Outline and evaluation of the idea of how analysis cures when considered from a Lacanian perspective - Essay Example

NUMBER MODULE PSYCHOANALYSIS MODULE CO-ORDINATOR Introduction The purpose of this paper is to outline and evaluatethe idea of how analysis cures when considered from a Lacanian perspective. The discussion includes perversion, neurosis, psychosis, free association, transference, jouissance, preliminary interview, Oedipus complex, paternal metaphor, imaginary-symbolic-real, Borromean knot, pathology, historicization, language ego, and Moebius Strip. Treating the Psyche: Exploring Lacanian Psychoanalysis The psyche to be treated is considered as a subject-effect brought about by the signifiers’ interaction in the unconscious, a mechanism that breaks up its believed ego-resembling strength, and, in a nutshell, ‘de-substantializes’ it. Thus, the clinical psychoanalysis of Lacan necessitates a multifaceted theoretical sequence, which may be frustrating for those who are looking forward to an uncomplicated procedural formula. A novice psychoanalyst will never find a formula. Not simply because a formula would not be suitable to the uniqueness of every unconscious, but due to the fact that the unconscious and the focus it produces are greatly characterized by the historicity which influences the practice of psychoanalysis in each temporal stage, and which influences the unconscious retroactively. Joel Dor et al. (1998) In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the symbolic-real-imaginary composes a triad of intrapsychic domains which cover the different points of psychic trend. They operate to position subjectivity within a perception system and a discourse with the outside world. Roberto Harari (2004) By establishing the similarity of the three groups imaginary, symbolic, and real, by embodying them as three completely similar circles that may be designated just by the names they have, and by tying these circles as one in particular ways, Lacan formed the Borromean knot, a new component in psychoanalysis. The Borromean knot is a physical component that can be controlled and a symbol for the subject’s structure. The knot, composed of three rings, is distinguished by how the rings, embodying the imaginary, symbolic, and real, interconnect and strengthen each other. Lacan addressed the issue of the symptom and the conclusion of the therapy. In order for the analysis not to be an endless procedure, in order for it to locate its own inner boundary, the understanding of the analyst, which relate to the signifier, should as well arrive at the symptom’s real, specifically, the level where the symbolically ‘meaningless’ fastens on the real, where the initial signifiers acquired by the subject have made their impression. As stated by Lacan, to arrive at its conclusion, an analysis should adjust the interaction between the real and the subject, which is an unbreakable entirety in the symbolic from which the desire and vision of the subject develop. Raul Moncayo (2008) Jacques Lacan has been labeled a ‘structuralist’, which is obviously somewhat accurate. However, for Lacan any structure, with a deficiency or gap in its core, is characterized by history’s progression, exactly via the symbolic structure it puts in order. One excellent illustration is how childish gibberish utterance, which Lacan called ‘lalangue’ (p. 208), on the one hand bears on the subject’s structure, and how the scientific and technological outcomes influence subjectivity on the other hand. In due course, the Freudian practice has attained theoretical deepness which equips it with better effectiveness and new capability. The limitations taking into account this practical and theoretical expansion are the three structures of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Lacan reconstructs transference by a unique examination of the triad steering his ideas: love, desire, and jouissance. He begins with the recreation of the task of the psychoanalyst as an individual who takes up the listener’s position, and whose ‘volitional’ ability resides in determining the meaning or sense of the subject’s expression. Nevertheless, he can simply decode this meaning as it is generated by particular signifiers furnished by the free association of the analysand—the individual who is going through psychoanalysis. This honored listener is someone who is believed to possess some understanding of the particular unconscious at risk; specifically, being the ‘subject-supposed-to-know,’” (p. 141) s/he will build the transference’s structural foundation. However, this transference is not only a copy of what has previously occurred; at its core is a variable overlooked by Freud but previously defined by Melanie Klein: “the partial object, the latent referent that is revealed when the analysand’s construction of the subject-supposed-to-know collapses” (p. 141). Jean-Michel Rabate (2003) Lacan had accepted the idea of Heidegger that human life depends essentially on an issue, and adopted it to describe neurosis as an issue raised by the subject about not just its life but its sex. While Lacan talks about the mythic interpretations of Hans, he claims that they address the issues about his position between his father and mother, encountered by him as a deadlock. By trying out the various kinds of impossible and possible forms of rearranging the elements of his world, he arrives at a stage where “the subject has placed itself at the level of its question” (p. 181). In comparison to Freud’s twofold conflict between psychosis and neurosis, the nosological paradigm of Lacan is somewhat more refined and its classifications more mutually exclusive. Lacan described psychosis and neurosis as essentially distinct psychic formations with independent causalities. Lacan validated and organized the diagnostic classifications of Freud, finally creating the triad of perversion, psychosis, and neurosis, where in each of the concepts stands for an independent clinical unit. Moreover, the clinical effect of these classifications under Lacanian psychoanalysis no longer relates to the probable entry of a patient to the therapy, but instead the recommended place of the analyst within the therapy and his favored treatment of transference. Lacan did not exclude psychotics as possible entrants for analysis. Jacques-Alain Miller (1988) Freud’s conceptualizations of differential diagnostics construct the basis of Lacan’s differentiations between perversion, psychosis, and neurosis. Possibly as an outcome of his own training and education as a clinical psychiatrist handling psychotic patients, he specified conditions most meaningfully for psychosis’s psychic makeup and he was least precise about perversion. Furthermore, in his argument about the different psychic compositions he often emphasized the language and speech attributes, the essence of the transference being considered as an outcome of these attributes. Because the three mental compositions of perversion, neurosis and psychosis are described as mutually exclusive classifications, attempting to neuroticize psychotic patients by rousing this symbolic castration is a useless venture. Even so, Lacanian analysts have positioned plenty of unusual techniques to mitigate psychotic distress, promoted by Lacan’s instruction that the analyst should not withdraw from psychosis. For example, Lacanians have claimed that an analyst handling psychotics should take on the place of an objective secretary who records the patients’ expressions while encouraging them to explain their worldviews, so as to speed up their formation of a strong and established vision. Bruce Fink (1999) According to Lacan, perversion is derived from the Oedipus complex, or that the pervert yields to symbolic castration in so far as the neurotic does, resulting in the establishment of separated subjectivity, jouissance, fantasy, and desire. Thus, Lacan seemed to be arguing that perversion and neurosis can definitely be analyzed on a similar Oedipal point. As Lacan had found out from Freud, if perverse individuals go through the Oedipus Complex then they should encounter despair in the similar manner as neurotics do. Similar to neurotics they should also start to recover that misplaced jouissance or enjoyment, a program whose outcome would include the renewal of subjective completeness. Bruce Fink (1999) In line with Freud’s perception of the Oedipus complex as the origin of psychopathology, Lacan connects every clinical makeup to dilemmas in this complex. Because it is not possible to remedy the complex entirely, a wholly non-pathological status is not present. Bruce Fink (1999) The center forming the Lacanian cure is the absence of the sexual relationship. This assumption can be reinterpreted in three distinct lines: the unconscious does not contain knowledge of sexuality; the unconscious exists because the interrelatedness in the sexes is absent; and sexual ‘act’ does not exist. The absence or lack- ‘a failure proper to the structure in Lacan’ (p. 124)- resides in the lack of sexual relationship. In the presence of this lack, a number of enhancements are created in order to sew it up. There is a crack at the core of the unconscious, the hole of the sexual relationship, a gap which is the Lacanian version of the castration complex. Two types of coherent non-existence, such as the lack, are proposed, which are integral to practice, to the extent that they are outcome of the absent sexual rapport: the absence of truth in all together and the absence of jouissance, or ‘pleasure’, all together. Raul Moncayo (2008) The sexual law emerges where sexual intuition is absent. This law, this prohibition, is logical with unconscious impulse, and even involves the character of law and impulse. For the speaking one, it establishes the breadth of truth in an imaginary order. Hence, psychoanalysis “socially has a consistency that is different from that of other discourses. It is a bond of two. That is why it replaces and substitutes the lack of sexual relationship” (p. 209). This absence determines that actual point by presenting an ‘impossible’ wholly unique to psychoanalysis. A conflict between the Real and truth operates throughout the Lacanian cure in a dialectical approach which has neither been surmounted nor integrated. The Real is something which constantly comes back, and it is inseparable from the coherent form of the impossible, a coherence that is irreconcilable with symbol and a link of the not-all, specifically, of an inevitably open set. Jean-Michel Rabate (2003) With regard to the clinical practice, the instances when Lacan puts emphasis on the connection between truth and the systematic analysis are when the historicization of the subject attains dominance in the methodical task. When he puts a premium on the real in its bond with the psychoanalytic work, he emphasizes structure and logic. If analysis is restored by making use of distortion within language, this is performed as well, also scandalously, by adjusting the standard duration of sessions. It should be kept in mind that Freud set a session’s duration at 45 minutes in relation to the attention span that was most favorable to him, not at all in terms of the being of the unconscious. Short sessions turned out to be the core of a scandal, and due to the scandal, individuals overlooked that sessions should be of changeable duration based on how the task of the analysand opens out. The length differs in line with the unlocking and locking of the unconscious, which employs normal time to support resistance in order to neutralize the closure which develops from unchanging length of sessions. Jacques-Alain Miller (1988) As argued by Lacan, a psychotic makeup shows as psychotic indication and psychotic breakdown not through an inner, unavoidable mechanism but through some kind of outside conflict with the ‘paternal metaphor’, or the ‘father being not only any real or imaginary male but also the symbolic father’ (p. 31). Without the ability of specialists to establish rigorous ethical limitations to their patients’ abusive ‘borderline’ actions, no degree of compassion, patience, or purely psychological idea can aid the victim to assume self-responsibility for the truth of their distress—whatever its previous causes—instead of ‘releasing it’ on other people or transferring the responsibility for or burden of it to other people. This so-called ‘laying down of the law’ (p. 31) bridges the discrepancy that Lacan refers to as the absent ‘paternal metaphor’ in the patient’s life—‘the word of the father’ which permits victims of abuse to start to differentiate between wrong and right behavior, in spite of the weaknesses of their own mothers, fathers, or any significant others or loved ones to do so. Simply the creation of definite ethical limitations to their own ‘borderline’ actions can aid victim of abuse disentangle the effects of their abusers’ immorality, and stop it from developing it themselves. Russell Grigg (2008) Lacan applies the Moebius Strip as a symbol for what he refers to as the ‘signifying chain,’ which is the independent domain of communication that is to be differentiated from structuralism’s theoretical concepts because in it the binary opposition essential to contemporary linguistics is questioned. The Moebius Strip becomes a representation of the contradiction by presenting a concept which is one and two all together and indicates as well that the signifiers which form it have no relationship with anything external to them. For Lacan, language is the dialogue of the Other, or the Id of Freud, and to use it is to assure that an individual will be eternally prohibited from any chance of signification: “the speaker, wholly at the mercy of the signifying chain which precedes him, is condemned to the metaphoric axis of the substitution of one meaningless phoneme for another” (p. 70). Christopher Morris (1975) Lacan charted symbolic transference as the effective aspect, recognizing it rather basically with the full speech act: “Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference—something takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present” (p. 116). Within this symbolic level, transference works as the analysis’s mechanism and it can assume either the structure of hate or love, or somewhat perhaps a combination of both. To support the notion that transference is totally connected with the language’s symbolic form, he mentioned the definition of Freud of ‘the fact of transference’ where he had related it with energy’s diffusion from an unconscious symbol to a remainder of a preconscious day. At this point, Lacan stated, Freud had elaborated how transference occurs when a prohibited unconscious dialogue clutches a more open, preconscious dialogue so as to manifest itself. Dany Nobus (2000) What Lacan referred to as ‘imaginary transference’ overlaps with the transference form Freud had stumbled upon as a hindrance to the therapy, under the condition that Lacan gives priority to its dialectic work over its emotional attributes. Analysands who are undergoing a bout of imaginary transference simply confront their analyst as a second self, or alter ego. The love encountered by analysands on this stage is strongly egotistical. Not accepting the difference of the other. Similarly, imaginary hate is not directed at ending a joint agreement, but at constant envy, competition, and opposition. Lacan studied the analysand’s transmission of old childhood visions to the analyst as a classic illustration of such imaginary transference. Ultimately, despite its popularity within ego-psychology, Lacan viewed it unfavorable to the extension of psychoanalysis: To bring into play the illusory projection of any one of the subject’s fundamental relations with the analytic partner, or again the object relation, the relation between transference and counter-transference, all this, remaining as it does within a two body psychology, is inadequate (p. 116). Dany Nobus (2000) Conclusions Jacques Lacan is perhaps the leading psychoanalyst from the time of Sigmund Freud, the founder and creator of psychoanalysis. Quite contentious, the ideas of Lacan have revolutionized psychoanalysis as a clinical process and a doctrine of the unconscious mind. Lacanian clinical psychoanalysis, without a doubt, is rooted in commitment to the Freudian psychoanalytic process, a commitment that, ironically, calls for improvement. If Freudian psychoanalysis is a research methodology and cure of the psyche, it remains the same with Lacan, though modified. The Lacanian psychoanalysis uses the ‘talking cure’, and it transformed the bond between psychoanalysis and language. Numerous analysts across the globe currently use Lacanian techniques. Free association remains to be the trend in clinical psychoanalysis, enhanced because of subverted linguistics. Its wisdom is legitimized and established by the free association principle, a method where in probability is carefully and thoroughly controlled. This method brings about autonomy from all a priori determinisms, regardless if sociological or biological, which would weaken the integral application and practice of psychoanalysis. Reference Section 1. Dor, J., Gurewich, J., & Fairfield, S., (1998). The Clinical Lacan. Pittsfield, NH: Other Press. 2. Fink, B., (1999). A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. New York: Harvard University Press. 3. Grigg, R., (2008). Lacan, Language, and Philosophy. New York: State University of New York. 4. Harari, R., (2004). Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Pittsfield, NH: Other Press. 5. Miller, J., (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 6. Moncayo, R., (2008). Evolving Lacanian Perspectives for Clinical Psychoanalysis: On Narcissism, Sexuation, and the Phases/Faces of Analysis in Contemporary Culture. London: Karnac Books. 7. Morris, C., (1975). Barth and Lacan: The World of the Moebius Strip. Critique, 17(1), 69. 8. Nobus, D., (2000). Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. 9. Rabate, J., (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Read More