By Andrés and Charlotte Bock.
As Freud himself put it, in some countries, for example, “the interest in psychoanalysis came from men dedicated to the fine arts”, thus extending “its multiple applications to the fields of literature and the science of art, to the history of religion and prehistory, to mythology, folklore, pedagogy, etc.”. Likewise, conversely, the articulation of knowledge through the study of these and many other disciplines have always been and are “indispensable to provide the correct representation of the value and essence of psychoanalysis” (Freud, 2010b).
As the great erudite he was, Freud studied and articulated the disciplines mentioned…such as mythology, history of culture, medicine, psychology of religion, and literature…thus enriching psychoanalysis in its development and method. In the same way, other psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan, who dedicated his life to studying and interpreting Freud, was trained in the same subjects studied by the father of psychoanalysis, including others such as topology, modern physics, chemistry, theatre, opera, philosophy….and even cinema (Motta, 2013).
Freud, Lacan, Miller, Laurent, and José María Álvarez, among other great psychoanalysts, have considered this broad and constant training as the basic foundation that allows the analyst to be at the height of the time, that is, of the contemporary subject and his environment. “This naturally implies that these other practices or sciences are at least known to the analyst since it is common for the subject to have gone through some of them to alleviate his suffering before devoting some time to analysis” (Yoany Rendon).
Returning to your general question about the difference with other practices, the first thing we want to start with is to highlight that psychoanalysis, as José María Álvarez says, is nourished by two main approaches: the structuralist and the singular approach. Although there are disagreements between these two approaches, psychoanalysis tries to integrate the best of the former in its practice. Here, it could be said that the other practices are not located in the second approach, in the singular.
From the structuralist approach, the clinic of the gaze, the subject is thought of as one more in a large crowd. As statistical data and one more of the average (Miller, 2006). Their suffering is placed within generalized diagnostic categories, meaning that when someone expresses feeling a, b, c, d….., from this approach, one can have a series of very generalized “details, categories and classifications”, which, although it helps to understand a little, also “contributes to having a certain ignorance regarding the intimate experience” of the subject (Alvarez, 2020).
This approach, from the “realm of calculation, by approaching the field of the psyche with figures and measurements,” brings forth “the man without qualities.” It is precisely there that psychoanalysis has positioned itself in “the art of the one by one” (Miller, 2006). However, it is “not the one by one of enumeration, but rather the restitution of the unique in its singularity, in the incomparable” (Miller, 2006).
Starting from Miller’s previous quote, we are now in the second approach, that of listening, where psychoanalysis has positioned itself, making room for the singularity of the subject and their unconscious. From here, the room is given to “the person in their singularity,” that “which recognizes them and makes them different from any other,” to understand what “works for them and what doesn’t” in each case (Álvarez, 2020). Here, in the rescue of the singular and the subjective, lies a significant difference with other practices, which also mostly attribute the discomfort of many subjects to “organic,” “chemical,” “neuronal” causes (Gómez & De la Peña, 2022) … as if it were not instead a matter of the soul; and whose psychic causality is very far from the organic, since it originates in the subjective although said subjectivity also has a cause (Lacan, 2006).
For example, people who recognise that they are ill and, after examination of the organs where different symptoms are manifested, these are found to be completely normal. “They are advised to interrupt their usual way of life, rest, invigorating procedures, tonics, and in this way, they obtain temporary relief…. but achieve nothing” (Freud, 2010c). The case of someone who “suffers from mood swings that he cannot control, or from an irresolute shyness that makes him feel paralyzed in his energy, because he is not confident of doing anything right, or he runs with anxiety in front of strangers” (ibid).
Deaf and mute who hear voices (Lacan, 2006); others who have difficulties in carrying out their professional activities and making decisions of high importance; or who “suffered a painful attack of feelings of anguish, and since then cannot without defeating himself walk in the street or travel by railroad, and perhaps had to give up both”; someone whose “thoughts go their own way and he cannot guide them by his will”; others who know they have done nothing wrong to anyone but experience an intense feeling of guilt; professional musicians whose hands fail to play the piano at the desired event; someone who “when he intends to go to a social gathering, a natural need comes upon him whose satisfaction would be incompatible with sociability”; another who “will eventually vomit up all his food, which may prove dangerous in the long run”; the unfortunate fact that someone “cannot stand emotions, which are impossible to avoid in life. On the occasion of them he suffers fainting spells, often muscular contraction” (Freud, 2010c).
In short, a long list of cases in which Freud exemplifies the cases of many subjects who “find out that there are people who specialize in treating this kind of suffering, and they enter into analysis with them” (Freud, 2010c). In this instance that arises in analysis, for example, “if our patient suffers from a feeling of guilt, as if he had committed a serious crime, we do not advise him to ignore the torment of his moral conscience by insisting on his undoubted innocence; he has already tried this without success. Rather, we warn him that such an intense and sustained feeling cannot but be based on something truly real, which may perhaps be discoverable” (Freud, 2010c). Through what Freud’s famous patient has called psychoanalytic method as her “talking cure.”
Perhaps a more contemporary example to situate the psychic attributions to the organic-chemical-neuronal is the commonly known depression. This is a diagnosis that seems to be common nowadays, and especially to a significant number of young people who consult practices such as psychiatry in search of relief from their discomfort. We often hear testimonies of subjects in pharmacological treatments for years, moved by the “hope” of ‘obtaining’ a solution to their “organic-chemical” discomfort.
These treatments are also made part of “innovative developments of the pharmaceutical industry”, whose new drugs offer the possibility of “experimental” participation with percentage promises of relief. Chemical-encapsulated relief, which ties the subject to the same treatments and even generates significant physical changes, as mentioned by some people in their analysis. Those who also reiterate that before coming to the analysis, “they have had little patience, little time and a certain fear of talking and knowing about what hurts them”. A situation that the industry is well aware of.
In 1937, Freud had warned of this imperative search for the immediacy of psychic relief and of “adjusting the tempo of analytic therapy to the American rush”. Well, this more contemporary pharmaceutical solution has its origins in the creation of the medical classification of mental illnesses (Gómez & De la Peña, 2022). As José María Álvarez explains, it was the APA’s (American Psychological Association) response to the dominance of psychoanalysis over American psychiatry in the 1970s. Once the APA had created the classifiable diseases in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the use of drugs to manage “medical, cerebral and genetic ailments, the exclusive competence of psychiatrists who were called researchers, was justified” (Gómez & De la Peña, 2022).
Thus began, with the classification of mental illnesses, a career at the service of the pharmaceutical industry and capitalism, accompanied by numerous entrepreneurial marketing efforts, to propagate through the press, radio, television, academic journals and books by well-known personalities that of the genetic basis of depression or the neurochemistry of dopamine (Gómez & De la Peña, 2022).
Thus, as Álvarez says, a mercantilist model had been imposed which, in recent decades, has been confronted and has been required to show its so-called “scientific evidence” of the biological origins of these diseases and, on the other hand, evidence on the correction that could be achieved through psychiatric drugs. Neither one nor the other was provided; the famous evidence does not exist, and it was confirmed that the use of these drugs worsens the situation in the long term (Gómez & De la Peña, 2022).
Here is another significant difference between the practices concerning the desired and promised promptness. Psychoanalysis, as well as love and art, does not get along well with haste. In an age in which the individual is dominated by immediacy, it would seem that analysis is an “impossibility” (Freud, 2012). Even so, at present, there are also subjects who take the time to know, generating an encounter with psychoanalytic practice, whose “analytic bond is founded on the love of truth, that is, on the recognition of objective reality”, which “excludes all illusion and all deception” (Freud, 2012).
Nor is perfection attributed to psychoanalysis or analysts since the latter are merely “people who have learned to practice a certain art and, along with this, have the right to be human like everyone else” (Freud, 2012). There is, however, an essential point that is a fundamental requirement for analysts and that marks another difference with other practices: “a higher degree of normality and psychic correction,” which is only achieved through “one’s own” analysis (Freud, 2012). This is unlike organic issues, in which, for example, a doctor might experience an ailment in one of his organs while working with his patient and might even specialize in said ailment. In matters of the soul, the analyst’s subjectivity and unconscious, if not subjected to rigorous analysis, can hinder work with his patients (Freud, 2012).
Regarding psychotherapy, we will proceed with Miller’s (2001) words: “it is a convenient label that encompasses the most varied practices, even gymnastics.” It may be objected, however, that there are psychotherapy practices that, like psychoanalysis, rely on words and are founded on listening, notwithstanding it constitutes nothing more than a phenomenon of semblance (Miller, 2001). However, there are essential differences which Miller points out. First, the analyst’s desire, which operates in psychoanalysis and is not the case in other practices. The analyst and his desire “are established on the auditor-interpreter’s refusal to use the medium of his supposed, identificatory omnipotence. The analyst’s desire is this very abstention and opens up a path beyond” (Miller, 2001). Another significant difference is that psychotherapy does not address the question of jouissance, which preserves the supposed omnipotence of the listener. “In psychotherapy, what questions the omnipotence of the Other is avoided. Its consistency is preserved, whereas the characteristic of the analytic position, which opens up to proper psychoanalysis, would be to admit the question of jouissance, not to make the Other consistent” (Miller, 2001).
It remains to be said that psychoanalysis is a method that believes in the subject’s desire. A defence against jouissance (Lacan, 2019), the force that opposes the death drive, a concept that is also commonly rejected in other fields.
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