Freud and the Desire of the Psychoanalyst

Serge Cottet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429913976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Freud's invention of psychoanalysis was based on his own desire to know something about the unconscious, but what have been the effects of this original desire on psychoanalysis ever since? How has Freud's desire created symptoms in the history of psychoanalysis? Has it helped or hindered its transmission? Exploring these questions brings Serge Cottet to Lacan's concept of the psychoanalyst's desire: less a particular desire like Freud's and more a function, this is what allows analysts to operate in their practice. It emerges during analysis and is crucial in enabling the analysand to begin working with the unconscious of others when they take on the position of analyst themselves. What is this function and how can it be traced in Freud's work? Cottet's book, first published in 1982 and revised in 1996, is a classic of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is not only a scholarly study of Freud and Lacan, but a thought-provoking introduction to the key issues of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

PART I

FROM THE HYSTERIC TO FREUD’S DESIRE

Psychoanalysis is like a woman who wants to be seduced but knows she will be underrated unless she offers resistance.

—Freud, Letter to Stefan Zweig, 20 July 1939.*

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^* Freud, E. L., Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939, p. 303.

CHAPTER ONE

Freud’s analytic act

Freud was not always Freudian. The changes that punctuate his work point both to moments of discovery and periods of inhibition. His time for understanding was not regulated by a will to knowledge, however obvious the latter may have been. Nor is the light thrown on his desire by his transference to Fliess enough to define the specificity of his orientation in relation to those of other physicians of his time.¹ If my concern here is to grasp Freud’s analytic act in statu nascendi, this is because no prehistory of psychoanalysis can account for this absolute beginning, which grants full power to speech by stating a fundamental rule: “Say everything.”

That Freud wanted his patients to say everything and to follow this rule has not been without consequences, which have necessarily created questions that must be addressed by all those who have followed in his path.

What does an analyst want?

Apathy, ataraxia, and silence were for a long time considered to be the cardinal virtues of a psychoanalyst: wanting nothing, doing nothing, and desiring nothing seemed to be not only the necessary guarantees for “axiological neutrality” in conducting the treatment, but were also the only foil against both spiritual guidance and suggestion. Freud had always wanted to remove psychoanalysis from the discourse of mastery, yet does this mean stifling the desire of the analyst?

It would certainly be paradoxical, and perhaps even fraudulent, for an analyst to claim to be neutral. After all, she has been led to her current position along paths that she now intends to clear for someone in her care. Can an analyst really forget who and what have set her up? If so, the ascesis that she is supposed to show is merely a semblance in which she has dressed herself up; she can thus offer to the other an even surface that reflects the speaker’s message and restores it to him, so that he can understand to whom he is actually addressing it. Even if this experience is forgotten by the very person whose task is to take another through it, it cannot be claimed that such indifference underlies Freud’s invention: “Psycho-analysis is seeking to bring to conscious recognition the things in mental life which are repressed” (“Five Lectures”, p. 39).

Is it really possible for an analyst to accept such a programme precisely by disengaging herself from it? Since each analyst can only base her practice on the transmission of something that has been bequeathed to her by Freud, can she forget his heritage? Her own connection with Freud is all the more unavoidable since there is no guarantee or third party that can endorse the scientific nature of the experience. Its nature remains not only ineffable but also unverifiable. Moreover, this experience cannot find its reason for existence anywhere else than in the desire of its inventor: Freud himself. No other necessity than Freud’s passion can account for the invention of this “plague”, for which the general public has no need.

Towards the end of his life, when his pioneering spirit had somewhat abated, Freud wrote to Binswanger that “In truth there is nothing for which man’s disposition befits him less than occupying himself with psychoanalysis” (Fichtner, p. 69).

These lines prove that Freud, who occupied the place of the at-least-one person who did not recoil from analysis and who showed a certain aptitude for it, had little idea about how it could be transmitted. The gap he opened up has no real reason to stay open, unless someone with a will as strong as his own decides to open it up again. One only has to consider the number of articles and works about Freud’s life to conclude that none of them is able to say why he invented psychoanalysis rather than something else. This is not even a failure on their part, for it is quite simply impossible to do so. A work cannot be psychoanalysed, Freud’s no less so than anyone else’s.

The inventor of psychoanalysis, however, did not lack passions, not the least of which was a burning ambition to make a name for himself. Yet it is clear that the sum of Freud’s passions could not be extinguished by inventing psychoanalysis. It also cannot seriously be denied that Freud far from being the conservative bourgeois that André Breton, to his astonishment, thought that he had discovered in Vienna was a man of desire. The fact that the future of psychoanalysis depends on Freud’s cause would only be obvious if the passionate element that he committed to it could be determined. When we consider the enormous weight of this heritage, it is difficult to imagine to what other source an analyst can trace back her filiation.

It is legitimate, then, to consider the question of Freud’s desire in terms of the sum of his passions. If, however, following Lacan, we speak of “the desire of the psychoanalyst”, this is because there is a certain community between this desire and the patient’s. Does this imply that the same properties can be applied to both? If we refer to the psychoanalyst’s desire, we cannot eliminate its erotic dimension: if desire, for Freud, is “lust” (Seminar II, p. 65), then the psychoanalyst’s desire cannot escape this definition. We can even claim that the metaphor of the sexual relation was the only formula by which Freud could account for this curious encounter:

The analyst’s power over the symptoms of the disease may thus be compared to male sexual potency. A man can, it is true, beget a whole child, but even the strongest man cannot create in the female organism a head alone or an arm or a leg; he cannot even prescribe the child’s sex. He, too, only sets in motion a highly complicated process, determined by events in the remote past, which ends with the severance of the child from its mother. (“On Beginning the Treatment”, p. 130)

The fact that the context of psychoanalysis, from the start, was not the doctor–patient relation but Freud’s relation with a woman and in particular a woman with an hysterical complaint gives a supplementary consistency to this claim. By excluding from this setting “all his feelings, even his human sympathy” (“Recommendations to Physicians”, p. 115), Freud lays bare the reality of the unconscious: sexuality.² At the same time, the sexual relation is ruled out, and Freud thus provokes a question in his partner: “What does he want? What does he want to do?”

We see that the analyst’s desire is split into two parts, based upon whether something is supposed about it or whether something is said that allows his desire to be located. These two aspects “subjective” desire and the function that Lacan referred to as x must not be confused. Furthermore, what analyst worthy of Freud and with at least some awareness of his own desire could be unaware of these sadder passions? Hate also plays a role. If we assume that an analyst is better aware of his desire than most, then how can he not know that the essence of love is deception, a deception that is conditioned by self-love? This is often the motive for misunderstandings between analysts: if one wants to make an analyst the equal of God, one cannot suppose that he is capable of hate. Yet it can hardly be said that Freud was incapable of hatred.

Horror of the act

It would be wrong to think that Freud had a simple love relation with the unconscious. His 1905 programme could not fail to lead to many surprises and disappointments: “Neurotics are a nuisance and an embarrassment for all concerned—including the analysts” (“The Question of Lay Analysis”, p. 241).

This disappointment is at the heart of the analytic framework. The fundamental rule and its corollary, free-floating attention (gleichswebende Aufmerksamkeit), imply that the analyst agrees to let himself be taken by surprise (“Recommendations to Physicians”, pp. 114–115). Now, unpleasant surprises were soon to appear, less from the discovery of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses than from transference love; less from the repetition-compulsion than from the negative therapeutic reaction. Yet in allowing himself, on every occasion, to be surprised, Freud necessarily had to wonder about the legitimacy of his act. As he states, with regard to the Unheimlich that is the unconscious, “One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primaeval days are really extinct” (“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, p. 229).

It was thus in the wake of a certain failure that Freud moved forward on the analytic scene, the very place where one might say that Breuer—who fled psychoanalysis at the moment when things started to go wrong—had succeeded. Breuer avoided the sexual transference, the irrefutable proof of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses. This “untoward event” (On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, p. 12) became Freud’s point of departure. He did not shy away from the consequences that had to be drawn from the sexual aetiology of hysteria. Breuer’s flight when his patient, Anna O, brought him the symptom of his own desire in the flattering form of an imaginary child, was a bungled action, and was therefore a successful discourse against psychoanalysis. Breuer did not recognize this first-born child of psychoanalysis as his own, and left the scene. “With all his great intellectual gifts there was nothing Faustian in his nature” (E. L. Freud, p. 413) added Freud, who himself had no qualms about taking on the gods of the underworld.

In order for an act not to be an acting out—which implies exiting the scene—but rather a passage to the act, one must risk failure, something Freud certainly did not avoid: “What is needed, as in the establishment of any right, is a passage to the act, and […] it is from this that that the psychoanalyst today is in retreat” (Lacan, “Response to Students of Philosophy”, p. 108, translation altered).³

This is what has aroused the indignation of the sociologist Robert Castel, who has not been duped by “analytic neutrality”, and who considers the instituting of the analytic method to be an assertion of power (Le psychanalysme, p. 38). It is true that this valid remark exempts the author from questioning the foundations of psychoanalysis in terms other than those of intellectual arbitrariness or the abuse of power, since he does not see that it is only the symbolic that can offer consistency to any material. One cannot say, however, that Freud carried out this feat of genius light-heartedly; he predicted that his act would lead to the most fearful consequences, even if he did not suspect the nature of the plague he was about to unleash: “Such is the fright that seizes man when he discovers the true face of his power that he turns away from it in the very act—which is his act—of laying it bare” (Écrits, p. 201).

It would be futile even to try to account for the history of psychoanalysis without considering the risk Freud took. The history of psychoanalysis, indeed, raises the question of Freud’s resistance to his own discovery. Before his hysterical patients, from whom he learned everything, sent back to him, in inverted form, his message—his own desire to make them talk about “everything” Freud could perhaps believe that both the science and the truth that he uncovered could cohabit very well. How an intellectual (savant)—someone who equates serving truth with the service of goods and social duty—was able not to compromise his desire is the mystery that this work shall try to elucidate.

From the hysteric’s desire to Freud’s passion for origins to his ethics, Freud’s work consists of a series of links in a chain, but without this desire, his work is condemned to the realm of non-sense.

Notes

1. This is Octave Mannoni’s thesis in “L’analyse originelle” (see Clefs pour l’imaginaire: ou l’autre scène). See chapter V below.

2. “Real sexual relations between patients and analysts are out of the question” (Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, p. 176).

3. The outcome is a split in the principle of the act. With regard to Freud, Lacan recognizes in him: “a man of desire, a desire he followed against his will” (Écrits, p. 537). At the time of the dissolution of the École Freudienne de Paris, Lacan still asserts: “Yes, the psychoanalyst holds his act in horror” (“The Other is Missing”, p. 135). See also p. 179 below.

CHAPTER TWO

Capturing the unconscious

Freud’s first works on hysteria stand as the “primal scene” of psychoanalysis. In his Studies on Hysteria, Freud’s desire can be read in terms of his request: “I am asking you to remember; I am asking you to speak.” Since what his patients told him was in answer to this appeal, we can argue that everything they said was related to it. It should be noted, however, that this relativity is connected less to the truth of the material than to its exactitude; in other words, the different scenes that the patient has remembered, and which may well conform to the physician’s expectations in terms of their chronology, are not entirely created. The same cannot be said of the historical exactitude of the material, since, in this case, all certitude is undermined by the intercession of the phantasy. Freud was not yet aware of this fact, just as he did not grasp the quite striking homogeneity between his theoretical preoccupations and the way in which his hysterical patients told their stories.

I shall establish that the structure of these hysterical accounts is connected with the structure of medical discourse. In relation to Charcot’s method, however, Freud establishes a cut by supposing the existence of knowledge in the other and by allowing her to take the initiative to gain access to it; his message is “You are the one who knows”, rather than “I already knew that”. He therefore supposes the existence of a knowledge that does not know itself and which the patient possesses. This knowledge, which causes the analyst’s desire, can be called the unconscious. Freud only knows what his patients are able to tell him; his love for the subject’s unconscious must also be valuable enough for her to offer it to him as a gift. This is not the same structure as that of suggestion, even if it is clear enough that the hysteric only says what the other wants to hear.

What, then, did Freud want to hear? What did he not already know? A hysteric’s docility in telling her secrets, her reticence or, on the contrary, her bad temper, her hesitations, her resistance—in a word, the signifying breaks in her enunciation—are subject to variations in which the analyst’s implication cannot always be read; there are, however, cases in which the hysteric is clearly seducing her psychoanalyst. Who seduces whom, however, when the master orders the hysteric to produce the knowledge she possesses?

It seems that Freud’s hysterical patients considered his artifice of applying pressure to the forehead as an amorous support, of which they had been imaginarily deprived. In the real of the treatment, it was a sign of Freud’s desire: a sign that he loved the knowledge they possessed.

It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Part I: From the Hysteric to Freud’s Desire
• Part II: The Passion for Origins
• Part III: Freudian Ethics
• Part IV: The Desire of the Other
• Conclusion
• References
• Index