Learning about/from Psychoanalysis

“Many of Freud's statements run counter to the inclusion of his work in hermeneutics. I have insisted, for a long time, on the absolute priority given to method.”“Before being identified as a clinical practice or a theory, psychoanalysis is first defined as 'a procedure for the investigation of psychical processes, which are otherwise hardly accessible'. This method is constantly defined as analytical, associative dissociative; 'free association' (jreie Assoziation) or 'freely occurring ideas' (jreie Einfiille) are only the means employed for the dissociation of all proposed meaning”“no synthesis was to be found in the id, which was governed by coexistence without coherence; on the other, the analyst had to be content with analysing, without proposing any kind of 'psychosynthesis' to the patient”“Freud no longer denies the fact that analysis can lead to partial and provisional constructions, as stops on a journey. The latter are, moreover, only brief reconstructions of historically well-defined chains of meaning. But the place he assigned Konstruktion allows Freud to give free passage to Deutung - interpretation - which is defined, in opposition to reconstructive synthesis, as taking one element at a time; that is, simply replacing a missing link in the associative-dissociative chain”“I would otherwise stress the idea that psychoanalysis is not the system of stereotypical interpretations to which it is too often reduced by certain of its adepts, to the great advantage of its detractors, who have things made very easy for them.”“My claim is that in the decade following 1900, psychoanalysis underwent a change which was as important as it was disastrous, with the appearance of the reading codes whose names are symbolism and typicality.”“The method consists in 'de-translation', on the track of elements described as unconscious (at this point Freud speaks of memories, or rather, of reminiscences). To be sure, this is not to say that no synthesis is produced; but it is a synthesis which is purely spontaneous, and above all, individual: as in chemistry, the analysed elements tend to recombine. But there are no pre-established codes for a retranslation.”“The symbolic, linking the symbol and what it symbolizes in a fixed manner, will only be developed in the later editions of the Traumdeutung. Freud will go so far as to talk in this respect of a 'fundamental language'. As regards the typical, it initially concerns dreams whose manifest content corresponds to a quasi-universal scenario.”“Symbolism versus association: my question is, do these amount to parallel, or even complementary methods, as Freud wished? Or are we dealing rather with two antagonistic vectors, precisely those of anti-hermeneutics and hermeneutics?” -THIS“There is a clear opposition between the two: (1) The symbolic method translates the manifest discourse of the dream at first sight, preserving its coherence, and, in the end, trusting in it; it transposes one narrative into another. By constrast, the associative method subjects the manifest narrative to dissociation without giving it the least credence. (2) The two methods are not in a cooperative relationship, because, according to Freud, when symbolism speaks, associations are silent. Indeed, it is the obstacle constituted by the so-called 'mute elements' which dictates the use of symbolism.”“It introduces what I have termed a phallic logic, a binary logic of 'plus' and 'minus'. The oft praised assumption of castration is not some grandiose amor fati; it is directly linked to the expansion of binarism, the foundation of the modern occidental world. But despite the irresistible conquest of the world by binarism, it is worth recalling that this expansion remains contingent, in relation to so many civilizations whose founding myths are not binary but plural - accepting ambivalence instead of staking everything on difference.”-original discovery of Freud is that of a method.“The refusal of synthesis, before being a virtual moral rule for Freud (the refusal of suggestion, the refusal of imposing his own ideas, even psychoanalytic ones), is a methodological abstention. Its profound maxim is that where one follows the path of synthesis, one silences the unconscious. Now, this discovery is masked, concealed, by the return of synthesis, of 'reading', of hermeneutics. The latter first takes the name of typicality and symbolism, soon spreading out into the great 'complexes'. Thus we end up with all the supposedly psychoanalytic myths which encumber us.”“hermeneutics cannot be imported from the outside, like a specialized discipline. It can only be a hermeneutics of the human condition, practised by the human individual”“What, then, would a psychoanalytic practice of hermeneutics be? The application of a new code to an old one, Subjecting the manifest to 'rereading', can only amount to the redoubling of repression.”“The first level, which I will call for convenience Level I, is that of the theories discovered in the human being by psychoanalysis. These are ideologies, myths, cultural formations which, as such, can be neither refuted nor endorsed by psychoanalysis. They are what critics of psychoanalysis most often choose to attack - and not without justification, because the majority of psychoanalysts have made them their own theories”“I would place in opposition to this Level I a Level 11, that of specifically psychoanalytic theory, also called metapsychology. Like all theory, it can only be constructed in an attempt to account for an experience: in the first instance, the experience of the treatment (its situation, its method, and its object). It is the theory of repression, of the genesis of the unconscious, of its manifestations, of its nature. Psychoanalytic theory, as it is described at Level 11, can claim to be open to refutation and falsification.”