Why rediscover?
Publish Date : August, 2024
Some years ago, as a consultant editor for a prominent publication, I reviewed a submitted paper that purported to discuss and remedy problems in the disciplinary history of psychoanalysis. The author correctly identified the hazards of an education in which every psychoanalyst‑in‑formation must undergo a full course of personal treatment with a senior psychoanalyst. The trainee’s unresolved attachments to the psychoanalyst hamper his or her subsequent career as a free‑thinking psychoanalyst. Indeed, the history of psychoanalysis has innumerable examples ― major and minor ― of psychoanalysts whose work seems to be influenced by ongoing processes either of identification with their ‘training analyst’ or of a rebellious counter‑ or dis‑identification with this figure. The author of the paper I reviewed had a snappy solution ― relinquish the requirement that trainees must undergo a personal course of psychoanalysis as central to their formation as a psychoanalyst, and let psychoanalysts learn from books. The ‘solution’ presages the end of psychoanalysis as such. So, I rejected the submission. Clearly, the author had not a clue about the distinctive features of this precious discipline of emancipation.
Psychoanalysis cannot be learnt from books. True, one cannot become a psychoanalyst without an immense dedication to studying the discipline’s literatures. However, the skills necessary to become a practitioner require years and years of personal experience as a patient and then as a practitioner who, in a profound way, remains a patient even if s/he has long since terminated personal treatment with a ‘training analyst.’ To become a psychoanalyst requires a lifelong immersion in one’s journey of speaking and listening free‑associatively.
Moreover, when it comes to study, psychoanalysis is entirely unlike any other discipline. To become a competent electrical engineer, one does not have to read Michael Faraday. To become a brilliant astrophysicist, one does not have to engage with the works of Angelo Secchi. One can become a topnotch philatelist without every hearing of the pioneering life of Jean‑Baptiste Moens.
But with psychoanalysis, one has to be foremost a patient and one has to engage with Sigmund Freud. This truism is resisted by many contemporary training programs in so‑called ‘psychoanalysis.’ Some training institutes suggest that you can read Charles Brenner et alia and skip Freud, read John Steiner et alia and skip Freud, read Stephen Mitchel et alia and skip Freud, read Jacques‑Alain Miller et alia and skip Freud…and so on. Study any number of introductory or secondary texts and one will be adequately equipped for practice. The misleading delusionality of such suggestions is based on the myth that psychoanalysis manifests a linear path of progress in the manner that most other disciplines indeed appear to do. But it does not.
In no other discipline does one have to return to the roots, and indeed to wrestle with them intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. But in psychoanalysis one must; not least because a progressive understanding of unconscious mental life and its sexuality does not characterize the course of the discipline of ‘psychoanalysis’ from its inception in the years between 1895 and 1915, until today.
Psychoanalysis ― as an authentic journey of truthfulness and liberation ― must be rediscovered by each generation and each individual psychoanalyst-in‑formation. Wise psychoanalysts of the late 20th Century ― André Green and Jean Laplanche, for example ― have said as much. And before them, other writers who truly grasped this discipline have articulated a similar opinion.
And it is to the process of rediscovering psychoanalysis that this website is dedicated … very much following the thesis of the Rediscovering Psychoanalysis trilogy. Herein we explore, what does it mean to rediscover psychoanalysis?