Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“If not the death, than at least, one could say that the ‘end of psychoanalysis’ is also a possible future that belongs to this institution, in the moment when analysis must come to an end, and it may be necessary to ‘forget psychoanalysis’ to go on living without it. Is this not the brilliance of Lacan’s performative and repeated gestures of dissolving a school or seceding from an association precisely at the moment when it seemed to become an apparatus that was beginning to assume too much the form of an institution that guaranteed its own permanence?”-the questions will always be relevant based on the current contexts so how does it well and truly die?“Are we talking about (a) ‘deterritorializing psychoanalysis’ in the imperative sense of causing psychoanalysis itself to become deterritorialized from the historical legacy and dominant institutions that belong to the psychoanalytic movement after Freud? Or, are we talking about (b) a ‘deterritorializing psychoanalysis’ in the sense that we could conceive of a psychoanalysis that would itself be deterritorializing, a psychoanalysis that would be without walls or frontiers, made for the open road, so to speak?”“it is not a question, by one method or another, of reducing the unconscious; it is much more a question for us of producing it – there is no unconscious that could be said to be already there, since the unconscious must be produced and it must be produced politically, socially, and historically. (Deleuze 2004: 381)”“The assemblage of these components defines the form of analysis itself, a form that arranges the contents and counts for much more than the contents that are plugging into it. It is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a ‘machine’ that produces the unconscious by a regular rhythm inserted into the interstices of speech and silence: symptoms, transference, interpretation, but most of all, the rumblings of unconscious desire. It is this machinic dimension of psychoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari have made into such an object of contestation”“It is here that silence could be said to belong to two different registers: the full silence (in all its phallic glory!) becomes the silence that marks a pause between two different constructions of desire; the anticipated silence that marked the aim of the subject’s demand returns in the form of non-sense, a residue, or left-over. Here, a major distinction emerges in our comparison: for Beckett this silence assumes a properly comic repetition accompanied by an impossible imperative to ‘get over it’, or ‘to give it up’; however, by contrast, psychoanalysis retains a tragic attitude with regard to the possibility of ever finishing – that is, the possibility of ever not saying ‘I’ – so that even while it empties out the signifier, it leaves the unconscious structure intact and awaiting a newly determined object that stands in for the drive.”“The analyst only materializes the division by occupying the position of the subject’s true enunciation (a place that in the first place is handed over, or sacrificed, to the analyst by the patient), and by refusing any immediate or direct object of the statement as the subject’s true intention”“As Lacan said quite clearly, ‘Psychoanalysis it is not a hermeneutics’. In fact, from the perspective of practice, this is because it has been discovered that interpretation leads more often to the failure of analysis than to the revelation of the unconscious processes: something that Freud himself readily demonstrates in his case-study of Dora, where a prejudiced and precipitous interpretation of Dora’s problems immediately implicated Freud in a secret pact with Dora’s father and Herr K.”“As for Lacan, who we know paid scrupulous attention to Freud’s mistakes, interpretation was always a last resort, and moreover, will never take the form of some information that the analyst offers to the patient, even at the end, which in fact achieves its desired effect only by the silencing of every interpretation.”“If from the perspective of psychoanalytic technique interpretation is an ethical act, in the strongest sense of the term ‘act’, the analyst here could be said to occupy the position of Antigone before the figure of Creon, who can perform this act only with the full knowledge that it already constitutes a death-sentence that will land on the head of the analyst himself or herself. To put this enigmatically, the analyst can only speak as a dead man, that is, dead to the question of desire, which is an issue that should concern only the living.”“Freud himself addressed the proliferation of so-called ‘psychoanalytic interpretations’ in his time – but perhaps this admonition can also apply to our own – by saying that knowledge of the unconscious cannot be gained by listening to lectures and reading books, which he compared to the same effect that handing out menus in a time of famine would have on hunger. As Freud writes, ‘This analogy goes even further than its immediate application; for informing the patient of his unconscious regularly results in an intensification of the conflict within him and an exacerbation of his troubles’ (Freud 1957c: 225).”