Abstract
This is probably not the best time to make a claim for any form of radicalism. Yet I choose the word radical to describe an author who in the sixty or so years of his psychoanalytic career has managed to stay firmly based in Freudian thinking, all the while making major contributions to the field. In his case, therefore, “radical” must be heard in several senses: bold, thorough, having deep roots in the discipline of Freudian psychoanalysis. But if anyone in our confused and confusing epoch finds the expression misplaced, it could easily be replaced by primal. Applied to the book I am reviewing, that word refers to a primal stratum of thinking and praxis that shares fundamental qualities with Freud’s works, an oeuvre that produced a radical breach with the psychology of consciousness.
In Freud’s time, psychology stayed tautologically within the field of conscious phenomena, without possessing—any more than today—an adequate theory of consciousness. It was psychoanalysis that, in part, wakened psychology from its dogmatic slumber. Today, after more than a century of psychoanalysis, another slumber is threatening, one from which a radical analyst like Michel de M’Uzan may awaken us. I am referring to the kind of falling asleep to which psychoanalysis is cyclically subject as a result of what might be called “metapsychological fatigue.” By this I mean the tendency to fix on psychoanalysis as a kind of “psychoanalytic psychology.” This happens when analysts find it too risky or not scientifically respectable enough to resort to the “sorcerer metapsychology,” as Freud called it. Psychoanalysis is then inserted within a more consensual framework, one more easily accepted, by virtue of steering clear of the disquieting effects of a more “radical” or “primal” psychoanalytic experience, as against, say, what is offered by manualized treatments.
Metapsychology obviously seems riskier, more speculative, and less palatable (if at all) in scientific fields where only the measurable has any value. One wonders what conception of the unconscious is implied if one does not admit that, despite its demonstrated clinical relevance, it cannot be accessed without a significant measure of speculation, in the nobler sense of the word. The “psychoanalytic psychologies”—practices and theories derived from psychoanalysis but inhabiting a more consensual terrain—are undoubtedly useful in extending the limits of psychological treatments. But if they forgo the more disturbing, “primal” side of psychoanalysis, the problem becomes how to preserve its generative power, considering that the psychologies in question, psychoanalytically inspired though they may be, tend to operate within standardized frameworks in accordance with more or less strict guidelines.
Michel de M’Uzan’s thinking and writing instead surf on the moving crest of the wave of primal psychoanalysis. From the very first reading, they offer, to whomever has not fallen prey to metapsychological fatigue, an outlook on what remains alive in the Freudian crucible. De M’Uzan has demonstrated throughout the decades the soundness of most of the Freudian foundations, concepts that have allowed for innovative technique both within the frame of “classical” psychoanalysis and in domains not included in its original project. While deep down in line with the Freudian impulse, these practices and theories generated newer conceptual tools that could be generalized well beyond their clinical domains. I am thinking, for instance, of de M’Uzan’s work in psychoanalytic psychosomatics or his analytic work with patients suffering a terminal illness. In the book reviewed here, readers will have the opportunity to experience once more the originality and thoroughness of his thinking, but they are also bound to be surprised.
I speak of “radical” or “primal” psychoanalysis in de M’Uzan’s case, because not many analysts would dare assert, as he does, that psychoanalysis belongs to the “sciences of domains with indefinite borders” (p. 73; all translations mine) and that it bears not one, but two responsibilities: first, “the responsibility of offering a possible mastery over the drives and the opportunity to maximize one’s satisfaction with reality”; second, “another responsibility, of capital importance when one is dealing with the most authentic side of being, the unveiling of its most intimate and primordial layers: the responsibility of allowing for—or providing the subject with— a possible access to enduring concern” (p. 110). The two responsibilities are linked in that the “enduring concern” in question aims at “reaching a point where one must acknowledge the . . . more or less uncertain and haphazard character of the borders between categories . . .” (p. 110).
The notion of enduring concern may sound disquieting but it clearly resonates with what for a brief moment of his theorizing Winnicott had dubbed the “stage of concern” (1954–1955). The expression was meant to rename Klein’s depressive position, but Winnicott abandoned the idea in the very paper in which he introduced it. However, we must note that while Winnicott’s notion of concern was about the object, de M’Uzan’s notion is about the subject. Still, the two ideas are complementary: it would be futile to expect a subject to feel concern for the object if the foundations of that subject were not flexible enough to make room for the other. And the tolerance of fluidity, uncertainty, and flexibility is what the capacity for enduring concern is all about.
In a way, the groundwork for the complementary roles of concern for the other and enduring concern for the subject himself has already been laid out by de M’Uzan. He has written extensively about a manner of being with the other in the analytic session that happens only when the frontiers of identity have been sufficiently blurred; in such states inside and outside tend to be indistinguishable and the secondary processes of the mind can be dimmed, thus allowing for uncanny phenomena that go hand in hand with novelty and creativity. A number of his papers on these topics have recently been made available in English with the publication of Death and Identity in 2013. Even in these earlier papers he was speaking of a disposition the analyst should strive for, that is to say, a relative state of depersonalization! A state that, of course, is also implied in the question of enduring concern, understood as a capacity acquired in various degree through analysis; one through which “I must be able to recognize myself as other,” as Murielle Gagnebin points out in the appended glossary (more about that later).
De M’Uzan prepared us, clinically and conceptually, for his way of considering the responsibilities of psychoanalysis when he introduced the terms paradoxical thinking, the double, the paraphrenic twin, the spectrum of identities, the chimera, and so on. Here he goes a step further, making explicit how psychoanalysis differs from neighboring disciplines in that mastery over the drives implies no beatific appeasement of life’s pulsation. The capacity for a greater satisfaction in life acquired through psychoanalysis does not rest on steeling oneself in an unmovable identity; quite the contrary, writes de M’Uzan, it is a matter of acquiring a fluidity of being and accepting the fact that one is endowed with a variety, a spectrum, of identities rather than ending up walled behind some “final truth” about oneself.
The chimera, the paraphrenic twin, and other uncertainties about identity appear in this new book as elements of a conceptual cluster, an organic ensemble by which analysts can orient themselves while discovering ideas that return to psychoanalysis its original edge and uncanny aura. In de M’Uzan’s thinking, Freud’s uncanny is itself not simply an abnormal experience, and the same goes for depersonalization, de M’Uzan contending that either can “occur without being accompanied by anxiety, but rather by a certain elation, as can be seen in the context of creative activities or highly skilled sports achievements” (p. 104).
At first glance, the newest and most noticeable notion developed in this book, the Vital-Identital, appears to lead us back to an older stage of Freudian theory—it apparently underscores the importance of self-preservative instincts. But by introducing the Identital—a neologism purposely coined to echo Laplanche’s Sexual—de M’Uzan actually puts “a knife,” as Laplanche would have said, into self-preservation. Although it is considered by him a biological program, self-preservation (the Vital-Identital) nevertheless carries along its main axis certain critical points and phases indicating a number of tasks which, while part of the program, expose the subject, all the same, to the impact of encountering the other. I am thinking here, for instance, of the acquisition of identity and of its double (the paraphrenic twin), or of the hosting structure offered to primal seduction as theorized by Laplanche. In my view, this is a rare case where two major authors, starting from different perspectives, have developed their own distinct theories and yet find a point of convergence around a theme important to both. Mind you, differences persist. For instance, de M’Uzan accords greater importance than Laplanche to self-preservation, and the term has not exactly the same meaning for both authors. The important thing is that their different views do not raise an either/or issue, but indicate points where additional theoretical research, with its clinical backdrop, is not only required but made possible thanks to the rigorous thinking of both men.
In the first part of Enduring Concern, dealing with “the artist’s ordeal” (pp. 13–53), we are invited to hear lengthy excerpts from a conversation between de M’Uzan and J.-B. Pontalis on the problem of writing—both literary and psychoanalytic. It must be said that before entering medical school and then becoming an analyst, de M’Uzan had embarked on a promising career as a writer of fiction and had been published by the prestigious house Gallimard. The reader will find an extraordinary discussion between him and Pontalis elaborating their opposing views about the possibility for a psychoanalyst to write concurrently in both genres. De M’Uzan has written extensively on issues of creativity in the past. Here he offers yet another part of his highly original views on the matter. Having reflected further on the problem of artistic creation, he brilliantly illustrates how “primal psychoanalysis” operates in various fields without ever becoming applied psychoanalysis. The issues of “identity” and its wobbling and of “quantity” and its vicissitudes also traverse the question of creativity and are addressed at various points in the present work. Interestingly, the writing in the book at times gives the reader the very feeling it is describing, tracing a profile of psychoanalysis as a field of research that is all the more fascinating for being disquieting.
It is worth mentioning that an extremely useful glossary of de M’Uzan’s terms and concepts, compiled by Murielle Gagnebin, is appended to the text. Its inclusion is a smart choice, a boon to readers for whom this book is a first encounter with de M’Uzan, as it gives direct access to definitions of terms which could at first be puzzling. The glossary is also usefully cross-referenced and may serve as a guide to further reading of other works by de M’Uzan. With this rather complete inventory of terms and concepts, Gagnebin offers not only a precious compass but also a good conceptual basis for further research.