There is a peculiar problem that haunts all attempts at theoretical communication. The terms with which we communicate, no matter what they are-“unconscious” or “ego” or “intersubjectivity” or “object relations” or “bad breast” or “play of signifiers”-tend to lose their vibrancy as they are passed along in the community. This is the entropy of thought: whatever life the concepts might have had when they are first being applied in vivid psychoanalytic contexts tends to get drained out of them, and they get turned more and more into slogans. Eventually, the terms get used in place of thinking rather than as an expression of it. The ultimate absurdity is a dead paper on therapeutic action.
The entropy of thought is not a problem that can be completely avoided. It is endemic to thinking itself. Even the phrase “entropy of thought” can become a cliché. So, too, can warnings to avoid it. So, the task for us is to bring our concepts to life.
It is crucial that we try, for psychoanalysis is essentially committed to its own transparency. This does not mean that analysands should learn psychoanalytic theory. Indeed, our patients often get interested in theory as a defense against the psychoanalytic process. Still, there should be no essential secrets. By contrast, for a magic trick to work, it is essential that the audience not see the sleights of hand by which the effect is produced. There are cultures in which a voodoo curse can have powerful effects on the recipient. But it is crucial to the “therapeutic action” of voodoo that the recipient not understand how voodoo really works. And while it might just be possible for there to be a cynical witch doctor-a pigmy Wizard of Oz-still it is much easier for him to carry out his curse if he too remains confused about what he is doing. One might thus say that it is essential to the practice of voodoo that the voodoo theory of voodoo mislead the participants. The participants have to think that the curse works by voodoo-and though the curse may indeed work, that is not how it is happening.
Psychoanalysis stands to voodoo, to hypnosis, and to other forms of suggestion as philosophy stands to sophistry. It is a constitutive contrast. We may spend our lives trying to figure out what philosophy is, but one of our permanent touchstones is that it is not sophistry. Indeed, as soon as we can identify a form of argument as sophistical, we are in a position to refine our sense of what philosophy is by rejecting that kind of argument from the repertoire. Indeed, figuring out the difference between philosophy and sophistry is itself part of the therapeutic action of philosophy. So, too, when we can identify a certain form of human interaction as “suggestion,” we are in a position to reject it as part of psychoanalytic technique. And this attempt to root out suggestion will be a lifelong commitment because, like voodoo, its myriad forms will tend to hide the fact that they are forms of suggestion.
So the challenge is to make psychoanalysis transparent in a psychoanalytically vibrant way (p.34-35).
In short, the concept of objectivity has a potentially important role to play within the context of the analyst’s own attempts to sustain herself as an analyst. Anyone who practices psychoanalysis knows that it is an unending task. We are constantly being brought up short by our analysands, constantly being surprised by the flow of our own emotional lives. Being a psychoanalyst is in part a never-ending task of bringing oneself back to the activity of being a psychoanalyst.
As Loewald puts it, “Objectivity and neutrality need to be understood more in a therapeutic setting.” The danger-in terms of self-misunderstanding-would be to think that the concept of objectivity comes with a fixed and determinate meaning, independent of the context in which it is deployed. We then set ourselves up for the misconception that the only use of objectivity is, as it were, an objective use of objectivity (p.40-41).
The problem then is that the conception of objectivity within psychoanalysis is a confused mélange. It starts from a legitimate need for some conception of objectivity-one that is appropriate for the distinctive activity of psychoanalysis-but then assumes that there is only one fixed conception of objectivity, that which is bequeathed to us by the (physical) sciences of the early twentieth century. And the confusion is only compounded if, seeing how inappropriate this conception of objectivity is for psychoanalysis, we simply throw out the concept of objectivity altogether. “We’re all intersubjectivists now!” In the name of change, we are unconsciously remaining the same: for both sides of this debate share the assumption that there is one fixed conception of objectivity-one side deeming it appropriate, the other inappropriate. And by simply throwing out the concept of objectivity, we mislead ourselves about our own needs. Rather than choose between this either/or, a conceptual working through is in order.
One might begin by reflecting on the fact that scientist is itself a subjective category. That is, a scientist should be perpetually asking herself whether she is shaping herself to pursue her inquiries in the right sorts of ways. The question of whether I am inquiring into this or that realm in ways that are appropriate for yielding knowledge is not one that should go away. Indeed, I constitute myself as a scientist by keeping myself open to changing how I investigate the realm that matters to me, in light of better understandings of what it would be to yield knowledge in that realm. It is essential to being a scientist that I ever be engaged with the question of how to live as a scientist. What counts as scientific is the activity of a scientist who behaves appropriately as such.
Even in the sciences the concept of objectivity is essentially subjective; as I shape myself as a scientist, I must ask, What are the norms of inquiry, discovery, and communication that make my research objective? Here, it seems to me, we need to return to a primordial conception of objectivity: the idea that we are relating to objects with sufficient respect for their being objects. That is, we are relating objectively to objects when we recognize that they are to a certain extent self-standing, that they have certain claims to stand out from the environment in which they are located, certain claims to independence, certain claims to reality. We also recognize that objects have by their natures many facets and dimensions. Ironically, we shape ourselves into a certain kind of subject, a scientist, when we discipline ourselves into relating objectively to objects (p.43-44).
At the beginning of an analysis, what the analysand lacks is a subjective use for the concept of objectivity. He takes the world, including the social world, as given. It is as though he were a passive recipient of reality-at least, that is how it seems to him. By now it is familiar that the beginning analysand is largely unaware of his own activity, unaware of his projections onto the world, and unaware of his distortions of it. But it remains unfamiliar that this lack of awareness is facilitated by a confusion of his own relation to objectivity. He lacks the ability to ask the following question in a genuine or full way: “Given that I wish to become/be a certain kind of a subject-a lover, a creative person, a friend, a parent, a son or daughter, a true professional, etc. – what is the correct view of the social world, what is the correct view of my inner world, that I can use to deepen myself as the subject I wish to become/be?” Lacking the ability to ask this question, ideas of objectivity tend to get used as a defense (p.48).
But the as one develops a concern for oneself as a subject-concern for oneself as someone who sincerely wants to ask the question of how she should live-then the question of objectivity becomes a question of understanding the world aright, in terms of one’s own decisions of how to live within it. That shift to a subjective conception of objectivity occurs when one is able to ask oneself, “Am I sure I understand the boss correctly when he gave me a raise?” In the confused sense of objectivity, the sense of the way the world is is meant to preclude any further questions about it. That’s the way the world is, and that’s that. In the subjective sense of objectivity, by contrast, there is always a further question about whether I have understood myself and others accurately… When one is concerned with the human realm, that is, the realm of hopes and fears and desires and wishes and projects and designs, the objective use of objectivity closes down questions, and the subjective use of objectivity opens them up.
Once we can see the analysand as moving from an objective to a subjective use of objectivity, we can see that the analyst is herself engaged in essentially the same process as the analysand. Indeed, they are moving in tandem. For the analyst is ever renewing herself in her efforts to understand herself, her patients, and her friends and loved ones, clearly and well. This activity is the repetitive re-creation of herself as an analyst. This essentially involves subjective use of the concept of objectivity. As Loewald puts it:
It also needs to be said that the love of truth is no less a passion because it desires truth rather than some less elevated end. In our field, the love of truth cannot be isolated from the passion for truth to ourselves and truth in human relationships. In other fields, too, the scientist is filled with love for his object precisely in his most creative and “dispassionate” moments. Scientific detachment in its genuine form, far from excluding love is based on it. In our work it can be truly said that in our best moments of dispassionate and objective analyzing we love our object, the patient, more than at any other time and are compassionate with his whole being. In our field scientific spirit and care for the object certainly are not opposites; they flow from the same source.
At first, it might seem ridiculous that in our most dispassionate and objective moments we manifest our greatest love. But now that we have worked through the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity, we are able to recognize the possibility of a certain kind of passion in our dispassion. It was the possibility for this peculiar kind of passion that was all but missing before the therapy began. Remember the analysts of the 1950s who are now criticized for being too dispassionate, too cold, and too unloving? Even if this is a caricature, let us stick with the grain of truth within it. Given the confused conception of objectivity they were working with, there was no room for them to understand how a dispassionate stance can be passionate and loving. The very idea of objectivity that they lived with served to preclude the idea of objectivity as itself an expression of love. Loewald’s strategy was not to reject objectivity, but to offer a sympathetic subversion of the concept.
And this is as important today as is was then, for haven’t we been living under a similar illusion? That is, although we reject the image of the cold, distant analyst, there is a tendency to think one does that by adopting a more emotionally demonstrative relation with one’s patients, perhaps by telling them more about how one feels oneself. This is the other side of the same coin. It rests on the assumption that if one is to reject the idea of the analyst as objective, one has no choice but to move over to a conception of the analyst as subjective (or intersubjective). Loewald’s strategy is to help us grasp from the inside that we are not in fact prisoners of fixed concepts with absolutely determinate meanings. This does not mean that anything goes, but it does mean that we need to look at the various ways we live with a concept, rather than assume that a fixed meaning is forever imposed on us. (p.48-52).
The other ending is termination, and the analyst should have it in sight (however inchoately) from the beginning. Think of parents who manifest their love for their child by facilitating the process by which the child grows up and becomes more independent. The love in parenting is manifest in the recognition from the beginning that parenting has its own termination phase. Other forms of love and intimacy may well grow into its place, but the parenting relation itself should be structured in such a way as to phase itself out. Should the parenting relation remain rigidly the same as the years pass, it ceases to be a manifestation of love and becomes another form of clinging. Similarly with psychoanalytic treatment. If psychoanalysis is aimed at promoting a person’s freedom, part of the freedom is freedom from the need to keep coming to the analyst. It is a manifestation of love that the analyst, in her role as analyst, keeps an eye on that goal.
She also takes responsibility for seeing the analysis through to its end. Some parents can naturally “let go” of their children when the time comes; for other parents, the idea of eventually letting go when the time comes was there from the beginning, structuring the way they acted as parents. In both cases we can imagine the parents having done well-in both cases we can imagine them loving and letting go. Yet in the latter case the parents took responsibility for letting go, and in this way the eventual letting go was always there as part of the relationship. In this sense, the end was always in sight. This is what I mean by a lively sense of death. Whatever you may think of this in terms of parenting, in analysis a lively sense of death is crucial. In terms of everything the analyst says or does in the analysis, it ought to be in the context of an ever-renewed questioning: How does this facilitate the analysis? Part of facilitating the analysis must be facilitating the analysis through to its end. Analysis is a relationship with a termination, and it is only by keeping that in mind that the analyst can really answer the question of what does and does not facilitate the analysis.
Once we take these aspects of love seriously, we can see that the task of becoming a psychoanalyst is never at an end. For it is not simply that there is no end to the process of coming to understand another (and to understand oneself in the project of understanding another), of helping another come to understand himself, and of promoting another person’s freedom. After all, in the name of freedom, analyses do come to an end, and we hope that analysands can then go off and lead better, freer lives. No, it is really the “till-death-do-us-part” condition that makes the project of becoming an analyst an infinite task. For we need constantly to keep alive a sense of what analysis is and what it isn’t, and to take responsibility for that distinction in everything we do within our psychoanalytic work. This is a process that by its very nature cannot be a once-and-for-all achievement.
I said earlier that psychoanalyst should be understood as a subjective concept. We now have a much deeper sense of what that means. Becoming a psychoanalyst is a way of forming oneself as a subject, and the process of forming oneself as this kind of a subject, with those peculiar commitments of love, is never at an end. As a true psychoanalyst, one is always in the process of deepening oneself as a psychoanalyst. By now we are ready to understand
the following claim without a tinge of paradox: the more subjective one becomes, the more objective one can be. For it is precisely as one deepens oneself as a psychoanalyst that one can ever better reach out to one’s analysands in their objective particularity. That is, one can reach out to them as the subjects they are.
But to say that psychoanalyst should be understood as subjective does not mean that is how it has been understood. As it happens, the concept as it has been passed along through the generations has remained in an un-worked-out limbo of confusions and fantasies. There are fantasies of objectivity (that themselves could not possibly fit actual psychoanalytic activity) that are somehow mixed together with subjective commitments. The concept has not been worked through (p.56-59).
The reasoning goes something like this: Psychoanalysis has to take neurological research seriously if it is going to be true to itself as an objective science. But if psychoanalysis is an objective science, it must be continuous with its fellow objective science, neuroscience. In that case, it is at least conceivable, as Freud himself seems to have believed, that neuroscience may one day replace psychoanalysis. Or, perhaps, that psychoanalysis may one day develop into its own branch of neuroscience. That seems to be the cost of accepting that psychoanalysis is a science. If it is not a science, then, the thought goes, it is merely subjective, and thus anything goes. As though I can give my interpretation, you can give yours, for, after all, the art of interpretation is merely subjective, meaning is indeterminate, and so on.
What a mess! But the mess isn’t revealed in any one particular belief; it is revealed in a mistaken view of the universe of possibilities. For the underlying assumption seems to be, “Either objective (in which case continuous with and replaceable by neuroscience) or merely subjective,” as though there are no other possibilities than these.
By now it should be clear that the right response is not to choose one side or the other but to dissolve this dilemma. To say that psychoanalysis is essentially a subjective endeavor is not to say that it has no interest in objectivity; we have already seen the sense in which it is important to strive toward objectivity in our dealings with our patients. It may also take up the latest results in neuroscience in all sorts of unforeseen ways. But insofar as it does so, it should always be under the overarching question, How does this help us in the overall project of facilitating the development of the subject?
Consider, by way of example, a familiar situation in contemporary psychopharmacology: the prescription of an antidepressant. It may be of inestimable help to know the neurochemistry of the brain-drug interactions. If we know on the neurobiological level what lifting a depression looks like, we may, for instance, be able to see what other areas of brain activity are also affected. We may be able to choose among drugs for differences that are detectable only at the micro, not at the macro, level. We cannot tell ahead of time what the discoveries will be and what they will mean.
Nevertheless, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the point of the antidepressant is not simply to relieve the pain and lift the depression; it is to help to put the patient back into a position where she can again take up the task of developing herself as a subject. But there is no drug, now or ever, that can perform that task.
It is the idea that antidepressants can replace psychoanalysis that is a confusion. For it is to treat a person as though she were only a biological organism–a collation of nerves and tissues–as though there were no issue of what it is for her to develop as a person. Of course, the profession of psychoanalysis itself facilitated this confusion via its own scientistic self-misunderstanding. It advertised itself as offering a cure for depression. Thus when a better psychopharmacological type of cure comes along, there is every reason to ask, Why do we need to hold onto that old-fashioned medicine? The confusion is compounded by the fact that for certain patients and certain forms of depression, psychoanalysis does help lift the depression. The thought is inevitable: Why not just treat everyone with the cheaper, more universally effective drug?
Lifting a depression can make a huge difference in how a person is able to live her life. The problem only arises if one assumes that, having lifted the depression, there is no further question about how to live. It is as though human being is a fixed objective category: Before, this human was in a depression. Now the depression is lifted. End of story. That is how one forgets to be a human being.
Here is a healthier psychoanalytic attitude toward depression: certain depressions are themselves the outcome of fundamental neurotic conflicts occurring deep within a person’s psyche. As a person comes to a deeper understanding of who she is, and, in particular, as she comes to resolve that conflict, one should expect the depression to lift. Other depressions are not like this, and we may not know much about them other than that they are caused by chemical imbalances and can be shifted by correcting those imbalances. It would be inappropriate to try to cure these depressions simply by talking. Nevertheless, these depressions are not only the effects of certain causes but also the causes of other effects and some of them occur deep within the psyche.
That is, even if a chemical imbalance causes one’s depression, one will tend to make meanings around this depression. There will be fantasies about what these feelings mean for me. One might say that, whether we like it or not, we are always in the business of becoming human. We are making meanings about who we are, what things mean for us, which in fact shapes who we are. Much of this occurs unconsciously, beyond the range of our awareness or immediate control. Even if meanings did not fundamentally cause the depression, the depression will be causing meanings, and one needs to grasp these meanings if one wants to grasp the life one is living.
How do we fail to notice this? How could the existence of an antidepressant make psychoanalysis seem obsolete? In part, as we have seen, psychoanalysis forgot that it was a science of the subject, and advertised itself as a medical cure for a specific disease. But our culture is fascinated with scientific research because it taps our futuristic fantasies. After all, if a drug can lift a depression today, who knows what’s just around the corner! No doubt marvelous treatments await us, and some of them will impact psychoanalytic treatment in unpredictable ways. Still, the idea that drugs might-if not now, soon!- take the place of psychoanalysis is comparable to thinking that drugs may one day replace the task each of us faces of becoming the kind of person we should each like to be (p.78-81).
In a similar vein, we may learn much about the brain that is of value in alleviating human suffering, in figuring out how to alter unwanted moods, and in finding out how emotions are correlated to certain brain states, but none of this can answer the subjective question: What is it for me to become a person? This is a question that cannot be answered by looking at my brain states–even looking next year, when we will know so much more about the brain than we do today. Rather, we should need to know more about what I love, more about what I could come to love, more about what I hate and could come to hate. Correlatively, we should need to know what it would be for me to betray that love-or to have that love betrayed. Psychoanalysis is alive because there is no straight-forward or direct ways to answer these questions. In the proper sense of the term, they are essentially subjective questions. That is, I form myself as a subject by my living engagement with them. Neuroscience cannot answer those questions for me (not now or ever); psychoanalysis is (and will remain) essential. For there are inevitably aspects of my commitments that escape my conscious awareness, escape the immediate control of my conscious will. Psychoanalysis is a process by which I come to take responsibility for hitherto unconscious aspects of myself. I thereby deepen myself as a subject. My wishes and fantasies are taken into the orbit of my ongoing quest to become/be a person (p.84).
This would suggest that the search for wisdom is a risky business. For if we generalize from the model of becoming a doctor, it would seem that if we are searching for wisdom, we find it not by finding the right object, but by becoming the right kind of subject. Only when one becomes the right kind of subject will one see the world with the appropriate objectivity. (Only when we become a doctor can we see the illness in the patient.) But what if one throws oneself into the wrong sort of activity? By the time one can judge it, one’s perspective is also skewed. Consider, for example, the selfish person who looks out on the world and sees that everyone else is selfish: they are all grabbing too much for themselves, so she feels the need to grab her “fair share.”
Or, closer to home, consider the person who is sure that talking cures are obsolete, and that some day psychopharmacology will be the only kind of treatment there is. Ironically he may be right precisely because so many people believe this, as a social fact it may come true. But this does not mean that the problem of becoming a human being has been solved; it is rather that one more way of evading it has been invented. Of course, that is not how it will look to him.
In this section we have been concerned with the skewed perspectives that can arise within one’s own attempt to become a psychoanalyst. And in this case at least, the form of therapy has been irony. In our own attempts to become analysts, we find ourselves perched between pretense and aspiration. On the one hand, there are the training programs at our institutes, our daily lives with patients, and so on; on the other hand, there seems to be something left open in the aspiration to be an analyst of the psyche. We recognize that however thorough our training, however careful our efforts, there is always room for the question, “Am I really being a psychoanalyst?” And we recognize that the answer to that question can never be, ‘Yes, because I graduated from the institute.” And that’s not because the right answer is, “Yes, because I am certified by the American Psychoanalytic Association.” We recognize that the word itself–psychoanalyst pulls us out of whatever contemporary embedding it has. It gives us at least the glimpse of a question of whether its contemporary realization is adequate to its aspiration. We can’t clearly recognize what this aspiration is. To do that would require that we had already changed ourselves as subjects–already undergone the shifts that would entail a shift of perspective. But we can feel the pull, and this is the tug of irony.
Similarly with the question, “Is this a therapeutic action?” In the first instance we may feel we can answer the question in the affirmative if our proposed intervention fits with the theory of, say, Hans Loewald-or Paul Gray, or Melanie Klein, or Jacques Lacan, or Anna Freud, or Sigmund Freud. We may think the answer is yes if it fits with current fashion, with what we have picked up from our training, conversations with colleagues, and so on. Yet there is something about that question that pulls us out of every context. It confronts us straight out with the question, Is this action genuinely therapeutic? A lifetime can be shaped around trying to answer such a question (p.86-88).
Jonathan Lear – Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony – Ch. 2 Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Irony p.34-88
The Sea Is Not Full 