The Flourishing Analyst,Responsibility,and Psychoanalytic Ethics: Commentary on Kirshner

It is an indication of this that good fortune is thought to be the same as happiness or close to it, and happiness is a kind of rational activity: it is activity going well.

Let’s try to imagine, in full Aristotelian spirit, the flourishing psychoanalyst. This is that psychoanalyst who is most excellently fulfilling his function as an analyst. Excellent (i.e., virtuous) analytic functioning is due to the analyst’s rational activity. Notice that flourishing is not a state; it is an activity “going well.” We would be justified in saying that the flourishing, excellently functioning analyst is a happy analyst. Good fortune, by which Aristotle means “chance” or “luck,” may also be part of the flourishing analyst’s happiness.

These adjectives—flourishing and the like—in the context of the conditions under which the psychoanalyst actually practices, ring utterly false. After all, Freud put “happiness” in its place long ago by renaming it “common unhappiness.” And Lacan, as Lewis Kirshner points out in his searching and complex paper on Lacan’s Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, called the analyst’s desire to assist patients in finding happiness a desire for “the impossible” and a “fraud.” In the conventional and conscious senses of flourishing, excellence, and happiness—words that imply a self-sufficient subject—no working psychoanalyst could disagree with Freud and Lacan.

And yet, were Aristotle fully informed about psychoanalytic knowledge (let us remember that he described aspects of psychic conflict is his notion of akrasia, or weakness of will), we can imagine him articulating in careful, stepwise fashion how a psychoanalyst, given psychoanalytic ends, carries out the work of psychoanalysis excellently; how, that is, a psychoanalyst takes actions that facilitate a psychoanalytic good. Kirshner does not pose his questions in this way, but he does ask us to consider a kind of analytic flourishing that interrogates conventional views of the ethical—what Lacan calls the system of goods—and that continually re-involves the analyst, après-coup, in the vagaries of his own unconscious and his own desire. The psychoanalytic good is an activity, a praxis (a doing), not a thing. Kirshner is interested in “a more fundamental statement of the values and goals on which psychoanalysis rests and by which specific rules of behavior can be supported” (p. 2). His paper speaks on a number of levels, from the individual psychoanalyst in the consulting room to the local and national organizations of which the psychoanalyst is a part.

To unpack the idea of analytic flourishing (however shocking it might sound to our postmodern ears), I want to look at the conditions under which the analyst works within the context of the aims of analysis. Only then can we think more deeply about a psychoanalytic ethics.

What are these working conditions? At a minimum, they can be stated as follows.

What are the aims of psychoanalysis? This is a question that seldom receives an easy answer. The aims or goals of psychoanalysis have been debated for decades. And yet, analytic action is difficult to assess without an idea of what that action is meant to achieve. Lacan is quite clear that the analyst should not be satisfied with bringing the analysand into greater contact with conventional goods: “When in conformity with Freudian experience one has articulated the dialectic of demand, need, and desire, is it fitting to reduce the success of an analysis to a situation of individual comfort linked to that well-founded and legitimate function we might call the service of goods? Private goods, family goods, domestic goods, other goods that solicit us, the goods of our trade or our profession, the goods of the city, etc.” (1959–1960, p. 303).

Though Lacan is appreciative of Aristotle’s efforts (the service of goods is legitimate and well-founded), he sees them as confined “to a certain order . . . the uncontested order that defines the norms of a certain character” (p. 22). This order is within an equilibrium defined by pleasure and pain, and on the social level by the symbolic system (the big Other in Lacan-ese) that structures what is thought to be good and what is thought to be bad. So when Lacan says that “the question of the good is situated athwart the pleasure principle and the reality principle” (p. 224), he is situating the good within a symbolic order. Another way to say this is that the pleasure principle is not some radical notion that supposedly captures the drive-related nature of human desire. Instead, the pleasure principle is always in dynamic relation to the reality principle, and both together are essential aspects of the normative symbolic order (the Other) in which we all live.

Lear (2009) offers another possibility for an ultimate psychoanalytic aim. Employing Aristotle’s concept of final cause, he describes four apparently different psychoanalytic traditions (represented by Paul Gray, Hans Loewald, Lacan, and the neo-Kleinians) and asserts that freedom is an end (the final cause) for all of them. Lear believes that freedom is an open-ended concept capacious enough to capture the therapeutic intentions of these four approaches. In Lacanian terms, freedom is separation from the Other (the Law, normative constraints, the superego, etc.) to whom the analysand has always answered, in relation to whom the analysand has routinely taken the measure of his actions (Should I do this? Should I have done that?). Clinically, and more prosaically speaking, freedom involves relative autonomy from the analyst, such that the analysand is able to think and act for himself along the “limit in which the problematic of desire is raised,” as Lacan famously put it.

Kirshner’s reading of Lacan’s Ethics reveals, I think, an emphasis somewhat different from Lear’s: freedom is less important than responsibility. Responsibility for what? For who one is, for what one has done, and for what one will do. Lacan subsumes all of this under the heterogeneous term one’s desire. In his Ethics Lacan puts forward an imperative that is entirely singular and specific to each individual subject, including the analyst. This is the imperative to grapple in an ongoing way with all of these aspects that constitute one’s desire. As Kirshner points out, this imperative might appear to be a simplistic directive: “Do what you have discovered you want to do!” But, as Kirshner rightly emphasizes, the assumption of one’s desire has to do with taking responsibility for one’s actions. Because we are conflicted beings this is no easy business. Hence the weighted words that Lacan attaches to desire as it emerges in the analytic setting: desire is “a problematic” and necessarily involves a “limit.” As Lacan says toward the end of the Ethics, “an ethics essentially consists in a judgment of our action, with the proviso that it is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgment, even if it is only implicit. The presence of judgment on both sides is essential to the structure” (p. 311).

Lacan’s position is more radical than questions of judgment, action, and accounting to oneself for one’s actions seem to imply. This is because of Lacan’s thesis that “moral action is, in effect, grafted onto the real” (p. 21). The Real resists symbolization. Sometimes the Real presents as shrouded in daily objects, endeavors, or features of particular people that ineluctably suggest to the subject das Ding, the lost object of desire. Other encounters with the Real are more traumatic; they can be thoroughly upending and disturbing (as an example, imagine being adopted and meeting a biological parent for the first time), or exhilarating or terrifying (as in a sublime and uncanny engagement with a piece of music or performance). These encounters with the Real answer a question the subject did not know he or she was asking. Such experiences—as rare as they are precious—require of the subject an ethical response: Do I dare disturb my universe? This kind of questioning is what Lacan means by “judgment.” Lacan insists that guilt derives from “giving ground” relative to one’s desire, desire that lives in the liminal space between the normative symbolic order and the Real that eludes its capture.

These descriptions of morality and the Real are not easy to grasp, for obvious reasons. Any attempt to describe an ethics based on the subject’s encounter with the Real can only be a symbolic domestication. We can see that the Real and the Symbolic are mutually constitutive, and any action taken or judgment made that partakes of the Real, that feels to the subject radical or “crazy,” is also a “naming,” is at the same time a partaking of the tools of the symbolic order. As Neill (2005) writes, “any judgment, while it cannot be reduced to the Other, to law, necessarily entails a re-inscription in the field of the Other” (p. 21). When the subject decides to act beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the service of goods, he or she courts an engagement with anguish. In other words, “the limit in which the problematic of desire is raised” involves the subject’s taking on the tragic dimension haunted by a kind of death (what Lacan calls a “second death”). Antigone is Lacan’s example of such a subject who acts in accordance with her desire. As Kirshner says, one can wonder about Antigone’s position as a venerated subject of desire—wasn’t she just a fanatic? But no matter. Certainly some patients, such as those Kirshner describes in his paper, take on radically new ways of being, and experience what he calls “profound upheavals in . . . self-definition” (p. 1228). Equally important, the limits of desire and the anguish that can ensue often involve choices not made, avenues not pursued. Kirshner quite rightly concludes: “Perhaps Lacan means only that an intuition of the subject’s essentially meaningless pursuit of desire represents facing a kind of Aristotelian truth, a taking ownership of the conditions of one’s subjective existence, including one’s longings to fill its inherent lack” (p. 1233). The point seems to be that responsibility for one’s desire—taking ownership—involves an honest self-accounting, whether one has acted in the spirit of one’s desire or not.

If the analyst cannot rest on measuring his actions against the conventional view of the service of goods, what can we say about the analyst’s desire? Here Kirshner offers psychoanalysis a very important, perhaps crucial opportunity to engage in a question of the analyst’s activity at its most basic level. What is it that the analyst wants? Kirshner is keenly aware, as he reminds us several times, of the problem of the dyad in psychoanalytic work: that is, the ubiquitous risk that the patient will one way or another settle on “borrowed solutions” from the analyst (a consequence of working conditions #5 and #6). This risk is especially likely to occur if the analyst does not have as part of his basic orientation (at the level of clinical theory) that his intentional stance as a working analyst, what he wants from a given patient at a given moment, is foundational in all that unfolds in the transference-countertransference. The analyst’s desires for specific experiences with a patient (e.g., that the patient free associate, tell the truth, listen to an interpretation, think or speak in certain ways, that there be emotional contact between patient and analyst, etc.) set up conditions for countertransference reactions that will be misrecognized as engendered by the patient if the analyst does not appreciate the ways in which his desires necessarily condition such reactions. Often enough the analyst’s desires (those that directly impact the work at that moment) are relatively accessible to consciousness and have an uncertain relationship to unconscious fantasy. The ethical point is that the analyst must be responsible for his desire as it is engaged and at times manifested in the work. Lacan’s analysis of guilt in relation to desire (i.e., guilt arises from the subject’s not taking responsibility for desire and action) suggests that the analyst is likewise open to experiences of “analytic guilt” if he is blinded to the roles his desire plays in his work.

Kirshner’s analysis goes deeper than what I have just described. While it is crucial for the analyst to continually engage himself internally regarding his wishes as he is working with a patient (what Racker [1957] called the analyst’s capacity for “internal division” [p. 309]), the intersubjective nature of psychoanalysis often makes this internal work difficult. The analyst, as Kirshner cautions us, may have a theory of the analytic third that obscures identificatory processes leading to compliance and stalemates. Or, because the hothouse of the dyadic relation can lead to mutual projection’s becoming the dominant mode of relating in the analysis, the analyst may have enduring difficulty reaching himself (via the internal work I have described) or the patient. “Analysis is a judgment,” Lacan writes in the Ethics. “It’s required everywhere else, but if it seems scandalous to affirm it here, there is probably a reason. It is because, from a certain point of view, the analyst is fully aware that he cannot know what he is doing in psychoanalysis. Part of this action remains hidden even from him” (p. 291).

And yet, as Kirshner shows repeatedly, Lacan’s attempted solutions to some of these issues often have a two-dimensional feel, with pronouncement replacing more detailed argument. I am not sure they are as flat-footed as they seem (as I have tried to demonstrate). Kirshner offers several partial remedies for the dilemmas every analyst faces. They include Lacan’s process of “the pass” (a way of mitigating the enduring difficulties of the training analysis) and the importance of ongoing supervision and study groups for practicing analysts. The overall effort here is exactly right: we as a profession must think through, continually, how to facilitate the analyst’s taking account of, and taking responsibility for, the desire he invests in his work, especially his desire to be an analyst. The analyst cannot engage in this project on his own. Kirshner sums up his thoughts as follows: “it may be time, at this moment in the evolution of the analytic discipline, to find new ways to involve others as witnesses to analytic practice” (p. 1239).

Let us now return to where we started and revisit the question of analytic flourishing. The story we can now describe about the happy, flourishing analyst is filled with ironies that should not obscure an underlying truth: the flourishing analyst is the analyst who is not flourishing, and the happy analyst is the analyst who is not happy. Given the basic working conditions the analyst inhabits, the analyst, as a lacking and therefore desiring being, will stumble. He will misunderstand. He will unwittingly impose and occasionally demand or insist. Thus, the analyst who excellently fulfills his function-as-analyst is the analyst who fails to fulfill his function excellently (Wilson 2006). But this is only part of the paradoxical story of excellent functioning, because manifestations of the analyst’s lack are also sources of the analyst’s good fortune. In the wake of his stumbling, the analyst has the opportunity to grapple with his desire and thereby hear the patient more openly, more feelingly. By the analyst’s taking ownership of his desiring state (usually a state of unpleasure relative to the patient), recognition has a chance to replace misrecognition.

Most essentially, the analyst’s normal, everyday clinical self is imbued with his desire to work in specific ways consistent with his personal style, character, and theoretical leanings. No doubt for most of us our everyday clinical self partakes of certain virtues or excellences: honesty, tact, open-mindedness, and the like. From Lacan’s point of view, the virtuous analyst is not the analyst who is temperate or open-minded, tactful or prudent. Rather, the virtuous analyst takes responsibility for wanting to be these ways in the first place. Otherwise, tact can become insensitivity and open-mindedness can turn into intolerance. This is how Lacan’s ethics of desire works: nothing should be taken for granted. In this ethic of responsibility—never not hard-won and always easily lost sight of again—the analyst frees the analytic field (potentially and relatively speaking, of course) from a dynamic of contest and constraint. If the analyst cannot assume responsibility for his desire, there is no way the patient can assume responsibility for his, not in that setting, with that analyst. The ongoing taking of responsibility for one’s desire in all its complexity is, for Lacan and Kirshner, the ultimate psychoanalytic good.