A Holist’s Anxiety of Influence: Commentary on Kirshner

Throughout the history of philosophy, nobody has been able to bridge the gap between “is” and “ought.” Most efforts are really answers to other questions, such as “What is the nature of Man?” Lofty and philosophical as these speculations are, they are factual, not ethical. They may abstract from what “is,” but they do not obligate it. There is also a common, practical realm of casuistry that confronts a person’s different moral judgments with each other. That is the ordinary function of ethics in our social world, as for instance in medical ethics. The limits to this are amusingly evident in psychological experiments that show people judging actions on varying principles (“I shouldn’t push the person off the bus to save the others, but I shouldn’t avoid driving into him if that would endanger the others.” “I may kill him but I shouldn’t torture him”). In no case is the overarching rule itself subject to logical debate.

Freud taught that moral judgments are individually derived from our childhood (we abbreviate the process in the term superego (see Friedman 1956). Individual conscience gives us our marching orders. Ricoeur (1970, pp. 519–524) adds to this that we are pre-equipped with an open file for “oughts” and our psychodynamics simply fill in the particulars. That is probably the best bone we can throw to the philosophic moralist, though he might find additional nourishment in recent evidence that even some details, such as the rule of fairness, may be inborn. But the fact that most of us make moral judgments does not tell us that we should make moral judgments, and if someone is lacking that category, there is no way to demonstrate that he should have it. In particular, of course, desire is a matter of fact, and not a voluntary act. Analysts believe that desire is the rain that falleth from the heavens upon the earth below.

The general features of a “world” created by conscience are described by Kant (1781, 1788) : Within our individual moral world, the rules dictated by conscience are universal and apply equally to all people, whether they agree with us or not. If they don’t agree with us we judge them to be morally wrong. Our own world is so saturated with these values that moral significance fills the meaningful universe, and the only modification we can voluntarily make is to shade some values to see others better, as when we exercise empathy with the wrongdoer, or hurt people to help them, or understand the moral monster to grasp the human drama, never able to completely escape the moral universe as long as we are observing action. For the analyst who wants to avoid imposing his own preferences on the patient, even if they are shared by the vast majority of society, it is a theory of mind that does the shading. For that reason, Lacan tries to fashion theory as a reliable chaperone.

Here, as with most psychoanalytic issues, we do well to observe the distinction (as well as the relationship) between theory of mind and theory of therapy. Lacan wants both of these to support the analyst’s discipline. (1) Lacan describes mind as essentially fluid, and human development as a progressive deformation by socialization. Such a scene does not tempt an analyst to impose his judgment, since it offers nothing for him to endorse or correct except a direction of movement, specifically, movement toward greater self-estrangement, which he should block, or divestment of social impositions, which he should encourage. (2) Analytic therapy is therefore a paradox: How is one to “teach” non-learning; how unsocialize a social situation; how enforce a tendency without impact? Lacan confronts the analyst’s dilemma since he is especially aware that desire is the essence of humankind and that a social situation will call out the analyst’s desire no less regularly than it does from anyone else. How to preserve the paradox, rather than overriding it—that’s the question. It won’t suffice to watch out for the intrusion of this or that particular wish, especially if the mind is as fluid as Lacan believes. The analyst must take responsibility for the broad tide of his desire in regard to the patient. Only thus will he restrain himself from covertly exerting a persuasive “taking over” that escapes explicit listing on the Index of forbidden (usually sexual) wishes. I think his theory of mind and theory of therapy are what Lacan considers a kind of special psychoanalytic ethic, designed to prevent the analyst’s own desire, including his private and public ethical demands, from imposing itself in defiance of the treatment’s fundamental rationale. As I understand it, that is the main subject of Kirshner’s paper.

Ego psychologists ¹ will recoil, as I do, from this theory of mind and the formulation of therapy in its terms. But I suggest we put aside for another time our quarrel with the idea that normal human development is a deforming process that alienates a free spirit from its own identity. Better to wait until we have weighed the practical value of Lacan’s approach, thinking of it, perhaps, as a philosophical or existential brace for the analyst’s neutrality, before advancing the counterargument that human beings are better represented by a mixed, native-cum-learning model like that of Freud (see Ricoeur 1970) or Piaget (1954) or Fonagy et al. (2002) or Kohut (1977) or Loewald (1971) or George Herbert Mead (1934).

And the first reward for our forbearance is the surprising discovery that Lacan has, just as he claimed, captured something extremely important in Freud’s original vision. That becomes apparent as we follow Freud’s original presentation in Papers on Technique (1911–1915). Freud was pleased that he didn’t need to wag an ethical finger at psychoanalysts: the practitioner’s interpersonal behavior is dictated by the treatment goal, which is to increase the patient’s free choice and thereby relieve his symptoms, as requested. Treatment was therefore a mere servant to the patient’s values. A certain relationship was found necessary to mobilize a patient for choice. It’s almost coincidental that the technique has an ethical cast. The analyst’s motivation is beside the point. And that is fortunate, since, as Lacan points out, even an ethically praiseworthy urge to cure may interfere with treatment.

Unquestionably, Lacan and Freud are together at the start. The professional ethic prescribed by Freud was one of radical self-effacement. I cannot sufficiently emphasize that this stance was adopted by Freud at precisely the moment—and for the reason—that the treatment was no longer an operation on a single object (a memory). A memory had been something that could be presented neatly framed by the patient himself. When the analyst abandoned that model, his target became a broad swath of character and behavior—just the sort of thing we grasp in a story line, each in our own way, judging and moralizing en route. Now the analyst must grit his teeth not just against the pressure of obvious moral judgments, but even the minimal ethics that is intrinsic to the framing of a human situation. What can the analyst bite on for restraint? At this point we seem to take a sharp turn away from Lacan. For Freud, help comes from a theory that describes mind as a confused interplay of conflicting interests and passions; a measure of theoretically induced bewilderment dampens the analyst’s ardor. To benefit from that cooling off, the working analyst need not be thinking explicitly of the admonition to stay equidistant from id, ego, and superego. It is sufficient that his gaze automatically focuses on a grid of conflicting complexity that turns his thoughts—even his very perceptions—toward defenses, substitutions, and the like, all thanks to his theory of mind. For example, even if he doesn’t think “superego” when listening to a patient, he nevertheless does not think “conscience” as a layman would, but rather of something already compounded of—as well as interacting with—personal passions, childhood attachments, and fears. This sort of thinking interferes with the kind of advocacy and antipathy that would be evoked in ordinary life. That is why the analyst cannot simply say “Follow your bliss.” No more can he say “Don’t be inhibited by ‘oughts.’”

In today’s climate, it is hardly necessary to emphasize that principles such as Indifferenz are ideals, not instructions; they are poles of effort, and signposts marking how far one is from a destination. In many ways, the poles are opposite to each other, the destinations contradictory and impossible to reach. An analyst must have a grasp of the rationale of the overall treatment structure, in the light of which departures from the ideals can be noted and appraised. In these ambiguous situations, certain less technical ethical standards for interpersonal behavior will come into play.

This leads to a more serious concern. Despite the central struggle of the Freudian movement to distance itself from old-fashioned hypnosis and suggestion, analysts have always grudgingly acknowledged that though technique may shape the analyst’s perspectives, what patients react to is a partner, albeit a partner-with-those-perspectives. When something is pointed out about us, we know it is salient in the pointer’s perspective and is connected to a plan to affect us. (Why else would he take the trouble to point it out?) “You’re pretty nasty today” may record a (very small) world-historical fact, but we don’t regard it as scientific reporting. Speech-act theorists like Austin (1962) have made much of this. Freud was up-front about the patient’s very personal “take” on the analyst’s observations, and others followed, more or less willingly (see Friedman 1988, pp. 51–73). Fancy psychological experiments and cognitive neuroimaging merely confirm the common knowledge that people’s experience is primarily holistic and only secondarily analytic, especially in perceiving our fellow human beings. Face recognition is a good model of that sort of basic human experience. (Political judgment is another splendid illustration of physiognomic thinking, where “analysis” consists principally of identifying the “face” (ugly/beautiful), not just of a public figure, but of whole countries, parties, classes, movements, history, etc.). An analyst will be perceived (accurately or not) as a person betraying attitudes with his every action, no matter how diligent he is at self- effacement. That this processing is heavily and intricately, subtly and grossly, informed by transference is immaterial in this regard, as Freud indicated in the extreme case of love. (The question is still open whether there is any other way for human beings to grasp meaning than contextually and rhetorically.) All the analyst’s undeliberate emanations will feed into his perceived shape, and thence into speculations about “what he’s trying for.” A patient wonders, “Does he think I’m moving in the right direction?” and “Am I satisfying or frustrating him?” These are not questions most of us want the patient to be asking, but patients are constantly scanning for answers, nonetheless.

Is the patient right to experience his analyst’s behavior as expressive rather than informative? Perhaps the thorniest question analysts have had to wrestle with is whether a patient extracts from the global sense of his partner’s intervention a delimited, carefully packaged, objective piece of information (an “interpretation”) and contemplates it separately from the analyst’s personal attitude. Over the years, in fact, analysts have divided patients into those who “get it,” and those who can’t separate the comments from the commentator. I think it’s wrong to make this an either/or question. A personal perspective is not necessarily inaccurate for being a personal perspective (“You’re pretty nasty today”), and I would say that analytic-type interventions are simply the analyst’s best effort to convey objective information while minimizing manipulation, bearing in mind that all actions are a form of manipulation, as is the inaction that simply allows transference-countertransference to do its own manipulating (Friedman 2002). Absolute neutrality may be quite unattainable, but there is a range of more and less objectivity in pointing, and best efforts at objectivity will be credited at least by some patients as indicating the pointer’s stance. Part of what the analyst personally expresses is, after all, his extraordinary effort to be objective, never mind how successful. That can’t be without effect on the pointee.

So there is a spectrum on which utterances will be weighed for their proportion of objective content. But in one degree or another, comments by one person about another (or, indeed, about oneself) are always partly expressive of perspectives, with some ethical ballast that is bound to be unloaded by the receiver. I will not argue the point further, since it is implicit in Freud’s initial recognition (1915) that we learn only from those we love, an insight quite consistent with what we have learned from assorted speech-act theorists, hermeneuticists, narratologists, interpersonalists, and intersubjectivists, and due to be supported, I am sure, by imaging brain localization. (Actually, common sense should have headed this list.)

So when we consider the central question of how the analyst pushes the patient and vice versa, it is useful to include some large, gestaltish, final common pathway, and not simply congratulate ourselves on this or that abstemious intention or autoclaved message we have floated into it. That is where Lacan and many other French analysts make a contribution by not just employing the term desire, but actually making it the center of their discourse. Of course, there are also modish reasons for the popularity of the shift. In particular, the analytic community has recoiled with an ungrateful vengeance from intricate theories of mental mechanism. Even in the United States, Brenner (see Friedman 2011) and Kohut (see Friedman 1988, pp. 368–388) have moved from parts and process of mind to a sort of unified flow. But European analysts, especially the French, have made the most of the individual’s life-force, and in a certain sense have spiritualized Freud’s original, mixed force-and-meaning model of psychoanalysis, preferring something like Bergson’s élan vital (1911). But we cannot assume that this philosophical trend in Continental thinking is the only reason for Lacan’s ethical deliberations. In fact, if we return to Freud’s original description of the analytic situation, we see that Lacan is elaborating the fundamental rule—the fundamental rule, that is, as it applies to the analyst. As noted. Freud famously wrote that he didn’t need to lecture analysts about ethical restraint, because the principles of technique all by themselves enforce them—and, we might add, with a vengeance. In Papers on Technique he has ruled out all intentional behavior by the analyst. The analyst must have no wish. He must not even want to figure out what the case is all about. He must have no special interest (say, dream interpretation). Any interest or wish will be used by the resistance. Such a radically nondirective tendency to want nothing from the patient is clearly the engine of treatment; it is what differentiates psychoanalytic treatment from any other human encounter. Freud notes that it is a hard fate for the analyst.

And it is clearly hard on the patient. That is the most blatant feature of the phenomenology of treatment, as any beginning analyst or veteran patient will testify. But what is the ethical implication of imposing that hardness on patients? This is clearly not one of the ways that analytic technique subsumes ordinary ethics. Consider a transference, evoked involuntarily and dealt with differently from every other ethical human relationship—that is, the patient is neither disabused of it nor gratified. How ethical is that? In fact, there are rather few ways in which the analytic procedure follows any of the ordinary ethics of a social encounter. Nonresponsiveness, unclarity about promise or intention, mystification about the interlocutor’s feelings, withholding of interlocutor reassurance—you name it. Violations, all of them, of what we are entitled to expect from one another.

Freud’s broad blanket, smothering all of the analyst’s personal inclinations and civil behavior, is better honored in Lacan’s problematic of desire than, for example, by a simple prohibition of sexual intercourse. It easily overshadows the analyst’s social prejudices, as Lacan says, but also, in principle, his curiosity, his wish for success, his sense of effectance, his image of professional status, his livelihood, health, and material interests. Freud specifically bans the analyst’s wish to be acknowledged as useful, and his interest in furthering scientific understanding. We have no trouble adding to the list of no-no’s a myriad of analysts’ background appetites: entertainment from human company, aesthetic joy from apt expressions, philosophical awe from the human drama, vicarious pride in a companion’s courage and accomplishments, etc.

Once again, I stress that we need not agonize over the obvious impossibility and pointlessness of literally achieving so barren an outlook. It is easy to see from Papers on Technique that a technical ideal is an orienting post that marks one aspect of the field of forces, to be offset by other ideal orienting posts pointing in other directions. One gets the impression that Lacan is less willing than Freud to compromise in that respect, and I will return to that below. But it is crystal clear that Freud does recommend just the sort of universal clamp that Lacan puts on the analyst’s desire.

Despite Freud’s assurance at the start of Papers on Technique that disinterested technique coincidentally satisfies ethical concerns, by the end of the book he has been brought to acknowledge the analyst’s ethical vulnerability (Freud 1915, p. 163). And we can see that the sort of safety the analyst offers comes from obliterating the very desires that make a person a decent companion—that would make him, indeed, an ethical person in any ordinary sense of that word. You might say that psychoanalysis deliberately sets itself to violate both Kant’s Categorical Imperative and the Golden Rule. Yes, of course, in the short run only, and, yes, of course, for an honorable purpose, and yes, of course, with genuine good will, and so forth. If you like, you can say that it simply subordinates ordinary ethics to a technical ethics, but everyone can see that it is a rather more solipsistic one than the technical ethics of other tough professions. ² In any case, we have found Lacan’s strictures about the analyst’s desire to be a faithful rendering of Freud’s recipe for a nondirective psychotherapy, and the concept of desire is well chosen for that purpose.

What about Lacan’s way of curbing the analyst’s desire? It is the opposite of the Freudian way. The Freudian analyst pictures a grid of conflicting interests as a way of keeping himself from preaching. In contrast, Lacan asks us to think of desire as a single thrusting stream, rather than merely an umbrella term for a fund of wishes. ³ He believes that the more general concept avoids the built-in moral and ethical judgments encoded in intrapsychic segments. His warning is similar to Brenner’s: Don’t get involved in battles between egos, ids, and superegos, since these institutions have dramatic and therefore moral ranking (see Friedman 2011). You cannot view even an intrapsychic battle without taking sides, especially if you see real-world consequences. We’re all rooting for the ego. In contrast, Lacan’s more consistently liquid theory dissolves all the evaluative categories that saturate thought and language. It is the nature of desire to squeeze through society’s funnels and filters without essentially taking on their structure, but these structures can obstruct the flow of basically uniform desire. I understand Lacan to say that static forms are traps; all words and interpretations, every “take” on desire, every reduction of desire to “wish,” is already a disservice to the patient, ignoring his nameless, vital, idiosyncratic urge and leaving his passion to pound away senselessly on alien embankments, never recouping the freedom that is the patient’s essential identity. Only when he is left to pull up stakes and move from one form to the next does the patient finally realize the futility of seeking his identity in a particular public shape.

It is a familiar position—one of the two oldest in the chronicle of human thought: All thinking, all explaining, all definable terms, are fixed brackets enclosing generalities, whereas every actual being—and especially a mind—is a singularity in motion that can never fit or rest in those frozen brackets. Pick up any respectable argument in philosophy or psychology, or in science in general, for that matter, and you will find this mind-busting conundrum lurking in its terms. Who can deny that skepticism about general descriptions is an important vision of human reality?

But it is just one hemisphere of reality. Yes, it’s a good idea to remember how inadequate our terms and theories are to capture the unique, once-in-history, living experience of our patients. But in psychoanalysis, excessive skepticism about what we can formulate may leave us with no unwavering torch to light up a misstep in the analytic field. Consider Bion (1967, 1970), for example. He seems to suggest that an analyst can tame his cognitive intrusions by tuning his undesiring and unthinking state to the patient’s unformulatable state. But with so much riding on unshaped intuition, where is the edge that even the humblest analyst can seize to rein himself in? Lacan recognizes the problem. In polar contrast to Bion, he proposes to avoid mismatch by avoiding match altogether. In other words, he gives up what he considers the fiction of understanding. His solution, it seems to me, it to provoke constant movement. It is the logical solution, isn’t it? If the patient’s fluid desire has no parts to be coordinated and no public aim to be approximated, the best the analyst can do is to get out of the way, even though the patient keeps seeking the analyst’s alien conduit.

But wait: do we hear something a little more specific? I think we hear Lacan adding that people’s flow should not seek alien conduits. It is not just that patients suffer from self-alienation through public goals; Lacan seems to regard that direction of flow as a sin against the human spirit. I think that is Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethics, in its form more like ordinary—even political—ethics than Freud’s. I think we might have guessed as much. After all, how do you encourage a flow if you believe it is intrinsically uncharacterizable? The answer is that you can’t. You cannot endorse a direction that you can’t specify. The conflict theorist believes he merely clears obstacles so the patient can find his way, and he doesn’t have to advocate for a direction. In fact, the current understanding of structural theory is that the patient will start with conflict and end with conflict, because that’s the nature of mind. (Brenner has made this recognition the centerpiece of his theory (see Friedman 2011). The analyst has no dog in this fight. He will help the patient find as much peace as he can. Lacan is able to root for the patient’s flow only because he “knows” more specifically its proper direction. It leads, for example, away from bourgeois happiness. What is happening here? Forms—indeed stock forms from yesterday’s warehouse—are slipping in again. Whence this contempt for “the bourgeois dream”? Where else have we heard these denunciations of shameful compromise, these accusations of selling out? And how about that tiresome old bogey, American adaptationism? So far from floating free of social forms, everything here can be found in the annals of the twentieth-century intellectual: a call for liberation from a culture that calls for liberation. A bourgeois contempt for the bourgeoisie. These are now themselves a part of history, well-rooted in a fin de siècle modernism that some would argue came to an end with the First World War. In 1911, according to the critic Terry Teachout (2012), Schoenberg is reported to have said to Kandinsky, “One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.”

The fact is that we cannot do or think without words, or—alas—some embeddedness in our culture and our history (see Gadamer 1975). Analysts should ask themselves: Is my self-awareness of my cultural reflexes so much greater than the patient’s awareness of his? Do not all of us tacitly share a taken-for-granted world with the class and professional cohort of our moment on earth? Isn’t the very recognition of our limitation, along with some effort to discount for it, what we rely on to blunt our evangelical desire in therapy, rather than a grandiose fantasy of above-it-ness and shapelessness?

But having noted how personal bias inexorably enters into even so hands-off an outlook as Lacan’s, we are free to use his main point as a corrective to the oversights of his rivals. Thinking fluidly draws attention to the thick mixture of technical aims and overall purpose that can be missed when we inspect one or another strand of the analyst’s thought—his theory, his diagnosis, the acting out of this particular fantasy, a boundary crossing of that particular sort, etc. Lacan invites us to weigh the whole suitcase instead of searching for contraband.

Can an analyst immunize himself from the many satisfactions or frustrations available in the course of his daily work? (see Fenichel 1941). Lacan would say that the analyst wants something from, or for, the patient—perhaps everything he has ever wanted, at some level, in some token form, and it’s best for him to be aware of that.

Even if we subtract from the analyst’s desire all its sexual, competitive, companionate elements (e.g., liveliness) and its entertainment elements (e.g., wit, verbal articulateness), does anybody really believe that there remains no subliminal sense within the analyst of what would be the “best” outcome for a patient, especially if the patient seems to be on the cusp of it? Is it possible to be with a struggling person over a period of years without imagining a development, a denouement? (see Loewald 1960). And while this may be felt to be honorable, Lacan points out that it is nonetheless a pressure on the patient. The analyst wants the patient to “get there” or “go there,” even if the “there” is regarded as a stepping stone to a more autonomous end. And, according to Lacan, it is more or less the same sort of pressure—pressure to be what is wanted—that patients have been conforming to all their life, in order to fill the dissatisfaction inherent in living in society. And the pressure can be quite covert and inadvertent. I think some of the analyst’s most influential “assignments” are delivered by the shape of his personal curiosity. An orthodox tradition acknowledged that power by forbidding the analyst to ask questions. But even without asking questions, the analyst subtly comes to life on occasions that implicitly mark his personal curiosity, from which a clever philosopher could show deeply buried “hopeful” implications, though to the working analyst they are simply professional responses dictated by a learned algorithm. Finally, no matter how tolerant they may be, analysts have always admired and rewarded courage when they see it in their patients. And now, thinking of Lacan’s failure to lift himself above the campaigns of his day, I return to the other secret source of the analyst’s desire: the wish to fight against something in the patient, a demon of many names, most familiarly, “the” resistance.

Let us add this to a list of the ethical ruminations that Lacan stirs in us: Can we conduct a therapy without wanting something for the patient? Can we want something for or from a patient without thinking of it as something he ought to do or be? And if we can do that in theory, can we do it in practice? Can we hope or wish but still not judge? Watching Lacan’s heroic effort, it dawns on us that after one has melted down almost everything by a sort of Cartesian doubt, the one desire left in an analyst—the one prize he can’t do without—is for an enemy. He can whip most of his desires back into their cage, but the need to fight scampers out. Here is Lacan, the most scrupulously indifferent analyst of the lot, mentally insulting patients for compromising with society, and condemning them for the unforgivable sin of betraying their authentic desire. That, I gather, is what Lacan settled for as the neutral analyst’s bare minimum, default position— the least demanding attitude, fighting for an ethics that justifies its imposition on the grounds that it is not a local ethic, which is the very devil, but an ethic from nowhere, so to speak. We have noted that this nowhere is not so wildly exotic after all—it is, indeed, a geographically and culturally very local and very “now” “nowhere.” Let’s face it: it’s just the old neighborhood.

Does that tell us that there is always a struggle in psychoanalytic-style treatment? Do we always need to set up an enemy in the patient, however we define it? You can call it society, or false consciousness, or the resistance, but maybe they all come down to the same thing. Maybe you can’t try for any kind of change without overcoming some kind of stubborn evil. Can you imagine freeing a patient without freeing him from something? Maybe Freud was right in 1912: it’s a battle (1912, p. 108).

At this point I think it would be a good idea to revisualize the scene. Perhaps we are too ready to take the treatment couple’s own, “inside” view at face value: patients feel at the mercy of their analyst. And the analyst is taught that they are right: he is cautioned to attend meticulously to the terrifying power he wields, lest he misuse it and overwhelm the patient. The profession needs continual inspection for signs of authoritarian abuse. That is the perspective of every ethical practitioner. That is the perspective of Kirshner’s paper. That is the perspective of my own, present commentary. But step outside our little orbit, for a moment, and imagine the slightly different perspective of a naive but thoughtful layman looking in at the situation and comparing it, for example, to a dental office. In the analytic chamber he sees two people who have agreed on a peculiar procedure. He doesn’t see anybody muscling anybody else. When told that one of them is tasked with changing what is deep inside the other’s mind, would he not feel sorry for that one, so totally at the mercy of the other, who governs the inner realm and keeps its keys? Might not the observer reasonably conclude that the cards are stacked against the analyst? How different it is from the scene in the dental office, where the professional person, once hired, does pretty much whatever he wants to the patient. (Think of the riddle framed on the notion that the analysts’ lightbulb, like the patient, “must want to change.”)

Let’s carry the imaginary investigation further: We want to tell the naive observer that it’s not that simple. It is true that the analyst’s so-called power is not something he takes up and wields as he plans or pleases. It is only imagined, but it is imagined by both parties, and that is because it is attributed by sectors and layers of society, and by associations from childhood. You might conclude, then, that the analyst does have what Austin (1962) calls performative power, which is no less real than that of a judge or a marrying minister. But that would be more than a little misleading. The ideal analyst (unlike those other, official “performers”) does not believe that he has performative power. In fact, his job description is to disabuse the patient of that very idea. But how can he do that? He has no oxymoronic authority to authoritatively disabuse the patient of anything. We are back to the paradox discussed earlier. In some ways, the analyst’s power comes from dodging the attribution of power, and from dodging it without (performatively) pronouncing himself powerless. Lacan deserves credit for emphasizing the analyst’s paradoxical job of altering the patient’s mind in such a way that he has no power to alter the patient’s mind. Since that is his only power in a strictly psychoanalytic sense, he would seem even more ridiculously at the patient’s mercy. This is no mere wordplay. A beginning analyst who has not become numb to the pain of therapy bemoans the misery of being lifted up bodily and plastered helplessly on the transference mold. (Kohut [1971] has offered help in some of these situations.) A turning point in the transition from suggestive treatment to psychoanalysis was Freud’s acceptance (1913) of Ferenczi’s idea that hypnosis and suggestion amount to a patient’s planting his fantasy wishes upon the analyst, rather than vice versa.

What is important for our inquiry is the analyst’s reaction to his helplessness. In Freudian therapy, the analyst’s intolerance of helplessness often takes the form of moralizing disapproval of “defense” and “resistance,” and inner impatience with patients who fail to appreciate the “unreality” or the merely playful and instrumental nature of the analytic relationship. With certain extremely powerful patients, an analyst’s helplessness may lead to sexual boundary crossings as a last, despairing effort to regain control.

Lacan’s fluid theory was meant to wash away the newly defined and sectored aims that Freud hoped would legitimize the analyst’s attention, in the way that the old self-defined and sectored memories had offered themselves to the analyst as targets. But as targets, the new ones were at first more blurred. Freud started by referring to “unserviceable” character traits. Thereafter, analysts would have to decide for themselves what, more particularly, would constitute “serviceability,” and they developed customary end points: a vaginal orgasm; heterosexuality; a better spouse; disenchantment with religion; disdain for dependency; that sort of thing. Officially, of course, all these were supposed to be merely signs of completion, not the personal values of the analyst. Officially, an analyst would repeat Freud’s insistence that the goal of treatment is the patient’s goal, namely, freedom from unwanted symptoms. But now some of what are called symptoms may not even be unwelcome to the patient. A symptom generally was no longer a localized disturbance, of the sort that patients would bring to a neurologist, but a term of art for whatever in the personality the analyst judged injurious. Moreover, analysts began to show unconcealed indifference to those old-fashioned, patient-defined, complaint-type symptoms as unworthy to stand alongside the new, “structural” aims of treatment. But they still needed some outward sign of those theoretical aims, and they selected measures of psychological “maturity.” ⁴ To cap it off, just as philosophers are forced to the conclusion that the worthwhile life is the life of a philosopher, so psychoanalysts, once supported by a worshipful culture, were inclined to assign supreme moral value to the state of being successfully analyzed, and even a little inclined to think it sinful to shield a juicy, psychoanalyst-defined symptom from the scourge of a proper psychoanalytic treatment. Maybe the patient no longer assigned the analyst his task, and maybe the treatment was in danger of losing its nondirective soul. But the analyst would have a shining goal (of his own choosing), and an implicit enemy to fight. He need not feel married to helplessness.

Viewed in this light, the ethical problem is not how to protect the helpless patient from the analyst’s personal power, but how to protect the analyst from the transformative power of the patient (see, e.g., Fairbairn 1958). For if the analyst’s poise can be preserved, he will not mount fruitless campaigns against the patient’s values. And he will have less need for an enemy. But where to find the poise? What we see in this country today is a new, vaster recognition of helplessness among practitioners who had previously thrown away their bullying weapons—the idealized end points and authoritative framings—that used to arm them in the past. The natural recourse would be a renewed faith in technique (see Friedman 2008). And that may be what’s emerging in the background. But since technique, too, is associated with idealization and domination, the focus in America at the moment is on the modest obverse of technique—that which it is designed to minimize—namely, the analyst’s role in enactments. One could almost say that the analyst’s collusion is the new enemy (see Friedman 2008). Lacan noted and took up the challenge ahead of us, and has carried his response on to the matter of technique. What can we learn from his example? Can we do without an enemy if we focus on technique?

One might have thought that an analyst who mans the dyke heroically against the hydraulic pressure of ordinary social ethics would feel himself plenty stalwart without having to bully the patient to feel effective. But if Lacan is a test case for that possibility, it would seem not so: here devotion to the original technique was not sufficient. Lacan, too, has had to set himself an enemy—in his case, it turned out to be a standard target of the French intelligentsia. Maybe, after all, an analyst does have to be energized by some sort of advocacy beyond his basic “forwarding” attitude toward the patient. Or it may be that the milieu has something to do with the experiment, specifically the national culture: I have always wondered why Continental analysts are bewildered by the American preoccupation with enactment, while readily recognizing the relevance of Lacan’s antinomian crusade.

Another possibility is that an analyst’s imagination of a future, whether very general or more specific, is part of the bedrock human relationship without which communication has no meaning. And what could appear more naturally in that imagination than an enemy who blocks the way? Some form of imagination is probably a specific feature of psychoanalytic treatment. To my mind, Loewald’s form of it (1960) is most plausible. That sort of imagination is in dialectical tension with the momentary immersion and Indifferenz that defined the analyst’s attitude in Freud’s original formulation (for which reason Loewald was originally looked on with suspicion). Before taking a position on the proper technical balance between curiosity in the momentary encounter (where one might avoid an “enemy”) and the temporal sweep of imagination (where it might be hard to avoid advocacy), we are confronted with the larger question of how narrowly confined attention and curiosity can possibly be (see Bion 1970; Stern 2004). One can almost imagine Lacan trying to be disengaged at the moment, and finding that he needed a long-line saga—in this case, a revolutionary romance—to preserve his sense of purposefulness.

As in every circle of the analytic arena, the work is a perpetual balancing act: one must bridge the gap between a distant anti-ethics, on the one hand, and a deep human, hermeneutic engagement, not to mention ordinary decency, on the other.

But that’s not the end of the matter. Even if we decide that the analyst is always campaigning against something or other, the more practical question is whether different theories have different effects on the intensity of the analyst’s private desire, fanning the flame or damping it. So we ask of the interpreting and inquiring ego psychologist, in the one corner, and the deconstructing Lacanian, in the other, how his theory affects his temperature when he does or does not get what he wants. It is an empirical question about the psychological effect of a theory in the analyst’s mind, so we must not jump to conclusions. Does a fluid theorist like Lacan, who wants to watch someone exhaust endless appeals, strip desire bare, and play wildly and formlessly before him, feel more passion than a pedantic ego psychologist who wants only to kibitz in a quiet chess game of internal structuring? Perhaps, but then many people get a lot of jouissance out of simple, patient inquiry. We can’t be sure who is the more sedate and who the more excited.

As is evident, my sympathies are with the ego psychologist. The consistent ego psychologist does not advocate adjustment to society. That’s a French canard. An ego psychologist thinks any inadvertent wish to see a patient develop ethically would be the trivial “educative” wish that Freud despised. For my part, I think it a truism that an analyst’s attitude toward cultural norms—pro or con or indifferent—is as much a product of the culture (reflective of his own small-group norms) as the norms themselves. It is no more the job of an analyst to free the patient from cultural norms than it is his mission to urge them on the patient. Cultural norms are part of the external and internal complexity of life that a patient (like anyone else) deals with, and the analyst is supposed to impartially analyze how they are dealt with. An analyst’s contribution to the ethical improvement of his fellow citizens should find avenues outside his profession. The analyst’s visible integrity in adhering to his role will often have a powerful “moral improvement” effect as a model, and it is the one moral and ethical avenue consistent with his role, but being a role model is not itself a proper self-image or deliberate posture for the analyst as an analyst. Perhaps he will find an enemy, and he will call it resistance, or culture, or the death instinct, or something like that, and then it will be his job to keep that judgment under suspicion. The formula for an analyst, I suggest, is that he has all the responsibility and none of the power, and should do his best despite that to be happy in his work.

Now, let us ask about its effect on the patient. How does Lacan’s approach compare with Freud’s in actually liberating the patient from indoctrination? The Lacanian analyst relies on the power of consistent, radical withdrawal to make it clear that he wants nothing from a patient (and therefore offers no blessing). That is radically different from the strategy of the ego psychologist who offers himself as an honest broker for each aspect of the patient’s predicament. The ego psychologist tells his patient, “We will clarify your conflicts and you will then fashion your own solutions. That’s how I will facilitate your autonomy.” To this, Lacan replies, “You are doing nothing of the sort: What you call clarifying can be done only in society’s terms, and those terms encode prescription for the ‘good life.’ You’re just another citizen sharpening and aiming your civil desire toward the patient. What you call ‘conflicts’ are tendentiously defined by your culture as a setup for conventional cultural judgments.” The ego psychologist would retort that Lacan advertises a great vanishing act, but appears on stage as an exhibitionistic showman, clearing brains of useless engrams—a prophet more certain about what’s false (“inauthentic”) than the “ego psychologist” ever was about what’s true. We are left with the ego psychologist in the dock for endorsing the patient’s conventional desire; the Lacanian charged with inciting fanatical rebellion.

There remains one, even more practical, dimension for evaluation: we have been considering the effect of an idea on patients and analysts as though patients and analysts are fungible and analysis is standardizable over time and place. We can assume—and have every right to hope—that there is a specific element common to all psychoanalyses. But the specifically psychoanalytic element is just one part of a prolonged, fluctuating, and complex human relationship in which many interactive and informative phenomena are at play. Even at its purest, if the truth be known, such a long, wandering relationship as psychoanalysis must consist of a tincture of technique in an adjuvant of odd sociality. Between the specifics of technique and the years of subtle human transactions, a good deal of what interpersonalists call “negotiation” doubtless takes place. Quite apart from specific enactments and personal intentions, ordinary ethical norms will govern more of the experience than anyone is aware of, and those norms will have some variability. The net effect of that variability will in turn depend on many other variables. What meaning does a particular technical style gather from its congruence with the local culture? What happens to the meaning of an analytic style that is transplanted from its birthplace to a different culture? How does a given procedure such as Lacan’s blend with—bounce off of, enhance, or detract from—the myriad shapes and facets of the historical experiences of the two lives in the consulting room?