Confessions from the Couch

Valérie Blanco

Description

The unconscious? The Oedipus complex? The castration complex? Neurosis ? The objet a ? What are they? And what does one say to an analyst? What happens during an analysis? For those asking questions about psychoanalysis, Confessions from the Couch gives clear and simple answers. The principal psychoanalytical notions, both Freudian and Lacanian, are explained and illustrated with chosen extracts from actual analytical sessions. (Traduction en anglais de Dits de divan, Notions de psychanalyse illustrées d'extraits de séances).

Sujets

• Psychologie
• Psychanalyse
• Psychiatrie

Informations

• Publié par: L'Harmattan
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782336375878
• Langue: English

Extrait

Cover
4th of cover
Title
Valérie BLANCO





Confessions from the Couch

Psychoanalytical notions
illustrated with extracts from sessions






Translated by Jane Hodgson-McCrohan
Copyright

© L’Harmattan, 2015
5-7, rue de l’École-Polytechnique; 75005 Paris
http://www.harmattan.fr
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EAN Epub : 978-2-336-72598-7
Foreword
Psychoanalysis has been a source of fascination, intrigue and worry for more than 100 years. It has rarely been treated with indifference.
In the practice of psychoanalysis, you often find yourself replying to questions about it from patients, family, friends and acquaintances.
These questions push you to explain simply, in just a few sentences, notions that are often very complex. They push you to give your own interpretations of these notions.
This book takes up the challenge of simplification.
As with all popularisation and interpretation, there is an inherent but recognised risk of weakening or distorting the original concepts. But it might offer a first opening to psychoanalysis to those who perhaps have neither the time nor the inclination to plunge into the works of great psychoanalysts like Freud and Lacan.
This book intends to give a first taste, and as such to whet the appetite and to stimulate the curiosity of the reader. Let us hope that this introduction to a few basic notions will encourage the reader to take his investigations further.
This book is also witness to the extraordinary and passionate experience of the analytical cure.

Furthermore, to make these theoretical notions more meaningful and to reply to questions concerning what actually happens in a psychoanalytical practice, this book provides extracts from clinical sessions, thus giving the reader a concrete idea of what is said on the couch and a link between the theory and the practice.

Of course, in order to preserve the anonymity of the patients, the details or characteristics allowing their identification have been either slightly or radically modified. The inconvenience of this is that these extracts lose that which is at the heart of the analytical ethic: the unique and singular character of each patient, but the advantage is that these extracts “speak” to a great number of readers who, other than the authors, could recognise a part of themselves.

The aim of this book is to incite in its readers the desire ( envie ) to know more about psychoanalysis or about themselves and the desire (envie ) to undertake an analysis. A desire ( envie ) to embark upon this long journey, which will lead them to a feeling of “l’en-vie” * .
* In French the author is making a play on words. « Envie » means desire, craving, longing and « en-vie » written in two words means being alive.
Chapter 1 – The unconscious and symptoms
Psychoanalysis is a little more than a hundred years old. Sigmund Freud invented it at the end of the 19 th century.
Today, a certain number of psychoanalytical discoveries have become general knowledge and are commonplace. For example, we accept that an unconscious exists, that a part of our sexual drives are repressed, that there is such a thing as an Oedipus complex and that our Freudian slips can be revealing.
Nevertheless, we must try to imagine the context of prudish values of the 1890’s and 1900’s to fully understand the thunderbolt of the new psychoanalytical discourse. The first patient to whom Freud said: “You have an unconscious desire to sleep with your mother” must have nearly fallen off the couch! In 1905 Freud created a scandal when he published his book Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality in which he claimed that children were animated by sexual drives and referred to the child as “polymorphous perverse” (to convey the idea that the sexual drives, which are numerous, go in all directions, without organisation).

This scandal was nothing compared to Freud’s understanding of the unconscious and how it revolutionised our way of thinking. Certainly the term “unconscious” existed before Freud, but he was the first to give its meaning such scope. The Freudian unconscious goes beyond the simple opposition between things we consciously know and those of an unconscious kind that we are unaware of. Freud’s originality does not lie in the distinction between the known and the unknown, but in the importance given to the unknown. Our unconscious determines us and makes us act. In other words, we are not masters of ourselves. There is an unknown pilot directing our course of action.
With his idea of the unconscious, Freud inflicted a new narcissistic wound on mankind. Already in the 16 th century, Copernicus undermined the idea of man being at the centre of the universe, being at the centre of God’s creation, by showing that the Earth turned around the Sun and therefore, it was not the centre of the Solar System. Later, in the middle of the 19 th century, Darwin dealt another blow with his theory on the origin of species and natural selection, leading us to believe that man descended from apes. Freud now added that man was not master of himself, that he was determined by his unconscious.
We need to understand the intellectual explosion that this represented at a time when, following Descartes’ suggestion that the body worked like a machine, science had been spreading its knowledge and therefore its mastery of the human body. For instance, the three “A’s”: asepsis, antisepsis and anaesthetic that were discovered during the 1870’s. These opened up new prospects for surgery with the possibility of operating on a live body, repairing it, exploring it and understanding the mysteries of life without the previous risks and pain of surgery. Investigation was no longer restricted to dissecting corpses. Furthermore, in 1895, Röntgen invented radiology making it possible to see through and into the body. Science had made the body transparent. All this progress enhanced the utopian view of science’s mastery.
Then Freud arrived on the scene and said, no, there is something uncontrolled or uncontrollable in human beings. We are not masters of our minds, our thoughts, our actions or our symptoms. Some are not even known to us and completely escape conscious control. Good will and reasoning can change nothing. There is another force at work: it is the unconscious.

Through psychoanalysis we can know or learn a little bit more about how our unconscious determines us, how it directs our life without us knowing it. And thanks to this knowledge we can gain a little room to manoeuvre, enabling us to be less of a puppet of our own unconscious.

The unconscious is a sort of jumble of words made up from listening to speech or from the “non-spoken”, for example a family secret, as well as images and experiences lived or felt. Some words serve as predictions, such as the one from the wicked fairy in “Sleeping Beauty”: “At sixteen years old, she will prick her finger…”. All these elements are like free drifting electrons whose energy causes damage whilst they are not integrated into the correct circuit, the correct circuit being the chain of conscious speech. Until these wandering elements have been integrated into this symbolic chain and especially into the patient’s life story, they can have more or less serious consequences.

Patient: Since I was born 4 months premature, my mother used to say all the time: “you should never have lived!”
Analyst: Which means what for you?
Patient: That I should not be here! That I am an intruder!
Analyst: An intruder…
Patient: Yes, an intruder, I am one too many…
Analyst: In “you should never have lived” you heard “you should have died”. Why not “what a miracle that you survived!” ?

To reintegrate these elements into the symbolic chain, we need to talk about them, and that is what happens during an analysis. Through talking, and with the help of dreams, Freudian slips and revealing blunders, we can flush out these free roaming elements and give them a place and a meaning in the story of our life. By reintegrating them into the symbolic chain we stop the damage they cause. In a way, it is like filling in the blank chapters of one’s own history: next to the official version (conscious) we need to write the unofficial version (unconscious), which is neither more nor less important or active than the official version.

Analyst: What frightens you about these dizzy spells?
Patient: I am frightened that they could happen anywhere and I’d fall down in the street.
Analyst: “Fall down in the street”? Like your mother, when she fell on her way to work, struck down by a heart attack?
Patient: Maybe…I don’t know…I’ve never made that connection before.
Analyst: What age was your mother when it happened?
Patient: 45…like me…

Why have these elements strayed? On the one hand, there are times when our psyche has difficulty in treating certain elements due to an “energy”, a charge that is too strong (a charge of jouissance which will be explained in a later chapter). As well as that, these elements can be in conflict with society’s moral values, values that have been passed on to our psyche through the authority of our superego. The superego then