upon that flowing of the language, and that is how science shall constitute itself” (Etcheverry JL, 1976).

This is a singular science, as subject and object coincide.

This is an interesting model with which to carry on thinking about training. Self-observation, the attention turned towards our own unconscious, introspection, all these help us find ways through which the transmission of psychoanalysis is produced. Our itineraries follow the paths of our unconscious activity, and in order to express them in words (word-representation) efficient to propose our ideas, the psychoanalytic method as a tool becomes invaluable.

Candidates at one time, finally psychoanalysts, then training analysts; our whole life is an experience about how to become an analyst.

The trains of thought we wish to follow are founded on psychoanalytic conceptualisations. This has to do with thinking about the psychoanalysts’ training from a psychoanalytic perspective, with its own tools; it has to do with turning the attention towards ourselves – psychoanalysts – subjects turned into objects for the paths of thought. Freud himself gives us a footing for this issue when he states that “to the psychoanalysts the same can happen as patients in analysis”. That is the direction in which we will be heading until an obstacle forces us to re-think the route (turning back to make way as we go).

The repetition of the subject we have chosen, approached during symposiums, meetings, congresses and chats in the corridor; discussed, regulated and modified; written and re-written, opening up new chapters for each of the issues that make it up; thought about in 1910 and also in 2000, here as much as in Europe or the United States, accounts for the fact that the road is uncertain or yet, is destined to be shipwrecked, thus showing the impossibility of obtaining definite and lasting answers.

On the one hand, this repetition has a place next to the failure of the pleasure principle, a discomfort with training that dictates, and which we can encounter at different times in the history of the psychoanalytic movement.

This assertion is enough, for now, as proof that contradicts the assumption that the present times – “in crisis” – are the cause of the current difficulties (and that the loss of a “golden age” should be regretted).

On the other hand, the impossibility of finding an answer indicates a certain ‘lack’. And yet, we are not prevented from looking for some representations of that lack assuming that, from the beginning – that of us thinking – we choose to place ourselves at the centre of the three impossible professions: to educate, understanding here the transmission of psychoanalysis that reaches its effect in the psychoanalysts’ training; to rule, as in the coordination of institutional actions that provide a setting for training; and to analyse, whether in our role as analysts or as analysands. And as this does indeed happen, we know about its impossibility, that impossibility which can account for in advance, certainly, the insufficiency of results.

We will not overlook here that the way in which the paternal complex develops, and the way it is dealt with among the members of a group in particular, will determine the fate of an institution. (The groups of power, rivalries, the possession of “the truth”, submission, the presumptions of teaching, the families within the institution, among others, are all ways in which the murder of the father is carried out, while we are convinced of the good faith in which we think we act within psychoanalysis).

What we must do, then, is to look towards the practice of the psychoanalysts’ training, covering the vicissitudes, the difficulties and the contradictions present in the aforementioned practice, without forgetting that any conclusion we reach is provisional.

Moreover, it is necessary to bear in mind that the object of teaching and/or transmission is psychoanalysis. This causes the training process to have very specific singularities. If we leave these considerations aside we would incur a technical discussion about the teaching of a discipline. I think that the psychoanalysts’ training is quite another thing: it is about the need for an adherence to principles established among psychoanalysts in the act of the transmission of psychoanalysis, about rules that regulate the relationship psychoanalysts have with one another and in relation with knowledge.

Among the diversity of directions we could take, our path will be easier if we start from what is best known to all of us: psychoanalysis. This proposal takes on a double meaning if we express it as follows: psychoanalysis as a subject that has to be transmitted during the training process. But also, psychoanalysis is an instrument of work and research, a way of using it as a means to think about our purpose.

 

In search of a word: Psychoanalysis

The first time Freud mentions the word psychoanalysis – “a new method of psychoanalysis” – appears in 1896, in “Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses”*. Before using this term he had used other expressions** to refer to a method “subtle but irreplaceable”, successfully used to bring to the light of conscience dark traumatic events that had taken place during the individual’s childhood. In “Sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses” (1898), he refers to it as a “therapeutic procedure”.

Quite some time passed until his better know definition from “Two encyclopaedia articles” (1922).

Without trying to carry out a strict punctuation of the noun psychoanalysis, I shall leap over some texts – and a few years – to stop on the case history of Little Hans. In this article Freud points out that “(…) a psychoanalysis is not an impartial scientific investigation, but a therapeutic measure (…)” (Freud, 1909, p. 104 SE). We understand that he is putting in order the theoretical background of the clinical act, a foundation over which the scientific discourse that explains the therapeutic method is put forward.

A few pages later he associates the therapeutic method with the patient’s unconscious production and the operations it carries out to become conscious. (“Therapeutic success, however, is not our primary aim; we endeavour rather to enable the patient to obtain a conscious grasp of his unconscious wishes”) (Freud, 1909, p. 120 SE).

He returns to the rescue of this idea in “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning” (1910), this time referring to psychology founded upon psychoanalysis. When he says “psychology”, he is referring to the science as long as it is something thought about, or rather, the process of thinking that obtains its significance from the fact that it is founded upon the unconscious mental processes, with the peculiarities of which we have become acquainted through analysis.

In 1918, in “Lines of advance in psychoanalytic therapy”, he refers again to psychoanalysis as clinical work that, uncovering resistances, allows the patient to bring forth into consciousness the repressed unconscious.

The reason I have quoted these concepts about the idea of unconscious at such length is that I would like to highlight the coherence in Freudian thought: what gives sense to the term unconscious can only be reached through psychoanalysis, and the way to achieve it is the therapeutic work on neurotic suffering. The theoretical outline constitutes an addition to it.

1922: in “Two encyclopaedia articles”, he says:

“Psychoanalysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline”. (Freud, 1922, p. 235 SE).

This itinerary of thought places before us the issues with which we work during training. We shall say, then, that analytic training is the transmission of psychoanalysis.

On elucidating it, the aforementioned transmission of psychoanalysis will show in part the way in which it operates while in its movement, as well as the difficulties it presents; and its very impossibility will become apprehensible in the process of someone becoming a psychoanalyst. This can at least work as an arbitrary starting point for our work.

We have said, in agreement with Freud, that psychoanalysis names the unconscious as a paradigm, it is a method of working on neurosis that allows us to know the aforementioned unconscious by means of its productions, and carries out a theoretical formalisation that is a construction of ideas accounting for clinical work only as it develops.

Once we have established these ideas, we want to know whether this transmission can be carried out within the framework of teaching, or if we should suggest a different methodology from that used in the teaching of other themes.

To do so, we will take some ideas capable of helping us consider what is transmitted during the training of psychoanalysts.

 

Psychoanalysis: way of access into the unconscious mental processes

                                                                              Those who have no hope of the hopeless will never discover it,                                                                                                   for it is unfathomable and there is no way leading it.

Heraclites

 

We began this line of argument to find out whether it is possible to transmit psychoanalysis through the usual channels of teaching, or if the new knowledge demands opening up another methodology for its transmission. In this way, we came up with the unconscious as the foundation of psychoanalytic knowledge; but we must still say something else about this paradigm.

According to the definition offered by Freud, these mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, find in the interpretation of dreams the “royal road” to the unconscious. This royal road (it is not the only one, transference can also be considered among the privileged accesses to the unconscious) points out (a signal for us, an intellection for Freud) the architecture of the psychic apparatus in terms of efficient causality.

The experience of satisfaction* – die Erfahrung der Befriedigungserlebniss – allows us to continue with our trains of thought.

We consider ‘experience of satisfaction’ in separate ways, since the term ‘satisfaction’ gives a specific quality to the term Erlebniss (‘experience’). The latter, following the text The interpretation of dreams (1899), is the excitation produced by the irruption of need, which marks a trace with its insistence. A perception mnemonic image remains associated thenceforward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need.

The excitation – which we understand as somatic sexual energy, the impact of the drive on the organism – has an effect on the soma and causes an alteration. Somatic manifestations, as well as the expression of affects, are the aforementioned memories made ‘actual’. By overflowing the rudimentary possibilities of the psychic apparatus, they appear as traumas, the fundamental quality of the experience.

The modifier of the term Erlebniss (‘experience’), ‘of satisfaction’, points to the presence of a strange ‘other’, giving excitation appropriate derivation.

The irruption of a new quota of excitation – driving force – demands identity in what regards to satisfaction. Impossibility is encountered and the path of desire is opened, the psychic apparatus’ driving force.

The dream fulfils wishes by the shortest path which, through regression, invests perception images. At the same time this is never reached, there is always a limit to go beyond. Freud calls it “the dream’s navel”, “the spot – he tells us – where it reaches down into the unknown.” (Freud, 1900, p.525 SE).

This outline presents a psychic apparatus structured with representations (re-transcriptions of memory traces, following the ideas present in the “Letter 52”) which, led by the wish, open a way of functioning that is described by principles, processes and mechanisms. Among these, repression, which divides the Unconscious system from the Preconscious one, constitutes the “watchman of our mental health”.

This register remains differentiated from the other “unknown”, which is the foundation of the Preconscious system.

This “unknown”, even in its denial, suggests the idea of what lacks verbal expression, what lacks representation. It is the territory of ‘Erlebniss’: a mixture of a void with the conjugation of a verb in all its voices, tenses, and persons. This unassertible experience is impossible to be put into words; however, we must bear in mind that, on naming it, it becomes something else. Belonging to the real register, it escapes any intention of being captured, but analysis can limit it in its two presentations: somatic manifestations and the expression of affects.

The thing in itself, nearer to the real register, is inapprehensible and ineluctable. We only have access to it by means of the translation we do (This is what Freud maintains from the “Project for a scientific psychology for neurologists” onwards. We find it in chapter VII from The Interpretation of dreams (1899) as well as in his last papers: “An outline of Psychoanalysis” (1938)).

It is important to understand Freudian thinking within the Kantian tradition of operating  with the psychic apparatus, which, in its work translates, deduces, conjectures, makes intelligible, constructs.

Returning to previous ideas, we are now able to discern two psychical dimensions: a psychoneurotic dimension, a function of repression and the return of the repressed, the symptom being its expression as a transaction solution. Uncovering the resistances, filling up memory gaps and making conscious the unconscious, all undo the previous operation.

The other dimension corresponds to actual neuroses, where Erlebniss presents itself, the infantile sexuality which manifests itself in the somatic ambit, without the mediation of words. Trauma, the drive overflowing the ego, affects the ego and becomes impossible to be worked through. Being excluded from representational activity and from the associative commerce, it remains ‘actual’, it cannot fall in oblivion, and neither can it be remembered; it lacks history and transference.

Its manifestation presents itself – and it doesn’t represent itself – in the somatic ambit, forming the actual neurosis[1], the action of the somatic sexual excitation, which was theorised by Freud, from 1920 onwards as death drives, that is, what is not linked, insisting and remaining ‘actual’ because Erlebniss is.

Its presentation within the ego points to the ego’s passivity faced with the absence of restrain; the ego is taken up by ‘das es’, is lived by Erlebniss, so to speak, which is traumatic by definition. Its clinical manifestation is what we call actual neurosis and demands the construction of a scene that takes place there. The quantitative-qualitative factor is the difference.

The psychic apparatus, on dealing with this, continues to give meaning to the voice – mute and voluble – of Erlebniss. The word introduces discontinuity into the primal whole of Erlebniss and introduces into the discourse the possibility of working through the representations which can only refer to Erlebniss, but can never explain it in itself. The discourse imposes separation within the whole, allowing us to intervene, to modify, to produce an alteration within the ego. The word becomes meaning and representation.

At the beginning we set the goal of thinking about the unconscious, presented to us as the paradigm of psychoanalysis. Diverse thoughts brought to our attention a psychic apparatus operating in two registers. Depending on the operation of one or the other, we define a structure and a field for the activity of each. These are the ideas present in training. But they escape us time and again, because their contents cannot be captured in a ‘full word’, and also because of our own resistances.

Psychoanalysis: a method for the treatment of neurotic disorders.

The things that were immortal

Became mortal;

Merged before, then separated

They changed abode

Empedocles

Continuing with the trains of thought we have been following, we understand that ‘psychoanalysis’ names something that until then could not be named.

Then, says Freud, those thoughts we have discerned are articulated in the process of cure for the neurotic manifestations we deduce from the psychic apparatus we have described.

With this clarification, Freud is stressing the great value of psychoanalysis as a clinical method[2], present since the beginning of his activity, which privileges the singularity of each person, the alteration of the ego as an achievement of the cure, the lasting working through of a driving force.

What this involves is that the way in which the analyst participates in the psychoanalytic treatment should be different from that of the doctor when faced with the physical pain of the man that suffers. This is not about seeing in illness merely the absence of health, that which medicine understands as distance from the norm – normality – established for each function, this idea being full of consequences for the process of cure.

Among the many references to the Freudian works we could think about, we can take up a quotation from the clinical case of Little Hans that will prove useful: “Therapeutic success, however, is not our primary aim; we endeavour rather to enable the patient to obtain a conscious grasp of his unconscious wishes. And this we can achieve by working upon the basis of the hints he throws out, and so, with the help of our interpretative technique, presenting the unconscious complex to his consciousness in our own words” (Freud, 1909, p. 120-121 SE)

This direction allows us to conjecture what the work carried out in analysis should be: giving up purposive ideas, and making conscious the repressed. By means of free association-evenly suspended attention[3], the analyst interprets ‘in his own words’ and the analysand gains conviction.

A whole work expresses the analytic operation as a circular relationship carried out between two subjects: from what the analyst – who conjectures the analysand’s unconscious due to the analyst’s self-analysis – has made conscious to the analysand who then gains conviction, closing the circle started up by his words. With his words the analysand becomes the subject of analysis to yet another subject who becomes such with his words.

In this way, the previous quote is strengthened by the following phrase: “There will be a certain degree of similarity between that which he hears from us and that which he is looking for, and which, in spite of all resistances, is trying to force its way through to consciousness; and it is this similarity that will enable him to discover the unconscious material” (Freud, 1909, p. 121 SE).

And this only takes place with another. That ‘other’ who, being involved in the patient’s psychic reality, can do something when he works with a subject in which he is included, in which he becomes something else, in which he is one of the characters of a scene that unfolds in session. We are talking about transference and about the analyst’s function in the process of cure.

Through our effort to understand psychoanalysis as a psychotherapeutic method, we have focused our attention on the analyst and this has not been due to chance since our interest continues to be the analysts’ training.

Here as well, when we go through the narrow gorge offered by speech every time we try to capture ‘that’ unconscious in ourselves, words again emphasise the limitation in our thinking. However, we cannot give up this need to represent. Representation is the ground on which psychoanalysis takes place, with its false links, mnemonic gaps, compromises between the wish and defence, all of which are effects of repression over the unconscious, which is cloaked in strange apparels as it strives to reach the centre of the scene with all the variety of its repertoire. The word is also the field in which the transference is interpreted.

The analyst acts as a translator of the drama written in a language which is foreign to the ears of its own author. And in the translation – treacherous, impossible, always accompanied by the shadow of its original version – appears a new text, full of meaning, which presents the reader-author with the acquisition of meaning.  This is the work of uncovering resistances and cancelling repressions so that the psychic apparatus can function in the free circulation of representations.

Along with this a shadow slips by. That shadow which is theorised by Freud in his first essays as mixed neurosis: psychoneurosis and actual neurosis, which the article “On narcissism: an introduction” (1914) establishes as correlated one to another, and which in the article Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he calls “the experiences of psychoanalytic cure”, an exteriorisation of the compulsion to repeat, with its impulsive, passionate and rash traits, according to Etcheverry’s translation of Triebhaft.****

But here there is a change that can be found in the theory – a passage to the conceptualisations about the Freudian second model of the psychic apparatus – and in psychoanalytic practice: something that makes of the analyst an ‘other’ included in a plot without a story line, the experiences of the psychoanalytic cure that Freud mentions. To resolve them the analyst’s presence is necessary at the very scene into which he is called.

To all the recommendations made by Freud throughout his extensive work concerning the difficulties involved in carrying out a treatment using the psychoanalytic method, we add the hundred years of clinical work that have allowed us to display our psychoanalytic listening and our participation, at the borders of what is mute, that is, the absence of representations that take possession of the session as well as of its actors. Our work is not about finding what is hidden any more, but of naming what presents itself, what is.

Freud had already anticipated this idea in “The future prospects of psychoanalytic therapy” (1910). There he makes a precise reference to counter-transference: “We have become aware of the ‘counter-transference’, which arises in him [the analyst] as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings (…)”. The analysis (and self-analysis) of counter-transference is what makes the treatment an analytic treatment; the analyst’s failure to carry out this work – Freud is very specific about this – indicates his inability to analyse.

With Beyond the pleasure principle (1920) the idea of transference including the person of the analyst as an active participant in this demoniacal drama incorporates the participation of the death drive in the encounter between patient and analyst.

We give the name of transference on the person of the analyst to that moment in which the irruption of ‘the actual’ interrupts the analyst’s evenly suspended attention, cancels the roles patient and analyst have in the treatment, and unfolds the oedipal tragedy with incestuous and parricidal features.

These manifestations of direct sexual drive, not subjected to psychical work, or death drives, are the aforementioned “experiences of the psychoanalytic cure”. They are not about reproducing a past event in the life of the patient. They are the pure action of the drive’s imperative to re-establish the draining of meaning, the absence of all linking, which Eros, the peace disruptive, intended to introduce to alter the course of events. It is repetition in the sense of actualising what is ‘actual’, what insists and persists as impressions which have not been subjected to psychical work, which do not repeat themselves because Erlebniss  itself is.

We say it happens, it occurs – it happens now, once, it happens always – and not that it is something that has happened, which would then indicate its belonging to the past in the time order.

The analyst is the object of drive investment and participates in the tragic-incestuous scene displayed in the session. The somatic manifestations, the expressions of affect, the sexual excitation, lethargy and, in general, everything that could be called ‘acting’, expresses this ‘actual’ experience (Erlebniss) in the session, can happen to the patient as well as to the analyst, and defines the ambit we call transference on the person of the analyst.

The indelible nature of early experiences presents itself in the session, i.e. an irruption of the incestuous sexuality present in their origins. This irruption, interruption of the analyst’s evenly suspended attention, floods the session, takes its actors and demands its rightful place with greater rights than the feeble ego.

Once all the arguments the ego can rely on to understand a reality have been dissolved, the tragic incestuous scene unfolds in their place. When the boundaries of identities are erased, what prevails is ‘chaos’. The resistances that such experiences awaken lead to the introduction of time within the process of thought and to the indication that the traumatic episode belongs to the past, something – we can now say – that has happened during childhood. Taken by resistances, the analyst alienates himself, he shies away from participating in the scene, he maintains his own identity and remains as an observer of a drama that does not include him. One more step and he might even believe to have found that strange and valuable archaeological piece he was missing to tell a fragmentary story that is not his, that belongs to somebody else.

In the session, the foundation – not repressed – manifests itself without words, and without any psychic work or restrain, expresses itself through somatic disturbances and the expression of affects.

Analyst and analysand are active participants of that scene in which they are dispossessed of their identities and taken by characters who claim their ‘bodies’ to develop the drama for which they have been summoned. The word creates the scene of Erlebniss and what never was, happens for the first time.

The construction names characters and describes actions. And with this inscription it sends the main characters back to the land of language; it turns them into speakers of discourse when it introduces discontinuity into a unified whole. The word borders the Erlebniss, it says something about it that allows psychic work. But it keeps within itself what is not Erlebniss. While words always refer to something else, they escape the dimension of Erlebniss and present (and represent) all that is multiple and diverse as different from Erlebniss.

The ego links the unbound insistent elements, it includes in itself what until then was the id within the ego, with enough libidinal capacity to restrain the drive, leaving that residue which is impossible to capture in the buried foundation.

The singularity of the unconscious, of the products of the unconscious in each individual, prevents the analyst from establishing ways of operating, common to all the cases. Regular relationships between causes and effects only exist in an absolute theory, but they never appear in any patient.

The psychoanalyst working with the evenly suspended attention-free association in the session, is always exposed to the irruption of the unthought-of, to the presentation of Erlebniss. (In this case, nothing but Séneca’s warning occurs: “Existence takes place between fatality and uncertainty”).

The analyst’s intervention creates representations, institutes its place in language and includes analyst and analysand with his words. The psychoanalytic treatment is constant and continuous indetermination and its production is creation. It endeavours to cause a permanent change in the subject, and that is why it excludes any causal explanation (which is imaginary), as causality denies otherness.

All these ways of participating in the psychoanalytic treatment are part of what we call technique. But not anymore in its usual sense (as a group of established procedures which belong to a science or an art), but understood as general statements which have a non-specifiable application (e.g. technique can say that the analyst’s intervention must be in statu nascendi. But this is non-specifiable, it cannot say when that time has come: it has not got a password and only the analyst’s participation can notice it).

What we have been developing focuses on the analyst ‘inside’ the session, the only place where we shall find him. It assumes that all change in the analysis is a change in the analyst, but it does not deny the modifications in the analysand.

With the former what stands out is the position of the “analyst” to deal with that “beyond”, to find himself, without looking, while faced with the impact of sexual drives in all their expressions of transgression, which accompany words as if they were their double.

The tough stance we are taking becomes evident. The limits in the possibility of analysing are given by the analyst’s own limits and limitations. They are his responsibility in the conducting of a cure and he is also responsible for its failure.

But all this has not succeeded in providing any answer to our questions about training. Is it possible to learn the technique of psychoanalysis? Does carrying out technique in all its details as was prescribed by Freud guarantee the development of a process of cure?

In any case we must ask this other question, how does a person become a psychoanalyst?

 

Psychoanalysis: name of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline

If human though ever was at a dead-end, this is it.

1. Freud

What if psychoanalysis were a science?

Here is one of those dark aspects over which we psychoanalysts have not yet been able to agree on a certain direction. Each try is sufficient proof of its impossibility.

As knowledge, it is so based on ignorance. And filling up empty spaces that reason has not yet commanded, because it has not yet considered them, but eventually could, is not what this is about. Neither is it to propose the extension and conquest to which knowledge could be destined.

The dream of an unlimited progress of rationality was based upon the belief of a knowledge that could allow man to establish the laws governing all things, even those chance had shown to be incomprehensible. Man was naturally gifted for knowledge, and ignorance of a certain phenomenon was owing to the fact that man had not paid attention to it. However…

Freud, among others, provoked a switch in thinking by giving ignorance another meaning. That is, it is not about reaching knowledge to complete it: knowledge in itself is flawed, it bears an essential impossibility, and instead of offering certainties, it questions, ‘forcing you to reply, just like Thebes from the Sphinx’*.

This is already an initial warning to our thinking. We must not expect our “psychological information”, which we discern with unclear boundaries, to be exact. When we look for their definitions we find their extraterritoriality and every time we outline a map of them, we verify that their territory does not adjust to geographic boundaries. This points in the direction of a theoretical construction that is necessary to analyse.

According to the definition we have adopted, Freud defined psychoanalysis as “psychological information”. Let us stop there for a moment.

The perceptions we have of the things presented to us are mere appearances. PHAINO is Greek for ‘(to) appear’: what is shown, what comes to light. This is where phenomenon PHAINOMENON comes from, the term science takes as a starting point for research. (phantom and fantasy, among other terms, have the same root).

It is difficult to proceed down this path if we see ‘the thing’ over which we are working in the phenomenon. We know that there are not any unequivocal meanings, and yet, we act as if there were. As Freud says throughout his works, perceptions are given to us. This conceptualisation has a strong Kantian influence; it always indicates the sensory quality with which we perceive the object’s properties. However, once again we must distinguish what is perceived from perception itself. What is truly objective is “unknowable”.

The work we intend to carry out demands something else: independently from the receptive capacity of our sense organs, we are looking for something else which approximates more closely to what may be supposed to be the real state of affairs.

When we are thinking we “make intelligible”, we carry out a work of binding, we establish dependent relations present in the external world. We are not able to reach the external world itself, we can only infer its links, and we reproduce the weaves of the real world in “the internal world of our thought” which, in a way, is reliable. And this “enables us to ‘understand’ something in the external world”. Therefore, it must be put into words and translated “back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for us to free ourselves” (Freud, 1938, p. 196 SE)

We understand this as the task of constructing ideas and concepts of the new scientific discipline which infers “(…) a number of processes which are in themselves ‘unknowable’ and interpolate them in those that are conscious to us. And if, for instance, we say: ‘At this point an unconscious memory intervened’, what that means is: ‘At this point something occurred of which we are totally unable to form a conception, but which, if it had entered our consciousness, could only have been described in such and such a way”. (Freud, 1938, p. 197 SE).

This activity of constructing a science is not different from the work demanded from us by the analysis of a patient. So the path follows the route indicated by the itinerary from clinical work to theory. It is a work of production: a production of the unconscious, and a production of science.

The productions of the unconscious can be observed. A dream is told, we can listen to a slip of the tongue and, in some cases, neurotic symptoms become evident.

We are presented with a first provisional idea: in psychoanalysis the observer is included in the “scene” observed. We are dealing with a subject related to another one.

Science, at least what we have understood as science for the last 400 years, that is,  positivist science – science of positum, of facts, factual science – assumes there is a subject observing the phenomenon, this observed object is called ‘reality’, and operating over it, the subject describes it, experiences it, reproduces it for verification, establishes causes of bi-univocal correspondence for the effects, he states laws and communicates results to others  so that the procedures can be repeated to reach the same conclusions. However, the subject is excluded from what he observes.

For this very reason he is interchangeable or, even better, he is erased as the subject of enunciation. What matters there is the object, deposited there, in front of a subject alien to the situation.

Psychoanalysis as science – personally, I prefer to talk about theoretical knowledge in order to make reference to its formalisation – is characterised by the itinerary which goes from the clinical work to theory. The transference is the instrument by virtue of which this operation is carried out. But transference, in itself, is non-theoretical. It includes the person of the analyst in the scene taking place in the session (first provisional idea). The theoretical activity should not be confused with the clinical operation. There is no correlation.

Following the former, we approach a second provisional idea. Psychoanalysis exists within the psychoanalytic session. The session is a space built up by the encounter between the analysand and the analyst, in which the unconscious manifests itself by means of its productions. The analyst’s interventions (interpretation, reconstruction and/or construction) find their verification, in turn, in the openness to a new production of the unconscious.

Psychoanalytic theories are constructions based on the reality of the analytic session. However, we must count the psychoanalytic session among the productions of the unconscious, as its theoretical construction is the product of the same need to work through the productions of the unconscious.

A third provisional idea tells us that the materiality of the productions of the unconscious is made up of experiences and representations – mute manifestations and discourses – which are their basis. Over this basis, theoretical conceptualisations of structure and function are made: the psychic apparatus and the forces operating in it (structure), and what makes it work, psyche’s functioning rules (function).

Theory is that construction which is able to retain something of the productions of the unconscious (Tort, M. 1972).

Psychoanalysis as a theoretical formalisation is a construction of ideas which can account for a clinical situation, which in turn is constructed with the theoretical elements that formalise psychoanalysis.

The formalisation of psychoanalysis as theory is what we call metapsychology. In any case, its difficulty lies in the fact that it poses questions but does not resolve formal problems, because it does not establish objective procedures with which to resolve productions. It does not provide a ‘know-how’.

In this way, theoretical ideas belong to the domains of a knowledge always open, unfinished, enigmatic. They never correspond to a truth, to a reality captured by the concept, unless, on being written for the last time, their death certificate is also written.

 

Up to this point we have tried to think about the elements the Institute of psychoanalysis has to pass on to the psychoanalysts who come to be trained in it.

The initial idea did not have many aspirations. It was satisfied with some clarity about the contents present in a production within a system that, in a way, names a candidate as psychoanalyst. The complications we came across, and the extension of our undertaking, delayed our course, it forced us to devote ourselves in detail to certain aspects, extended our course on to paths that, in the beginning, we had not suspected we would have to cover. Even so, we have covered only a part; there are many intermediate stations waiting for more extensive treatment. On other stations we have not even stopped. There is a long way to go. However…

We have learned something. Psychoanalysis, as a procedure for the investigation of mental processes, as a method for the treatment of neurotic disorders, as a theory, is a development which has impossible extremes: at one of these extremes it is an unfinished and never ending production, due to its structure, it lacks certainty and is constantly renewing its points of arrival (as knowledge, it is always provisional).

At the other extreme – if there is one, somewhere, provisionally – it lacks an origin established on a basis that is certain: its starting point is the unconscious, always open, ineluctable, inexhaustible as it is not a demarcated territory to be conquered.

In between we could say something about what is hidden from the usual way of perceiving things.

Institutes of psychoanalysis are in a difficult position because they deal with these themes and at the same time are institutions placed within a wider culture which privileges rationality and science (with positivist values), the urgency of results, economic mastery and superficiality.

If the place of psychoanalysis is a non-place (‘atopia’, according to Castoriadis), what, then, is the place of the training of psychoanalysts within an institute of psychoanalysis?

For now, it is an impossibility: a teaching impossibility, because all the education theories and techniques fail in front of the unconscious desire, i.e., a point of failure; a political impossibility because the psychoanalytic institution is a contradictory expression that finds its failure in the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis; a psychoanalytic impossibility, because the unconscious is an inexhaustible source and it does not cease to make itself heard. In the last analysis, what is transmitted in the psychoanalytic training is a failure.

 

Where once I was analysand, analyst must become

So, how does a person become an analyst?

A psychoanalyst is such because of what another – ‘a man in suffering’ – demands of him, in search of relief to his psychic suffering. This demand creates an “inclusive field” we call transference. At the beginning of the treatment, by virtue of the aforementioned assumption, the ‘neurotic’ identity of the man in suffering is transformed into that of analysand (a change that corresponds to psychoneurosis being substituted by transference neurosis).

The analysand assumes that the analyst knows about his suffering: child sexuality, Oedipus complex, unconscious fantasies, etc. The analyst is aware of the power lent to him by his position, and puts a limit on it that allows him to operate as an analyst. He establishes the setting and the rule of abstinence, both of which pertain to sexuality.

By virtue of what does the analyst accept to resign drive jouissance in order to join, as an active participant, a drama that, until then, was alien to him?

From his own position as an analysand in analysis, he knows that the drama displayed is also his. He knows about Oedipus and the drive in all their kaleidoscopic expressions. This is what allows him to make use of his own power, it empowers him to be an analyst for another analysand.

Knowledge, ethics, and personal analysis are what we require from a psychoanalyst.

We now ask ourselves what possibility there is of acquiring this function and who to demand it from. This path goes through analytic training.

Psychoanalysts soon found in the tripod the method for the training of new analysts.

Freud warned, from his own self-analysis, that anyone who wished to take the psychoanalytic tool for himself, had to go through that process as a patient before, had to know his own unconscious, to such an extent that it became the exclusive condition through which one could become a psychoanalyst.

Subsequent formalisations determined the remaining requisites which would “guarantee” the ‘well doing’ of the analyst belonging to a society.

In consequence, when it comes to thinking about training, the building of its edifice relies on the solid basis of many years of experience. What does not seem to have equal clarity is the procedure operating in each of the processes forming the tripod that must be gone through.

This is due to two reasons:

1. a) the blurring of the paradigm of psychoanalytic training: to become a psychoanalyst where one was analysand requires a radical alteration to the ego.
2. b) new regulations succeeded one another as an expression of resistances in front of the difficulties faced in realising the tripod. These new procedures were believed to facilitate things, but what they really did was merely maintain the façade of the undertaking[4]. That is how the mandate: ‘what must a candidate do to become a psychoanalyst’ started.

From a different position, we might ask ourselves what a candidate must offer in exchange for becoming a psychoanalyst.

The debate, which derives from the ideas around training, usually takes conflicting positions: questioning or defence of  “teaching” in training; rejection or affirmation of all ideas that establish an equivalence between training and learning or teaching; introduction of other terms to refer to training, e.g. transmission, with which it is intended to highlight training as a process and to privilege in it the analysis of the future analyst; for others, this idea disregards training itself by not clearly defining the profile (or the curricular aspect) of what is offered with the transmission.

Whatever name it bears, for now it remains open, we are referring to:

1) a process which involves, per se, a radical alteration of the ego; 2) the product of this process is a qualification to practice psychoanalysis; 3) this qualification does not necessarily involve the participation of an institution, although any institution that considers itself psychoanalytic necessarily includes among its fundamental objectives the training of psychoanalysts; 4) the institution introduces in the qualification process a conscious purposive idea that contradicts the psychoanalytic process; 5) the exclusion present in the intersection between institution, education and psychoanalysis is pointed out, however; 6) the object of training and/or teaching and/or transmission is psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysis is an impossible task.

Through the direction taken by our thoughts about the process of training of psychoanalysts, we discern that the task becomes increasingly complicated because analysis, as Freud points out, is a “sui generis” procedure (“something novel and special, which can only be understood with the help of new insights – or hypotheses if that sounds better”, Freud, 1926, p. 189, 190 SE) which escapes the corset of previous knowledge and methodologies. It demands the aid of new ways of considering the function assumed in the training of psychoanalysts.

We move towards the construction of a psychoanalytic setting for this activity. This setting – such as we conceive it for the psychoanalytic session – includes, in a legal order, all the members who take part in the training process, it regulates their relationships through the interchange and preserves each of them.

We consider this setting to be the most stable element in the structure. The lack of it leads to the subjugation of institutional order and its members; its inadequacy either leads to feelings of guilt or their disavowal, or to acting. What is aimed at is to take responsibility from the subject and this has important consequences that express themselves as discomfort (“discord”) among analysts. And this bears effects on the structure, the institution, the analysts and even, one’s own work.

Initiated from this setting, the training of analysts demands arduous work from individuals, unheard of outside analysis, and which we can describe in terms of the conviction of their own unconscious. (Freud, 1912, p. 115)

We cannot forget that the analyst’s own unconscious is his instrument of work in the analysis he carries out in others. “It is not enough for this that he himself should be an approximately normal person. It may be insisted, rather, that he should have undergone a psychoanalytic purification and have become aware of those complexes of his own which would be apt to interfere with his grasp of what the patient tells him” (Freud, 1912, p. 116 SE).  This phrase stresses the insufficiency of considering oneself, and of being considered “normal”. In a sense, more is asked from the psychoanalyst:

• The work of becoming aware of his own unconscious by means of a personal analysis, thus allowing him to work with others.
• The acquisition of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis and the theories that explain the processes taking place in psyche.[5]
• The knowledge of psychoanalytic technique and the clinical consequences of using such a technique.
• The experience of conducting one or more psychoanalytic processes with the help of a more experienced analyst.
• A way of accounting for the experience carried out by the analyst during the process of training. This is done by means of the communication he can make both in writing and in the dialogue with other colleagues who get together to testify receiving a new member to the group of psychoanalysts.

 

The Institute of Psychoanalysis

“Preparation for analytic activity is by no means so easy and simple. The work is hard, the responsibility great. But anyone who has passed through such a course of instruction, who has been analysed himself, who has mastered what can be taught today of the psychology of the unconscious, who is at home in the science of sexual life, who has learnt the delicate technique of psychoanalysis, the art of interpretation, of fighting resistances and of handling the transference – anyone who has accomplished all this is no longer a layman in the field of psychoanalysis”

1. Freud

 

In the previous section we referred to some considerations about the way in which an institute aimed at training psychoanalysts should be understood. In very few words, what I expressed there is that this institute is the coming together of all those who have a part in the process of training, and who are included within a structure in which each of them is invested with a function.

Let us remember what Ferenczi read in his intervention of March 30 1910, at the Congress of Nuremberg: “The transmission of psychoanalysis requires an organisation as a place of permanent analysis, as a place for its members’ mutual analytic “critique”, with a view to search for satisfaction in our own work, and not in self-recognition” (quoted by Phillippe Julien in “El debate entre Freud y Ferenczi”, Rev. Ornicar?, n° 1)

This place of permanent analysis and exchange between psychoanalysts, a virtual, rather than a physical place, is defined by the institution of a law in which all members are included.

In the article, “The question of lay analysis” (1926), Freud picks up these ideas. After enumerating the components of the tripod (analysis, theoretical instruction, and aid from a more experienced analyst during the first analyses undertaken by a candidate), he says that what is missing is acquired through practice and exchange of ideas between the younger and the older members.

But this “place”, which initially appears to us as an appropriate and tension-free ambit for the scientific and professional development, is just that: an appearance. We soon discover that intense passions dwell in it, which work as obstacles to the training process[6]. The manifestations of civilisation and its discomforts also dwell in psychoanalytic institutions.

An inevitable destiny. That is why the functionality of a psychoanalytic institute rests upon its members renouncing their drives, and upon the rules that regulate their mutual relationships. The possibility of fulfilling its objective and of exercising the power it holds, to be able to do something with the power with which it has been conferred, are to be found in the former, and nowhere else.

Where can that power be found? Who can confer it?

Psychoanalytic training is neither structured in the form of a university course, nor as a post-graduate course. It lacks the legal support[7], within the legislation in our country, to grant degrees in psychoanalysis, and the degree itself is not registered in any mental health listing, nor has it got official recognition.

This does not prevent certain universities from offering postgraduate courses in psychoanalysis and granting degrees[8]. But in such cases what is maintained is only the formal aspect of the mentioned education, theoretical contents are imparted, however, the fundamental aspects of training, e.g., gaining knowledge of one’s own unconscious, are forgotten.

Another recourse offering recognition for the exercise of power is “social position”. In this case, legislation is substituted by the prestige won. If in other times this prestige was great and well-founded, nowadays we are witness to its downfall, for whatever reasons, either psychoanalytic or extra-psychoanalytic, which are proposed as a valid argument.

We would be left, then, with just the glittering letters of the name ‘psychoanalysis’. But we know well that many rivals of the couch have found in that same glitter a surface with which to publicise their merchandise, making ‘psychoanalyst’ the name of anyone practicing psychotherapy, and even other methods to relieve neurotic suffering.

An institute of psychoanalysis will not obtain its power from any of the aforementioned dominant positions. Any of them will put its weakness in evidence and, by making use of power, will abuse it.

This is not the place to carry out either a study about power, or an analysis of its uses. However, what we cannot fail to mention is that power is always present and that, being analysts, we know what it is about.

In the origin of power we shall find the drive component that, with little binding and without any adequate psychic work, reaches its expression in the unlimited strength that asserts a truth backed by itself (dogma) while at the same time erasing the subject as such.

But we also acknowledge that the power processed by the word authorises the action of whoever makes use of it.

Between one case and another, different variants of its use (and abuse) can be found.

The consideration of power within analytic training is of no less importance because, when we become analysts, we are recognised as having the “power to heal”; on practising psychoanalysis we summon “hidden, unknown (unconscious) powers”; we face up to “the power of resistances” and, to overcome them, we depend on the “power of words” in transference.

The relationship between the Institute and the analyst (giving this name to each of its members, without distinguishing them according to their functions) is instituted and supported in the recognition, on the part of the Institute, of an analysand (candidate) who carries out a training through which he can become an analyst. An analysand, in turn, institutes himself in the process of training by demanding from the institution that it should be a place where analysts meet, and where those analysts account for their clinical experience, analysts to whom he presents his own clinical experience, which shows the effects of transmission in him.

Double effect, we might better say, if we are aware that this transformative process is directed towards the place shared with others, the place in common, and towards subjectivity.

In the first case, the analyst, only one among others, shares with the other analysts, his peers, the common legacy of psychoanalytic thinking initiated by Freud.

At the same time, his singularity places him in the role of analyst, a clinical role in which he is faced with his loneliness, a legacy he makes his own. It is, as Piera Aulagnier says, “(…) that which allows him to be transmission of the text in his own name” (Alulagnier, P., 1980). There he is an interpreter of a text: the Freudian text (which he acquired in seminars); the text of the analysand in front of him (made present in supervision); the text of his own unconscious (disclosed in his own analysis).

All this process which operates through training “(…) is the “gift” that can only be transmitted from mouth to ear, that can only be transmitted to that individual whose project is to become an analyst himself; e.g. the candidate. That ‘plus’ to be transmitted, typical of teaching relationship, is to do with what in psychoanalysis belongs to the performance register, e.g., it is to do with praxis and not only with duty”. (Aulagnier, 1980).

At this point, we do not know whether we make any progress with each step forward in the text. We should perhaps consider that any progress is nothing but a new opening to new enigmas that, in their silence, challenge our restlessness to carry on thinking.

What the previous issue brings with it is a new problem which complicates the evolution of transmission: transferences.

The plural makes us assume that we are referring to more than one transference, and that is correct. Let us review some facts: the training process is carried out within an institution; a great number of analysts take part in the training; there is a direct and personal relationship between the analyst and the candidate; institutional participation favours the contact with different analysts; a passage through different authors and theoretical settings is produced.

All this makes us talk about transferences.

The decision to begin the process of training gives rise to the need to choose an analyst in order to start training analysis (perhaps it is the same analyst with whom he had been conducting his personal analysis). But to this we must add the belonging to a society towards which the candidate directs transferences, linked to unconscious fantasies with the analyst.

Alternatively, it can happen that, from the very beginning, the choice is made over a psychoanalytic society to where the analyst, chosen afterwards, belongs. This society is an imaginary place over which transferences are made.

There is transference towards the analyst, to which the transference towards the institution is added. Moreover, we have transferences with the supervising analyst, with the teachers, with the authors, with the texts, with certain ideas, with groups or families of analysts, and so on.

Up to here, someone could say that the same thing happens in other training schools; that this is not exclusive of psychoanalysis.

We agree. What makes the difference is that we, psychoanalysts, know of the existence of the unconscious and of its production in transference (s). Moreover, the conviction in the existence of the unconscious makes us subject those transferences to analysis, this being the cornerstone of the training process.

Without transference(s), transmission of psychoanalysis is impossible.

Once again we have followed an itinerary that testifies yet again that the training process transmits a failure; an impossibility that the analysand (candidate) tries to make up for according to his own possibilities. However, this process is flawed in advance.

The tripod

The tripod is the expression of a methodology chosen by the first psychoanalysts to make training possible for all those who approach psychoanalysis in order to practise it. Although there is agreement in this, we find important differences in different societies.

The factors influencing this are various, among them, in a very general way, are: the foundational acts which form the origins of a certain society and its institute; the history thus constructed (in which the facts of historical experience predominate over the officially promulgated history); the culture of the region in which the institution is based; transferences – both those acknowledged and those not subjected to analysis.

All this makes the presumption of establishing guidelines regarding ‘training know-how’ imprudent, besides, on being established as a model, it dismisses psychoanalysis.

Taking the risk involved in going along the paths of psychoanalysis, we will examine each of the training instances to question them and to see which new (and old) enigmas they confront us with and where we can support ourselves to maintain our convictions.

The process of initiation: admission to training

To ‘initiate’ and to ‘admit’ are words whose meanings are often confused. Both are inseparable when the time of naming what will take place as a process comes.

Initiare (initiate) derives from initum which is ‘beginning’ and means to accept new members into an organisation through often secret ceremonies. (Collins dictionary, [English], Valbuena dictionary, [Spanish]).

We notice at once that the secret is the unconscious; the ceremony is the analysand becoming an analyst, and the question is whether he who asks to be admitted to the process can go through it to make of his own unconscious an instrument with which he can practise the art of psychoanalysis with others, who demand treatment of him.

As is usual with all questions, half answers are all we obtain. And what can be said in this ‘half language’ is what constitutes the commitment of the aspiring analyst: one will privilege his own analysis, another will be committed to the ‘career’ he will make at the institute.

It is important to be aware of the difference.

With regard to this admission, it is convenient to add another meaning that will concern us in the following developments. I am referring to initio, which means the outlining of a path, or the opening of it (Hieronimus).

I consider it important to ask the prospective candidate to express what his interest in psychoanalysis is and what method he has undergone. This includes the work of analysis over his own unconscious and the itinerary of his training.

It could be said that the former is the product of secondary revision, worked by resistances, if he has never subjected to analysis his desire to become an analyst. It shall nevertheless have an effect and will allow him to start building on the steps of his training, as will be seen further on.

This initial process is currently carried out in three interviews with different analysts. Somewhat different from those first admissions in times when psychoanalysis was younger and visibly less experienced. In those times, the candidate’s personal analysis was equivalent to today’s admission interviews: “… its main objective is to help the training analyst assess if the candidate can be admitted for his subsequent training”.

New arguments against the duration (‘just a few weeks’ or ‘several months’) of this analysis could then be presented, as well as criticisms regarding the role of judge attributed to the analyst[9]. Then the procedure could be abandoned.

Freud rapidly settles the question and once again bases things on the stable ground of psychoanalysis. To the first objection he replies that, due to practical reasons, that analysis is brief and incomplete. The second issue is decided upon the candidate’s firm conviction of the existence of the unconscious.

Admission will have as its product the opinion – fallible and without guarantees – of a psychoanalyst who, faced with the demand of an individual who wishes to be an analyst, considers that analysis can produce in him alterations to the ego, one of them being that of becoming an analyst.

Training analysis

But where and how is the poor wretch to acquire the ideal qualifications he will need in his profession? The answer is, in an analysis of himself.

1. Freud

 

As we have already said, the psychoanalyst’s own analysis finds its main foundation in the fact that his instrument to work with other analysands is his own unconscious.

Only by undergoing with an ‘other’ the analysis of resistances can the analyst become aware of his own unconscious. (Freud, 1912, p. 116 SE)

It is by virtue of his own analysis that the analyst obtains “(…) a kind of sharpness of hearing for what is unconscious and repressed (…)”

As an effect of this process, we have said that “where once I was analysand, analyst I must become”. In this paraphrase, we understand that becoming an analyst is the product of the process of cure undergone by the candidate. We point it out in this way to stress that analysis is work – production of the unconscious – and not a result or an objective. It would be contradicting the analysis itself to establish a purpose as a result. (Here begins the discussion about the term ‘training’, an addition to the analysis undertaken by a candidate).

We know what this analysis is about: to gain firm conviction in the existence of the unconscious. What makes the difference with the analysis of a neurotic who does not wish to become an analyst is that, in the case of the candidate, there is a peculiar resistance that must be taken into account in analysis: the wish to become an analyst is a symptom that the analysand (candidate) is not asking to analyse.

If this wish is not questioned, there is something left out of the analysis, which  establishes itself as the bastion of the most persistent resistances. It is doubtless that other conflicts will go unanalysed as well. We could consider the possibility of the analysand finding, through analysis, other paths for his life and dropping out of training. (To become an analyst is the inadvertent effect of analysis brought to a conclusion).

But this is not about the candidate obtaining conviction about his ‘vocation’. If this happens, then the analyst would find himself haunted by the same absurd concern Arminda Aberastury discovered in her: “(…) I caught myself thinking as much about this candidate’s career, as I thought about his cure, or even more. In turn, the candidate seemed to be more preoccupied with calculating when he would start his seminars than with analysing in depth his self-knowledge” (Aberastury, A., 1959, p. 382).

Some years have gone by, and in the same way as bulwarks protect themselves from the passage of time and from the ravages of tenacious adversaries, this idea has lost none of its force. Ad-hoc commissions have pointed out, at different times, the loss of importance, seriousness and reliability of training analyses. This disrepute continued with the questioning being extended to the number of weekly hours devoted to analysis, and in some cases, analysis became nothing more than a compulsory requisite in the formalities of training, reduced to a certain number of seminars and other formalities merely as a measure of the end of analysis.

When analysts and candidates lost their conviction, regulations adjusted to the new situation. But that was not the last chapter in the history of training analysis. With the driving force of renovation at university levels, the intention of turning analytic training into a course, or a post-graduate course determined that the candidate’s analysis was not among the curricular requisites. The temptation to sustain academic thought would bring with it the disappearance of psychoanalysis and its substitution by knowledge that can be learnt; ‘to know what to do’ backed up by the ‘career’ and the academic qualification. So Arminda Aberastury was right.

Another author in our circle claims that in training analysis all the driving forces that occur in usual analysis are also present. Fidias Cesio highlights the wishes and ideals that emerge in the psychoanalyst who offers himself as training analyst and which stimulate the candidate in a complementary way.

“’The direct identifications previous to any investment of the object’ are also present at the basis of a training analysis, therefore, an intimate and profound communication between patient and analyst is established within the soul’s deepest layers. That will turn them into a kind of ‘family’, the psychoanalytic ‘families’. Resistance to admitting that these processes occur, due to their uncanny quality, leads some analysts to the strong rejection of this idea”. (Cesio F., 1996).

What enters the scene here, Cesio says, is the training of the analyst called ‘training analyst’. Once again, we are dealing with an effect of training.

Parallel to this line of thought is Piera Aulagnier’s, when she points out the threat perceived by the training analyst in the analysand’s singularity, which emerges due to his being different thus threatening the analyst’s ideals, who then imposes upon the candidate “the singularity of his interpretation, of his actions, of his style” (Aulagnier, 1980, p. 20)

Another danger in this relationship is that of the prestige invested in the condition of being a training analyst, the prestige that giving the role an official title brings with it. This is quite common in different societies and in some psychoanalysts.

In other times all roads led to Rome. In our case, all these issues lead to the psychoanalyst’s own analysis, to the significance of psychoanalysis as an instrument of work over the productions of one’s own unconscious, to psychoanalysis as the practice of an activity in the form of an uncomfortable position, questioning, hesitating, of a certain knowledge that returns to the analyst and puts him daily in a situation involving an alteration to his ego.

But this is not only to do with analysis (self-analysis; re-analysis). The practice of training analysis should make analysts aware of the necessity for a meeting place where they can interact with other analysts in their same situation, as a clinical space of the training role allowing them to maintain a permanent discussion on the singular characteristics of training analysis.

We must emphasise the responsibility undertaken by an analyst when he conducts  training analysis, for in this responsibility lies the only possible safety to which an institute can aspire regarding its members.

This position of responsibility substitutes all norms, regulations, dispositions or mandates presuming to regulate desire. (We know that prohibitions induce the wish to break them, and the more there are…).

Training clinical supervision

-What shall I Do? What do I have to do? What do you think?

(A patient)

Freud, in a letter to Ferenczi, writes that “(…) the Recommendations on Technique I wrote long ago were essentially of a negative nature. I considered the most important thing was to emphasise what one should not do, and to point out the temptations in directions contrary to analysis. Almost everything positive that one should do I have left to ‘tact’, the discussion of which you are introducing” (Jones, E., Vol II, p. 270).

Freud comes back to the tact to be expected in an analyst (although in varying degrees, he says), in his “conversations with an impartial person” when he says that “That is a question of tact, which can become more refined with experience” (Freud, 1926, p. 220 SE). The question of tactfulness is determined by the analyst’s unconscious.

In consequence, clinical supervision is not the teaching of know-how, it is not the candidate learning psychoanalytic technique. Knowing the technical aspects of psychoanalysis is part of the training, but know-how belongs to the register of the imaginary, and the only thing achieved by using up supervision to these ends is that the analyst, having identified with the supervising analyst, repeats with his patients the words he has incorporated. Indeed, we are not dealing here with an act of pedagogy.

1. Jones tells us that, during the summer of 1909, Freud had told him he intended to write a short manual of technical rules. However, this never happened, Freud gave up this task because he felt incapable of writing a complete treaty, which he considered to be an impossible task.

The situation in which an analyst with more experience examines a candidate’s wish to become an analyst through the work of analysis carried out by the candidate with his own patients is nearer to the suggestions Freud offered. (This is what training analysis is about: Freud expresses it clearly when he says that the analyst himself should undergo analysis by someone with expert knowledge. He does not say that the analyst should be older than the analysand. This opens up another issue in training, as fascinating as any other, but it goes beyond the aims of this paper).

Without confusing it with training analysis, this supervision works on the candidate’s unconscious production, whose ‘blind spots’, repressions, unconscious complexes and anxieties infiltrate into his listening during the analysis he is carrying out.

The requirement made of the candidate to present reports regarding the work carried out with a patient endangers analytic treatment while this is being carried out, as Freud points out in section “d” of the article, “Recommendations to physicians practising psychoanalysis” (1912).

Taking this risk will allow us to make a clinical presentation concerning the work carried out. This is a meeting where the members of a psychoanalytic society listen to the presentation of the analysis carried out by the colleague in training (candidate). This meeting is intended for the candidate as a way of accounting for his clinical act in front of a group of colleagues, thus constituting his recognition within the psychoanalytic community to which he wants to belong.

For the analyst in charge of training supervision this act has all the peculiarities, characteristics and difficulties we have discussed in the previous section. All the ideas put forward there about training analysis can be thus applied to training supervision.

Seminars

How can I talk to the wise man about life if he is a prisoner of his own doctrine.

Chinese Proverb

Only a man who really knows is modest, for he knows how insufficient his knowledge is.

1. Freud

 

1. a) A privileged way of transmission of the theoretical formalisation.

The section presented to our intellection does not offer less difficulty than the previous one. On discussing the previous sections, we have followed the ideas proposed by Freud in his definition of psychoanalysis, namely the existence of the unconscious, a method for the treatment of it and the construction of a theory which can explain it.

We shall discuss here the transmission of that field of knowledge (theoretical formalisation). But we shall do so with the idea that psychoanalysis constitutes a praxis and its instrument is the analyst’s unconscious. The formal aspects of theory and technique are merely a part that can account for the theoretical basis of the clinical act, but they will never instruct us as to when the analyst will use such and such a concept, or the moment of his intervention; they do not tell us how to produce.

After that wish, during the summer of 1909, to write a short manual on technical rules, Freud wrote that “this technique cannot yet be learnt from books and it certainly cannot be discovered independently without great sacrifices of time, labour and success. (…) it is to be learnt from those who are already proficient in it” (Freud, 1910, p. 226 SE).

With these arguments we consider that the teaching of the theoretical formalisation during training is proposed in a manner different from that of the usual school models, including university models. ‘Transmission’ and ‘teaching’ are different because the latter privileges the acquisition of knowledge, whereas the former values the subjectivity which is at stake, and offers tools for the production of an alteration in each of the participants, in whom the theoretical and technical formalisation is present. The aforementioned formalisation is carried out by a psychoanalyst with a teaching function, and the level of formalisation that can be reached depends on each subject’s training. The clinical experience stemming from one’s own analysis and other psychic processing of the transferences within the institution are not alien to this process.

When the “individual factor”[10] is so significant in training, what matters most is not a particular teaching methodology, but the commitment with which the thought that is transmitted, i.e. psychoanalytic thought. Before the teacher’s ability, what should be taken into account is his conviction in the existence of the unconscious[11].

Therefore, we consider that the study and research of psychoanalytic theory, clinical practise and technique find in the seminar a privileged instrument. By seminar we understand a space created by an analyst with a teaching function and a group of candidates to read, question, discuss and work through a text. Space and function are both a product of the structure which is created in the interrelation between analysts, due to the fact that one of them presents his experience (elaboration of his psychoanalytic thought) to a group of colleagues.

This is always unfinished; it leaves an ‘un-said’ which drives towards new ‘un-known’ concepts.

Within transmission there is always something in-transmissible. The in-transmissible has an unconscious nature, and it is always present whether it is taken into account or not during the training process.

Among those who have inquired into this issue is Alberto Cabral, who considers the polarity teaching-transmission to be included within the tripod’s articulation, it being a dimension exclusive of analytic experience “which is refractory to theoretical apprehension”.

In his article, Cabral says: “the peculiarities of the object that constitutes our practise, which is the unconscious, are the ones that  respond due to the distinctive trait of analytic training: the secondary place, subsidiary if that sounds better, theoretical teaching has in it, is related to the significance we attribute to the singular experience of our own analysis” (Cabral. A., 1998).

On the one hand, this singular experience rests on transference, and on the other its praxis is non-specifiable, i.e. in which way can it be taught when the analyst intervenes with his interpretation? We shall obviously leave the choice of that time in his own hands, trusting that his ‘tactfulness’ and the effects of analysis have done their part.

We conceive the teaching of psychoanalysis as the space of an experience[12].

This is what Raúl Sciarreta claims when he refers to theoretical formalisation during the training of psychoanalysts. “The essentials of clinical work are displayed in transference, when transference is not just theoretical discussion but is displayed within a group. A space of “transmission” emerges, where analysts exchange, with theoretical resources, their experiences of the praxis of cure, each holding himself responsible for his own transference. Otherwise, we could be faced with a theoretical-intellectual discussion, of a certain philosophic, or sociologic importance, but never an analytical one.” (Sciarreta, R., 1988).

This exchange is the space of teaching; an exchange of the effects of psychoanalysis over each of the participants, which, in turn, also has effects. It is true, though, that it has certain traits that should not be disregarded. In the preface to the book commemorating the 10^th anniversary of the Berlin Institute, Freud stresses the importance of “securing a society where analytic theory can be taught, and where the experience of more experienced analysts can be transmitted to students who are eager to learn.”

The teaching of theory and the experience circulating within transmission have not been resolved yet.

There is something that can be taught: psychoanalytic theory. However, we make a mistake when we consider that this is possible by means of instruction, and this is true in more than one sense.

The orderly teaching in a curriculum which responds to the requirement of learning – i.e. the acquisition of certain knowledge by means of accumulation, in a pre-established time, and with a measurable result – prevents us from thinking and, in consequence, from producing psychoanalytic knowledge. Any attempt at regulating teaching commands a model of knowledge, established as an ideal, which is at the end of a path that must be gone through. This belief is based upon the need for a father, an authority, a director, no matter what or who is vested with this power, and no matter who has the final say and establishes the model of “supposed to know” that the candidate wishes to reach.

When an institution is structured following those traits – those which lend the institution its character – it is highly possible that these gain form and substance in the person of its teachers. The place of knowledge will be substituted for that of the “professor” himself. He is the “magister”, an ideal to look up to, with all the institutional difficulties and neurotic conflicts in its members rising as resistances to the process of transmission, among other things.

This is part of one of the Freudian impossibilities – that of ruling – that we attribute here to the institution. “The Institution’s ethical demand, the constant search for ideals, cannot account for the psychic reality which refers to the significance of experiences, according to what we know about the analytic process; i.e. that it is determined by the first fundamental rule”, says Jacqueline Cosnier. (Cosnier, J., 1984).

Within these ideas, the difference between what has already been thought about and what needs to be thought about in the future is put forward. What has already been thought about can be incorporated, accumulated, and repeated. However, even if it is iterated well, it will not tell us “how to do” with the analysand. What it certainly does produce is an illusory feeling of certainty: not only in the “student”, because there is a body of pre-established knowledge he can incorporate, which is guaranteed by the illusion that there truly exists someone who is already in possession of this knowledge, but also in the “professor” as there is a body of pre-established knowledge which is guaranteed by the illusion that there are others who echo his own words.

In a nutshell: we can talk about transmission only when  teaching has failed.

On the other hand, we shall also have to consider the metapsychological explanation of the process of teaching. Psychoanalysis has a theoretical structure founded upon psychoanalytic praxis, a construction of ideas and intellections that constitute the theoretical basis of the productions of the unconscious in analysis. Moreover, these theoretical formulations have their own internal coherence, characteristics and extensions within the Theoretical Categories which establish their scientific rigor (Ariovich, E., 1998).

This theory, which is disseminated throughout the broad body of Freudian work and which has been continued in the discourses that have followed, is part of the academic training for future analysts. In its formal aspect, the teaching of psychoanalysis occurs in preconscious-conscious ways.

Transmission acknowledges the formations of the unconscious, their productions are articulated in both Freudian models of the psychic apparatus with all their manifestations. All discourse is over-determined by the unconscious.

“This double perspective of training points to the relationship subject-object where, being the object another subject, the relationship produces an intersubjective field. That is, Theory is carried out within intersubjectivity, its goal being not the object of theory, but the ways of the subject” (Ariovich, 1998).

We are following a path in our thought, one we are constructing as we proceed, one which warns us that if we think about training as starting from other paradigms, following models borrowed from other disciplines, we lose track of psychoanalysis.

If we encounter difficulties, the same tools used by psychoanalysis in its praxis are enough to treat those difficulties.

We have already stated that the seminar is the space created by an analyst and a group of candidates to read, question, discuss and work through a particular Freudian text, subsequent authors, clinical materials, or scientific and/or cultural subjects related to psychoanalysis. This is its formal aspect. There is also a ‘plus’ that runs through the process of the seminar, since the seminar as well is produced in transference.

Fidias Cesio adds that the seminar takes place within a setting similar to that of the analytic session. The reading of articles and the subsequent comments are the manifest content, the ‘free associations’ which open up the path towards the unconscious. That is why they create transferences.

The teacher, “who is supposed to be less resistant and to know more than the candidate, interprets the texts thus awakening transferences which grant him a suggestive power. With it, the overcoming of resistances becomes possible and teaching can progress” (Cesio F., 1996).

We shall add that the teaching of psychoanalysis reaches its effect only if it has the feature of a psychoanalytic act. Theory finds a new signifier within the discourse of the subject who has become an analyst, who is now authorised to speak for himself within the psychoanalytic field. A change in the subjective position of the analysand (candidate) has taken place here as well.

The idea of assessment rests on the former. We understand assessment as a way of making conscious the effects of transmission throughout training. This can entail either a seminar, or the whole training process. However, once training is over, this goes beyond that process, within the clinical activity, in supervision, in the candidate’s own analysis, as well as in his ability to realise that something has changed in him by going through the experience of the seminar  as much as that of transmission.

Borrowing an idea from R. Sciarreta, I think that we must not be afraid to admit that the seminar is somewhere between catastrophe and psychical work.

1. b) Certain practical issues

Let us go back a few pages, to keep in mind what we have said about “initiation” in the sense of “tracing a path”.

This idea shall be our guide to thinking about certain practical issues concerning the transmission of the formal aspect of psychoanalysis. This idea and another, namely that the work carried out in the seminar is a production operation which borders the ineluctable.

Both axes are within the conception of departmental freedom and of curriculum[13].

Following the spirit of the 1974 Manifest (APA 1974), we can attempt a re-reading of it and give meaning to these ideas within a process containing all the characteristics described, in which the production of knowledge occurs.

On the teacher’s part, the departmental freedom goes beyond creating a syllabus for the seminar with the particularities he might wish to add, and letting it be known to candidates in advance should they wish to take it. Departmental freedom involves there being an experienced analyst who is committed to psychoanalysis and who is considering, from a psychoanalytic perspective, an aspect of theory, technique, clinical work, and who is carrying out a psychic work over it. This is what he comes to offer to a less experienced group of colleagues.

We understand freedom of curriculum as the free choice the candidate can make of the seminars which offer him the instruments for the construction of his psychoanalytic thought. In other words, it is the possibility of making his own way according to the preoccupations awoken by his experiences. That is the route the path traces.

Throughout this path he deals with the psychic work he carries out in each seminar, articulating new knowledge with previous acquisitions and experiences. It is to be expected that a candidate can explain to himself the (conscious) reason for choosing a seminar according to the particular trajectory he follows.

When the compulsory seminars are over, the production his psychoanalytic thinking will be expressed in writing, by way of a personal development concerning an aspect of psychoanalysis, which is a product of that other meaning that going through training operated in him. It is what we call the candidate’s written discourse; an expression of the candidate’s psychoanalytic thinking.

It would be more adequate if this writing task, as a result of the production of the aforementioned thinking, combined the ideas constructed in the seminars. The themes that arouse his interest, which guide his readings, which point to a certain path followed within psychoanalysis are continually articulated in his thought. But now that they have become his own ideas, they are turned into writing, writing that can be transmitted to his colleagues. This act of writing constitutes a visible mark of his becoming a psychoanalyst.

This writing is not a summary which nowadays requires little more than the effort of purchasing a CD, it is not an essay, and it is not a thesis. It is the operation of an analysand who has become psychoanalyst in writing.

As for the teacher, something should be asked of him, and something should be given to him. The “Programa para la reestructuración de la APA” [Programme for the re-structuring of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association] (APA, 1974) claims that the way of functioning proposed by this programme allows all members to fully recover the responsibility for their own actions. We agree with that, in fact, we claim that it is only in the exercise of ethics that the transmission of psychoanalysis is possible. This is what we ask of the teacher.

There is need for the active participation of each individual at a Senate of analysts with a teaching function (different from those analysts with a training function), or at a  meeting place where the debate over the particularities of the process of transmission in seminars is opened.

As regards what to give the teacher, it is not difficult to know. It is the remuneration for his work. Believing that the analyst should consider himself well-rewarded for having the opportunity to give a seminar would be a masquerade. The lack of payment causes discord among analysts, as recognised by Angel Garma more than 45 years ago (Symposioum 1959). This recognition is also part of the institute’s responsibility, of its ethical position.

To end up… To transmit is to work  through

Words, words, words… we have used so many words up to this point in order to say what could be said in just a few. Those words which point to the impossibility of psychoanalysis, both its practice and transmission. It is necessary to repeat words in order to have representations that can help us think, to cross the borders of the lack of words to name what is missing.

Because of its very characteristics psychoanalytic training is transmission. However, a clarification becomes necessary: in its interminable movement, transmission is to be transmitted in the future. And what it transmits is a failure, an impossibility that the candidate tries to make up for according to his own possibilities, knowing in advance (or not, as the case may be, though he will become acquainted with the idea through his own analytic experience) that this process is flawed. We are moving in a field which belongs to psychoanalysis: that of desire. However, there are no maps that can show us desire.

Within transmission something is transmitted. But the experience carried out by each in the process cannot be transmitted.

In consequence, this ‘to be transmitted’, in its movement becomes ‘to be worked through’. An alteration which produces a change in the subjective position of the analysand (candidate) is produced and a new signifier is the result of the experience made.

The ability acquired on going through that process grants authorisation to practise psychoanalysis. This authorisation is beyond established guidelines and regulations, although it does not disavow them. The aforementioned authorisation is granted before a group of colleagues with whom the candidate, now analyst, constitutes a society, that space in which the awareness of being one more link in the chain is aroused.

Psychoanalytic training has a theoretical formalisation that can be taught. The theoretical contents and the technical aspects can be acquired in courses, conferences and seminars. In fact, psychoanalytic theory and technique can be studied through books and scientific papers. However, that is not enough. In spite of all the ink that has flowed onto paper, the text which conveys practical know-how for when an analyst meets the analysand in an analytic situation will never be found. Transmission has a ‘plus’ due to the fact that is carried out in transference.

Theodor Reik replies to the question ‘how does one become a psychoanalyst?’ with another question ‘how does a person become a musician?’ And he replies that a student can only be taught certain technical aspects [of music]. The mental act itself of composing cannot be taught, even if that is what students expected at the beginning.

He then quotes Mahler: “the most important element of music is not found in the notes”. In this way, by comparing the student of psychoanalysis with the music student, Reik points to that peculiar trait that is the ability to compose: creation is distinguished from reproduction (Reik, T., 1965).

This has to do with the difference between the analyst in training and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In Goethe’s own words:

Seine Wort und Werke

Merkt ich und den Brauch.

Und mit Geistesstärke

Tu ich Wunder auch*

We already know the ending: mere repetition does not make a psychoanalyst. With repetition “[the psychoanalyst] resembles the magician who is no longer capable of controlling the infernal powers, those powers he has unchained with his spells”, as Karl Marx says in The Capital. This is the difference made by Reik in the title of his article: “Students or Sorcerers’ Apprentices?

The transmission as psychic work is different from transmission: it is the effect of psychic linking, a function of libido, a passage from one agency to the other, from the unconscious to its corresponding word-representation.

As long as training constitutes a place of interrelation between groups of analysts, which develops in a physical space, i.e., the Institute, the latter must incorporate the idea of the triple impossibility presented by Freud. What functions successfully then takes the place of the system of regulations, and in this way, the autonomy of each of the Institute’s members is affirmed. All analysts with a part to play in training are aware that they are assuming the responsibility which is shared by all those who have the same function, namely, the responsibility of thinking as a group about the experience each has of his own practice; acknowledging that training is a place of exchange, which involves ceasing to tell “the candidate” what to do in order to know how to do (thus permitting the candidate to gain the identity of a psychoanalyst). This renunciation offers the analysand (candidate) the possibility of finding “the gift” he is willing to give within this exchange. This idea gains a singular importance because it establishes a difference between to be and to have. To put it briefly: “When we refer to the ‘gift’ the essential notion is that of giving, which must be understood differently from its economic sense. We should remember that do – to give- is to give as well as to take. What is emphasised is the circulation, not the act of ‘having’ (…) (Loschi, A. 2000). What is at stake is desire.

 

Words, words, words… Signs repeat themselves, variations appear in each of our interpretations, and they do nothing but emphasise the impossibility of putting an end to them.

However, when we are reflecting, we may come across new representations with which to carry on thinking; a thinking process that increasingly demands the recovery of its creative capacity.

References

 

Aberastury A. (1959)                 La filosofía del hecho consumado.  Revista de Psicoanálisis. T° XVI

n° 4. APA. Buenos Aires, 1959.

Ariovich E. (1998)                     Teoría – Idea. Mesa redonda del Claustro de Candidatos del Instituto  de Psicoanálisis. APA: El papel de la teoría en la formación psicoanalítica. Buenos Aires, 1998.

Aslán C. (1980)                        La experiencia argentina. Trabajo presentado en el II Symposium de API. Febrero de 1980. Revista de Psicoanálisis T° XXXVII. Buenos Aires 1980.

Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina. 1942 – 1982. Publicación de APA. Buenos Aires, 1982.

Aulagnier P (1980)                    Sociedad de Psicoanálisis y psicoanalistas en sociedad.

El sentido perdido. Ed. Trieb. Buenos Aires, 1980.

Cabral A. (1998)                       Participación en la Mesa redonda del Claustro de Candidatos del Instituto de Psicoanálisis. APA: La formación psicoanalítica en los seminarios. Buenos Aires, 1998.

Castoriadis C. (1986)                La psychanalyse, projet et élucidation. ‘Destin’ de l’analyse et responsabilité. Ed. Du Seuil. (Trad. cast. El psicoanálisis, proyecto y elucidación. Nueva Visión. Buenos Aires, 1992)

Cesio F. (1996)                        La formación psicoanalítica. Trabajo presentado en la Jornada del Instituto de Psicoanálisis sobre la formación psicoanalítica. APA. Buenos Aires, 1996.

Cosnier J. (1984)                      A propósito de la transmisión. Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse.

T° XLVIII, 1. –1984. (Trad. cast. en Rev. Praxis psicoanalítica n° 1)

Diccionario Valbuena (1851)     Consultas realizadas en la edición vigésima del Diccionario Latino-español Valbuena. Ed. Librería de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret. París, 1914.

Etcheverry J. L. (1978)             Sobre la versión castellana, en Sigmund Freud Obras Completas. AE. Buenos Aires, 1978.

Freud S. (1893)                        Charcot. AE T°III. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1899 a)                     La interpretación de los sueños.  AE  T° IV. Buenos Aires, 1976.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­______   (1899 b)                     La interpretación de los sueños.  AE  T° V.  Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1909)                        Análisis de la fobia de un niño de cinco años. AE T° X. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1910)                        Sobre psicoanálisis silvestre. AE T° XI. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1912 a)                     Contribuciones para un debate sobre el onanismo. AE T° XII. Buenos Aires 1976.

______   (1912 b)                     Consejos al médico sobre el tratamiento psicoanalítico. AE T° XII. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1915)                        Lo inconciente. AE T° XIV. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1917)                        Conferencias de introducción al psicoanálisis, Conferencia n° 24: El estado neurótico común. AE T° XVII. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1922)                        Dos artículos de enciclopedia: “Psicoanálisis” y “Teoría de la libido”. AE T° XVIII. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1923a)                      El yo y el ello. AE T° XIX Prólogo. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1926)                        ¿Pueden los legos ejercer el psicoanálisis? AE T° XX. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1927)                        El porvenir de una ilusión. AE T° XXI. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1932)                        Nuevas conferencias de introducción al psicoanálisis. Conferencia

n° 34: Esclarecimientos, aplicaciones, orientaciones. AE T° XXII. Buenos Aires, 1976.

______   (1938)                          Esquema del psicoanálisis. AE T° XXIII. Buenos Aires, 1976.

[The quotations from Freud in English were taken from The Standard Edition. Translation from German by J. Strachey]

Jones E.                                  Vida y obra de Sigmund Freud.

Julien P.                                     El debate entre Freud y Ferenczi: saber cómo hacer o saber estar ahí.          Rev. Ornicar? 1. Publicación del Champ Freudien. Madrid.

Loschi A. (2000)                        Don, dinero y religión. Rev. La Peste de Tebas. Año 5 n° 17. Buenos    Aires, setiembre de 2000.

Reik T.                                      ¿Estudiantes o aprendices de hechicero? Treinta años con Freud. Ediciones Hormé. Buenos Aires, 1965.

Sciarreta R. (1988)                   Clínica, transferencia y transmisión. Rev. Praxis psicoanalítica. N° 1: La transmisión del psicoanálisis. Buenos Aires.

Tort M. (1972)                          El psicoanálisis en el materialismo histórico. Ed. Noé. Buenos Aires, 1972.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Standard Edition, Vol. III, p. 151.

** Two years before Freud had used the term “psychical analysis”, “clinico-psychological analysis”, “hypnotic analysis”. “To analyse”, as a verb, had been used by him in the Preliminary communication of the Studies on Hysteria (1893). SE, Vol. II).

* The term Erlebniss, in the sense it acquired within German psychology with W. Dilthey, and which was later re-signified by S.Freud, is always difficult to translate into other languages. The word ‘experience’, as translated by J. Strachey admits other meanings which differ from its original meaning. Although we admit that the sense of Erlebniss is included in the English word ‘experience’, we prefer to maintain the term Erlebniss every time we make reference to this concept.

**** Translator’s note: The author is referring to a Spanish version of Freud’s works, which were translated from the German by J.L. Etcheverry.

* Italo Calvino in Las ciudades invisibles

* I follow your word and your Works/ and your way of behaving/ Then, with a strong spirit/ I also work wonders”. Goethe based upon a popular legend to write a ballad he called “Der Zauberlehrling”. Paul Dukas, a not very well-know French musician, composed the symphonic poem “L’Apprenti sorcier”, which became popular in 1940 with the film Phantasia.

[1] We are indebted to Fidias Cesio for providing new meanings for the concept of “actual neurosis”. His papers on negative therapeutic reaction and lethargy shed light over this concept. Moreover, Cesio enriched theory by means of his systematisation of the oedipal tragedy and repression. The technical use of the aforementioned concepts allowed us to elaborate further the ideas of experience, actual transference and construction, among others.

[2] La théorie c’est bon, mais ce n’empeche pas d’exister (The theory is good, but that does not prevent things from being as they are, Freud, 1893). This was Charcot’s reply to young Freud when he objected to something Charcot, “one of the greatest doctors and a man with remarkable sense” had said. Charcot’s clinical activity deeply influenced Freud who, already in 1885, wrote to his beloved Marti: “I am under the impression that I am changing much”.

[3] We understand this idea as corresponding to a double operation in the analysand as well as in the analyst.

[4] This is a direct result of the ambivalent attitude towards the father figure. Frequently, once the father is dead, the hatred among siblings cannot be put behind. The siblings all wish to become the new leader and are only stopped by fear. As a surrogate for unknown desires, they exchange their own image for a group of regulations and rules, which must be obeyed, and which replace the previous ones that have lost their value merely because they were created by others.

[5] This process is not produced by the accumulation of concepts which ends with the acquisition of knowledge. Rather, it requires the reading, questioning, discussion and elaboration between two (or more) individuals.  Within dialogue – with the text as well as with the other – there is a possibility of thinking and this, in its turn, produces an alteration of the ego.

[6] Within a brief enumeration of the attitudes characterising the pathology of institutions, Ferenczi includes the following: puerile megalomania, vanity, respect for shallow formulae, blind obedience, and personal interest.

[7] A quotation from Freud shows that, in spite of the passage of time, things have not changed much: “The analytic training institutes are few in number, young in years, and without authority” (1926, p. 233 SE). Time has had an influence; today we could no longer assert the first two ideas. The third one deserves to be carefully considered.

[8] “So long as the attitude of the medical school to the analytic training institute remains unaltered, doctors Hill find the temptation to make things easier for themselves too great” (Freud, 1926, p. 233 SE).

[9] In “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”, Freud says: “(…)we cannot judge the patient who comes for treatment (or, in the same way, the candidate who comes for training) till we have studied him analytically for a few weeks or months” (1932, p.155 SE).

[10] “Something, it is true, still remains over: something comparable to the ‘personal equation’ in astronomical observations. This individual factor will always play a larger part in psychoanalysis than elsewhere”. (Freud, 1926, p. 220).

[11] “It is only in the course of this ‘self-analysis’ when they actually experience as affecting their own person – or rather, their own mind – the processes asserted by analysis, that they acquire the convictions by which they are later guided as analysts” (Freud, 1926, p. 199). These insisting ideas do nothing but express what is singular about psychoanalysis; that is, the privileged status of the work conducted  in transference.

[12] If the image is not sufficient to cover, in good part, what the teaching of psychoanalysis is, we cannot interpret it as an objection. For instance: in line with what we have stated, we may remember Freud saying that if  knowledge were enough, patients would be cured merely by means of reading a book and attending a conference. As we well know, knowing psychoanalysis does not authorize a person to be a psychoanalyst.

[13] Ideas belonging to the reform carried out by the Institute of Psychoanalysis from the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in 1974 (APA, 1982). A structural change in the psychoanalysts’ training system introduced a model which emphasised enthusiasm, creativity and responsibility.

The introduction of this model in the “Programme for a re-structuring of  the APA” – which was signed by Madeleine and Willy Baranger and Jorge Mom – was established in opposition to that other model we could call ‘ideal’ (perhaps because of its adherence to ideals), and which was described as being a rigid school system that limited creativity, and which was established within the frame of  an excessive political power. The aforementioned power was concentrated on certain individuals and structures (i.e., the “teaching panel”), stereotyped roles of teachers and candidates; an “official theory” which marginalised scientific pluralism and which established itself as the only way of transmitting psychoanalysis.

To this “ideal” model, the “74’ Manifest” opposed an analytic pluralism “(…) covering on equal terms the different variants of analytic thought and abiding by it  (…) in our way of functioning, in particular, the level of analytic training”.

In this new model the following characteristics stand out: diversity (acknowledging the diverse psychoanalytic training of any person interested in the training offered by the Institute of Psychoanalysis, opening the Institute to professionals with a “university training different from the medical one”, in particular to psychologists); the personal construction of psychoanalytic knowledge (“We must admit that the Institute does not ‘make’ psychoanalysts, because each psychoanalyst becomes so by himself (…)”; creativity (which, by privileging the candidate’s production, is opposed to iteration and to the rigid and school-like ways of education); active work and participation; responsibility. These characteristics are displayed within the setting of the Institute and provide optimal conditions for studying: “information of the highest possible level and training contact with people of acknowledged analytic capacity”.

This proposal is based upon two main principles in order to make their postulates viable: departmental freedom and freedom of curriculum. The freedom of curriculum, “an unusual flexibility in training” offers all candidates the possibility to choose freely seminars, teachers, rhythm of study, etc. This involves that each analyst in training is constructing his own psychoanalytic thought, he elaborates an itinerary within training that takes into account “… his previous interests, his current interests, his future plans and the possible vicissitudes in his life” (Aslán, C., 1980).

Departmental freedom offers the possibility of attending a seminar to anyone who may wish to do so.

In brief: the main ideas of the Manifest propose two principles which are the foundation for the freedom to do things and whole responsibility for what is done, thus re-establishing psychoanalysis as movement.

“Diversity in both the starting points and in the approaches will also cause diversity in results, allowing each analyst to find the path felt to be most adequate for the practise of psychoanalysis”.

 

Translated from Spanish by Valeria Muscio. Supervised by Ben Weller.