Archimedean Desire: Commentary on Kirshner

“Give me a place to stand,” Archimedes is reported to have said, “and I will move the earth.” If only there were a fixed point in the universe, the earth itself would give ground to his desire. But how are we to live with the fact that when it comes to the human realm, there are no Archimedean points? This, I think, is the most fundamental question raised by Lewis Kirshner’s thought-provoking paper, “Lacan’s Ethics of Desire: A Critical Reading.” Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States the authority of the doctor was an unquestioned fixed point. And psychoanalysis partook of that authority. But through a variety of social and economic forces that authority has come in for questioning, and Kirshner wants to take up the challenge via an engagement with Lacan.

As we look at the myriad ways that humans have spent time on earth, we are convinced that some ways of living are better than others. And psychoanalysis, of course, is a peculiar intervention in a human life that is meant to be of help. But as soon as we try to say what we mean by “better” or “help,” we enter contested territory. One route is to stick to a high level of generality: for example, to claim that a person who is able to exercise her capacity for creative engagement is better off than one whose capacity for creativity has been stifled or foreclosed. But even if that claim is true, it is open to the charge that “creative engagement” is an enigmatic signifier (Laplanche 1999), one that can lull us into thinking we are dealing with a concept with determinate content, rather than a placeholder for an open-ended (and inevitably contested) investigation into what human creativity consists in. Even worse: we become vulnerable to the charge that we are deploying phrases like “creative engagement” for ideological purposes of which we are largely unaware. Perhaps we unwittingly use such phrases to valorize and legitimize a therapy that props up an unjust status quo. How is one to respond to such charges?

Ethics, in the broad sense that Aristotle, Lacan, and Kirschner use the term, is not to be identified with morality per se, nor with its superego voices, but covers all the normatively laden ways in which humans live together. So, to take the relevant example, the psychoanalytic relationship is one way that two humans spend time together; and as we consider whether meeting five times a week is better than four, or whether four times is better than three, or whether lying on the couch is better than sitting up, or whether there are alternatives to free association, or whether one should use one’s awareness of the countertransference as a therapeutic tool, and so on—these are all questions of the ethics of psychoanalysis broadly construed. The ethics of psychoanalysis is basically concerned with two questions: first, what is psychoanalysis good for? Second, how does psychoanalytic technique facilitate (or impede) that good?

Lacan, as Kirshner presents him, deploys a hermeneutics of suspicion. But there is often a clinching moment in Lacan’s argument of which I am suspicious. Kirshner quotes Lacan: “At every moment we need to know what our effective relationship is to the desire to do good, the desire to cure” (1959–1960, p. 219; quoted by Kirshner, p. 3). So far, so good. Psychoanalysis is a self-reflective form of practical engagement, and an analyst ought to be aware not only of what his conscious desires are, but also of their deeper meanings. Lacan’s next step is also okay: “We have to deal with that as if it were something that is likely to lead us astray, and in many cases to do so instantly” (p. 219). This is basically the Freudian point that the psychoanalytic unconscious is not simply unconscious; it is unconscious because it has in various ways been rejected, and it has been rejected because it is in some way oppositional to established conscious belief. But then comes the Lacanian clincher: “I will even add that one might be paradoxical or trenchant and designate our desire as a non-desire to cure” (p. 219). It is at this moment, I think, that Lacan offers the false relief of an obscure certainty. If only we could hold fast to this “paradoxical” dictum, we could participate in the narcissistic pleasure of knowing where we stand—namely, above all those dupes (in the psychoanalytic profession) who take their desire to cure seriously.

This is what is so tricky about Lacan’s writing. On the one hand, he is the psychoanalyst who has thought most deeply about the fate of the modern mind, destined to live under the ultimately incoherent demands of a jumble of normative authorities. This remarkable contribution should not be underestimated. On the other hand, his style is so pervaded by self-promoting theatricality and obscure sayings that it can encourage a perverse complacency in his reader. So, to stay with the example: if one believes the desire to cure is really a non-desire, one is spared the difficult task of working out nuance. In any training analysis worth its salt, the analysand-candidate will explore in significant depth her own engagement with the analysands she is treating. Her desire to help will be explored, revealing intimate and idiosyncratic networks of meaning—and from the point of view of conventional morality or aesthetics, not all of it will be pretty. But this need not impugn her desire to cure so much as illuminate its complexity, depth, and multivalence. We need to be able to distinguish analysts-in-training who are en route to becoming analysts and analysts-in-training who ought to be doing something else altogether. One way to do this is to have a substantial distinction between those whose desire to cure, however complex and multifaceted, can be understood as such and those whose “desire to cure” is so permeated by envy, resentment, competitiveness, and narcissism that it really is a non-desire. That crucial distinction is covered over by a blanket dictum about the analyst’s desire per se.

Kirshner provides a clear account of Lacan’s critique of American ego psychology—clear enough for us to be able to see a unique blend of penetrating insight and false comfort. On the one hand, Lacan was devastatingly accurate in showing how a phrase like “adaptation to reality” was being deployed ideologically, to enforce conformity to established social norms. He also diagnosed a tendency to overlook Freud’s insistence that the ego is itself a defensive structure, formed from idealizations and images that, on their own, can facilitate self-misunderstanding. On the other hand, Lacan ignored the best writing in the ego psychology tradition—for instance, the work of Hans Loewald or Paul Gray. One might excuse this, on Lacan’s behalf, by saying that he was trying to diagnose a social movement—namely, the profession of psychoanalysis in America—as it actually played itself out in practice; that his aim was not to think of what ego psychology might be at its best. But that can lead the Lacanian reader into thinking he is spared the task of nuance: that he is entitled to dismiss all of ego psychology (without having to take into consideration the best thinking in the field).

Kirshner writes: “However, we know that just as the ‘good’ for Aristotle embodied the status quo interests of the dominant social class of his time, so the notion of healthy ego functioning in the psychoanalyst, which was supposed to serve as a model for identification, inevitably carries a normative ideology” (p. 1226).

True; but what are we going to do about it? Aristotle’s account of the good life for humans does contain a defense of slavery; and it embodies virtues he himself considered aristocratic. It also contains some of the deepest insights into human flourishing ever achieved. Are we to throw it all out because it contains status quo interests? Similarly, it is now not difficult to see that, in the second half of the twentieth century, terms like “healthy ego functioning” were deployed ideologically to either promote or restrict access to positions of power and responsibility within the American Psychoanalytic Association. (Think about the historic achievement of admitting candidates into training who were openly homosexual and then promoting them to the status of training analysts.) Still, the phrase “healthy ego functioning” was getting at something important, and blanket skepticism lets us off the hook of figuring out what that something is. To take one example: a good analyst needs to be able to tolerate the aggression of his analysands, without feeling the need to retaliate or feeling too undone by it. The ability to keep on analyzing in the face of aggression is a healthy ego function that ought not to be dismissed as mere ideology.

Lacan’s writing can encourage his readers to conflate significant occupational hazards of analytic practice (of which he is a master diagnostician) with unavoidable conditions of the psychoanalytic situation. Kirshner writes: “When the analyst believes he has grasped the ultimate nature of a patient’s desire and can articulate it, he is most likely imposing an interpretation compatible with his own theory or personal fantasy about the patient or perhaps all people, but one that is inevitably, in greater or lesser ways, alienating to the particular subject” (p. 1231).

Very strictly speaking, true enough. We should in any case be suspicious of an analyst who thinks he has grasped the “ultimate nature” of a patient’s desire. What in the world might that be? Still, as Freud himself came to see, the hard work lies in devising a technique that facilitates a process in which the analysand comes to speak her own desire (to the analyst). This inevitably and usefully deploys interpretation on the part of the analyst. And, as we sit with our analysands over years, we do come to see basic structures of desire that get repeated again and again in the large and the small. Blanket skepticism about the analyst’s understanding or his use of interpretation can again lend a false sense of security. On the surface one takes oneself to be giving up the Archimedean standpoint: one no longer thinks that one’s interpretation is going to give one that firm ground. But just below the surface one takes up yet another Archimedean standpoint (not recognized as such): the firm belief that interpretation won’t provide firm ground. And that “frees” one from the hard work of figuring out the nuanced differences between interpretations that are impositions from those that facilitate a process of self-discovery. To claim that this distinction is itself illusory (or ideological) is, I think, one more move of the same type. It is another attempt to treat skepticism as a fixed Archimedean point.

So when Kirshner writes that “attempts to pin [desires] down by interpretation are bound to fall short, as they inevitably depend on the language and tone chosen, which embody a theory, the particular context of delivery, and the analyst’s own countertransferential desires” (p. 1232), he does name a crucially important occupational hazard; following Lacan, however, he puts it forward as an inevitable condition of the psychoanalytic situation. Why do we need to think of interpretation as an attempt to pin desire down? Why not think of interpretation (when well done) as facilitating the expression of desire itself? It is true that interpretation occurs in language (and in that sense depends on it) and that it is spoken by an analyst who, when things are going well, is involved in a thick relation with the analysand. Still, it seems to me that we are installing a weirdly skeptical psychoanalytic superego if we insist that we thereby “fall short” in our psychoanalytic practice. The psychoanalytic response to such a claim, I think, is to ask what kind of hidden relief we achieve by seeing ourselves as inevitably falling short in this way.

Kirshner valuably draws our attention to Lacan’s linking successful analysis to the development of subjectivity. Here the notion of subjectivity is different from the conception often assumed in contemporary intellectual culture. Subjectivity, for Lacan, is not simply a point of view, the kind of thing each of us already has (to be contrasted with the objective state of affairs). Rather, subjectivity is an achievement and a task: the development of the subject. This alternative conception of subjectivity is prominent in Kierkegaard, who exercised profound influence on Lacan. And from a Lacanian point of view, which I think is also a Freudian point of view, this development of subjectivity is a process that, as Kirshner suggests, “should inevitably lead to something unsettling and decentering to the ego” (p. 1228). On this point, Kirshner, Lacan, and Freud are right on target. It goes to the heart of the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious as repressed or otherwise rejected—as well as the conception of the ego as defensively constructed out of wishful or anxious internalizations—that a psychoanalytic development of subjectivity will partly consist in un-settling the ego.

It is in this context that we can understand Lacan’s enigmatic ethical injunction never to cede one’s desire. The point cannot be that the analysand should never let go of his unconscious desire, for example, to experience the world as disappointing over and over again. That would be preposterous. Rather, the point is this. If we look, for example, at Freud’s case histories we can see in each case that the neurotic suffering of the subject is also, in its own hidden way, a protest against some aspect of the established normative order. We see this especially clearly with the hysterics Freud describes in Studies on Hysteria—where the women could not and would not fit without remainder into restricted gender roles. Lacan’s point is that whatever it is that is the source of protest to the established social demands of the moment, we should not give up on that. This is a very particular picture of the human condition: that it is our fate as creatures of modernity and postmodernity to live under a mixed bag of demands, ideals, and norms that we do not and cannot fit. Lacan’s ethical injunction is that life ought not to consist in pretending (to ourselves and others) that we do fit. And psychoanalysis ought not to encourage this illusion. Rather, we must find creative ways to embrace and express those aspects of ourselves that are inevitably in protest. That is, I think, what he means by not ceding our desire.

Kirshner, following the critiques of Lacan, Renik, and others, is suspicious of the idea of analytic neutrality. And there is no doubt that this notion has a rich history of ideological misuse. Still, I think it is a mistake to think of ourselves as having “got past that outdated notion.” This facilitates its own illusion of historical progress. The strategy I would recommend is to give up on the idea that neutrality is a determinate concept that either must be defended as an analytic ideal or criticized as an outdated relic. Instead we should look on it as an enigmatic signifier, pointing us in a certain direction. Its content is our task. The psychoanalytic relationship is, after all, an extraordinarily unusual human encounter. What does its unusualness consist in? In contrast to other human interactions, the analyst forgoes what might be thought of as “ordinary” responses to expressions of desire or anger or competition or jealousy or admiration or idealization or love and holds on to the commitment to keep on analyzing. Neutrality, in my opinion, is an invitation to keep on thinking about what this commitment amounts to.

There is so much more to discuss in Kirshner’s rich paper, but I will conclude with his positive suggestion on how to improve psychoanalytic training: the requirement, as he puts it, to bring in “a ‘third’ as a normal part of psychoanalytic work” (p. 1239). Basically, I am in favor of confidential, informed, supportive conversations about one’s psychoanalytic work—these should be encouraged throughout one’s analytic life—but I am wary of making it a requirement. Or, rather, I am skeptical of the thought that making it a requirement would provide a solution to the problems that Lacan raises. Part of what makes Lacan’s challenges to psychoanalysis so fascinating is that there are no easy institutional solutions. His are problems that cannot be solved at the level of policy. One of the lessons I take from Lacan is that as soon as one takes a good idea and tries to make it a requirement within a social structure—for instance, psychoanalytic training—one inevitably instantiates structures of power and recognition that distort the good idea with which one started. One adds to the jumble of social norms that are our problem to begin with. That does not and should not mean that one should avoid all social structures! To take a paradigm example, the supervision of analytic cases of candidates brings in “a third,” and it is an invaluable requirement of analytic training. Still, the way to respond to Lacan’s challenges must, I think, be more oblique, indirect, and playful than any direct suggestion for institutional change.

In comparing my work with Lacan’s, Kirshner says “the points for clarity of exposition” go to me (p. 1224). I would like to thank him for that; and I hope these comments live up to that ideal.