What does modern psychoanalysis teach us?
Last Century Psychoanalysis firmly merged with the mass culture, so everyone believes that if he knows the words "unconscious", "Oedipus complex" and "ego", he can heal the soul and understand all the mechanisms of sexual attraction. This is naturally not the case. Psychoanalysis is a complex theory that is applied strictly individually and does not have a precisely predictable effect. The famous philosopher Karl Popper believed that psychoanalysis is not a scientific theory, since it cannot be refuted. There is not a single statement or problem that psychoanalysis could not explain. In order to somehow understand what tools psychoanalysis owns in solving human problems, is it true whether everything is based on sexual attraction and how this theory has evolved since Freud's time, we turned to Alexander Bronnikov, president of the Freudo Pole Russia group .
Sigmund Freud
Who is Freud for psychoanalysis, what is conscious and unconscious
There are two Freuds. One Freud - the hero of jokes and the real Freud - a man who is discussed by intellectuals like Sartre. The main idea of the founder of psychoanalysis was not that everything has a sexual meaning, but that sexuality is unconscious. The unconscious is that in yourself that you do not know. Therefore, sexuality is something you don't know about. Even adults, who seem to know, actually do not represent anything. Unconscious - this is the thing about which we get an idea through an error, reservation or mistake. I wanted to say one thing - said another. And then sexuality at the same time becomes something that a person does not know about himself, and that which he learns through an error. Imagine that there would be no mistake and the person could not have made a reservation by chance. Like animals or robots. Then this absence would abolish the human dimension itself. Man would cease to exist, and only animals or robots would remain. Therefore, sexuality is always a surprise.
What is the difference between love and desire in terms of psychoanalysis
In the text "On the humiliation of love life," Freud talks about the causes of mental impotence, which is that love and desire are separated. When they love one and desire another. For example, they live with their wife and sleep with a prostitute. And that the desire of a man for some reason is subject to such centrifugal force. Before us is the logic, where there is a choice "either-or": either love or desire. In modern psychoanalysis, this choice is called "alienation", which Jacques Lacan explains by the example of choosing "wallet or life." Choose a wallet - you lose everything. If you choose life, then what is life without a wallet? This choice very accurately describes the misadventure of the subject with love and desire. To understand how to get out of this logical impasse, you need to understand what love and desire are connected with. The essence of psychoanalysis in what is called "talking cure" - the definition given by Freud's first patient - "speech therapy". Speech can be treated differently. A person is a talking creature, and how he enters into speech will depend on how he builds his relationship in love.
What is desire
Desire is not a need or a requirement. Desire is when a word is missing. We do not want what we require. Desire unconsciously, the man knows nothing about him. Sexual desire arises in the form of a riddle, and it cannot be satisfied with an object. For example, does a unicorn exist? As an object of the physical world, it is not, but it possesses speech being and some have phobias of unicorns. They are afraid of "them", "of these unicorns", which are only as speech beings. And this fear is a completely real feeling. People are able to have real feelings for phantoms that exist only in speech. So, the desire has only speech being.
Is there a unicorn? As an object of the physical world, no, but it has a speech being and some have unicorn phobias
The word gets its meaning only in the context of the phrase. Picasso has a beautiful thought: “I’m not looking and I find.” She has long been the motto of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. You can give an example from his practice. One client of Lacan was anxious and woke up every day at 5 am in nightmares. She said that during the war, the Gestapo exactly at five in the morning fumbled around the city and took away people. And since she was Jewish, she was very afraid that they would come for her too. Despite the fact that the war is over, her anxiety has not gone away. She asked Lacan: "Will it ever pass?" To which Lacan replied: "No." And she continued to talk about the Gestapo. Then at some point Lacan ran his hand over her face and at the same time ended the meeting. Her anxiety passed. In French, this gesture is called "geste à peau" - "gesture on the skin", or "guest and on." This is an example of how modern psychoanalysts work.
What do Freud reservations mean
When a person makes a reservation, he suddenly says something and does not know what he is saying, since words always have slightly more meanings. For example, a person instead of the word "text" says "sex." And then we are confronted with what is not clear. For psychoanalytic ethics, lack of understanding is a possibility of surprise, a find. Finding something that was not there yet is desire. This removes the question "what to do?", Because the point is how to take a position in relation to the incomprehensible. Freud was able to take an ethical position that the unconscious is not just a loss of meaning, but also a find. Therefore, reservations - is a reason for analysis, but not condemnation, internal and external.
Jacques Lacan
What happens in modern psychoanalysis
One of the functions of the psychoanalyst is that questions arise where they have not yet been. This gives a person the opportunity to find out what he did not know and did not know his analyst. For example, you want to speak simply or even simplified. This is a paradoxical and rather dangerous thing. Why do I need to publish only clear texts? Lacan speaks of the triumph of religion in the future, because religion gives meaning to all that is incomprehensible. This is the practice of adding. Modern psychoanalysis is the practice of subtraction. There is such a way to enjoy - to give meaning to all things of the world. Lacan sends religions about the same anecdotal accusation as mass culture sends to Freud - Freud gave sexual meaning to everything. However, what difference does it make sense to give everything: sexual, scientific or religious. Suppose we could say that psychoanalytic treatment is a transition from tragedy to comedy. In order to understand the cure mechanism, you need to understand what suffering is, from which they want to be cured. Suffering is when you read something unequivocally. The cure mechanism is to learn to read a little. The patient says: "This is a tragedy in my life, yesterday I was late for driving as usual." And then she reads it and the word "obsession" appears.
Who is a man in psychoanalysis
Usually, when people come to the analyst, they know perfectly well who such men and women are. And this “too good knowledge” makes people suffer. For example, some people think that men are the ones who should make money. Or that women are those who should be the object of desire for a man. And these meanings already give answers. And when you have the answers, you no longer want anything - the desire itself disappears. For psychoanalysts, a man is not a penis carrier, that is, there is no concrete quality that could distinguish a man from a woman. Imagine that someone wants to learn how to play chess. And you say to him: "The horse differs from the elephant in that the horse has a mane." This is crazy, because a person does not know anything about the difference between a knight and an elephant on a chessboard. It would be just as crazy to say that a man differs from a woman in that he has a penis. It seems to me that a man is one who wants a woman. Following Nietzsche, Heidegger and Lacan, it is possible to say that “aleteya” (truth) is a female deity. And then the desire of a woman is connected with the desire of truth. The woman exists about the same quality as the unicorn. One of Lacan's phrases: "La femme n'existe pas" ("Woman does not exist") - with an emphasis on "La", the definite article. There are no definite and indefinite articles in Russian to describe it.
The main object of study in psychoanalysis
The most important object that psychoanalysts study is called "this is not that." The name of the object is “this is not the one” that arises in alarm. Anxiety is when you do not know who you are in the eyes of another. About the object "not that" you can talk a lot in the context of love. When people come and say: “It’s not that,” they don’t know what exactly “that” is, but they know for sure that everything around them is “not that”. “That” does not exist, but this is not a reason to be sad, because sometimes wits are born from blunders. Wit is when you say something "wrong." For example, I wanted to say one word, but said another, and this is ridiculous. One patient said that she has a phobia - to cross the road. And the psychoanalyst asked: "Are you afraid of crossing the road to whom?" She replies: "I'm afraid to cross the road to my mother." Thus, psychoanalytic interpretation is similar to wit. The joke is also based on a shift in meaning.
What happened in psychoanalysis after Freud
After Freud, nothing new appeared in psychoanalysis. Or one can say otherwise - “nothing” appeared as Jacques Lacan’s treatment of set theory, where there is an empty “nothing” set. And this “nothing”, associated with a lack of something, refers us to a desire that could best be explained with the help of set theory. Therefore, it is very easy for modern psychoanalysts to talk with physicists and mathematicians. You can say this: "there is nothing - this is an empty set." And "there is one nothingness - it is a multitude within which there is an empty multitude as a subset". And this allows us to express a number of interesting things about desire and about a human being. The modern composer Cage, who sometimes wrote lectures, once said: "Slowly we understand that we are moving from nowhere to nowhere. And this is a pleasure."
It is very easy for modern psychoanalysts to talk with physicists and mathematicians.
Movement from nowhere to nowhere Freud discovered the name "repetition", which can cause terrible suffering from the fact that the same thing happens in life. Modern psychoanalysts who listened to Cage and Lacan, read the theory of sets, know that moving from nowhere to nowhere can cause happiness and pleasure. A movement from nowhere to nowhere is not a movement from one good to a better good, as capitalist society suggests. There was one woman - a better woman. There was one car - the car became better. With this approach, women are reduced to machines.
The concept of norms in psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis says that modern society is delirious by the concept of the norm. There is even such a phrase: "There is nothing more crazy than being normal." Norma simplifies us to an imaginary ideal. People desire norms because they are insane. To desire the norm is to be sick. The norm is often understood in an imaginary way. This is some imaginary ideal. When you look in the mirror and think: "Something I look abnormal today." The future of psychoanalysis and something new in society that psychoanalysis can bring depends on the place where the slip and the error will have. For example, in school discourse you know where the error is - the errors must be corrected. Psychoanalysts say sexuality is a mistake and a blunder. And a mistake is sometimes luck that brings happiness.
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