Leonardo Provini: I was wondering what relationship, if any, there might be between group psychology and psychoanalysis. It seems to me that you have not found one and that you actually emphasise the distinction, or am I wrong? It also seems that the question of the differences between psychology and psychoanalysis is implicit.
Sergio Benvenuto: I don’t know if anyone has said this before me—it is impossible to have read all the literature on Freud, as there are millions of titles. However, I proposed to read the title of Freud’s essay in a precise way: that on the one hand there is a “group psychology” or one of collectives, on the other there is an “analysis of the ego,” which is psychoanalysis. In fact, only two years later Freud would put forward the so-called second topic (which others call structural model), in which das Ich, the “I,” appears to be only a part of subjectivity and not subjectivity as a whole. Although, in my opinion, the Freudian ich always lends itself to this ambiguity: I am never master of my own house. The “I” is both the house of which I believe I am the master and the “I” that believes I am its master. “Ich-analyse” of the title is simply another way of saying psychoanalysis.
But this separation between Massenpsychologie and psychoanalysis in no way implies that one is alien to the other! Far from it. Precisely because “group psychology” —which for Freud is psychology tout court—is not psychoanalysis, a psychoanalytic explanation of it needs to be provided. In the same way, for example, as psychoanalysis is not hysteria, but it is important for psychoanalysis to explain hysteria.
Freud always considers psychology a group psychology (probably exaggerating) because, as he says in the very first page, the other is invariably involved in relation to a subject. Involved “as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent.” Many today want to go beyond Freud and say that we need to break away from the Freudian notion of drives, from the isolated individual mind, and always think of psyche in terms of relations, Mit-sein, being-with, etc., etc. But I think they say so because they have not fully understood Freud.
In fact, Freud clearly states himself what these “anti-Freudians” say: doing psychology means looking at a subject’s relationship with others. Psychology is always social psychology. But then, at another point in the essay, Freud says that “the psychology of the group is the oldest human psychology.” Are these not two contradictory concepts? If psychology is always social psychology, so it is that even today, how is it possible that it is an archaic and therefore obsolete psychology? This is my interpretation of the contradiction: Group (or social, or collective) psychology is the archaic part of our modern subjectivity. As soon as we enter a group, we regress to something pre-subjective, we regress to psychology.
Consider the comparison Freud draws between Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. The key to both, he thought, is the Oedipus complex. But there is an essential difference between the two tragedies. While Hamlet has an unconscious (and is therefore analysable), Oedipus is in the unconscious (and therefore is not analysable). In Sophocles, Oedipus emerges as a character in a psychosis: he experiences his subjectivity in the real. Freud therefore puts forward a history of subjectivity, and since for him the subjectivity that matters is the unconscious, he posits a history of the unconscious. Let us say that Freud reads the tragedy of Oedipus through the lens of Hamlet—or rather, to be more precise, through that of the Brothers Karamazov.
So, every time we enthusiastically join a group—for example, a psychoanalytic school or institution—according to Freud we regress from subjectivity to psychology. In other words, we set aside our unconscious and behave like... a herd? Theorists before him, including Le Bon—but also Nietzsche—said that society is a herd, Herde. Freud, rather, says that when we are members of a group, we are a Horde. In my view, this shift from Herde to Horde is essential.
For Freud, the horde has a characteristic that the flock lacks: the love for a Führer. The flock passively follows the shepherd, but need not love him. Freud speaks of a Führer—and at the time Hitler was not yet in power—i.e., of a chief or leader. The horde is based on Eros, that is, on love for the leader. But the love for the Führer or leader is a return to psychology, that is to group psychology. Individuals, when they become “active members” of a group, remove their unconscious, silence it. This is why, sometimes, subjects facing difficulties are “cured” through active participation to a militant group.
Indeed, the most acute commentators on Freud’s essay have not failed to see that for him every Masse, every collective with a Führer, is essentially fascist. At the time, Nazi-fascism had not yet asserted itself, but it is clear that for Freud the structure of every collective is a “fasces,” a bundle of individuals united by love for a Dux.
LP: So you don’t think it is possible to be in a group while protecting and enriching your unconscious. Are the two incompatible? Nietzsche, for example in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” probably presents the same problem: once someone has joined a group, the ultimate goal remains to keep it such; the group takes precedence over the individuals, over their choices and ethics.
Can people not live together and form a society without a regression to a horde or a flock? From this point of view, it would then be interesting to reflect on group psychoanalysis.
SB: According to Freud, being part of a group can be a source of enrichment from many points of view, but not from that of the unconscious. But let us not forget that Freud established his own Masse, the International Psychoanalytic Association.
First, let’s clarify one thing that is often overlooked. Massenpsychologie is not a theory of social relations in general! Freud’s is not a theory of just any group with a functional chief, so to speak, but of special groups: groups with a Führer. Freud does not describe groups made up of, say, clerks in a post office, nor of workers in a large factory, who also have a “boss.” Not all bosses are leaders, and leaders are not necessarily bosses. Freud is concerned with groups members choose, more often than not with extreme enthusiasm. Groups that can range from improvised crowds that spark off uprisings to highly structured collectives such as the church and the army. All these cases regard political groups in the broadest sense. Freud does not describe social ties in general, but political social ties, which imply a commitment on the part of each individual.
Freud was not familiar with Max Weber’s distinction between types of power he called bureaucratic, based on legal and formal norms, and types of power he called charismatic, formed around a charismatic leader. Post office employees or factory workers are under bureaucratic power, whereas Freud is interested in groups with a charismatic leader. I call the latter hot groups, to distinguish them from cold functional groups. For there to be a heat, there needs to be a Führer loved by all members.
This Führer can be dead, like Jesus, or Mohammed, or Stalin, or... Sigmund Freud (many psychoanalytic associations have a charismatic leader, whether dead or alive). Although Freud does not say so explicitly, the Führer can also be immaterial: it can be the Cause for which we are willing to fight, the Cause we love and for which we have joined, whatever this Cause may be (some may deem it a good or a bad one, that is not the point).
In my book I argue that Freud’s essay is a psychoanalytic theory of political societies, not of the social bond in general. After all, there are various social bonds, which, after Freud, psychoanalysts such as Bion and Lacan have tried to describe. In the book I also focus on the work of the latter.
Now, for Freud the analytic couple is not a political group – I am not saying that I agree with him, I am only trying to clarify what Freud means. On the other hand, the hypnotic couple was a political group, “a crowd of two.” In hypnosis, which Freud practised for many years, the hypnotised person follows the orders of his Führer. Every (hot) political group is actually always hypnotic. Whereas—and this is Freud’s bold gamble—the analytical relationship, which is based on transference, is not hypnotic. We can say that for Freud, at bottom, every group is made of the stuff of dreams.
Many analysts disagree on this point: they identify the analytical relationship to a “virtuous” hypnotic relationship, to a Masse. But every Masse wants to be virtuous, wants to work for the Greater Good... even if it means persecuting opponents and minorities. In the book I comment a paper by my mentor Elvio Fachinelli in which he shows how even an extremely virtuous group of the 1968 counter-culture can gradually turn into a mechanism of persecution. According to Freud, the analytic relationship has to reject outright the dynamics of political groups.
LP: This work by Fachinelli, part of his political writings, also came to my mind. My impression is that it returns to Nietzsche’s theme of the closed group, according to which the other risks disrupting the balances within the group and can threaten its very survival. Nietzsche called this “power,” which was the ultimate goal, for example, of organised groups such as the Church and the Army. He reflected that while the initial constitution of a group may be motivated and finalised by a common, even noble objective, in the long run the group organises itself to preserve “power.” What are your thoughts on this point?
SB: We know how groups or institutions tend to perpetuate themselves, perhaps to endure through the ages, to result in what Weber called the “power of tradition,” as distinguished from bureaucratic and charismatic power. But in Fachinelli’s article “Closed Group or Open Group,” the central theme is not so much the actual perpetuation of a group itself as the need to purify the group, the need to purge it of some sort of contamination. I tried to show in the book, developing Freud’s insights, that this “impure” element needs to be removed from the group—whoever or whatever it may be—as another face of the self-idealisation of the group. This is also what happened in psychoanalytic Massen: there has always been a tendency to expel the rejects, from Jung to Masud Khan (the famous Pakistani analyst expelled from the British Psychoanalytic Association) and beyond... But I also say that the rejected impure element “returns” and ends up constituting new idealisations. In the end, we always idealise rejects, and every idealisation implies a reject. Moses was the son of a slave, Jesus was the son of a carpenter and was condemned to the most opprobrious punishment, Mohammed was a poor orphan... A circle (the first will be the last, the last will be the first), if you like, that perhaps describes a great deal of political dynamics.
LP: So the relationship between psychoanalyst and patient must steer clear of this “political” risk?
SB: Lacan said that this type of analyst–analysand relationship existed even before psychoanalysis. In the Seminar Transference he traces it back to Socrates. For him Socratic maieutics was already an analytical procedure. But, indeed, Socrates was not a political leader. Politics actually killed him. Athens, a city that at the time was more democratic and politicised than ever—it had a system of direct democracy of the type so many populists call for today—perceived Socrates as a threat to social cohesion and sentenced him to death. Socrates was a polluting element, even for Aristophanes. Freud, on the other hand, was never sentenced to death, even though, it is said, he was convinced he was bringing the plague. And not only to America. So, Freud thought he deserved to end up like Socrates. What plague was Freud spreading? The analytical relationship, which Freud saw as a subversion of the political bond between human beings.
Reading between the lines of Freud’s writings, I would say that the subject who suffers and engages in analysis is always an impolitic subject, to use a term from the philosopher Roberto Esposito. Ultimately, all subjects bring to analysis their distress in the society in which they live, precisely insofar as society is swarming with charismatic leaders of every hue and variety. Today they are called influencers. Millions of people follow the videos of utterly banal social media “celebrities,” look at what they eat for lunch and what they do in the garden, because they are their Führers. I wouldn’t be surprised if a famous influencer decided to give birth in front of her followers, for example, as the queens of European courts of the past.
Instead of influence, the analyst offers transference. The difference is all here. But, as you can see, this is where all the problems begin. What really distinguishes transference from charismatic relationships? And what use should the analyst make of transference?
Certainly the Freudo-Marxists—most influential in the intellectual world—will say that analysands can no longer bear to live in capitalist neo-liberal societies; in short, that we need to build a society in which psychoanalysts are no longer needed, just as for Brecht “unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” Freud thought otherwise: he believed (and I agree with him) that every society, Kultur, as he called it, every “culture” we would say today, is unsustainable for many. Not for everyone of course, but for many it is. Once non-followers would become monks or nuns (or heretics…), today they go into analysis.
As for group analysis, I did it too as a patient for five years, and I was a member of a group analytical association for years. At that time a distinction was made between analysis of the group, analysis in the group and analysis by the group. Analysis of the group is Bion’s analysis: the object of analysis is the group itself. In a way, Freud’s Massenpsychologie is the analysis of human groups with a charismatic leader. Analysis by the group—what my own analyst intended to do—was an analysis of the various members carried out by the group, which became the actual analyst, even if an analyst was a member of the group (let’s say that there were two analysts here: the individual analyst and the group). I think Freud could only have accepted analysis in a group as truly analytic: analysands can also analyse themselves in a group. In this sense classical analysis too is analysis in a group of two. But I’m not entirely sure.
What was important for Freud was that the analytic relationship should not become a Masse-like relationship; in short, that it should not become a political group. This is why at first he viewed transference as a difficulty: the analysand runs the risk of considering the analyst his own Führer, someone either to worship or to kill. In such cases analysis turns into a cult of two. Which may result in a cult of many: an analyst gathers his various analysands outside the analytic setting and poses as their Führer. Then he founds an analytic association made up of his own analysands. A disastrous outcome. In this way analysis becomes an indoctrination to joining a cult, what was once called a sect.
LP: My impression is that it is at this point that the problems arise; or the problem, or the plague that Freud thought he was bringing to America together with Ferenczi and he who was once Freud’s closest associate but would turn out to be a rebel: Jung. Transference. From where does transference arise? And what happens to it within a politicised society? Freud in this way ultimately preached an individualism that threatened to undermine the organisation of sociality. And with regard to social psychology? Could we think of psychoanalysis as a metapsychological theory that relies on and is supported by an older psychology, or would it be more correct to think of a subversion of psychoanalysis with respect to social psychology and therefore the two should be kept theoretically and pragmatically separate? I hope I haven’t put together too many questions, but it seems to me that they’re based on somewhat similar themes.
SB: I will answer by reversing the order of the two questions.
When Freud wrote “from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology,” he was not referring to social psychology as a university discipline, which combines psychology and sociology. He meant that the original, “primitive” subject is a completely socialised one. In the horde, which he thought of as the degree zero of sociality, there are no subjects, only subjugated individuals. The paradox is that, according to Freud, the development of society consists in a progressive weakening of social ties!
Indeed, I wonder if Freud did not conceive of analysis as the reverse of the supposed development from the savage state to civilised society. Not that analysis leads us back to a savage state, but it brings out something wild that we had bridled.
I have tried to show in my book that the myth of the horde developed in Totem and Taboo was the most recent version of that imaginary “state of nature” postulated by so many philosophers before Freud. In Hobbes, the state of nature is that of a fierce and brief life. In Rousseau, the state of nature is instead a harmony between humans and the rest of nature, which culture destroys, and to which we should return. The Horde, with its tyrannical father-and-master, is a variant of this philosophical myth, which conceives of the cultural state of humans as an alteration—conquest or defeat—of a natural state. I also explain why the Freudian state of nature should be read as a reversal of the Rousseauian. Through the myth of the horde, Freud attempts to reconstruct the beginning of human societies as based on the emergence of law, and the fundamental law for him is monogamy—all men resign themselves to possessing only one woman. Now, it is clear that for Freud what he calls the unconscious, and therefore analysis, are only possible in a post-natural society, subsequent to the “totemic pact.”
Freud was not acquainted with Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between communal society and associational society. But we can say that the state of nature, dominated by the primal father, corresponds to Tönnies’ Communal Society: the individual is not truly differentiated from the community to which he belongs. For Freud, an unconscious is formed when we shift to Associational Society in Tönnies’ sense; one in which individuals distinguish their own interests from those of others and of society as a whole. In other words, psychoanalysis is possible when the individual comes out of “social psychology” understood as maximum social cohesion.
That is why I find Marxists who loathe psychoanalysis as a “bourgeois therapy” —I am thinking of Basaglia, Deleuze, Toni Negri, etc.—more coherent than the Freudo-Marxists who reign supreme today. Indeed, both psychoanalytic theory and technique are liberal, in that they presuppose a liberal and individualistic society, freed from the burden of traditions and community loyalties. Whereas all that Marxism preaches is a kind of futuristic return to a new Gemeinschaft—back to the future. I have always found Freudo-Marxism, even the most sophisticated, a hodgepodge. After all, I was a Freudo-Marxist as a young man, like everyone else.
Now, Freud seems to be saying that this primal “social psychology” still exists and forms the backdrop of those symptoms, those sufferings, that analysis tackles. What strikes me in my clinical practice is that nearly all my patients (not yet analysands) bring as their essential problem the guilt of the other. They are convinced that someone else is the cause of their woes, that the blame lies with another (in ancient Greek aitia meant both cause and blame). For many the object of boundless resentment is their father or mother, or the opposite sex (“all men are bastards,” “all women are whores”), or capitalist society, or secularised society, “what’s this godless world coming to,” or their work colleagues. For some even a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst “who ruined me.” Men and women with ego-dystonias, in short, with symptoms, essentially describe themselves as victims of the other, which is a way of reactualizing the horde, in which the blame always lies entirely with the primal father. The effort of the analyst is therefore to pull the subject out of an endless demand for compensation.
Note that this claim for compensation by the other, actually unclaimable, turns the subject into a victim subjugated to the other: life will resolve itself in an eternal request for requital. Often by someone who has been long dead. In this way the suffering subject is plunged in “social psychology,” which usually takes the form of querulousness, to use an older term from psychiatry: the syndrome of spending one’s entire life suing somebody to obtain some sort of reparation. An analysis consists of transitioning the analysand from querulous social psychology to a subjectivity aware of its own limits.
This is why I say that analysis comes to an end when subjects are reconciled with their parents, that is, when they come out of that endless lamentation in which they waste away their being-in-the-world. This is not to say that parents haven’t made lots of mistakes, that the society in which we live isn’t full of injustice, but in any case... we move on and turn over a new leaf. Winnicott tried to describe a good enough mother, but I think that every mother, every parent, our neighbour, is always bad enough. And yet we must conclude with the words of a Neapolitan song Italians are very familiar with: “Let bygones be bygones, what’s done is done, so let’s forget the past…”[2]
So, social engagement is an endless dispute—speak with anyone about social life, and they will say that “politicians have stolen everything we had,” that being a citizen equates to being a victim of fraud who must demand restitution. Leaving social life, however, does not mean saying that “the fault lies not with the parents, but with me.” There is a whole controversy against Freud that makes no sense, starting with Jeffrey Masson, who says that he interpreted the absolutely real abuse of children, especially of girls, as Oedipal fantasies of the female subjects. This current, strong today in psychiatry and many other fields, argues that “the fault lies not with the subject’s unconscious, but with that pervert of a father, with that hag of a mother.” But Freud did not say that hysteria is the fault of the unconscious desires of the young girls, he said that a subjectivation of incest was missing, whether it really happened or was merely fantasised by one party or the other. A daughter can be profoundly shaken by her father’s incestuous fantasies, even if he never actually acts upon them. What a father thinks can deeply disturb a daughter no less than what a father may do. To subjectify means to escape from the logic of guilt and innocence, from that great tribunal that the relationship between parents and children has become. An escape from the family-tribunal is necessary.
As you say, the analyst tries to produce this subjectivation—no longer being subjugated to social life—through transference, but also through interpretations. Today interpretations actually suffer from a bad press; there is a whole anti-interpretation movement in psychoanalysis that runs through all the post-Freudian schools. Hence the emphasis, rather than on verbal interpretations, on enactment, the analyst’s empathy, etc., etc. My impression is that fewer and fewer interpretations are made in sessions, they are only made subsequently between colleagues, in supervision or group clinical discussion. Analysts today tend to interpret behind their patients’ backs. I will not go into this question of Deutung, of interpretation, in which something essential of psychoanalysis is at stake, that is, its betting on the performativity of the real word. I will speak about transference.
Any effective psychotherapy creates transference, certainly not only analysis. According to Freud, the same primal relationships with parents, with siblings, etc., are repeated not only in the so-called psychotherapies, transference can be found in other life encounters as well. I would say that the life script that we all tend to repeat, that is, our characteristic way of being-with-others, is repeated with the psychotherapist (I am still not referring specifically to analysts), the difference being that the latter does not fit with the script, does not react as others usually do, but abstains. Even the most rudimentary psychotherapists understand that they “must not fall into the patient’s game,” that they should not react as anyone else would. What characterises analysts is their special handling of transference, in practice, their being unyielding, their not succumbing either to the flattery of analysands (with self-satisfaction) or to their provocations (with anger).
For many analysts, transference needs to be constantly analysed. That is, the analysand must be told, “See, you’re mad at Tom, Dick and Harry, but in fact you’re mad at me, the analyst!” Others—particularly Lacanians—do the opposite: when the analysand says or signifies to the analyst “I love you” or “I hate you,” the latter must instead say, “Oh no, your authentic object of love or hate is someone else!” The first type of interpretation tends to lead the analytic relationship back to the group of two, that is, it leads what an analysand says back to the here and now of the relationship with the analyst, that is, to social psychology. The second type, on the other hand, seeks to lead the social relationship—between two individuals—back to something that is not present, in both a spatial and a temporal sense. Here the analyst assumes the role of Other in relation to the ghosts the analysand perceives as if on a screen.
In my view, the analyst should avoid being located where the analysand expects them to be; they evade the position assigned to them within the analysand’s repetitive life script.
In any case, it must be said that transference is a mystery. In other words, how and why analysis works is a mystery. Of course, every analytic theory has its own explanation of transference and the effects of analysis, but I have to say, in all honesty, that even if every theory has something interesting to say on the subject, how analysis really works remains an enigma. Not least because, as we know, it is not only analysis that works, but many sorts of other therapies work too, though the term “work” remains to be clarified.
An analysand of mine once said, “I don’t get it. How is it that we chat about this and that a couple of times a week, and then... everything starts to get better for me? Analysis works, but how?” I would be lying if I told him that I know the answer. I have no illusions that it works because, for example, I interpret his dreams well. I could even refrain from interpreting them—it is the transference that works. Even if a well-interpreted dream can have important and lasting effects. So, on the one hand I can safely say “Interpretations don’t matter, it’s the quality of the transference that matters,” but on the other I can also confidently say, “Interpretations matter a lot, also because they bring changes to the transference.” Strangely enough, the two propositions do not seem contradictory to me!
What works about transference? No one so far has been able to provide a satisfactory answer.
LP: From this point of view, one perspective that you take up in your essay seems very interesting to me. I’m referring to your arguments about social malaise, which are probably inspired by Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, an essay Freud wrote a few years after Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and which you actually quote in your text. It would seem, if I have understood your thinking correctly, that this process of subjectivation associated with working on the unconscious allows human beings to somehow transcend their social nature and “subject” themselves to something else. On the contrary, the primitive horde responsible for killing and cannibalizing the father, and organised groups in general, confer a structure to this social malaise and keep it at bay, probably under the illusion of keeping in check those human drives that would otherwise be allowed to run riot even within the group.
First of all, I would like to ask you whether this is indeed your thought, and then whether in this sense the passage through this mysterious transference can play a key role of some kind.
SB: First of all, it should be stressed that we should never take Freud’s theories, which are largely mythical, literally. After all, there is something mythical in every theory. Today, to take Freud literally amounts to being banal, to being “psychoanalistic!” Not only the myth of the killing of the father of the horde, but most of Freud’s theories are myths. Not too different from Plato’s famous myths, for example: the myth of the cave to emerge from, the myth of the soul as a chariot with an obedient horse and an unruly one, the myth of Eros as the son of Poverty and Resourcefulness, etc. Not all myths are obscurantist, some can be revelatory. Today it is the revelatory aspect of Freudian myths that needs to be emphasized.
I do not say that human beings “transcend their social nature,” because for me there is no such thing as a social nature, just as I do not believe in the distinction and opposition between “nature” and “culture.” But this topic is too vast, it would take us off track. In my opinion for Freud the Urvater, the primal father, is a metaphor for Gemeinschaft, where psychology and society coincide. The subject emerges in the modern sense—in the Hamletian sense, we might say—when individuals subject themselves to Society, when they individualize themselves and have to submit to the rules of coexistence with others, in what Kant called “unsocial sociability.” In Massenpsychologie Freud attributes this revolution to epic poetry, something I would read today as: “It is through language and literature that we emerge from the community and enter society, one potentially made up of ‘equals.’” In short, human beings move from one subjection to another: from being an integral part of a community, they become modern individualists, men and women who have to constantly negotiate with others. We have shift from an identification of humans with the Other to a “politics” of coexistence with others. In short, as Sartre would say, “Hell is the others!” This is the discontent of civilisation, stripped of Freud’s mythical garlands. That malaise that feeds the discontent of hundreds of millions of human beings today, that has fed Marxism and the radical left, but also religious fundamentalisms, revanchist nationalisms, and our anti-social rage in general. Even those who live in the wealthiest countries—by which I mean those of Europe, America, Japan, Australia...—say that their lives are miserable. Humans do not live by bread alone, but also by discontent. Often they cannot live unless they loathe the society in which they live.
Freud also adds, however, that the social being experiences a Sehnsucht of the father of the horde. I would render Sehnsucht, an almost untranslatable term, not with nostalgia (as has been done) but with yearning desire. In my non-mythical reading of Freud, this means that modern men and women have a yearning desire for Community, for relinquishing that unsocial subjectivity that characterises us all. In my opinion the entire leftist tradition, for at least a couple of centuries, has been based on this yearning desire for Gemeinschaft, community. Significantly, there have been many attempts to establish communes over the decades, all of which have actually failed. The kibbutzim in Israel were established as socialist communes based on egalitarian principles. Communism means the state of being for and of the Community, or, as it used to be called, the fraternity. In contrast, the right-wing tradition is essentially based on the glorification of unsocial sociability: each family is a fortress at war with other fortified families. I think the time has come to accept this polarity between Community and Society without wanting to exclude the opposite pole. That is, to finally accept this fatal, Enlightenment separation of the individual from the Community, but also not to ignore our yearning desire, Sehnsucht, for Community.
LP: In your text, and also earlier in this conversation, you mentioned the risk of psychoanalyst and patient forming a group of two: is this related to the Sehnsucht you speak of? In other words, are patient and analyst also at risk of a tendency to relinquishing “unsocial subjectivity?” Is it also from this perspective that an ethics of psychoanalysis should be contemplated? Precisely because of this risk of forming a group of two?
SB: As I already said, there is a concrete risk of analysis turning into an initiation ritual, into a cult, not a religious one, but a psychoanalytical one, with all the sectarian drifts that follow. For example, I find the speeches that certain Lacanians make very dangerous; when they say that “the real end of an analysis is only when the analysand, at the end of the path, becomes an analyst!” This risks turning psychoanalysis into a self-referential circuit or, as a well-known psychoanalysis basher, Frederick Crews, put it, “Analysis does not cure, it is like a vampire producing another vampire: one Freudian produces another Freudian!” If this is indeed the case, then psychoanalysis is heading for certain marginalisation.
This happens in IPA associations too. For example, many distinguished analysts only accept as analysands young people who want to become analysts. Who will then, in turn, only take as analysands people who want to train as analysts.... It is the monotony of self-reproduction.
Freud thought that analysis, while certainly a social bond (if only because there is circulation of money), could be an entirely new social bond, different from that between doctor and patient in particular—as we can read in Laienanalyse, “Analysis performed by non-physicians.” What kind of bond? Others after Freud tried to formalise it, notably Lacan, when he distinguished the analyst’s discourse from that of the university, from that of the absolute master, and from hysterical discourse.
I think that what attracts many—myself included—to psychoanalysis rather than to the other psychotherapies or to psychopharmacology is simply the desire (the dream?) to cure discontent through truth. This point is essential. Therefore, for Freud, interpretation, or Konstruktion, construction or reconstruction, were essential: both interpretation and construction had to be true. Time, however, led to the realization that there were various interpretative keys: classical Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, ego psychology, Lacanian, Kohutian, etc. And it was noted that all or almost all of them are effective. Or rather, they are all effective and not effective.... A prestigious Lacanian analyst stated something that, in the end, we all know: around one third of those who have been in analysis think it was a waste of time and money (even if they often actually felt better because of it), another third were satisfied with their analysis but without any sublime enthusiasms (“that analyst helped me through really tough times...”), and around one third become a strong admirers and propagandists of analysis, and may even try to become analysts themselves.
Now, significantly, cognitive science—an approach to the human mind using scientific protocols—rejects any kind of interpretation, because interpretations are never verifiable, or rather, never falsifiable. Therefore, it takes no interest in dreams. If I read a poem, a philosophical text, the text of a dream, a work of music... what will prove that the interpretation implied by my reading is the correct one? Though it is for me, of course. When confronted with certain dreams, the interpretation seems simple, clear, obvious... but only for me. In life we are constantly interpreting what others say to us, and only God knows how many misunderstandings arise! Our social life is a long chain of interpretations and of misunderstandings.
This has resulted in a certain decline of interpretation in clinical practice. Analysts prefer to steer transference, possibly through enactments. But then, the fundamental link that Freud wanted to establish between “speaking the truth” and the removal of repressions breaks down. Analysis becomes a psychotherapeutic manoeuvre like any other.
What I can say for myself is that the content of the interpretations I sometimes pronounce is never irrelevant, because it creates in the analysand an affect of truth. Not an effect, an affect of truth. But does this affect of truth guarantee truth? Absolutely not, as we well know. Those who convert to a political idea or religion often say, “I suddenly saw the truth!” While we may think that their truth is total nonsense. The affect of truth is not universally applicable.
Yet, knowing how to arouse an affect of truth creates transference. That is, as Lacan said, the analyst is invested as a sujet supposé savoir, a subject supposed to know. But this supposition is a méprise, a mistake, a delusion, because to interpret is not equivalent to knowing: it amounts to making the analysand take a certain path rather than another.
The whole unresolved question of psychoanalysis is how it deals with truth. We are convinced that truth emerges in an analysis, but no one has yet been able to formalise its performance. This is the great philosophical question about psychoanalysis: what kind of relationship is it? Relational theories, so fashionable today, offer a solution that is actually a problem yet to be solved: analysis is a relation, of course, but of what kind?
We can, however, enounce the idealities of analysis. It is these idealities that have so far ensured its survival and the prestige it still enjoys. We need only consider all the films that feature a shrink. It all began with Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, published in Italian in 1923, probably the first novel to feature the figure of the psychoanalyst as a central character, and there have been many more since. The analyst took the place held by the warrior and the maiden in pre-modern literature. The analyst is a typical character of our era. From where does all this voracious curiosity that permeates the analytical profession and the analytical setting come from?
Freud said there were three impossible professions: education, government, and psychoanalysis. This should put an end to the whole debate around the question: “Does psychoanalysis have a scientific basis?” It’s another misunderstanding. Does the Montessori method have scientific foundations? Does the liberal and permissive education we give our children today have scientific foundations? Do certain politicians win because they have scientific foundations? Does Marxism have scientific foundations? And does liberalism? Politics, education and psychoanalysis are practices based on strong ethical assumptions, not on scientifically accepted proof. I know that many analysts think psychoanalysis is scientific, but how can they think such a thing after Wittgenstein’s analysis of psychoanalysis in his conversation with Rush Rhees? In any case, Lacan maintained that psychoanalysis is not a science. What is called “psychoanalytic technique” is in fact the application of a particular ethic, not a form of knowledge. But the practice of an ethic can reveal something that a mere technique keeps concealed. Every practice creates a trail of knowledge, so to speak.
I said earlier that the analytical relation is “impolitic,” it does not want to create any sort of Masse. But it is a relationship similar to the political in the sense that the latter also appeals to the unconscious. Indeed, education, government, and psychoanalysis are three practices of the unconscious. There are politicians who alienate the unconscious into hatred and resentment—racism, sovereigntism, nationalism... And there are politicians who appeal to Eros in the Freudian sense, like Greta Thunberg for example, who is so in love with the earth. But everyone involved in politics needs to grapple with the unconscious.
I think the good fortune of psychoanalysis is related to the fact that the analytical setting enacts the deep ideals of the modern world. Unlike other psychotherapists, the psychoanalyst does not prescribe: analysis is based on an anti-authoritarian principle that pervades modern democracies. The analyst does not give orders. The analyst does not make prescriptions, unlike the doctor. Nor does the analyst prescribe paradoxical acts, similar to the koans of Zen masters, as some family psychotherapists do. I am by no means against prescriptive techniques, but psychoanalysis differs from these precisely because it does not prescribe. Never does the analyst give advice. The patient is therefore called upon to engage in a maieutic process in the broadest sense, and significantly they are now more and more often referred to as the “analysand”, not the “patient”: they’re required to analyse, not the analyst. The analysand does not endure the analyst’s initiative.
The rule of maximum truthfulness and free association embodies the ideal of authenticity that is also typical of contemporary ethics: taking off our social mask and confronting our naked mask.
The fact that analysands are free to say what they want, to come to sessions or not, responds to an ideal of autonomy that is no less essential. In other words, analysis aims at the subject’s non-dependence on something. We usually realise that psychic discontent is closely related to a dependence on the parents, even when they’re dead. Neurotic and psychotic individuals are still closely dependent, if not on their actual parents, on the shadows of their parents. Many of our analysands are literally dominated by parental ghosts. Analysis has an anti-familist valence that makes it disliked by conservatives, who always pose as champions of “family values.” Although it never says so explicitly, psychoanalysis is de facto anti-familist.
Psychoanalysis is a new social bond invented in—I was about to say by—the liberal-democratic society, in which the Gemeinschaft is neutralised. Analysis is a long good-bye not only to one’s “family complex”—which Freud mythically called the Oedipus—but also to a Gemeinschaft as its possible replacement. This is why psychoanalysis has no place in dictatorial or paternalistic systems, to the left or to the right. I have many Russian and Ukrainian friends who were put through the wringer in the USSR not because they were dissidents, but simply because they said they were Freudians (today the Russians are starting to have the same problems with Putin). Reading Freud was forbidden in the USSR. With all due respect to the Freudo-Marxists, I think psychoanalysis is a “bourgeois” practice, in the sense that it is unthinkable in a communitarian society of the kind so many communists dream of.
Lacan said something similar when he stated that “psychoanalysis is a symptom.” Of what? Of the unsocial sociability in which we all live today. Note, however: neither neurosis nor psychosis are the symptoms of the unsocial society in which we live—currently the most common and trivial idea today—the symptom is psychoanalysis. It is analytical practice itself that troubles, embarrasses, the framework of the techno-scientific society in which we live. Hence the cyclical attacks on psychoanalysis as “unscientific” (who claims that it’s a science anymore?), etc., etc. Today’s technological society would like to do away with it altogether, to treat everything according to the protocols of scientific research. Because psychoanalysis hurts, many people even feel persecuted by psychoanalysis. I’m not joking, I know of many such cases. Some people, when they find out I’m a “psychologist”—not even a psychoanalyst—pounce on my supposed profession like hungry hyenas ready to tear apart... psychology. There is a widespread underlying psychophobia that it would be time to analyse.
But it would also be a big mistake to think that the technological ideal of our society represents all of our society! Our society is not monolithic, but a patchwork of often contradictory narratives. Because, as I said, psychoanalysis also embodies certain fundamental values of our modern culture. If it were not an intimate part of it, it would not be a symptom of it.
But it would be naive to want to construct a psychoanalytic theory that does not take this symptomatic function into account. Psychoanalysis is a historical emergence, which, like any emergence, can also vanish. After all, everything in history vanishes sooner or later.
LP: Thank you for your insights.
Notes
[1] Jenseits des Lustprinzips.
[2] “chi ha dato ha dato / chi ha avuto ha avuto /scurdammoce o’ passato....”
Bios
Sergio Benvenuto is a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome and a psychoanalyst. He is an editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and a member of the Editorial Board of American Imago and Psychoanalytic Discourse (PSYAD). He teaches psychoanalysis at the International Institute of Psychology of the Deep in Kiev and at the Esculapio Specialization in Psychotherapy in Naples. He has been or is a contributor to cultural and scientific journals such as Lettre Internationale, L ’évolution psychiatrique, DIVISION / Review.
Leonardo Provini is a psychologist and psychotherapist in Rome. He accomplished a Ph.D. program at Sapienza University of Rome studying states of mind with respect of attachment in divorcing couples engaging in chronic conflicts. He published some papers on the field of psychoanalysis and he started a psychoanalytic training at the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI).
Publication Date
September 20, 2024