SoU 002 (Psychoanalysis through time)
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Neil: [00:00:00] Hello everybody and welcome to the second episode of Subject of the Unconscious. This is a podcast where Isolda Alvarez and myself have conversations about Lacanian psychoanalysis. We hope that these conversations have a kind of relaxed seriousness to them. We take psychoanalysis very seriously, but we don't wanna talk about it in a way which is overly complicated. Our topic for today is to talk about how psychoanalysis has changed over time from Freud through Lacan till now, which is a really big undertaking. I think a lot has changed in that time. What are the important things that have changed in your opinion?
Isolda: Hello Neil. Always a pleasure to be here talking about this stuff. , I think that the most important point related to this is how psychoanalysis I. , Emerges as, an answer to sufferings of that time.
When Freud started to try to listen, , beyond [00:01:00] whatever these patients were telling him about their sufferings, it was kind of, uh, trying to answer, , an issue of his time, , and sufferings that were from that time. , I. In that sense, I think from its origins, psychoanalysis always has been trying to catch up with whatever is happening in kind of in the contemporary works, right?
So we had, I don't know, a war or you have a certain type of illnesses, , that they didn't have any cure at the time, and now you have internet and the AI and all the things that comes from an inside psychoanalysis seems. It's beginning have been trying to catch up with that. So we have sufferings nowadays that are completely different and they were like unthinkable by Freud, , someone anguish or an anxious because it, he or she doesn't have enough likes.
What something like out of even like imagination for Freud. [00:02:00] And even for Lacan too. Mm-hmm. So one of the major ones that I have said that Right. That is important to keep in mind that psychoanalysis have been changing and moving with civilization and society. I think one, like long story short, a major change has been the way how psychoanalysis is practiced.
We said the other day that this is a practice. Okay. It's a practice. Very good. How do we work with it back then? , We have Freud inventing this new practice trying to, um, take the concept or the notion of unconscious as something that is hiding stuff.
There's things that the subject has not access to it. So part of the work was actually to decipher. What the unconscious was saying. So it was more the level of interpretation, this interpret this dream to see what the unconscious is saying, as if the unconscious has something to say and we have [00:03:00] to find out what was the unconscious saying.
I am not saying that's not on the table nowadays, but there's more. It's not just interpretation in that sense. I think there's also something that, thanks to Lacan and Jacque Miller, we , we have access to it, which is how we in, we make interventions. It's not just interpretation as if we're reading a text.
There is also something beyond the interpretation. It's not just what the unconscious is telling us, but it's also how these weird and ironic satisfaction that we call jouissance is operating. What is it doing? So you have, if I have to make a super like summary of this will be with Freud, we have interpretation as the main tool and now we have interventions.
We just not limited to just interpret what the patient is saying, but [00:04:00] also how this suffering is taking place. How the patient is not just behave behaving, but how this is playing an important role in his or her decisions 24 7. I don't know if you would like to add something.
Neil: I have a couple of things that you're saying that spark some thoughts for me.
So the first thing. That I think is vital , is that psychoanalysis was created in response to suffering. People came to Freud because they were suffering, or they were sent to Freud by oth, you know, by somebody else because they were suffering. And it is my opinion that what really motivated Freud was to help people with what they were suffering from.
I. Psychoanalysis is a combination of theoretical ideas and practices that aim at [00:05:00] doing something with that suffering. I think that following, again, what you were saying here, Freud's method was to assume that what. People believed about themselves, what they said about themselves, the story they told themselves about themselves and the world they lived in and how they lived in that world.
That that was not the whole story. Mm-hmm.
Isolda: There was
Neil: something else happening and , we see this. Freud's very famously known for writing a book about dream interpretation. So dreams were one of the things. There was other things like jokes and slips of the tongue that he believed revealed the other part of the story that wasn't being put into.
What a person was saying, and you, we see this, uh, Freud would use these two terms. They're translated into English as manifest content. What a person says in latent content, which is the [00:06:00] meaning of that, and the latent content is something that needed to be interpreted, right? Somebody says something or they don't say something, or they say something, they say one person's name and they go, oh, no, no, no.
I didn't mean that. I meant this. Well, all that would be interpreted. And the idea, I believe, for Freud was that through interpretation, this stuff. That was in the person's unconscious could be put into words, could be given meaning. And that through the process, of producing meaning that things changed the way that the person suffered changed.
And a lot of times the suffering was relieved as a result of the meaning that would be produced through things like interpretation. And the way that Freud did this changed over time. He didn't keep it the same. There was a time when his ideas were new and novel and no one knew what he was going on.
About to a point where he was kind of a celebrity and people had read his work and they would come in [00:07:00] and they would say things already framing them within like the Oedipal dynamics mm-hmm. And, and stuff. , They would give him dreams , in a, which it's almost as if they were kinda like daring him to interpret them a certain way.
Isolda: Mm-hmm.
Neil: Right? And so that meant it couldn't work in the same way people had adjusted. And when people adjusted psychoanalytic practice also needed to adjust. And so I, I think that what Freud shows us is that psychoanalysis is this thing, which is always. In a relationship to the world.
Isolda: Mm-hmm.
Neil: And the people in that world. And that it, it's not a static thing. It's not like this is how I do psychoanalysis and therefore that's how everybody will always do psychoanalysis just the way that I do. No, it's this thing that is a response to. Whatever is causing suffering in the world.
So that's my, first thought that I had in response to what you said. The second thought is that Freud changes [00:08:00] his technique over time, and then we see Lacan come on the scene. And Lacan of course changes his technique a lot and is very explicit. He, he believes, and he says this in the Écrits, that psychoanalysis has to meet the subjectivity of its time, which I take to mean that it has to respond to.
The suffering that people are experiencing in the here and now and respond to that in a way, and that's what the clinic I think is about, is how do we do that? And since psychoanalysis is a living practice, we change this over time within psychoanalytic institutions, we discuss it, we think about it, the.
Manner in which we operate doesn't stay the same. It does change. There's some things that I think stay fundamental. We believe in subjectivity, we believe in the unconscious, so on and so forth. But, uh, a lot of the other stuff is very, very changeable and has changed.
Isolda: Yeah. You mentioned something that, uh, I think is important to try to make the [00:09:00] point that we're trying to transmit here, which is like interpretation is sort of speak work with whatever the patient says, right?
And when we make an intervention, we're working with whatever the patient is not saying. Kind of in between the lines and people will ask like, how do you do that? I mean, how do you make an intervention based on what people, uh, are not saying? And it's precisely kind of the thread that we follow in a session.
The patient comes to see us and they start talking, as you said about the history, about what is bothering about the things that they don't understand. And you pay attention to what they say, but you're trying to follow or track what they are not saying. And I think there's a major change. As well.
That is, thanks. I mean, we can't do that. Thank you to Freud too, because he was the first one that noticed that people were saying certain things and other were like, no, that's not, I'm not gonna talk about that. Or there was like certain, like [00:10:00] blind spots in whatever they were saying, I think it's very important what you said also about psychoanalysis being alive.
Because sometimes people think that whatever psychoanalysis is doing right now is exactly the same as Freud was doing in 1905. And it's not, not because was anything wrong about whatever Freud was doing, but society has changed a lot and sufferings have changed a lot too. So we operate and we make this practice in a way that is actually useful for whatever sufferings are happening right now.
Hashtag history matters, right? So yes, we have the orientation and what been happening, whatever, but it's different. It is not. The same. It's not stuck in 1905, and we do exactly the same. There are many reasons why a person could, decide to do an analysis and all this myth related to the length of the therapy.
I [00:11:00] have to be 20 years in a psychoanalysis. And no, that's not the case. And it depends on you. Actually, the practice is very complicated to put it out there and. Explain it because it's quite singular. It goes one by one. , You, in your case, three sessions will be enough or maybe 20 years.
But it's because the patient wants it, not because it is a mandate or, an imperative. , The same with the amount of sessions I know at the beginning, especially. From the school of Freud tried to build up there was like, you have to do analysis five times a week or three times a week or two times a week.
There's no standards, and at least not in Lacanian psychoanalysis, a person will do as much or as less sessions. Each person wants a desire depending on whatever they're work in. So I think that's also important to put there and how the symptoms or the suffering are treated too. [00:12:00] One thing is to try to cure it and get rid of it forever and ever.
And another one, trying to invite, the patient to try to deal with it in a different way.
Neil: Yeah. So there's a couple things I want to respond to in what you said there.
So the first thing is about. What people don't say. I think that this is an important thing, and I'm gonna kind of make this up and speak in a super general way. I'm not speaking about anybody in particular when I say this, but in, in a lot of sessions that I do, I will hear people come in and they will say a lot of things about what other people want.
My, my spouse wants this. Yes, my kids want this, my job wants this, so on and so forth. And if that happens, one of the things that I might do is point out to the person that they've been talking for, you know, 10 minutes or so, and they've told me a lot of things about what all these other people want, and at no point have they ever said anything about what they [00:13:00] want.
This is what I think you called earlier an intervention. It's trying to call the person's attention to something that is not there in their speech, and I'm not interpreting necessarily what they've said about the way that they experience the demands coming at them from other significant people or other significant institutions in their life.
I could do that. Sometimes I will do that, but other times, the intervention is simply to point out what has not been said. It's not there. I don't know how the patient would respond to that. It depends on the patient. 'cause as you said, every patient is unique. , It's a one by one kind of treatment. But that's a thing that I do and I think that might be hopefully , a decent example for people listening for how to zero in on what is not being said and how somebody might.
Make use of that the second thing I wanted to respond to is about the [00:14:00] way that psychoanalysis has changed as the times have changed. Mm-hmm. And you talked about how Freud's method was to see people many times a week for a pretty long period of time, and. He didn't have to deal with medical insurance, which a lot of people today have medical insurance.
This is how they pay for the majority of the work that's being done. They might have a copay or co-insurance or a deductible, but then after that, a deductible is met, the insurance company will take over and so on and so forth. This did not exist for Freud. It was not a thing that he needed to contend with.
And I bring this up because I personally have patients who are paying me out of pocket for the work that I'm doing with them. We agree on a fee, that's what they pay me. Insurance is never involved at all. And there are other patients for whom they use their insurance to pay for the services they're getting from me.
And sometimes people are really shocked by that. They're like, wait, you're a [00:15:00] psychoanalyst and you'll take insurance. I didn't think psychoanalysts could take insurance. I disagree. You don't have to take insurance. You don't have to not take insurance. It's really up to, , the individual practitioner and they can make that determination for whatever reasons they wanna make it.
But that's not a rule that you do or don't take insurance. , It's negotiable, it's contingent, we might say. Mm-hmm.
Isolda: Um,
Neil: the desire of , the person who's practicing. The desire of the patient who's coming for the treatment. But these are things that are very fluid, right? We, we changed this.
Another thing is there are many patients who I will see, and the way that I see them is the way that I'm talking to you now. They're a face on a screen, right? You are in Florida? I am in Illinois. We are pretty far apart, but we're having a conversation here, and I can do this with my patients as well.
Now for Freud, that wasn't something that he could do. It's something we can do now, [00:16:00] and so it's available these are some small examples may be, but also I think very.
Relatable examples of how the practice can and does change in response to the conditions that exist in the world at the present moment.
Isolda: Yes. And you made me think about something that was huge at the time of Freud, which was what it means to be a psychoanalyst. , How each one works. As a psychoanalyst or not. When you say like, whoa, a psychoanalyst working with insurances, that's weird. That is something implied about the conception or the notion of what a psychoanalyst must do or, or be as well. But I think it's very important how nowadays, especially in the Lacanian orientation, , is about style.
It's about the style of the patient and how their style relating to their, desire or issues or symptoms or whatever you want to call it. But also the style of the psychoanalyst. The many [00:17:00] ways in which you can make interventions. , You were saying that some of your patients, you allow them to pay you with insurance, for example.
That is not like right or wrong, it's just your style.
Neil: Mm-hmm.
Isolda: It's based on whatever you decided to do. The other secondly that they don't work with insurances. For whatever reasons, and it is not right or wrong, it's just another style. So the practice has changed, but also the formation of the analyst have changed too.
How we get, , training will be the word, how do we train ourselves to become, to work as a psychoanalyst? In the school of psychoanalysis, we call that formation is how we form ourself to try at least to occupy this place and intervene in this way or the other one. But I think the style is a huge.
I think that also has changed because back then when all of this started, there was the belief that everybody has to do or to be [00:18:00] like the psychoanalyst. And it was a very strong belief back then. Even Freud, while he was alive, , made some declarations on it, saying like, eh, no, it's not about that.
Exactly. I don't think I passed my message quite clearly related to that. But even though it was something that was installed in certain schools with the time, um, passing through, I think the idea of the style is very important. Not just for the psychoanalyst, but also how we treat our patients.
There's not just one way to do things in a right, the right way or the wrong way. Everybody, every patients will be actually part of the work and analysis will be kind of discovering what. Is their own style.
Neil: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Isolda: To deal with sufferings, to love, to hate to, I don't know, to be a person or not to be a person, whatever they want, depending on the case.
But I think that's very important to put to [00:19:00] how. This idea of psychoanalysis actually open up a space beyond of the conception of normality, for example, or what is, acceptable in the society and morality and all this stuff is more related to the singular position of each
one that is consulting for whatever reasons. So in that sense, I think the idea of interpretations and this idea that you can get like. Quite lost in meanings. And this meaning why and why and why and why also get kind of certain, limit with certain type of interventions. And we should for example, cut the session.
So you have, new things invented by Lacan or proposed by Lacan, which is the cut in the session. How do you say that in English? Is that, how is the expression in English to say that?
Neil: There's a couple of different ways you, you could say that you end the session before the. Typical time, I think is what you're getting at, right?
Typically a [00:20:00] session is 50 minutes and the Lacanian practice of cutting the session means that you stop the session at a moment after something important. And that's very vague, I realize. But something important has been said. Rather than interpret it or say more about it or keep the session going, kinda riffing on whatever that important thing is, you'll say like, we're done now.
Isolda: There you go. Thank you very much Neil. Because I think it's important , based on something that you just said, you talk when you were, what we were asking a couple of minutes, before you say something about contingency. Exactly, so the session is not pre-established. There's not like a, it's, there's no script for the session.
That's why the time is variable. There's no like 50, 45, 55, da, da da is not taken in the same terms as like, you know, chronological time. Although a session could last like hour and a half sometime, depending on [00:21:00] whatever it is being like elaborated or worked on the session. But I think it's important to know how this idea of the surprise of the accident of the contingency
is played in session too, so you could cut session yes, as you said, because something important pops up or maybe a Freudian slip. And you're not gonna go like what it means and why and where, and da da da da Uhuh. You just leave the session there. So it opens up kind of another dimension for the patient to work on that it is like at the Twilight Zone.
Remember that? Yes. Program. What do you think about that?
Neil: I have so many thoughts. I'm not gonna be able to speak them all. But. Let me do my best , to respond to this and I don't know how, if you'll agree with me on this, thing that I'm about to say , or not. So only one way to find out.
Thinking about psychoanalytic practice and how it's changed over time.
One of the things that I think [00:22:00] maybe has always been important throughout the history of psychoanalysis. Is to help people find some form of relief from suffering through an opening up to what we might call the unconscious, or what we might call desire. What I find, and this is a result of my own formation.
So when you say formation, let me take , a quick side note on that. , For people who might not know this when they're listening to this podcast, psychoanalytic formation consists of several things, but three main things. The most important is the person doing their own analysis.
You go and you attempt to speak to a psychoanalyst about things that are happening in your life, and that informs your own practice quite a bit as a result of how that goes over time. The second thing is supervision. You practice, you bring your cases to somebody else. You talk about your cases, you learn by doing that.
And the third would be participation in the life of the psychoanalytic community, or what we call the [00:23:00] school, , is , a huge part of it. Those three things kind of come together and result in formation. So as I've been going through this, one of the things that I think has had a huge influence on my own style.
Is that I find that a lot of people who come to me are suffering because, and this is again saying this in a very general kind of non-specific way because they know something or they think they know something. For example, there's a person who comes and they have a complaint about their spouse. , They come to the session and , they issue this complaint.
They tell you all about their spouse and all about this thing and the way that they are, and it's awful. And it makes me, and I hate it, and it's always been this way and da da da. And at a certain point I might. Ask a question, have you ever talked to your spouse about this? And I'll have people oftentimes say to that kind of question, no, of course not.
I, I'm not gonna talk to my spouse about that. That would be a disaster if I talked to my, I know. I. KOW. No, I am certain it [00:24:00] is guaranteed in my mind that that would be a disaster for me to speak to my spouse and therefore I don't. And I would say that in my head. I hear that and I think, here's an example of somebody air quotes, knowing something.
It's preventing them from experiencing desire. Desire comes from lack. It's not knowing something. It's not knowing what will happen when you have a conversation. It's not knowing what will happen if you marry this person or if you break up with this person, or if you take that job or quit this job or whatever.
That's something we don't know. We lack the knowledge, but we want to find something out and this is where. Desire can enter our lives. And I see people suffering a lot because some kind of, knowledge prevents them from going there. And I think that's something that the practice is hopefully able to do for people , is through various interventions, helping a person maybe [00:25:00] have an experience where that knowledge is called into question.
And. Maybe they become a little bit more open to the desire that might be present in their lives. A desire to find something out, a desire to have an experience, a desire to find out what would happen if, whatever. And that's , a. Big thing that influences my practice. So that was the main thought that I had in response to what you said.
I don't know if that makes sense outside my brain. I hope it does. And like I said, I don't know if you'll even agree with that formulation that I just put forward. So I'm really interested to hear what, however you wanna respond to that. It
Isolda: , For me it makes sense. Yes. I think it's important because as we were saying these other like dimension, it's kind of when you realize that you have misunderstandings with yourself.
It's not just with the other, or when people complain about the other is not listening to me, doesn't understand me, da da da. Yeah. But you start to [00:26:00] realize that you are having misunderstanding with yourself. There are part of yourself that you don't get, there are part of yourself that you can make sense out of it.
And they like just appear and disappear randomly, the things that you think, oh no, my God, I'm just so far away from that. And then you find yourself exactly in the same position. Again, and I think the interventions , of the psychoanalyst aim into that. You can aim to highlight the inconsistencies, the part that you don't know, the part that you maybe would like to know or or not, because consciously we could say, I wanna know, and then the unconscious gentle say, no, you don't.
You don't wanna know that much. And I think it's important because this other dimension is related to this part. That's what I was saying, at the beginning, that the style of the patient is very important is the core of the experience because , you're not lecturing, you're not teaching, you're [00:27:00] not, um.
You are helping, but you're not doing it because you're helping. , You're trying to open up this other space in which the patient is gonna be able to create their own answers. And I think when psychoanalysis started, part of the style was kind of give certain answers to the patient. I. It doesn't mean that we are there like seated, like we're like death.
It is not like mu saying. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, that's not my point. My point is that you kind of orient and, choose certain ways in which to kind of, show the path. So to speak.
Neil: Mm-hmm.
Isolda: This is the way, maybe you have this element, you have this other element and these other, what if you could do this or that, or what if you didn't think about this, about that?
Kind of highlighting and deconstructing the narrative, trying to find another ways to put those elements together in a new way that caused less suffering. So I think that is another change because , I can't explain [00:28:00] you. Why you were suffering in this way or the other way, but based on whatever you're telling me, I can pick certain elements of your speech that will help me to show you that there is another side of the story that you may be missing.
Mm-hmm. So I think that is another turn, if that's possible to say that we have like kind of we can follow and track in the history of psychoanalysis that it wasn't, is not as used to be at the beginning. And same with formation when you were saying that we need to do our own, journey.
In psychoanalysis in order to occupy the place of the analyst. That has changed too, because that had quite a rigorous and different kind of, , standard . And Lacan introduces another new ways Yes. we included with the school. Yes. Their own analysis. , Study their policy.
Yes. All of this stuff. Very good, but there's no a standard, . The other thing that I want to highlight [00:29:00] if we have the time is that we do not deny, diagnosis at all, but we think there's more. I. There are many patients that I work with that they actually need assistance or another type of intervention, like from a psychiatrist, for example, and they're taking any type of pills because they need certain medicines.
The thing is that analy, were not against the psychiatric whatever, or the, the medicines. It's just that we don't think the existence of a human being could be reduced to that. So it's not just about functioning, it's also about how do you deal with what is making you suffering and how much can you change those circumstances or not make sense for you?
Neil: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that diagnosis would be actually such a big box to open. And that might be a future episode or episodes plural, where we could get into that because it's such a rich topic and full of so many [00:30:00] different things. So stepping back from that for a moment, one of the things that you said that I think is really important, I'm going.
Rephrase it. Kind of say it my own way, is that one of the things that makes psychoanalysis what it is, and I think this has stayed consistent throughout time too, is that it's not moralistic. It's not about judging people and saying, , you're right, you're wrong. You're ethical, you're unethical, you're sick, you're well.
, That's not the point of psychoanalysis, and I don't think it really ever has been. What I do think is the point of psychoanalysis would be to create the conditions where a person can experience their own subjectivity in a way that they probably wouldn't experience it otherwise.
The, starts with Freud. You show up and the idea was to free associate speak in an as uninhibited a way as you are able , to don't worry about censoring yourself, just say whatever comes into your mind. So if that's the conditions that people were met with. It's actually really hard to do that.
It's really hard to [00:31:00] just say thoughts as they enter into your mind for a bunch of different reasons. But that's kinda where it started, right? Is to introduce that possibility to people. Mm-hmm. And there's no other place in their lives where that was the way that the conversation was structured, where you just show up mm-hmm.
And talk to somebody and say whatever came into your mind without worrying about how it was going to impact the person who you were speaking to.
Isolda: Mm-hmm.
Neil: And you know, that's changed over time. I find that most people who come to me don't just start free associating right off the bat. ,
They, they have a reason for coming. There's something that has brought them there and they want to talk about that specific thing. And so they do. But even when that's the case, the idea here is that they will get an experience, which is not like a kind of conversation they would have with a friend.
Mm-hmm. Or with a family member or with their. Doctor, , if they go and speak to a medical doctor, about things, their body, you know, if somebody's talking to me about a bodily symptom, a panic attack, , they're not gonna get the same response [00:32:00] from me that they would get from their doctor if they were talking about the same thing.
And what I think makes it different is that it's open. You get to say whatever it is that you think you want to say about stuff and the response that you get from the analyst. Is this response that I think will probably surprise you and help you become more open to the stuff that you don't know
Isolda: what,
Neil: whatever that is, , the stuff that you don't know about the other important people in your life, the stuff that you don't know about your past, the stuff that you don't know about.
Why you want what you want. , somebody comes into a session and they start talking about the really big and expensive wedding that they want to have, and they mm-hmm. And maybe they say tons of things about that, and maybe at some point the question comes up, it's like, well, why do you want that?
Why do you want a big wedding? And they go, wow, I've never [00:33:00] really even thought about that. I've never thought about Uhhuh. , It didn't even occur to me that, I don't need to have a big wedding. I could have a not big wedding. If something like that were to happen, I made that up.
But that might be a good point to be like, oh, you haven't thought about that. Maybe we should end the session here. Right. And, and you can leave with that on your mind and explore it and you'll come back and who knows what will happen at that point. But it's this really radical. Very non tyrannical, non-directive thing that you set up for a person.
And if it's set up in a good enough way for a long enough time, I believe that the person can find things out about themselves that they really didn't know. And I think when that happens, it's really incredible.
Isolda: Listening to you. There was a signifier that , pops up in my mind, which is, I think we could say that if there is a common thread from the beginning of the invention of psychoanalysis, from the invention of psychoanalysis up to [00:34:00] today, is that is an experience of opening.
Neil: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Isolda: I do firmly like. Think that is, that's what is about. And that has been there from the beginning. Many way many things have changed in how we deal with the session and how we kind of understand the suffering of the human beings, but the experience as such, because secondly, always has invited to the human being to feel and experience itself as an experience.
, I think it's an experience of opening. Not just to the others in the world, but mainly to yourself.
Neil: Yeah. Yeah. Being open to the possibility that you don't know everything there is to know about yourself
Isolda: , And that line. Neil, what about if we make the next episode taking this line and, the diagnosis?
Because I think , [00:35:00] they're quite related.
Neil: Yeah. Okay. That sounds good. So maybe we've said what we need to say. For today, this has been the subject of the unconscious Isolda
Thank you very much for having the conversation. Listeners, thank you very much for taking the time to download this and listen to it. We appreciate that and we will hopefully be in your ears again sometime soon talking about diagnosis and other various things and stuff.
Isolda: Thank you.